Event

This EALC Speakers' Colloquium lecture is co-sponsored with Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Scholars and writers have long said that trials are a kind of theater, as performances to sway judge and jury, as formal rituals to reassure the public about a just order, and as dramatic stories that voice our hopes and fears about conflict. Little has been said, however, about the relationship between law and theater in medieval Japan, a subject that comes alive in the medieval Japanese courtroom drama The Blind Man’s Suit (~1500s). This little-known play gives us a window into the visual semiotics of justice, revealing how clothing and seating were used to make the medieval legal order visual and palpable. The play also adopts story-telling scenarios found in legal codes, about “bad” legal actors and “reasonable” litigants, thus revealing the underlying narrativity of laws. Where the first part of the presentation considers “law as theater,” the latter half switches tracks to “the law in theater”—the aesthetic repurposing of the courtroom. The Blind Man’s Suit makes a case for a “better” kind of disputation that brings people together, privileging debate over strife. This idealized image of a trial, in turn, amplifies the claims of theater, that rhetoric fosters understanding where formal rules fail, and that the ears perceive when the eyes deceive. The Blind Man’s Suit thus reveals both how trials were useful spectacles to leaders and how they functioned as experimental topoi for playwrights to elevate the capacity of rhetoric.

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Vyjayanthi Ratnam Selinger, Stanley Druckenmiller Associate Professor of Asian Studies at Bowdoin College, is a scholar of medieval Japanese literature and culture. She is the author of Authorizing the Shogunate: Ritual Material Culture in the Literary Construction of Warrior Order (2013) and several articles in both English and Japanese. This talk is drawn from her second book-in-progress, The Law in Letters: The Legal Imagination of Medieval Japanese Literature and Drama, in which she uncovers the judicial and carceral imagination of the medieval Japanese dramatic form known as nō.