Knowing Encounters: Law, Legibility and the Rhetoric of Presence in the Early Modern Imagination

At the core of this talk-in-progress is a fascination with the face to face encounter as an interpersonal event, an epistemic threshold, and a mimetic structure. But the genesis of the paper lies in my research on early modern law’s interest in legibility and drama’s dialogue with it. It begins by showing the way in which the law emerges as an interface between an expressive mode and a hermeneutic model, and thus an imaginative resource for literary writers interested in selfhood and inwardness. But in looking around for provenance, it widens out from its originally legal focus, surprised by the theological charge of turning and facing, and the connections between legal and religious structures of knowing, to begin to probe unlikely affiliations.