WS Society talks this month

Professor Chloe Kennedy’s Inducing Intimacy: Deception, Consent and the Law is based in part on research conducted at the Signet Library and considers the law’s response to deceptively induced intimacy across both civil and criminal law over more than two centuries. Encompassing both criminal and civil law responses within a fresh model of socio-legal history, Dr. Kennedy takes a long-term historical view which has important implications for law’s treatment of induced intimacy today. Register here.

At an online event, Dr Robert Pirrie will speak at the Curious Histories’ lecture programme. Attendees are asked for a small donation to attend the lecture, but all proceeds will go to help the work of the Signet Library.

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) remains a major figure in English historiography. Although descended from a storied Highland family, some of his most polemical observations were reserved for Scots. Robert Pirrie, who is writing a book on the history of Scottish national identity, will argue that although Macaulay’s work is seen today as flawed, a product of its time, the long reach of his influence has helped to perpetuate attitudes to Scottish cultural historiography into the present. 

While an admirer of Macaulay’s colourful, tendentious style, Dr Pirrie unpicks the ways in which Macaulay was seminal in denigrating and trivialising Scotland, one of Europe’s original kingdoms. He will demonstrate where this critique fits within his book as a whole. Register here.