The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700, edited by Lorna Hutson, offers a rich sampling of recent insights and approaches. Poets and dramatists weighed in on legal matters, including jurisdictional struggles, to a remarkable degree throughout the early modern English period, and jurisprudential themes in the works of John Donne, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, to name but a few, have received extensive critical treatment. The steady encroachment by the common law on other judicatures and efforts during the seventeenth century to reform the law offer added complexities.
The foundational role of Roman law and natural law precepts to these jurisdictions further complicates our appreciation both of the diversity of legal systems in England and the complex ways in which they adjudicated conflicts. So too, they approached the critical questions of justice and the individual’s rights, interests, and freedoms from a different set of underlying histories and norms. Each had their own bodies of laws, jurisdictions, judicatures, procedures, standards, and customs. Rather, a dizzying array of jural systems, including common law, canon law, Civil law, equity, merchants’ law, forest law, and local and manorial laws, amongst others, operated in the period. The legal system of England in the seventeenth century is a misnomer.
Review of Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries, by Alison ChapmanĬhicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2020
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