Awards
- Winner of Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award 2017.
- Winner of Winner of the 2017 American Association of Law Libraries Jospeh L. Andrews Legal Literature Award.
Overview
Many early modern poets and playwrights were also members of the legal societies the Inns of Court, and these authors shaped the development of key genres of the English Renaissance, especially lyric poetry, dramatic tragedy, satire, and masque. But how did the Inns come to be literary centres in the first place, and why were they especially vibrant at particular times? Early modernists have long understood that urban setting and institutional environment were central to this phenomenon: in the vibrant world of London, educated men with time on their hands turned to literary pastimes for something to do. Lawyers at Play proposes an additional, more essential dynamic: the literary culture of the Inns intensified in decades of profound transformation in the legal profession. Focusing on the first decade of Elizabeth's reign, the period when a large literary network first developed around the societies, this study demonstrates that the literary surge at this time developed out of and responded to a period of rapid expansion in the legal profession and in the career prospects of members. Poetry, translation, and performance were recreational pastimes; however, these activities also defined and elevated the status of inns-of-court men as qualified, learned, and ethical participants in England's 'legal magistracy': those lawyers, judges, justices of the peace, civic office holders, town recorders, and gentleman landholders who managed and administered local and national governance of England. Lawyers at Play maps the literary terrain of a formative but understudied period in the English Renaissance, but it also provides the foundation for an argument that goes beyond the 1560s to provide a framework for understanding the connections between the literary and legal cultures of the Inns over the whole of the early modern period.
Full Product Details
Author: Jessica Winston (Professor of English, Professor of English, Idaho State University)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 17.30cm
, Height: 2.10cm
, Length: 23.80cm
Weight: 0.549kg
ISBN: 9780198769422
ISBN 10: 0198769423
Pages: 286
Publication Date: 26 May 2016
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
Winston's analyses are ... patient, careful and illuminating, such that this book offers more than a few valuable correctives to commonplace notions of the Inns and verdicts on the literature produced there. It encourages one to look forward to future studies, whether by Winston or by those whom this book will inspire, on the clusters of early modern Inns writers that came subsequently: in the 1590s; in the 1610s; in the 1630s-40s. * J. Christopher Warner, English Historical Review * A long overdue examination of the literary network that coalesced around the legal societies of the Inns of Court in the 1560s. * Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900 *
Winston's analyses are ... patient, careful and illuminating, such that this book offers more than a few valuable correctives to commonplace notions of the Inns and verdicts on the literature produced there. It encourages one to look forward to future studies, whether by Winston or by those whom this book will inspire, on the clusters of early modern Inns writers that came subsequently: in the 1590s; in the 1610s; in the 1630s-40s. * J. Christopher Warner, English Historical Review *
Author Information
Jessica Winston is Professor of English at Idaho State University, where she specializes in sixteenth-century literature and Shakespeare. She is the author of numerous articles on the early modern Inns of Court and, with James Ker, she is co-editor of Elizabethan Seneca: Three Tragedies (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2012).
