Newly Published: Stephanie Elsky, Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature (OUP, 2021) @srelsky @RhodesCollege @OxUniPress

Stephanie Elsky, Rhodes College, has published Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford University Press, 2021). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

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.

 

Virginia Lee Strain, Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature @jcalvo11 @EdinburghUP

Virginia Lee Strain, Loyola University (Chicago), has published Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

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.

 

Via @jcalvo11.

Roehampton University Doctoral Fellowship In Renaissance Studies Available

A Phd scholarship (fully-funded) in Renaissance Studies area of London theatrical culture and related studies during the period 1565-1595, is available from Roehampton University. More information is available here, from the Before Shakespeare blog.


Via Prof. Andy Kesson @andykesson, Jean Noel Vandaele @jnvandaele, and Will Tosh @will_tosh.

Lockey on Law and English Renaissance Literature

Brian C. Lockey, an assistant professor of English at St. John's University, has published the book Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature (Camrbidge, 2006).

From the book description:

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.