Barbara Shapiro

Barbara Shapiro, Professor Emerita of Rhetoric at Berkeley (1934-2023) grew up in Tujunga, California. She received her PhD in History from Harvard (1966). Before coming to Berkeley, she taught at Occidental College, Pitzer, Wheaton (where she also served as dean of the faculty), UC San Diego, and Wellesley. She was a pathbreaking legal historian, who specialized in the law and culture of early modern England and drew important connections between the history and discourses of law and of science. She published seven books, several after her retirement in 1993: John Wilkins, 1614-1672: An Intellectual Biography (UC Press, 1969), History and Natural History in Seventeenth-Century England (1981), Beyond Reasonable Doubt and Probable Cause: Historical Perspectives on the Anglo-American Law of Evidence (UC Press, 1993), Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), A Culture of Fact: England 1550-1700 (Cornell Univ. Press, 2000), Political Communication and Political Culture in England, 1558-1688 (Stanford University Press, 2012), and Law Reform in Early Modern England: Crown, Parliament and the Press (Hart, 2020). She remained an active scholar into her mid-eighties and continued to teach courses in Legal Studies after her “retirement.” She is remembered as “a person of abounding kindness.” She died December 30, 2023, and is survived by her husband, Martin Shapiro, and their daughter, Eve Ridgers.