91ÖÆƬ³§

Presented by Dr Lucy Clarke

When studying politics, historians are often confined to language: the recoverable words that were said, written and read about government. If you were to only look for examples of ‘ordinary’ people actively using the discourse of ‘the state’ in early modern England, you wouldn’t find much. But people experienced the state through embodied interactions with its officials: if we are to truly understand the experience of the state in early modern England, we must engage with that inherent embodiment, rather than just words.

This talk therefore explores practice-as-research as a historical method: in this case, using actors to stage encounters between state officials and ‘ordinary’ people that were documented in the records of the Court of Star Chamber. As I’ll argue, this PAR allows me to engage with the state as it was originally experienced, as bodies in motion and conversation, and therefore to recover what people thought of the state, even if they never knew or used the word. Moreover, practice-as-research opens the strength of state authority up to scrutiny: as I’ll show, reckoning with the practicalities of arresting someone or stopping a riot reveals that state authority was far less secure than has previously been acknowledged.