Sarah Hanley

Professor Emerita, Early Modern & Modern France; Politics, Society, & Gender; Law & Litigation

E-Mail: sarah-hanley@uiowa.edu

Sarah Hanley has principally been interested in the evolution of law, gender and the state in early modern and modern Europe. Her research explores the ways that European governments structured societies by way of law. Currently, she is working on a history of the political theory of the male right of succession in the French monarchy between 1400 and 1700. More generally, Sarah is interested in how civil society emerged out of the conflicted evolution of statutory and case law, in the origins of a modern notion of civil rights.

Sarah regularly publishes in both English and French. Her book, The 'Lit de Justice' of the Kings of France: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual, and Discourse (1983), was an innovative study of the interplay of law, pomp, and power in Renaissance and early modern France. It unpacked the various practices and meanings of royal gatherings devoted to basic constitutional issues. Sarah's Les Femmes dans l'histoire: La loi salique ("Women in History: The Salic Law"), published in 1994, investigated attempts to exclude women from rule in France. Some of her recent work includes essays on family formation and state building in early modern France and on the use of film in the teaching of European history. In 1998, her essay, "Social Sites of Political Practice in France: Lawsuits, Civil Rights, and the Separation of Powers in Domestic and State Government, 1500-1800," won the Mary Parker Follett Award from the American Political Science Association. Sarah's work has appeared in journals such as The American Historical Review, Annales: Histoire et Sciences Sociales, Law and History Review, and French Historical Studies.

Sarah Hanley received her PhD from the University of Iowa in 1975, and was an active presence on the University of Iowa campus for many years, serving as the Dean of Faculty for the College of Liberal Arts between 1987 and 1990, and being one of the first members of Iowa's Women's Studies Program. She retired from the University of Iowa following the spring 2008 semester.

Selected Publications

• "The Family, the State, and the Law in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Ideology of Male Right versus an Early Theory of Natural Rights," The Journal of Modern History 78:2 (2006).
• "Configuring the Authority of Queens in the French Monarchy, 1600s-1840s," Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 32:2 (2006).
• "Natural Equality and Natural Rights for Women: The Legal Effects of Male Right on Family Affairs in France, 1550s-1750s," Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 33:65 (2006).
• The King's One Body: From the Fraudulent Salic Law to the Political Theory of Male Right in France, 1400-1789 (book in progress).
• The Social Sites of Political Practice in France: Law, Litigation, and Local Knowledge, 1500-1800 (book in progress).
• "Un Defi legal a le droit masculine de gouverner en France: Longueville contre Nemours 1674," a chapter in Princesses et pouvoir politique a l'epoque moderne (Paris: Editions Breal, 2004)
• "Limits of Sovereign Power in the French Monarchic State: A Constitutional Plan for Resistance 1574," a chapter, 259-275 in States, Societies, Cultures, East and West (New York: Ross Publishing Company, 2004).
• "The Jurisprudence of the Arrets: Marital Union, Civil Society, and State Formation in France, 1550-1650," Law and History Review 21:1 (2003): 1-40; and (in French) the Annales: Histoire et Sciences Sociales (2003).
• "European History in Text and Film: Community and Identity in France, 1550-1945," French Historical Studies 25:1 (2002): 3-19.
• "The Pursuit of Legal Knowledge and the Genesis of Civil Society in Early Modern France," chapter 4, 71-86 in Historians and Ideologues: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Kelley, Anthony Grafton and J.H.M. Salmon, eds. (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2001).