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A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law

Online ISBN:
9780226116259
Print ISBN:
9780226116242
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law

Published online:
21 February 2013
Published in print:
1 February 2008
Online ISBN:
9780226116259
Print ISBN:
9780226116242
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

English law underwent rapid transformation in the sixteenth century, in response to the Reformation and also to heightened litigation and legal professionalization. As the common law became more comprehensive and systematic, the principle of jurisdiction came under particular strain. When the common law engaged with other court systems in England, when it encountered territories like Ireland and France, or when it confronted the ocean as a juridical space, the law revealed its qualities of ingenuity and improvisation. In other words, as this book argues, jurisdictional crisis made visible the law's resemblance to the literary arts. The book shows how Renaissance writers engaged the practical and conceptual dynamics of jurisdiction, both as a subject for critical investigation and as a frame for articulating literature's sense of itself. Reassessing the relation between English literature and law from Thomas More to William Shakespeare, it argues that where literary texts attend to jurisdiction, they dramatize how boundaries and limits are the very precondition of law's power, even as they clarify the forms of intensification that make literary space a reality. Tracking cultural responses to Renaissance jurisdictional thinking and legal centralization, the book makes theoretical, literary-historical, and methodological contributions that set a new standard for law and the humanities, and for the cultural history of early modern law and literature.

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