Convenor of workshop: Figuring Communities: Early Modern Literature, Form and International Law

This workshop builds on recent scholarly interest in early modern literature’s relationship with the diplomatic sphere. It focuses on connections between literature and international law, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Contributors will ask how literature interacted with developments and controversies in international law during the period, and explore how issues of literary and material form might be implicated in these controversies. The workshop will discuss how perspectives from English, History, Law and International Relations might combine to throw new light on a period in which new European identities and institutions emerged. It will ask how the history of international law can point literary scholars to the formative legal contests and flashpoints of the early modern period, or how literary analysis can open up new perspectives onto the way in which new international communities were constructed, interpreted and scrutinised by diplomatic actors and writers. The workshop will bring together a number of researchers at the University of Bristol, who are working in these disciplines, together with invited scholars from the UK and universities abroad who have interests in early modern literature and international law.