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The Trials of Apuleius: An Ironic Legal History

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Ian Ward

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).


Abstract

© The Author(s) 2024.This article is an exercise in what might be termed ‘ironic’ legal history. The first part explores the idea of ‘ironic’ history, which aligns the insights of literary ‘ironism’ with those of micro and ‘anecdotal’ history and ‘new’ historicism. It will focus more particularly on the work of Richard Rorty, Carlo Ginzburg and Stephen Greenblatt. The second part of the article will present a ‘case-study’ in ironic legal history; revisiting the second-century trial of the Roman orator and writer Apuleius. Apuleius wrote two notably different accounts of the same experience, one pretending to fact, the other to fiction. To read these accounts is to engage in an exercise in ironic legal history.


Publication metadata

Author(s): ward I

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Law, Culture and the Humanities

Year: 2024

Pages: epub ahead of print

Online publication date: 11/04/2024

Acceptance date: 02/04/2018

Date deposited: 29/04/2024

ISSN (print): 1743-8721

ISSN (electronic): 1743-9752

Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd

URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/17438721241229066

DOI: 10.1177/17438721241229066


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