Awards

• Winner of Winner of the 2017 Roland H. Bainton Reference Book Prize, awarded by the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC)..

Overview

This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. For historians of early modern England, turning to legal archives and learning more about legal procedure has seemed increasingly relevant to the project of understanding familial and social relations as well as political institutions, state formation, and economic change. Literary scholars and intellectual historians have also shown how classical forensic rhetoric formed the basis both of the humanist teaching of literary composition (poetry and drama) and of new legal epistemologies of fact-finding and evidence evaluation. In addition, the post-Reformation jurisdictional dominance of the common law produced new ways of drawing the boundaries between private conscience and public accountability. This Handbook brings historians, literary scholars, and legal historians together to build on and challenge these and similar lines of inquiry. Chapters in the Handbook consider the following topics in a variety of combinations: forensic rhetoric, poetics and evidence; humanist and legal learning; political and professional identities at the Inns of Court; poetry, drama, and visual culture; local governance and legal reform; equity, conscience, and religious law; legal transformations of social and affective relations (property, marriage, witchcraft, contract, corporate personhood); authorial liability (libel, censorship, press regulation); rhetorics of liberty, slavery, torture, and due process; nation, sovereignty, and international law (the British archipelago, colonialism, empire).

Full Product Details

Author:   Lorna Hutson (Merton Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press
Imprint:   Oxford University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 17.80cm , Height: 5.10cm , Length: 25.20cm
Weight:   1.622kg
ISBN:  

9780199660889

ISBN 10:   0199660883
Pages:   826
Publication Date:   22 June 2017
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
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.

Table of Contents

Lorna Hutson: Introduction: Law, Literature and History Part I. Textual and Interpretative Culture 1: Kathy Eden: Forensic Rhetoric and Humanist Education 2: Margaret McGlynn: Idiosyncratic Books and Common Learning: Readings on Statutes at the Inns of Court' 3: Ian Williams: Common Law Scholarship and the Written Word 4: James McBain: 'Attentive Mindes and Serious Wits': Legal Training and Early Drama 5: Quentin Skinner: Why Shylocke Loses his Case: Judicial Rhetoric in The Merchant of Venice Part II. Literature and the Legal Profession, 1500-1700 6: Jessica Winston: Legal Satire and the Legal Profession in the 1590s: John Davies' Epigrammes and Professional Decorum 7: Peter Goodrich: The Emblem Book and Common Law 8: Paul Raffield: The Monarchical Republic: Constitutionality and the Legal Profession 9: Martin Butler: The Legal Masque: Humanity and Liberty at the Inns of Court 10: Christopher Brooks: Paradise Lost? Law, Literature, and History in Restoration England Part III. Administering the Law 11: James Sharpe: Law Enforcement and the Local Community 12: Norma Landau: The Changing Persona of the Justices and their Quarter Sessions 13: Barbara Shapiro: Law and the Evidentiary Environment 14: Virginia Strain: Legal Reform and 2 Henry IV Part IV. Temporal and Spiritual, Law and Conscience 15: Joshua P. Phillips: Immunities and Monasticism: Bale to Shakespeare 16: Alan Cromartie: Epieikeia and Conscience 17: Ethan Shagan: The Ecclesiastical Polity 18: Jason Rosenblatt: Making Law and Recording It: John Selden on Excommunication 19: Elliott Visconsi: Seldenism Part V. Legal and Literary Imagining 20: Luke Wilson: Contract 21: Tim Stretton: Contract and Conjugality in Early Modern England 22: Carolyn Sale: The Literary Thing: The Imaginary Holding of Isabella Whitney's 'Wyll' to London, 1573 23: Frances Dolan: Witch Wives 24: Henry Turner: Corporate Persons, Between Law and Literature Part VI. Libel, Publication, and the Press 25: David Ibbetson: Edward Coke, Roman Law, and the Law of Libel 26: Joad Raymond: Censorship in Law and Practice in Seventeenth Century England: Milton's Aeropagitica 27: Martin Dzelzainis: Managing the Later Stuart Press, 1662-1696 28: Alastair Bellany: The Torture of John Felton, 1628 Part VII. Liberties, Slaveries, and English Law 29: Bernadette Meyler: From Sovereignty to the State: The Tragicomic Clemency of Massinger's The Bondman 30: Paul Halliday: Birthrights and the Due Course of Law 31: Nigel Smith: Legal Agency as Literature in the English Revolution: The Case of the Levellers 32: Mary Nyquist: Base Slavery and the Roman Yoke Part VIII. The Extra-English Legal World: Between Colony, Nation, and Empire 33: Andrew Zurcher: Spenser, Plowden, and the Hypallactic Instrument 34: Rab Houston: Law and Literature in Scotland, c.1450-1707 35: Lorna Hutson: Forensic History: Henry V and Scotland 36: Christopher Warren: Henry V, Anachronism, and the History of International Law 37: Edward Holberton: Empire and Natural Law in Dryden's Heroic Drama 38: Dan Hulsebosch: English Liberties Outside England: Floors, Doors, Windows, and Ceilings in the Legal Architecture of Empire

Reviews

This handbook is scholarly, substantive, and insightful. ... this is a useful storehouse, worthy of study and valuable to specialists interested in law and literature in early modern England. ... Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. --J. S. Carducci, CHOICE

This resource can only advance the study of law and literature, and should be part of the larger discussion in early modern studies on how early modern individuals encountered, debated, and understood a form of English subjecthood that relied significantly on the period's legal and literary cultures. * Katherine Walker, The British Society for Literature and Science * This volume is commendable for both its breadth of topics and depth of learning (and for the bibliographies!). It should serve both as a valuable reminder of where the law and literature movement came from and as an early indication of where it is heading. * Gregory Kneidel, H-Net *

This volume is commendable for both its breadth of topics and depth of learning (and for the bibliographies!). It should serve both as a valuable reminder of where the law and literature movement came from and as an early indication of where it is heading. * Gregory Kneidel, H-Net * Constructively posing some of the most challenging questions animating the study of law and literature, The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 is a critical resource for any scholar of the field. * Katherine Walker (University of North Carolina), The British Society for Literature and Science * The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature offers a representative and stimulating snapshot of what the collective discussion looks like at this moment in time [...] Readers who want a sense of the possibilities that law opens up for thinking about literature and vice versa can benefit greatly from these essays [...] The volume offers its greatest reward for the reader willing to work through all of the essays since there is a synergy and a potentiality here that can be grasped only when one arrives at the end and turns to survey the full expanse of terrain crossed. * Alison A. Chapman, University of Alabama at Birmingham, in Milton Quarterly * While The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700, might be-come the go-to text for an undergraduate seeking to understand the early modern beginnings of slander as a criminal offense or the concept of 'assumpsit', each subset of essays, organized within the eight parts of this volume, provides a lush opportunity for researchers to enjoy expanded parameters of early modern legal ideas and the plays, poems, and pamphlets that register these concepts. The bibliographies that conclude each essay of this 800-page tome make this text a bargain. * Katherine M. Conway, The Review of English Studies * Lorna Hutson's magisterial Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 seeks to interrogate the 'menage a trois' between law, literature, and history...The sections of the volume deliberately juxtapose chapters by authors from different disciplines to generate further cross-pollination. * Harriet Archer, The English Association * With its compelling reading of The Merchant of Venice, its rigorous research, and its clarity of style, Skinner's chapter shines as an exemplar of the very best of Shakespearean scholarship. * Louise Powell, The English Association *

Author Information

Lorna Hutson is Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. Educated in San Francisco, Edinburgh, and Oxford, she has taught at the Universities of St Andrews, UC Berkeley, Hull, and Queen Mary, London. She has served as Head of English at St Andrews (2008-11) and has held fellowships from the Folger, the Huntingdon, the Guggenheim, and the Leverhulme Trust. Her books include Thomas Nashe in Context (1989), The Usurer's Daughter (1994), and The Invention of Suspicion (2007). Circumstantial Shakespeare (2015) was based on the Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures in 2012. She has also edited Ben Jonson's Discoveries (1641) for the Cambridge Complete Works of Ben Jonson (2012) and written numerous articles on Renaissance topics.

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