A Power to Do Justice
Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law
A Power to Do Justice 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 More to Shakespeare, Cormack 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, A Power to Do Justice 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.
Sixteenth Century Studies Conference: Roland H. Bainton Book Prize
Honorable Mention
Literature category
“There could be no stronger argument for integrating the study of literature and the law than this book. A Power to Do Justice is a magisterial accomplishment: for its formidable scholarship, its conceptual sophistication, and its stunning sensitivity to language, both poetic and prescriptive.”
“In this learned and legible book, Bradin Cormack shifts our attention from sovereignty and its others, to jurisdiction as the persistently problematic practice of representing and enacting legal authority. He convincingly demonstrates that Elizabethan and Tudor literature was a rich site for working out massively important material shifts in the construction of the legal order. A contribution to critical legal studies to be treasured; a contribution to critical legal history to be emulated; a contribution to our understanding of the relationship between law and literature that —to my complete delight—transcends the parochial terms in which the two fields of interpretive practice have typically encountered one another.”
“In A Power to do Justice, Bradin Cormack brilliantly revises our way of thinking about the relationships between literature, law, and ‘power’ in early modern England. He encourages us to think of law as constituted by jurisdictional boundaries, and shows us how profoundly the poetic fictions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are engaged in reimagining these boundaries, and all that they make possible. The dialogue between the disciplines isn’t just advanced by Cormack’s thoughtful and generous book: it is taken to a new level of theoretical and historical understanding.”
“This is a work of enormous erudition, enviable rigor, and considerable consequence. A Power to Do Justice offers a new model of law and literature, and it will act as a humanizing presence within jurisprudence for many years to come.”
Acknowledgments
Note on Citations
Prologue: A Power to Do Justice
Introduction: Literature and Jurisdiction
Part I Centralization
1 “Shewe Us Your Mynde Then”: Bureaucracy and Royal Privilege in Skelton’s Magnyfycence
2 “No More to Medle of the Matter”: Thomas More, Equity, and the Claims of Jurisdiction
Part II Rationalization
3 Inconveniencing the Irish: Custom, Allegory, and the Common Law in
Spenser’s Ireland
4 “If We Be Conquered”: Legal Nationalism and the France of
Shakespeare’s English Histories
Part III Formalization
5 “To Stride a Limit”: Imperium, Crisis, and Accommodation in
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Pericles
6 “To Law for Our Children”: Norm and Jurisdiction in Webster, Rowley,
and Heywood’s Cure for a Cuckold
Notes
Index
History: European History
Law and Legal Studies: Legal History
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature
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