Jurisdictional Formalism

This chapter explores post-Lateran IV ecclesiastical reformism, focusing on the ecclesiology and pastoral theology of Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln. Grosseteste understood pastoral care not only as the clergy’s most vital responsibility to the laity but also as a form of participation in the divinely ordered natural universe. His pastoral and estate management writings to women accordingly reveal the degree to which this ecclesiology finds inspiration in the ideal of the justly governed estate. This chapter reads Grosseteste’s Anglo-French soteriological allegory, the Château d’Amour, alongside his writings to and for women, showing how the logic of secular property law becomes a means of narrating Christian time from the Creation through the Redemption to the Final Judgment. Grosseteste’s larger corpus, however, also reveals the extent to which his vision of Christian history is premised on Jewish exclusion, not only in theological but legal and practical terms.

Introduction

This introduction maps the legal and literary terrain of the larger book, arguing that the two fields share more in common than is typically reflected in scholarship on the thirteenth century. Not only do the histories, saints’ lives, plaints, and polemics of the period reflect and absorb rapidly changing legal worlds, law texts themselves demonstrate the literary training of their creators. This foundational background in grammar and rhetoric, common to clerical administrators of the period, in turn shapes how writers and communities articulate their legal privileges and obligations. The book argues that scholars can most productively approach the relationship between literature and law through the lens of jurisdiction rather than the more common categories of discipline, language, or genre. The literary skills of clerics and lawyers prove most salient at moments when communities must claim or defend the boundaries of their legal authority. “Jurisdictional poetics” encompasses the kinds of writing that emerge from these moments of legal contestation.

Inventing Magna Carta

Having begun as a short-lived peace treaty in 1215, Magna Carta grew to acquire a quasi-sacral status over the course of the thirteenth century. This chapter traces the development of the “Great Charter,” arguing that literary modes of invention contributed vitally to its elevation as a symbol for the rule of law. It looks to three sites for the production of the “idea” of Magna Carta: in the chronicling traditions of St. Albans Abbey, in the legal historiography of London, and in the Latin, Anglo-French, and Middle English verse ephemera that proliferated in the margins of law books and histories. In all of these instances, literary forms of invention and historical modes of finding precedent converge, with the result that Magna Carta comes to embody both “old law” and the prospect of future reform.

Conjuring England

This chapter explores how the rhetoric of crusading shaped the literature of baronial revolt in thirteenth-century England, concentrating particularly on the Second Barons’ War of 1263–1267. It argues that crusading not only provided a template for polemical argument but also inflected the ways that participants understood Anglia as a territory and an idea. From the time of the early Latin histories of the First Crusade, a rhetorically amplified style had been crucial to promulgating Christian jurisdictional claims to the Holy Land. This chapter examines the legacy of this “crusading style” within insular revolts of the thirteenth century, focusing on the ephemeral verse that emerged alongside civil war. Poems such as the ornately Latinate Song of Lewes reveal the poetic and political sophistication of baronial partisans. In their triumphalism, such works also obscure the violence visited upon communities across England—especially Jewish communities, who became targets of attacks at once anti-royalist and anti-Semitic in tenor.

Classroom Historicisms

This chapter situates the most popular compositional treatise of the later Middle Ages—Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova—against the backdrop of the English Interdict of 1208–14. The Poetria nova belongs to the cohort of new artes poetriae of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Manuals designed to help grammar instructors teach verse and prose composition, they formulated lessons through examples drawn from the classical canon and the “real world” of contemporary affairs. Though rarely discussed as an occasional poem in its own right, Poetria nova shows itself very much concerned with the geopolitical tensions animating England and Rome during the time of its composition. Beginning with its lavish dedication to Pope Innocent III and ending with its plea on behalf of King John, the Poetria nova uses the occasion of the Interdict to explore the questions of mercy, judgment, and persuasion central to both rhetorical pedagogy and political diplomacy.

The Grammar of Sacrifice

This chapter explores the famous jurisdictional dispute between Thomas Becket and Henry II through the lens of grammatical pedagogy, arguing that the staple classroom genres of satire and epic played crucial roles in shaping the archbishop’s biography and legacy. It focuses on the works that John of Salisbury wrote for Becket’s advisement as he first took up his position as chancellor to the king: the Policraticus (1159), the Metalogicon (1159), and the Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum (c. 1155). In these texts, John’s famous condemnations of the “new logic” and promotion of the classical auctores merge with his theories of royal conduct, ecclesiastical liberty, and liberty of conscience in ways that would prove crucial to Becket once he split with the king. Exploring Horatian satire and Lucan’s civil war epic, the Pharsalia, alongside the Policraticus and Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum, this chapter shows how grammatical ideas inflect twelfth-century political theory.

Coda

The conclusion to the book expands the terrain of “jurisdictional poetics” to include both contemporary and medieval poetry. It begins with the work of Carter Revard, Osage poet and medievalist, whose discovery of the scribe of Harley 2253 has fundamentally shaped contemporary scholarship on legal and literary copying in later medieval England. His poem “Starring America” provides an entry point into the tensions between epic and local histories that resonate as well in a set of cross-Channel satires that date to the time of the Second Barons’ War. The coda examines the earliest surviving Middle English sirventes, “Richard of Almaigne,” alongside two French satires on the English revolt, the Pais aus Englois and La chartre de la pais aus Englois. In both cases, language difference serves as a synecdoche for territorial dominion, parsing the boundaries between political desire and legal authority.