Download or read book English Law and the Renaissance written by Frederic William Maitland and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Custom Common Law and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature written by Stephanie Elsky and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature argues that, ironically, custom was a supremely generative literary force for a range of Renaissance writers. Custom took on so much power because of its virtual synonymity with English common law, the increasingly dominant legal system that was also foundational to England's constitutionalist politics. The strange temporality assigned to legal custom, that is, its purported existence since 'time immemorial', furnished it with a unique and paradoxical capacity—to make new and foreign forms familiar. This volume shows that during a time when novelty was suspect, even insurrectionary, appeals to the widespread understanding of custom as a legal concept justified a startling array of fictive experiments. This is the first book to reveal fully the relationship between Renaissance literature and legal custom. It shows how writers were able to reimagine moments of historical and cultural rupture as continuity by appealing to the powerful belief that English legal custom persisted in the face of conquests by foreign powers. Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature thus challenges scholarly narratives in which Renaissance art breaks with a past it looks back upon longingly and instead argues that the period viewed its literature as imbued with the aura of the past. In this way, through experiments in rhetoric and form, literature unfolds the processes whereby custom gains its formidable and flexible political power. Custom, a key concept of legal and constitutionalist thought, shaped sixteenth-century literature, while this literature, in turn, transformed custom into an evocative mythopoetic.
Download or read book English Law in the Age of the Black Death 1348 1381 written by Robert C. Palmer and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2001-02-01 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Palmer's pathbreaking study shows how the Black Death triggered massive changes in both governance and law in fourteenth-century England, establishing the mechanisms by which the law adapted to social needs for centuries thereafter. The Black De
Download or read book Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature written by Brian C. Lockey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-31 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern literature played a key role in the formation of the legal justification for imperialism. As the English colonial enterprise developed, the existing legal tradition of common law no longer solved the moral dilemmas of the new world order, in which England had become, instead of a victim of Catholic enemies, an aggressive force with its own overseas territories. Writers of romance fiction employed narrative strategies in order to resolve this difficulty and, in the process, provided a legal basis for English imperialism. Brian Lockey analyses works by such authors as Shakespeare, Spenser and Sidney in the light of these legal discourses, and uncovers new contexts for the genre of romance. Scholars of early modern literature, as well as those interested in the history of law as the British Empire emerged, will learn much from this insightful and ambitious study.
Download or read book Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature written by Virginia Lee Strain and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-14 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study of legal reform and literature in early modern EnglandThis book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century. The late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean surge in the policies and enforcement of the reformation of manners has been well-documented. What has gone unnoticed, however, is the degree to which the law itself was the focus of reform for legislators, the judiciary, preachers, and writers alike. While the majority of law and literature studies characterize the law as a force of coercion and subjugation, this book instead treats in greater depth the law's own vulnerability, both to corruption and to correction. In readings of Spenser's Faerie Queene, the Gesta Grayorum, Donne's 'Satyre V', and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale, Strain argues that the terms and techniques of legal reform provided modes of analysis through which legal authorities and literary writers alike imagined and evaluated form and character. Key FeaturesReevaluates canonical writers in light of developments in legal historical research, bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to works Collects an extensive variety of legal, political, and literary sources to reconstruct the discourse on early modern legal reform, providing an introduction to a topic that is currently underrepresented in early modern legal cultural studiesAnalyses the laws own vulnerability to individual agency.
Download or read book Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature written by R. S. White and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-28 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural law, whether grounded in human reason or divine edict, encourages men to follow virtue and shun vice. The concept dominated Renaissance thought, where its literary equivalent, poetic justice, underpinned much of the period's creative writing. R. S. White's study examines a wide range of Renaissance texts, by More, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare and Milton, in the light of these developing ideas of Natural Law. It shows how writers as radically different as Aquinas and Hobbes formulated versions of Natural Law which served to maintain socially established hierarchies. For Aquinas, Natural Law always resided in the individual's conscience, whereas Hobbes thought individuals had limited access to virtue and therefore needed to be coerced into doing good by the state. White shows how the very flexibility and antiquity of Natural Law enabled its appropriation and application by thinkers of all political persuasions in a debate that raged throughout the Renaissance and which continues in our own time.
Download or read book Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance written by John H. Langbein and published by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.. This book was released on 2005 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our present system of criminal prosecution originated in England in the sixteenth century. Langbein traces its development, which was at its most intense during the reign of Queen Mary. He shows how the common law developed a system of official investigation and prosecution that incorporated the medieval institution of the jury trial. He places equal emphasis on the role of the justices of the peace as public prosecutors. The second half of the book compares the English system with those of the Holy Roman Empire (Germany) and France. He concludes by refuting the popular opinion that the English were strongly indebted to continental models. "This is an excellent work of scholarship, exhibiting wide research, erudition and analytical ability." --Joseph H. Smith, Harvard Law Review 88 (1974-1975) 485 JOHN LANGBEIN is Sterling Professor of Law and Legal History at Yale Law School. He has held academic positions at Stanford University, Oxford University, the Max-Planck-Institut für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte and the Max-Planck-Institut für Ausländisches und Internationales Strafrecht. Langbein is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Academy of Comparative Law, the International Association of Procedure Law, and other organizations in the fields of legal history and comparative law. Some of his most distinguished publications and articles include History of the Common Law: The Development of Anglo-American Legal Institutions (2009), Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancient Regime (1977), and "The Supreme Court Flunks Trusts," Supreme Court Review (1991).
Download or read book Solon and Thespis written by Dennis Kezar and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this attractively titled collection of essays on law and theater in the English Renaissance, Dennis Kezar has assembled an impressive array of talent to focus on the productive and yet vexed relationship of theater and the state. Plays 'tell lies' to their audiences: so argued Solon in his riposte to Thespis, to be followed in due course by Plato's attack on poetry in the Republic and all that Jonas Barish has studied under the rubric of The Antitheatrical Prejudice. This battleground here affords a rich opportunity for an exploration of 'an institutional antagonism over the tenuous distinction between theater's inconsequential fiction and the real world's socially consequential fact.' This volume is a truly valuable contribution to the growing interest in law and literature, here brought to bear on the great drama of Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker, Marston, Chapman, and their contemporaries." --David Bevington, Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities, University of Chicago "The diversity of topics explored in this excellent collection makes it a valuable addition to the burgeoning field of early modern law, theater, and literature studies. The essays included here touch on a wide range of material--from Dekker to Shakespeare to Chapman and Bacon; and in doing so, they explore the tensions between Solon and Thespis in such a way as to make the work of analyzing the relationship between literature and the law seem not only fruitful, but in fact essential to a deeper understanding of both." --Jeremy Lopez, University of Toronto This volume contains contributions by literary critics and historians who demonstrate that theater and law were not simply relevant to each other in the early modern period; they explore the physical spaces in which early modern law and drama were performed, the social and imaginative practices that energized such spaces, and the rhetorical patterns that make the two institutions far less discrete and far more collaborative than has previously been recognized.
Download or read book Crime Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy written by Trevor Dean and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-04-14 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wide body of internationally-renowned scholars, including a core of Italians, this volume focuses on new material and puts crime and disorder in Renaissance Italy firmly in its political and social context. All stages of the judicial process are addressed, from the drafting of new laws to the rounding-up of bandits. Attention is paid both to common crime and to more historically specific crimes, such as sumptuary laws. Attempts to prevent or suppress disorder in private and public life are analysed, and many different types of crime, from the sexual to the political and from the verbal to the physical, are considered. In sum the volume aims to demonstrate the fundamental importance of crime and disorder for the study of the Italian Renaissance. It is the only single-volume treatment available of the subject in English. Other books have studied crime in a single city, or single types of crime, but few have presented a cross-section of articles which deploy diverse methodological approaches in material from many parts of the peninsula.
Download or read book Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance written by Robert Stuart Sturges and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sovereignty, law, and the relationship between them are now among the most compelling topics in history, philosophy, literature and art. Some argue that the state's power over the individual has never been more complete, while for others, such factors as globalization and the internet are subverting traditional political forms. This book exposes the roots of these arguments in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The thirteen contributions investigate theories, fictions, contestations, and applications of sovereignty and law from the Anglo-Saxon period to the seventeenth century, and from England across western Europe to Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Particular topics include: Habsburg sovereignty, Romance traditions in Arthurian literature, the duomo in Milan, the political theories of Juan de Mariana and of Richard Hooker, Geoffrey Chaucer's legal problems, the accession of James I, medieval Jewish women, Elizabethan diplomacy, Anglo-Saxon political subjectivity, and medieval French farce. Together these contributions constitute a valuable overview of the history of medieval and Renaissance law and sovereignty in several disciplines. They will appeal to not only to political historians, but also to all those interested in the histories of art, literature, religion, and culture.
Download or read book Voices and Books in the English Renaissance written by Jennifer Richards and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Voices and Books in the English Renaissance offers a new history of reading that focuses on the oral reader and the voice- or performance-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice—and tones of voice especially—from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others' voices, as well as manage and exploit their readers' voices. The volume offers fresh readings of key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers including Anne Askew, William Baldwin, and Thomas Nashe. It rethinks what a printed book can be by searching the printed page for vocal cues and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process. Renaissance printed books have often been misheard and a preoccupation with their materiality has led to a focus on them as objects. However, Renaissance printed books are alive with possible voices, but we will not understand this while we focus on the silent reader.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature written by Candace Barrington and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive and wide-ranging account of the interrelationship between law and literature in Anglo-Saxon, Medieval and Tudor England.
Download or read book The Invention of Suspicion written by Lorna Hutson and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-04-14 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Invention of Suspicion argues that the English justice system underwent changes in the sixteenth century that, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect and a decisive impact on the development of English Renaissance drama. These changes gradually made evidence evaluation a popular skill: justices of peace and juries were increasingly required to weigh up the probabilities of competing narratives of facts. At precisely the same time, English dramatists were absorbing, from Latin legal rhetoric and from Latin comedy, poetic strategies that enabled them to make their plays more persuasively realistic, more 'probable'. The result of this enormously rich conjunction of popular legal culture and ancient forensic rhetoric was a drama in which dramatis personae habitually gather evidence and 'invent' arguments of suspicion and conjecture about one another, thus prompting us, as readers and audience, to reconstruct this 'evidence' as stories of characters' private histories and inner lives. In this drama, people act in uncertainty, inferring one another's motives and testing evidence for their conclusions. As well as offering an overarching account of how changes in juridical epistemology relate to post-Reformation drama, this book examines comic dramatic writing associated with the Inns of Court in the overlooked decades of the 1560s and 70s. It argues that these experiments constituted an influential sub-genre, assimilating the structures of Roman comedy to current civic and political concerns with the administration of justice. This sub-genre's impact may be seen in Shakespeare's early experiments in revenge tragedy, history play and romance comedy, in Titus Andronicus, Henry VI and The Comedy of Errors, as well as Jonson's Every Man in his Humour, Bartholomew Fair and The Alchemist. The book ranges from mid-fifteenth century drama, through sixteenth century interludes to the drama of the 1590s and 1600s. It draws on recent research by legal historians, and on a range of legal-historical sources in print and manuscript.
Download or read book Letterwriting in Renaissance England written by Folger Shakespeare Library and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduces in full size and transcribes a number of letters from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries
Download or read book Law in Common written by Tom Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law in Common draws on a large body of unpublished archival material from local archives and libraries across the country, to show how ordinary people in the later Middle Ages - such as peasants, craftsmen, and townspeople - used law in their everyday lives, developing our understanding of the operation of late-medieval society and politics.
Download or read book The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I written by Frederick Pollock and published by . This book was released on 1899 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Politics of Law in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy written by Lawrin David Armstrong and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Law in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy features original contributions by international scholars on the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Lauro Martines' Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence, which is recognized as a groundbreaking study challenging traditional approaches to both Florentine and legal history. Essays by leading historians examine the professional, social, and political functions of Italian jurists from the thirteenth to the late fifteenth centuries. The volume also examines the use of emergency powers, the critical role played by jurists in mediating the rule of law, and the adjudication of political crimes. The Politics of Law in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy provides both an assessment of Martines' pioneering archival scholarship as well as fresh insights into the interplay of law and politics in late medieval and Renaissance Italy.
