Immunities and Monasticism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Phillips
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Legal History ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
John Bale ◽  
George Peele ◽  
Failed Attempt ◽  
Politics And Law ◽  
King John

Over the course of the sixteenth century, numerous playwrights composed plays about King John of England (r. 1199–1216). While representing the king’s failed attempt to assert national sovereignty over papal control, the plays explore an even more subtle problem: the legal threat that monastic immunity poses to papal and monarchical power. The chapter examines how plays written by John Bale, George Peele, and William Shakespeare used their representations of King John to attend, in a post-Reformation context, to the legal complexities of monasticism as a social practice. In articulating the difficulties that communal formations and monasticism as a social practice create for post-Reformation politics and law, sixteenth-century dramatists—this chapter argues—shape a new version of legal history.

Academic Feud, Bloodfeud, and William Welwood: Legal Education in St Andrews, 1560–1611-Part I

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Joint Meeting ◽  
Academic Education

This article, in earlier versions presented as a paper to the Edinburgh Roman Law Group on 10 December 1993 and to the joint meeting of the London Roman Law Group and London Legal History Seminar on 7 February 1997, addresses the puzzle of the end of law teaching in the Scottish universities at the start of the seventeenth century at the very time when there was strong pressure for the advocates of the Scots bar to have an academic education in Civil Law. It demonstrates that the answer is to be found in the life of William Welwood, the last Professor of Law in St Andrews, while making some general points about bloodfeud in Scotland, the legal culture of the sixteenth century, and the implications of this for Scottish legal history. It is in two parts, the second of which will appear in the next issue of the Edinburgh Law Review.

Sovereignty’s Scribbled form in King John

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Political Efficacy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
Political Condition ◽  
Absolute Power ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Collateral Effects ◽  
King John

This chapter explores a concept of the nation-state defined in terms of leagues, friendships, and amity between England and France in King John. The play consistently describes the evolving relationship between nations in terms of friendship and hospitality. Constance’s desperate question, ‘France friend with England! What becomes of me?’ (2.2.35) after the rival nations become momentary allies, captures the challenge that national sovereignty poses to a subject’s liberty. In its depiction of this geo-political friendship, King John interrogates the powerful claims of an emerging bureaucratic network of authority exemplified by the Bastard’s relationship with what the play calls ‘borrowed majesty’ (1.1.4) and ‘perjured kings’ (3.1.33). In arguing that King John makes explicit the political condition of friendship in depicting rival nation-states, the chapter makes the case that the Bastard’s new sovereign relationship radically redefines a political subject as a bawd or broker in a bureaucratic network with radical, albeit unrealized, political potential. The Bastard—a bureaucrat with royal blood—is well aware that his fugitive survival and political efficacy are contingent on how he responds to the unintended contours of the sovereign decision, to its collateral effects that exceed ordered and absolute power, in other words, to that which allows him to act legitimately, with bureaucratic sovereignty, both inside and outside of the law.

Talking Books

2019 ◽  
pp. 185-229
Author(s):  
Jennifer Richards
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
John Bale ◽  
Printing Process ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Written Form ◽  
Oral Testimony ◽  
Anne Askew ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Authorial Voice

This chapter explores the printed books of the sixteenth century as ‘talking books’; it also explores how the voice is implicated in the printing process. It focuses on the work of two print-aware authors, John Bale and William Baldwin, who worked with the most influential ‘talking book’ in England in the 1540s: Erasmus’s Paraphrases. It explores Bale’s attentiveness to the physical voice of Anne Askew in his editions of her Examinations (1546, 1547), arguing that he uses print to turn the written form of her oral testimony into a script for oral readers. It attends to Baldwin’s representation of the voices of illiterate working men, medieval magistrates, and an array of untrustworthy characters, including some noisy cats, to create careful ‘listeners’ who are aware of the manipulative authorial voice that lies behind literary voices on the page as well as the risks of affective ‘mishearing’.

Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Legal History in Calvin’s Mosaic Harmony

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-195
Author(s):  
Barbara Pitkin
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Relationship

The chapter examines John Calvin’s commentary on Exodus through Deuteronomy (1563) through the lens of sixteenth-century historical jurisprudence, exemplified in the works of Calvin’s contemporaries François de Connan and François Baudouin. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how Calvin’s historicizing exegesis is in continuity with broader contemporary trends in premodern Christian biblical interpretation; this chapter explores another essential context for Calvin’s approach to the Bible. The intermingling of narrative and legal material in these four biblical books inspired Calvin to break with his customary practice of lectio continua and apply his historical hermeneutic more broadly and creatively to explain the Mosaic histories and legislation. Calvin’s unusual and unprecedented arrangement of the material in this commentary and his attention to the relationship between law and history reveal his engagement with his generation’s quest for historical method.

Semantic Mapping of An Ottoman Fetva Compilation: EBUSSUUD Efendi’s Jurisprudence through a Computational Lens

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-115
Author(s):  
Boğaç Ergene ◽  
Atabey Kaygun
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Semantic Mapping ◽  
Textual Space ◽  
Islamic Legal History

Abstract Fetva collections are important sources for Islamic legal history. However, few scholars have considered a particular collection of fetvas or the fetvas of an individual jurist as specific areas of legal and historical exploration. Instead, most researchers use fetvas selectively and instrumentally, that is in (at best) small groups, and in their explorations of various other topics. This article proposes computational methodologies that could characterize the contents of a 6,000-fetva corpus by an important Ottoman jurist, Şeyhülislam Ebussuud Efendi (d. 1574), to reveal its substantive composition and range. The article conceptualizes a previously uncharted textual space in a way similar to how a map depicts a geographical one. By doing so, it also provides insights into Ebussuud’s jurisprudential legacy and the major socio-legal concerns and anxieties in the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth century.

John Bale's Nondramatic Works of Religious Controversy

1962 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 218-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer Pineas
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
John Bale ◽  
Religious Controversy ◽  
Considerable Body ◽  
Better Than

John Bale is known chiefly as a dramatist and as a bibliographer. His considerable body of nondramatic polemical works has received little attention, probably because most scholars share the feelings of that biographer of Bale who says, ‘Of Bale's works as a controversialist, perhaps the less one says the better.’ However, Bale was an important propagandist for the extreme Protestant position, and a study of his nondramatic polemical works should add something to our knowledge of the art of religious controversy as exercised during the sixteenth century.Bale's polemical works fall into two categories: those written against the bishops of the English church, accusing them of being no better than the Catholics, and those written against the Catholics themselves, although Bale does occasionally refer to the Enghsh bishops in his anti-Catholic works also.

Rhetoric and Theater

2015 ◽  
pp. 448-460
Author(s):  
Russ McDonald
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
Early History ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Thomas Kyd ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
The Impact

This chapter demonstrates the impact of rhetorical training in shaping the Elizabethan theater at the end of the sixteenth century. English schoolmasters had translated the Latin rhetoric of Cicero and Quintilian into the vernacular, and these verbal forms—schemes, tropes, and figures—became a central feature of Tudor pedagogy; two classroom exercises in rhetoric were prosopopoeia (the impersonation of a character) and argumentum in utramque partem (defending both sides of a debating question). Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe first exploited these rhetorical and poetic forms theatrically in the 1580s, and shortly thereafter William Shakespeare built on their model in the abundant poetic artifice of his early history cycle, a feature especially apparent in Henry VI, Part Three. Crucially, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the possibilities of rhetoric as a persuasive art served to complicate the drama and thus to immerse the audience in the process of interpretation.

A Note on the Curious Case of John Bale in Spain

The Library ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-391
Author(s):  
Freddy C Dominguez
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Short Note ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
John Bale

Abstract A slender folder at the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid contains parts of a story about how John Bale’s Illustrium majoris Britanniae scriptorum … summarium (1548) ended up in sixteenth century Spain. Inquisition documents from 1583 reveal how the book got to Toledo from Lyon and how the Holy Office came to know about it. By briefly telling this story, this short note hopes to pique interest in the documents and to suggest ways in which the archives in which they reside can support further research on censorship and the early-modern book trade.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document