LOUISVILLE, Ky. – The issue of executive pardons was controversial in the early days of English criminal law, just as it is today. A history scholar will lecture at the University of Louisville March 22 about the way mercy was meted in early modern culture.
Cynthia Herrup, Duke University professor of history and law, will speak at 2 p.m. in Room 303, Gottschalk Hall. Her topic is “Dangerous Mercies: The Place of Pardons in Early Modern English Culture.”
Herrup’s visit is part of the Louis Gottschalk Lecture Series, sponsored by the U of L history department. The free, public event includes a reception afterward.
Her talk is expected to examine the role of criminal pardons and executive mercy in one of English law’s key eras of development.
Herrup, a specialist in British cultural and legal history, addresses the lecture topic in her next book, “When Mercy Seasons Justice: Royal Pardons in the Society of Early Modern England,” which is set for publication by Cambridge University Press. She has published two other books: “The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth Century England” and “A House in Gross Order: Sex, Law and the Second Earl of Castlehaven.”
The professor also is a visiting professor of history at the University of London’s Birkbeck College.
For more information, call Thomas Mackey, history department chair, at (502) 852-6817.