The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 (Oxford Handbooks)

"This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. Scholars of early modern English literature and history have increasingly found that an understanding of how people in the past thought about and used the law is key to understanding early modern familial and social relations as well as important aspects of the political revolution and the emergence of capitalism. Judicial or forensic rhetoric has been shown to foster new habits of literary composition (poetry and drama) and new processes 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. Accordingly, historians, critics and legal historians come together in this Handbook to develop accounts of the past that are attentive to the legally purposeful or fictional shaping of events in the historical archive.They also contribute to a transformation of our understanding of the place of forensic modes of inquiry in the creation of imaginative fiction and drama. Chapters in the Handbook approach, from a diversity of perspectives, topics including forensic rhetoric, humanist and legal education, Inns of Court revels, drama, poetry, emblem books, marriage and divorce, witchcraft, contract, property, imagination, oaths, evidence, community, local government, legal reform, libel, censorship, authorship, torture, slavery, liberty, due process, the nation state, colonialism, and empire"--Book jacket. Cover The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500–​1700 Copyright Contents List of Figures Abbreviations and Conventions Notes on Contributors Introduction: Law, Literature, and History Part I Textual and Interpretative Culture 1. Forensic Rhetoric and Humanist Education 2. Idiosyncratic Books and Common Learning: Readings on Statutes at the Inns of Court 3. Common Law Scholarship and the Written Word 4. ‘Attentive Mindes and Serious Wits’: Legal Training and Early Drama 5. Why Shylocke Loses His Case: Judicial Rhetoric in The Merchant of Venice Part II Literature and the Legal Profession 1500–​1700 6. Legal Satire and the Legal Profession in the 1590s: John Davies’s Epigrammes and Professional Decorum 7. The Emblem Book and Common Law 8. The Monarchical Republic, Constitutionality, and the Legal Profession 9. The Legal Masque: Humanity and Liberty at the Inns of Court 10. Paradise Lost? Law, Literature, and History in Restoration England Part III Administering the Law 11. Law Enforcement and the Local Community 12. The Changing Persona of the Justices and their Quarter Sessions 13. Law and the Evidentiary Environment 14. Legal Reform and 2 Henry IV Part IV Temporal and Spiritual, Law and Conscience 15. Immunities and Monasticism: Bale to Shakespeare 16. Epieikeia and Conscience 17. The Ecclesiastical Polity 18. Making Law and Recording It: John Selden on Excommunication 19. Seldenism Part V Legal and Literary Imagining 20. Contract 21. Contract and Conjugality in Early Modern England 22. The Literary Thing: The Imaginary Holding of Isabella Whitney’s ‘Wyll’ to London (1573) 23. Witch Wives 24. Corporate Persons, between Law and Literature Part VI Libel, Publication, and the Press 25. Edward Coke, Roman Law, and the Law of Libel 26. Censorship in Law and Practice in Seventeenth-​Century England: Milton’s Areopagitica 27. Managing the Later Stuart Press, 1662–​1696 28. The Torture of John Felton, 1628 Part VII Liberties, Slaveries, and English Law 29. From Sovereignty to the State: The Tragicomic Clemency of Massinger’s The Bondman 30. Birthrights and the Due Course of Law 31. Legal Agency as Literature in the English Revolution: The Case of the Levellers 32. Base Slavery and Roman Yoke Part VIII The Extra-​English Legal World: Between Colony, Nation, and Empire 33. Spenser, Plowden, and the Hypallactic Instrument 34. Law and Literature in Scotland, c.1450–​1707 35. Forensic History: Henry V and Scotland 36. Henry V, Anachronism, and the History of International Law 37. Empire and Natural Law in Dryden’s Heroic Drama 38. English Liberties outside England: Floors, Doors, Windows, and Ceilings in the Legal Architecture of Empire Index Présentation de l'éditeur : "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)." "This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. Scholars of early modern English literature and history have increasingly found that an understanding of how people in the past thought about and used the law is key to understanding early modern familial and social relations as well as important aspects of the political revolution and the emergence of capitalism. Judicial or forensic rhetoric has been shown to foster new habits of literary composition (poetry and drama) and new processes 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. Accordingly, historians, critics and legal historians come together in this Handbook to develop accounts of the past that are attentive to the legally purposeful or fictional shaping of events in the historical archive. They also contribute to a transformation of our understanding of the place of forensic modes of inquiry in the creation of imaginative fiction and drama. Chapters in the Handbook approach, from a diversity of perspectives, topics including forensic rhetoric, humanist and legal education, Inns of Court revels, drama, poetry, emblem books, marriage and divorce, witchcraft, contract, property, imagination, oaths, evidence, community, local government, legal reform, libel, censorship, authorship, torture, slavery, liberty, due process, the nation state, colonialism, and empire"--Jacket