Jonathan Powell came to Leiden from England to conduct research into the role of women in early modern court cases. In addition to all kinds of exciting documents, he also discovered the biscuits from the Water & Bloem bakery and the wild flowers at the Groenesteeg cemetery.
You studied in London and do research on early modern England. How did you end up in Leiden?
'My PhD was on theatre and common law in Shakespeare's England, in which I took a particular interest in the connections of women to London's theatre industry. Legal records show that many women made investments or acted as owners, sometimes contesting their rights in court. I was then lucky enough to take up a short-term postdoc on an amazing project back in the UK called 'Engendering the Stage'. The project seeks to establish a new evidence base for the gendered structures of performance in early modern England. Basically, I've long been interested in uncovering overlooked voices and histories from legal archives. So when I heard that Nadine Akkerman was looking for a postdoc to investigate the collaborative production of early modern manuscripts for her FEATHERS project, it felt like a really good fit! Happily, FEATHERS seemed to think so too…'
What have you researched in recent years?
'In the early modern period, England was unbelievably litigious: far more than today. At a time when the population of London was only around 200,000, for example, the common law courts at Westminster heard as many as 100,000 cases a year! I worked with the records of these courts during my PhD and continued to do so in Leiden. As a project, FEATHERS is interested in the role of scribes in the production of manuscripts: how much agency and influence did, say, a secretary or a court clerk have over the production of a text? Whose voice are we actually hearing in the archives? Given my background, I unsurprisingly focus on attorneys and clerks, and specifically their involvements in the production of married women's legal pleadings. Historians presumed for a long time that there were very few women to be found in common law court records. This was largely because, after marriage, a woman's legal identity would be subsumed into that of her husband. But it turns out that these records contain hundreds of cases detailing the legal experiences of women - which, as a researcher, is obviously super exciting!'
What are your main conclusions?
'Apart from the sheer volume of cases involving women, the most interesting result is probably the insight that even highly formulaic sources can be very individual. Common law records are often viewed by historians as sort of copy-paste jobs, but being able to compare different versions of a pleading, for example, or being able to compare a document to some of the form guides that existed for clerks in the period, can help to make visible a document's idiosyncrasies. Which, in turn, raises questions. For example, are these idiosyncrasies a sign of a women litigant's input or of the influence of her male attorney instead? Or of the court clerk? My colleague at FEATHERS, Lotte Fikkers, asks similar questions about equity court records, which is, of course, very helpful for me! Lotte is doing some amazing work showing how an attorney's individuality can be found within even the most formulaic aspects of legal pleadings.'
Powell at Groenesteeg cemetry 
What are your plans for the future?
'I have been very lucky to be awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, which is a UK equivalent to the VENI. This means that I'll be based at the University of Edinburgh for the next three years to work on my next project, which also involves combining legal and literary research. The project will look at the role of 17th-century English and Scottish imaginative writing in the emergence of the modern legal category of the alien (or 'foreigner'). Basically, I'm interested in how and why playwrights, poets, lawyers, and political thinkers of that era reinvented concepts of foreign status, essentially laying the groundwork for modern citizenship. On the one hand, you have a period in which freedom was being increasingly understood as a national birthright in England. But at the same time, you also have the establishment of new forms of unfreedom via colonial projects on the other side of the Atlantic.
I'll also be using the next period of time to finish my first book, which is now under contract with Oxford University Press. This is thanks to my being awarded OUP's Early Career Researcher First Book Prize, which is exciting but also a little terrifying…! When all this is done, I would love to come back to Leiden: it's a special place, and my partner and I would have liked to stay for longer!'
What are your favourite places in Leiden?
'I was fortunate to live in the most beautiful building in Leiden, in a university flat next to Groenesteeg Cemetery. In February and March there are lots of wildflowers and crocuses. Even if I didn't live there, it would have been one of my favourite places in the city, but it is extra special to walk through it as if it's your own back garden! I walk a lot generally, in fact, often looping the Singel; I also love the dunes near Kijkduin. Food-wise, Siri Thai is great, as are the loempias sold at the market on Saturdays. Toko Haven is likewise really cool. You can also get incredible cookies and bread at the bakery Water & Bloem. I like baking my own bread, too, but since there was no oven in the flat, there was less baking these past couple of years.'
Have you ever had a golden tip?
'You always need to leave bread to rise longer than you realise. From my PhD right through to today, I've been so lucky with my mentors, so I've actually been given a lot of good advice over the past few years. But this advice often holds true. It certainly transformed my bread baking! Sometimes you just have to be patient.'
