England's Insular Imagining The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland
September 2023
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Book
Our image of England as island nation is the legacy of the Elizabethan literary erasure of Scotland.
Literary Criticism
Debt and Doorways in Renaissance Comedy
January 2021
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Chapter
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Early Modern Debts 1550–1700
The collection includes essays by leading international scholars and early career researchers in the fields of economic and social history, legal history, literary criticism, and philosophy on such subjects as trust and belief; risk; ...
Literary Criticism
On the knees of the body politic
October 2020
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Journal article
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Representations
This paper analyzes the fullest theoretical elaboration of the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies in the Elizabethan period, Edmund Plowden’s Treatise on the Succession (1567). It argues that Plowden here deploys the King’s Two Bodies not, as has been thought, as a legal proof against the foreign birth of Mary Queen of Scots, but as a way of embodying and sacralizing the disputed historical relations of England and Scotland. Plowden’s sacralizing metaphors of embodiment transform the highly contentious English claim of Scotland’s historic vassalage into the indisputable and timeless truth of political theology.
FFR
Circumstantial Shakespeare
February 2018
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Book
Shakespeare's characters are thought to be his greatest achievement―imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality, while his plots are said to be second-hand and careless of details of time and place. . This view has survived the assaults of various literary theories and has even, surprisingly, been revitalized by the recent emphasis on the collaborative nature of early modern theatre. But belief in the autonomous imaginative life of Shakespeare's characters depends on another unexamined myth: the myth that Shakespeare rejected neoclassicism, playing freely with theatrical time and place. Circumstantial Shakespeare explodes these venerable critical commonplaces. Drawing on sixteenth-century rhetorical pedagogy, it reveals the importance of topics of circumstance (of Time, Place and Motive, etc.) in the conjuring of compelling narratives and vivid mental images. 'Circumstances'―which we now think of as incalculable contingencies―were originally topics of forensic inquiry into human intention or passion. In drawing on the Roman forensic tradition of circumstantial proof, Shakespeare did not ignore time and place. His brilliant innovation was to use the topics of circumstance to imply offstage actions, times and places in terms of the motives and desires we attribute to the characters. His plays thus create both their own vivid and coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the unconscious feelings of characters inhabiting them.
Circumstantial Shakespeare offers new readings of Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Lucrece, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Macbeth, as well as new interpretations of Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc and Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy. It engages with eighteenth-century Shakespeare criticism, contemporary Shakespeare criticism, semiotics of theatre, Roman forensic rhetoric, humanist pedagogy, the prehistory of modern probability, psychoanalytic criticism and sixteenth-century constitutional thought.
Rhetoric and Law
November 2017
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Chapter
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Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies
Introduction
August 2017
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Chapter
<p>The Handbook’s Sections divide contents thematically, with chapters by historians, literary critics, and legal historians. Analyses of literary and dramatic works are integrated into accounts of shifts in legal thought. Section I challenges commonplaces about legal and literary learning in the Inns, and Section II revises accounts of the lawyers’ professional identity and politics. Section III surveys the historiography of local government and considers how history plays elicit the audience’s desire for legal and administrative reform. Section IV engages with the extent to which spiritual life eludes jurisdiction. Section V focuses on how legal developments are registered in works of the imagination. Section VI considers how legal and regulatory practices inform interpretation of the politics of censorship and prosecutions for libel. Section VII concerns the emerging ideology of English common law. Section VIII examines literary dimensions of common law ideology relating to colonization of Ireland and America, to England’s title to Scotland, to the rise of international law, and to the legal rights of American colonial emigrants.</p>
Forensic History: Henry V and Scotland
June 2017
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Chapter
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The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700
History
'Proof and Probability: Law, Imagination and the Form of Things Unknown'
June 2017
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Chapter
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New Directions in Law and Literature
This collection of essays by twenty-two prominent scholars from literature departments and law schools showcases the vibrancy of recent work in law and literature and highlights its many new directions since the field's heyday in the 1970s ...
Law, Law and Literature
The Shakespearean unscene: Sexual phantasies in A Midsummer Night's Dream
October 2016
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Journal article
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Journal of the British Academy
Post-Freudian and post-Foucauldian readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream assume that the play celebrates the freeing-up of female sexual desire from neurotic inhibitions or disciplinary norms. But this is incompatible with what we know historically about 16th-century society’s investment in female chastity. This paper addresses the problem of this incompatibility by turning to Shakespeare’s use of forensic or legal rhetoric. In the Roman forensic rhetoric underlying 16th-century poetics, probable arguments of guilt or innocence are ‘invented’ from topics of circumstance, such as the Time, Place or Manner of the deed. The mysterious Night, Wood and Moonlight of Shakespeare’s play can be seen as making sexual crimes (violence, stealth, infidelity) take on the form of probability and fairy agency. The play thus brilliantly represents the stories of Theseus’s notorious rapes, abandonments and perjuries as fearful ‘phantasies’ or imaginings experienced by Hermia and Helena. This explains how the Victorians could interpret the play as a chaste, childlike ballet, while moderns and postmoderns take it to be a play about psychological repressions working against the free play of sexual desire.
‘ “I will conclude / Out of the circumstances”: Proof and Probability in The Devil is an Ass’
October 2014
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Chapter
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Les Usages de la preuve d'Henri Estienne à Jérémy Bentham
'"Lively Evidence”: Legal inquiry and the Evidentia of Shakespearean Drama’
January 2013
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Chapter
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Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation Among Disciplines and Professions
‘The Evidential Plot: Shakespeare and Gascoigne at Gray’s Inn’
January 2013
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Chapter
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The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court
Cultural Reformations
June 2010
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Chapter
Abstract
This title is part of the the Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature series, edited by Paul Strohm. This book examines cultural history and cultural change in the period between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries, a period spanning the medieval and Renaissance. It takes a dynamically diachronic approach to cultural history and brings the perspective of a longue durée to literary history. It redraws historical categories and offers a fresh perspective on historical temporality by challenging the stereotypes that might encourage any iconographic division between medieval and Renaissance modes of thinking. It also discusses the concept of nation in relation to three issues that have particular relevance to cross-period “cultural reformations”: modernity, language, and England and Englishness. The book is organized into nine sections: Histories, Spatialities, Doctrines, Legalities, Outside the Law, Literature, Communities, Labor, and Selfhood. Each contributor focuses on a theme that links pre- and post-Reformation cultures, from anachronism and place to travel, vernacular theology, conscience, theater, monasticism, childbirth, passion, style, despair, autobiography, and reading. The essays highlight the creative and destructive anxieties as well as the legacy of the Reformation.
Law, Crime and Punishment
June 2010
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Chapter
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Ben Jonson in Context
Literary Collections
Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700
January 2010
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Book
Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection examines the varied and complex ways in which early modern Europeans imagined, discussed and enacted friendship, a fundamentally elective relationship between individuals otherwise bound in prescribed familial, religious and political associations. The volume is carefully designed to reflect the complexity and multi-faceted nature of early modern friendship, and each chapter comprises a case study of specific contexts, narratives and/or lived friendships. Contributors include scholars of British, French, Italian and Spanish culture, offering literary, historical, religious, and political perspectives. Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 lays the groundwork for a taxonomy of the transformations of friendship discourse in Western Europe and its overlap with emergent views of the psyche and the body, as well as of the relationship of the self to others, classes, social institutions and the state.
Literary Criticism
"Che indizio, cheprova...?" Ariosto's Legal Conjectures and the English Renaissance Stage
January 2010
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Journal article
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Renaissance Drama
3604 Performing Arts, 36 Creative Arts and Writing
Probable Infidelities from Bandello to Massinger
December 2009
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Chapter
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Staging Early Modern Romance Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare
Literary Criticism
The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature
September 2009
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Chapter
Imagining Justice: Kantorowicz and Shakespeare
May 2009
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Journal article
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Representations
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies, 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
The Invention of Suspicion:Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama
December 2007
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Book
The result of this enormously rich conjunction of popular legal culture and ancient forensic rhetoric was a drama in which dramatispersonae habitually gather evidence and 'invent' arguments of suspicion and conjecture about one another, ...
Literary Criticism
The Law in Shakespeare
January 2007
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Chapter
Forensic Aspects of Renaissance Mimesis
May 2006
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Journal article
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Representations
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 3604 Performing Arts, 4705 Literary Studies, 36 Creative Arts and Writing, Biotechnology
Rethinking the ““Spectacle of the Scaffold””: Juridical Epistemologies and English Revenge Tragedy
February 2005
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Journal article
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Representations
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies, 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Liking Men: Ben Jonson's Closet Opened
December 2004
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Journal article
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ELH
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England
November 2004
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Book
This collection features the work of both established and up-and-coming scholars in the UK and US, with contributors including Peter Goodrich, Lorna Hutson, Erica Sheen and David Colclough studying the period of the English Renaissance from ...
Literary Criticism
Civility and Virility in Ben Jonson
May 2002
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Journal article
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Representations
47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4705 Literary Studies
Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe
January 2001
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Book
The book provides a historical perspective on such issues as the role of contract law in the production of the modern subject, the intersection of rhetoric and law in the construction of gender and sexuality, and the contribution of ...
Language Arts & Disciplines
'The Double Voice of Equity and Literary Voices of Women'
August 2000
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Chapter
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This Double Voice Gendered Writing in Early Modern England
Social Science
Feminism and Renaissance Studies
January 1999
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Book
This text offers 17 essays as an accessible introduction to the ways in which feminism has replaced the universal, abstract Renaissance Man of traditional scholarship with strategies for the analysis of the conceptual work of gender.
History
The Usurer's Daughter Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in 16th Century England