Law and the Ancient Constitution in Medieval and Early Modern Hungary

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martyn Rady
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ancient Constitution

scholarly journals THE ANCIENT CONSTITUTION AND THE LANGUAGES OF POLITICAL THOUGHT

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK GOLDIE
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Civic Humanism ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Status ◽  
Ancient Constitution ◽  
European Thought

AbstractHistorians of political thought speak of ‘languages’ of politics. A language provides a lexicon, an available resource for legitimating positions. It is looser than a ‘theory’, because protean, and not predictive of particular doctrines. Some languages attract considerable scholarly attention, while others languish, for all that they were ambient in past cultures. In recent scholarship on early modern European thought, natural law and civic humanism have dominated. Yet prescriptive appeals to national historiographies were equally pervasive. Many European cultures appealed to Tacitean mythologies of a Gothic ur-constitution. The Anglophone variant dwelt on putative Saxon freedoms, the status of the Norman ‘Conquest’, whether feudalism ruptured the Gothic inheritance, and how common law related to ‘reason’, natural law, and divine law. Whigs rooted parliaments in the Saxonwitenagemot; though, by the eighteenth century, ‘modern’ Whigs discerned liberty as the fruit of recent socio-economic change. Levellers and Chartists alike talked of liberation from the ‘Norman Yoke’. These themes were explored from the 1940s onwards under the stimulus of Herbert Butterfield; one result was J. G. A. Pocock's classicAncient constitution and the feudal law(1957).

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Stephanie Elsky
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Legal Concept ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ancient Constitution ◽  
Definition Of

The introduction offers a definition of custom as the basis of England’s common law and provides a lexicon of legal custom, including terms like time immemorial, the ancient constitution, consent, and commons, each of which contribute to the significance and power of custom as a legal concept. It argues that custom appealed to English literary writers who were experimenting with genre and form because of their society’s broad skepticism of novelty and thus it was crucial to ideas of Renaissance authorship. It situates the project within the larger body of work on early modern law and literature by showing how the latter can illuminate changes in the former. It further argues that the study of early modern law and literature should inform how we understand periodization because it offers different models of how the Renaissance understood itself and the past.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Como
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Orthodox Christianity ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Ancient Constitution

The Introduction offers an overview of the historiography of the English Civil Wars and Revolution, situating the present study within several recent trends in scholarship on early modern England. The approach and methods adopted in the book are outlined. The central category used—“radical parliamentarians”—is delineated and discussed. The goals of the study are then defined. The book aims to trace and illuminate the processes whereby a society, bound by custom, monarchical institutions, the ancient constitution, and orthodox Christianity, unraveled, cascading into constitutional and religious innovation, and, ultimately, regicide and republicanism.

Time Out of Mind

2020 ◽  
pp. 20-42
Author(s):  
Stephanie Elsky
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Professional Knowledge ◽  
Political Concept ◽  
Long Duration ◽  
Political Idea ◽  
Ancient Constitution ◽  
Common Learning ◽  
Century Literature

This chapter examines aspects of common-law custom crucial to early modern literary production. It sets the stage for understanding how a key concept of legal and constitutionalist thought shaped sixteenth-century literature, while this literature, in turn, transformed a legal-political concept into an evocative mythopoetics. It does so by focusing on a central aspect of custom that allowed for this relationship: the long duration of a practice, its supposed use since “time immemorial.” Temporality played a role not only in establishing the practice itself as a pattern, but also in legal education and professional knowledge about the practices that made up common law, often called “common learning.” Finally, “time immemorial” undergirded the increasingly political idea of the “ancient constitution.” This temporality was dynamic in nature and, as a result, it rendered custom and the ancient constitution a poetics that proved crucial for early modern literary writers.

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