Overview

Tuning into the collective understanding of law as lived experience, Knowing Justice is a timely and distinctive intervention in the field of law and literature. It seeks to understand and inhabit the intersection between judicial procedure, legal thinking and imaginative practice, where epistemic processes that elude the formal discourses of law and legal history are generated and brought into view. But the law in early modern England – the focus of this book though not its horizon – was also an imaginative resource and a repository of structures of feeling. These are functions uniquely grasped through literary mediation because literature shares the representational modes and structures of law but not its methods or ends. Bringing together established and younger scholars from literary studies, legal history, theology and law, and employing a variety of approaches, this collection of essays eschews flat description in favour of layered analysis, cognisant of the plurality of concept, practice and representation. In using a literary lens, it treats apparent binaries or distinct registers as interlinked constituents of an ecology, and navigates the gap between abstract jurisprudence and the affective, composite, social event of justice or judgment. Its perception of ‘literature’, likewise, is capacious: including imaginative method, literary strategies used by law and its cognate disciplines, and hermeneutic and critical methods that are traditionally regarded as literary. Its notion of epistemology, meanwhile, encompasses not simply the condition of judicial knowledge but also its process, psychology and ethics: it attempts to know justice at the same time as it attends to what justice knows, fails to know, or resists knowing.

Full Product Details

Author:   Subha Mukherji ,  Dunstan Roberts
Publisher:   Springer International Publishing AG
Imprint:   Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN:  

9783031740954

ISBN 10:   3031740955
Pages:   343
Publication Date:   07 January 2026
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

.- Part I – Introduction.- Chapter 1 – Subha Mukherji: Introduction.- Part II – Legal Imaginaries.- Chapter 2 – Julie Stone Peters: ‘Behind Justice’s Book and Sword: Knowledge, Emotion, and Judgement in the Scene of Law’.- Chapter 3 – Doyeeta Majumdar: ‘Law of Nature in Inns of Court Drama’.- Chapter 4 – Richard Sherwin: ‘Escalus’ Dream: Reimagining Shakespeare’s States’.- Part III – Text, Knowledge, Hermeneutics.- Chapter 5 – Regina Schwartz: ‘The letter and the Spirit: Portia’s Case’.- Chapter 6 – Torrance Kirby: ‘Configuring God as Law: Richard Hooker’s Poetics of Law’.- Chapter 7 – Charles McNamara: ‘The Common Consent of Words: An Aristotelian Element of Hobbesian Legal Rhetoric’.- Part IV – Play and Pleasure.- Chapter 8 – Peter Goodrich: ‘Doublings: Comedy, Office, Law’.- Chapter 9 – Maksymilian Del Mar: ‘Ludic Legal Pedagogy: Mooting in Early Modern England’.- Chapter 10 – Gary Watt: ‘“A delightful measure”: Imagining Barfield’s Poetic Jurisdiction’.- Part V – Law and Poetics.- Chapter 11 – Conrad van Dijk: ‘Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and the allegory of law’.- Chapter 12 – Valérie Hayaert: ‘The versification of legal codes’.- Chapter 13 – Jan Melissa-Schramm: ‘Towards a Poetics of Equality in Nineteenth-Century English Literature’.- Chapter 14 – Alex Feldman: ‘The Beatitude of the Berrigans: Jurisprudential Drama.- Part VI – Afterword.- Chapter 15 – Kathy Eden: Afterword.- Index.

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Author Information

Subha Mukherji is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. Dunstan Roberts is a scholar of early modern literature who has published widely on the histories of books, libraries, and reading.

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