ICYMI: Joseph Jenkins, Inheritance Law and Political Theology in Shakespeare and Milton (Routledge, 2016)

ICYMI:

Joseph Jenkins, Inheritance Law and Political Theology in Shakespeare and Milton (Routledge, 2016).

Reading God's will and a man's Last Will as ideas that reinforce one another, this study shows the relevance of England's early modern crisis, regarding faith in the will of God, to current debates by legal academics on the theory of property and its succession. The increasing power of the dead under law in the US, the UK, and beyond-a concern of recent volumes in law and social sciences-is here addressed through a distinctive approach based on law and humanities. Vividly treating literary and biblical battles of will, the book suggests approaches to legal constitution informed by these dramas and by English legal history. This study investigates correlations between the will of God in Judeo-Christian traditions and the Last Wills of humans, especially dominant males, in cultures where these traditions have developed. It is interdisciplinary, in the sense that it engages with the limits of several fields: it is informed by humanities critical theory, especially Benjaminian historical materialism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, but refrains from detailed theoretical considerations. Dramatic narratives from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton are read as suggesting real possibilities for alternative inheritance (i.e., constitutional) regimes. As Jenkins shows, these texts propose ways to alleviate violence, violence both personal and political, through attention to inheritance law.

Spy/Not Spy @saltpublishing

From novelist Guy Ware, at Salt Publishing's blog: Ten spies who weren't actually spies. Discussion ranges from Leonard Mosley's "The Druid" to Roger O. Thornhill (remember "North by Northwest"?) to some very literary speculation about Satan in Paradise Lost.

Some good reading for a Sunday afternoon, especially if one goes back to check out the original sources (JFF--Just For Fun). 

"Paradise Lost" as a Discussion of Early Modern Legal Justice

Alison A. Chapman, Professor of English, University of Alabama, Birmingham, has published The Legal Epic: “Paradise Lost” and the Early Modern Law (Harvard University Press, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

The seventeenth century saw some of the most important legal changes in England’s history, yet the period has been largely overlooked in the rich field of literature and law. Helping to fill this gap, The Legal Epic is the first book to situate the great poet and polemicist John Milton at the center of late seventeenth-century legal history. Alison A. Chapman argues that Milton’s Paradise Lost sits at the apex of the early modern period’s long fascination with law and judicial processes. Milton’s world saw law and religion as linked disciplines and thought therefore that in different ways, both law and religion should reflect the will of God. Throughout Paradise Lost, Milton invites his readers to judge actions using not only reason and conscience but also core principles of early modern jurisprudence. Law thus informs Milton’s attempt to “justify the ways of God to men” and points readers toward the types of legal justice that should prevail on earth. Adding to the growing interest in the cultural history of law, The Legal Epic shows that England’s preeminent epic poem is also a sustained reflection on the role that law plays in human society.

Exception Taken: Examining Injustice In Early Modern English Literature

New from University of Toronto Press: Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature (Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams, 2015).

Taking Exception to the Law explores how a range of early modern English writings responded to injustices perpetrated by legal procedures, discourses, and institutions. From canonical poems and plays to crime pamphlets and educational treatises, the essays engage with the relevance and wide appeal of legal questions in order to understand how literature operated in the early modern period.

Justice in its many forms – legal, poetic, divine, natural, and customary – is examined through insightful and innovative analyses of a number of texts, including The Merchant of Venice, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. A major contribution to the growing field of law and literature, this collection offers cultural contexts, interpretive insights, and formal implications for the entire field of English Renaissance culture.

Donald Beecher is Professor, Department of English at Carleton University.
Travis DeCook is Associate Professor, Department of English at Carleton University.
Andrew Wallace is Associate Professor, Department of English at Carleton University.
Grant Williams is Associate Professor, Department of English at Carleton University.

Copy provided by Chris Reed, publicist, University of Toronto Press.

The book includes the following essays:

Grant Williams, Law and the Production of Literature: An Introductory Perspective

Bradin Cormack, Paper Justice, Parchment Justice: Shakespeare, Hamlet, and the Life of Legal Documents

Tim Stretton, Conditional Promises and Legal Instruments in the Merchant of Venice

Virginia Lee Strain, The "Snared Subject" and the General Pardon Statute in Late Elizabethan Coterie Literature

Debora Shuger, The Prison Diaries of Archbishop Laud

David Stymeist, Criminal Biography in Early Modern News Pamphlets

Barbara Kreps, Two-Sided Legal Narratives: Slander, Evidence, Proof, and Turnarounds in Much Ado About Nothing

Elizabeth Hanson, No Boy Left Behind: Education and Distributive Justice in Early Modern England

Judith Owerns, Warding Off Injustice in Book Five of The Faerie Queene

John D. Staines, Torture and the Tyrant's Injustice from Foxe to King Lear

Elliott Visconsi, The Literatures of Toleration and Civil Religion in Post-Revolutionary England

Paul Stevens, Obnoxious Satan: Milton, Neo-Roman Justice, and the Burden of Grace


 

Cloth

ISBN 9781442642010

Published Jan 2015

$70.00