Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature

by Virginia Lee Strain

Overview

The first monograph study of legal reform and literature in early modern England
This 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 Features
Reevaluates 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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474416290
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	03/05/2018
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Virginia Lee Strain is Assistant Professor of English at Loyola UniversityChicago. She has held fellowships at The Huntington Library, Vanderbilt University, and Washington Universityin St. Louis. Her articles have appeared in ELH and Literature Compass, and in several essay volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 (OUP, 2017), Shakespeare and Judgment (EUP, 2016), and Taking Exception to the Law (UTP, 2015). Her dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize from the Shakespeare Association of America (2011).

Table of Contents

Introduction

1 ‘Perpetuall Reformation’ in Book V of The Faerie Queene

Part I: Perfection

2 Snaring Statutes and the General Pardon in the Gesta Grayorum

3 Legal Excess in John Donne’s ‘Satyre V’

Part II: Execution

4 The Assize Circuitry of Measure for Measure

5 The Winter’s Tale and the Oracle of the Law

Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

In this richly conceived and tightly argued study of legal reform as one index of law’s openness and ongoing potential, Virginia Lee Strain details how Elizabethan poets and dramatists exploited the formal resources of genre, plot, and language to reimagine and even re-authorize the attempts at law, both professional and political, to bring greater efficiency and consistency to the administration of justice. A terrific achievement.

Princeton University Bradin Cormack

In this richly conceived and tightly argued study of legal reform as one index of law’s openness and ongoing potential, Virginia Lee Strain details how Elizabethan poets and dramatists exploited the formal resources of genre, plot, and language to reimagine and even re-authorize the attempts at law, both professional and political, to bring greater efficiency and consistency to the administration of justice. A terrific achievement.

Editorial Reviews

This is an erudite study and a significant contribution to our understanding of the often submerged ways law and literature have always spoken to and about each other. English Renaissance scholars in particular will appreciate the comprehensiveness of Strain’s argument.

Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 4 - Karen J. Cunningham

This monograph delivers an insightful, interdisciplinary perspective on rhetorical and representation practices used to supervise English law at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Shakespeare Studies - Jessica Apolloni

In this richly conceived and tightly argued study of legal reform as one index of law’s openness and ongoing potential, Virginia Lee Strain details how Elizabethan poets and dramatists exploited the formal resources of genre, plot, and language to reimagine and even re-authorize the attempts at law, both professional and political, to bring greater efficiency and consistency to the administration of justice. A terrific achievement.

Princeton University Bradin Cormack