Old Thiess, A Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective
In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History

Extract

—We might well ponder the coincidence of the visibility of the black man in America with the pronouncement of the “death of God.”

Charles Long, Significations

A trial is a very tempting cultural object, particularly, perhaps, the trial of a criminal defendant who successfully makes of the courtroom their own stage. A fly in amber, the record of a trial seems to capture a moment in time—one brought into a certain order and given dramatic shape by the constraints of legal thinking. Although trials of otherwise famous and well-documented people—Socrates, Jesus, Paul, Joan of Arc, Henry More, Charles I . . . the list is very long—are also fascinating and revealing, the trial of the low-status person who might not be otherwise visible offers a very particular opportunity, the opportunity to see, hear, and give voice to one who otherwise is not seen or heard—indeed perhaps to glimpse “otherwise worlds” (Lethabo King et al. 2020).¹ Routine trial records, read against the presumed intention of those who created and preserved them, can thereby give access to ways of life only dimly accessible despite many recent impressive new historiographical approaches to understanding the lives of “ordinary” people in the past. Bringing together the tools of a legal historian as well as those of a cultural historian, the study of trials can be enormously fruitful; it also may serve to expand our imaginations about both law and religion and their interrelationship. There are also cautionary notes; trials have a logic of their own.²