Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University School of Law in London. A scholar of law and humanities and media history, she studies performance, film, digital, and legal cultures across the longue durée. Her publications include Staging Witchcraft Before the Law (2025), Theatre of the Book: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe 1480-1880 (2000, winner of the Harry Levin and Beatrice White Prizes), Women's Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (co-edited, 1995), and numerous studies of drama, performance, film, media, and the cultural history of law.
Peters applied the “Page 99 Test” to her 2022 book, Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe, and reported the following:
At the top of page 99, a medieval philosopher named Thierry of Chartres is trying to defend lawyers against people who say they’re all snakes. He’s just told a story that originates with Cicero but that medieval theorists loved to retell: the story of the origin of law. At the beginning of the world, says Cicero, “men were savage and lived in the manner of beasts.” But a man “who was wise and eloquent” and knew that even savages were “open to persuasion” used his eloquence to drive out their “savagery,” bringing people together “to live by law.”Learn more about Law as Performance at the Oxford University Press website.
For Cicero, the point is that, while eloquence can be used for evil, it can also be used for good. For Thierry, the point is specifically about lawyers and judges: true, some are scoundrels, and this can have disastrous political consequences. But (he adds), just because there are corrupt lawyers and judges doesn’t mean we should give up on law: it means that good people have to fight harder for what’s right. (The “more shamefully a most honest and worthy profession [i]s abused by the folly and audacity of dull-witted and unprincipled men, ... the more earnestly should the better citizens ... put up a resistance to them.”) That is, we don’t have to kill all the lawyers (as Shakespeare’s Dick the Butcher famously proposed): we just have to make sure the crooked ones don’t take over our courts, supreme or otherwise!
I quote Thierry on page 99 not just to get in another lawyer joke, but to support one of the central points of the chapter. Standard medieval legal history will tell you that medieval lawyers and litigants had no use for eloquence, —that ancient traditions of judicial oratory had become irrelevant in medieval courts, where autocratic Princes and Inquisitors weren’t “open to persuasion.” In fact (as I say on page 99), medieval theorists were centrally concerned with courtroom persuasion. They defined rhetoric as “the science of orderly and elegant speaking for persuading the judge.” They described the model “orator” as “advocatus” (i.e. litigator). One even says: if you know rhetoric, you already know law (by implication: no need to bother learning law, because it’s rhetoric, not law, that will help you win your case). To be a good lawyer, they said, what you needed was “eloquence”: not only verbal eloquence but what Cicero called “eloquence of the body,” that is, performance skills.
In some ways, page 99 would give browsers a good idea of my book. The heading there, “Courtroom Oratory, Forensic Delivery,” stands for one of the book’s central ideas: that courtroom oratory depended above all on “eloquence of the body,” sometimes called actio (acting, action), sometimes pronuntiatio (vocal expression), sometimes “delivery.” Early theorists never tired of an anecdote about the great orator Demosthenes: when someone asked him what the three most important elements of oratory were, he answered “delivery, delivery, delivery.”
Page 99 also represents my general methodology. It shows the abundance of historical sources I bring into play (10 medieval lawyers, philosophers, and rhetorical theorists on page 99 alone). It shows my use of short quote fragments, which allow figures from history to speak directly to readers with their own turns of phrase (without weighing down the text with long and ponderous block quotes). It shows how I push arcane scholarly debates into the footnotes (which take up half of page 99) to prevent the story I’m telling from getting lost in them. In short, it shows how I try to make serious scholarship fun to read.
However, there’s one thing that page 99 doesn’t represent well. That page appears in a chapter originally titled “The Body in the Courtroom: Indecorous, Leaky, Sublime, Obscene.” While page 99 is neither sublime nor obscene, the book contains many legal scenes that are: sublime, obscene, bizarre, histrionic, or hilariously funny. The book’s first pages tell the story of a trial by combat turned comic debacle. Later there’s an image of a woman named Calefurnia who—in protest against the rule that women can’t plead in court—turns her back to the judge, bends over, lifts her skirts, and moons him. These aren’t just entertaining stories: they offer an alternative legal history, —of law as theatre and anti-theatre, as force but also (sometimes) farce.
Much of what I describe is still with us today: for instance, in a judge’s protest that “this courtroom is not a theatre!” and our recognition that—in our world of 24/7 legal spectacle—it is. Like early legal spectators, we worry about whether law should be entertainment, whether lawyers should exploit theatrics, whether emotion helps or harms justice. Like them, we know that performance matters to how we make law and how it makes us.
--Marshal Zeringue
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