Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature. Virginia Lee Strain. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. x + 230 pp. £75.

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 1569-1570
Author(s):  
Karen J. Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
Legal Reform ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Critical Studies

Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Lee Strain
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal Reform ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
Measure For Measure ◽  
Professional Writers

This book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century. While the majority of Law and Literature studies characterise 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. The dominance of law in early modern life made its failings and improvements of widespread concern: it was a regular and popular focus of criticism. The terms and techniques of legal reform provided modes of analysis through which legal authorities and literary writers alike evaluated form and character. Legal reform, together with the conflicts and anxieties that inspired and sprang from it, were represented by courtly, coterie, and professional writers. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the Gray’s Inn Christmas revels of 1594-5, Donne’s ‘Satyre V’, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale all examine the potential, as well as the ethical and practical limitations, of legal reform’s contribution to local and national governance.

The ‘Angel’ of English Renaissance Literature

1959 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 85-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald C. Baker
Keyword(s):  
English Literature ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Gold Coin ◽  
Casual Reader ◽  
The Fantastic

They have in EnglandA coin that bears the figure of an angelStampèd in gold …(Merchant of Venice II. vii. 55-57)The scholar or casual reader whose interest is drawn to Renaissance English literature discovers very early that, in the fantastic profusion of puns and punning allusions that delighted the hearts of Englishmen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, second in frequency only to the cuckold's horns is a thin gold coin called the angel. The uses made of it range from the casual pun ‘There's a pair of angels to guide you to your lodgings’ to elaborate metaphors which mold a scene or provide the vehicle for an entire poem, as in Donne's Elegie XI, ‘The Bracelet’.

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