Privacy Studies Podcast Centre for Privacy Studies

Alisha Rankin is an associate professor of History at Tufts University. In this interview, recorded in the spring of 2021, Natacha Klein Käfer joins me as co-host to talk to Alisha about her book The Poison Trials : Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science.

Julie Hardwick (University of Texas at Austin) talks about her newest book Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France 1660 - 1789, which came out with Oxford University Press in September 2020. In the book, she focuses on intimacy among young workers who lived in the urban environment of early modern Lyon, and makes extensive use of archival material to examine a topic highly relevant for privacy studies.

James Gordley argues that, in the writings of the late scholastics, private rights and the common good were in harmony, but modern liberalism disrupted this harmony. In his lecture, he explains how these ideas fit together.

Paolo Astorri, winner of the RefoRC Book Award 2020 for his book Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany, talks about the influence of theological ideas in the development of contract theory in 16th century Germany. In this interview, we cover how ideas by Reformers Martin Luther and Philip Melanchton were expanded, developed, and sometimes even distorted by theologians and jurists that came in their wake.

Andrew Riggsby gives a talk titled "Locating the Private in the Roman World." He explains that, despite their common use of explicit terms for “private” (and “public”), the ancient Romans did little to theorize those categories. In his talk, Andrew supplies such a theoretical account and points out ways in which the “private” was used as a tool of social control. Drawing from examples from the realms of domestic space and of financial regulation, he attends especially to gendered aspects of this control.

Mette Birkedal Bruun takes about the Gospel of Matthew, which presents Jesus introducing the Lord's Prayer with an injunction to enter into the chamber and close the door so as to pray in secret (Mt 6.6). For early Christian authors, this command elicited a series of questions: How to reconcile the entry into the chamber with the command to pray everywhere (cf 1 Tim 2)? Where and what is this chamber – not to mention its door? How are praying persons to comport themselves in the chamber under God's watchful eye? In this talk, Mette discusses third- and fourth-century expositions of Mt 6.6 and ponder their place in privacy studies.