were attempts to participate in the legal arena by asking authorities to judge and punish violators, but in the broader sense that the practice of defining what counts as a violation was already contingent on particular sets of legal categories. This fact of legal mediation in the writing of non-elite history is thereby complicated not only because a layer has been added to the analysis, but also because such a history runs up against a deep and persistent disciplinary division.
In the historical tradition, one might say, individuals exist in the subjunctive, always as an endless series of possibilities, capacities, and complexities; law exists in the imperative, a series of commands, reductive and violent. Individuals make their world within dense and overlapping reciprocal networks; within these networks they share stories, rituals, gods, meals, and families. Law reduces networks to flowcharts of authority, abstracting those within the networks and treating them as replaceable units of analysis. Individuals exist in time and space; law tries its best to develop an allergy to such categories. The project, then, would seem to be built on a fundamental tension between two different visions of how to map the social world, and the histories which emerge from it tend to be stories of the conflicts between these two irreconcilable ways of imagining such a world. They are normally tragic stories, for no matter how crafty a litigant might be, no matter how well he or she might negotiate the complexities of a judicial system, the law nonetheless frequently wins.
The above diagnosis could be faulted in many ways: social historians, it could be objected, have always romanticized non-elites to an intolerable degree. Humans are not endlessly capable, but radically bounded by structural and environmental factors, as well as by various mental demons of their own making. Law is not divorced from social relations, but deeply embedded. Nor is it unidirectional or transcendent. Drawing a line between law and society is anyhow a flawed project, because it merely replicates a typically “legal” claim—the claim, made most often by practitioners of law, that law is not the social or the everyday, that it is something that has a different essence (should we wish to be metaphysical), a logic and language fundamentally its own, and a capacity to remain innocent of or at least insulated from the work of everyday life.
Objections could be multiplied, but they begin to feel thin to historians. And this is not because these objections are wrong (they are not), or because historians are unphilosophical people (though they sometimes are). They feel thin because, if we take the primary task of social history to be that of giving an account of the reasoning that our subjects gave for their behaviors, then these objections seem to have held little weight for them. They took problems to court. They asked for judgment. They fell into stunned silence or joyous relief at the reading of sentences. They moved through a social world wearing (and watching, and interpreting) scars from judicial whips and rods. Alternatively, these objections begin to feel thin because so much of social history is anyhow done on the back of law’s records: in societies in which literacy is not widespread we can count on finding non-elites in judicial archives, where their understandings of themselves were contested by others. Think here only of Carlo Ginsburg’s monumental work on inquisitorial records. Even in societies with abundant documentation and high literacy rates judicial records have proven a boon, given the vagaries of archival preservation.
But here we have come no closer to a method, and no closer to an answer as to whether the results will be entirely predictable when we pair social history with the history of the subject before the law. What we need is an explanation of why people found these structures so congenial in the first place, why law served as an important category to them—a richer explanation as to why, given the tremendous stakes and the possibility of disaster, someone would have been willing to move from open-textured capacities and possibilities to the world of judgments. And here I am loath to accept explanations that cast subjects as mechanistically responding to some sort of external factor—that these practices of “going to law” somehow emerged or persisted “because of” culture or class or status or identity, ideology or false consciousness or bad faith, litigiousness or prickliness or honor, or out of a rational choice to maximize gains vis-à-vis other social actors. This is not to deny the existence of any such factor; it is to deny all of them a priori causal status. It is to do so because these explanations—in fact, even the logical form of these explanations—strike me as being, at the very least, deeply inhumane. They smell of the kind of social theory that historians have often rightly distrusted: cold, abstract, and mechanistic—in many ways, the doublet of law itself.1 Such theories, it seems, have smuggled law’s most frustrating and mystifying elements into their own projects.2
This is not to say that social theory is useless to historians (it is not). It is to say that, if we wish to remain true to the humane project of social history, easy explanations are not to be had, and the usefulness of any theory will be judged by its capacity to do hermeneutic service, rather than provide a ready account of causation—that is, it will be judged by its ability to open up more possibilities and richer understandings, not to wrap the world into a neat and tidy package. This was, I take it, the stance of E. P. Thompson, and one reason his work has proven enduring.
The world may not be neat and tidy, yet people often wish it to be. This brings me to the central thesis of this project: when the social world—with its possibilities, networks, and participants—becomes, for whatever reason, overwhelming, unlivable, or intolerable, law may provide a means to rectify this situation. It does this not because it is necessarily a source of fair judgments or because it is per se a source of power (though it can be), but because, through its compressions, fictions, translations, and abstractions, it provides a manageable and simplified framework—a conceptual language—for people to rethink themselves and their relationships. It can serve, in however imperfect and attenuated ways, as a source for people to theorize themselves and their behavior—to answer the question “Who am I, where do I fit within my world, and how can I render that world tolerable?” As with social theory, law’s most important contribution to social life is hermeneutic.
As the title to this Introduction indicates, I have chosen to let Erving Goffman serve as my jumping-off point for this study. Goffman is perhaps the least systematic of social theorists; he was at his best as a diagnostician of human behavior. His central claim, to simplify greatly, is that human behavior and interactions are aimed at the goal of inhabiting a tolerable universe. Human beings do this by a series of small maneuvers, enacting delicate scripts that structure conduct and make it regular, predictable, knowable, or at least capable of being explained. But when these scripts fall apart, or when there is dissonance between the person and the script, repair work needs to be done, for these dissonances make the world fundamentally unlivable. But what happens when people are cast in a script which they find horrid or objectionable? How do they change it? What were the mechanics behind this process of changing a script? Here Goffman’s answers tend to be unsatisfactory, or at least depressing (for often, in the case of his other famous book, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, the script cannot be changed). What I will argue, in the course of this book, is that, in Roman Egypt at least, law provided one mechanism for changing these scripts. It did this because of the particular ways in which it interacted with narratives.
My strategy is this: to take narratives (in this case, petitions concerning violence) seriously and to read them sympathetically; to try, insofar as possible, to work out the logic of the claims that petitioners are making, to place these claims within both local and comparative contexts, and to propose a model for making them “make sense” to a historian that comes closer to explaining the way that they might have made sense to a petitioner in the Egyptian countryside. Two caveats are important. First, “sympathetic” reading, here, does not involve having to like, appreciate, or enjoy one’s informants. It does not entail a political commitment to sympathize with or romanticize non-elite people. If anything, the people who wrote petitions in Egypt are very much like any group of people who tend to complain: they lie and exaggerate, they whine; they are occasionally funny or clownish, periodically pitiable; sometimes we might suspect that they are a bit thuggish. Reading sympathetically simply entails that when they make claims we take them seriously, and try to understand the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which claim-making takes place. Second:
