Perspectives on Early Modern and Modern Intellectual History: Essays in Honor of Nancy S. Struever and Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2002 by Wayne A. Rebhorn

Not surprisingly, the initial essay in the collection, by David Sacks, examines in detail the shift in the nature of contract law theory around 1600. Later, in a very rich essay which does, in fact, live up to the interdisciplinary promise of the collection, Luke Wilson also examines that shift and relates it to the work of Ben Jonson who famously opens Bartholomew Fair with an Induction in which a contract is set up between the author and the audience. Victoria Kahn takes up the subject of contract law theory as well, in a fine essay analyzing the contradiction in that theory over the will, which is centrally involved in the contract-maker's giving of consent and is seen as being both moral, a matter of rational calculation, and psychological, that is, the result of antecedent factors, and hence not a matter of reason at all. To deal with this contradiction, thinkers made consent a rational act of consenting to one's own passions. Kahn shows how these issues got formulated in England in writings on domestic duties and in the works of Milton and Hobbes, and how they inevitably wound up gendering the subject involved as male, albeit in very problematic ways.

This collection also contains essays by Barbara Shapiro on the relationship between aspects of classical rhetoric and English legal practices, by Carla Freccero on Marguerite de Navarre, and by Johann Sommerville on the medieval character of the works of Selden and Grotius. In a quite stimulating piece, Peter Goodrich argues that the history of the law has forgotten or excluded what he calls the "gay science" promoted in the late medieval courts of love in France which saw love as a matter of erotic pleasure and personal intimacy, assigned women elevated positions, and thus threatened both canon and Roman law, which consequently abetted its suppression. Alan Stewart writes about how homosexuality, as sodomy, became visible as a crime in the period only when connected to some other crime, in this case the bribery charges that brought about Francis Bacon's fall from power. Constance Jordan examines the way that Montaigne's scepticism led him to distrust all possible natural laws in favor of positive (i.e., hum anly instituted) ones and thus to establish a secular, albeit conservative, basis for the stare. Annabel Patterson analyzes the life and works of Algernon Sidney, noting how defense speeches in treason trials came to constitute an alternative legal canon for English dissenters. Kathy Eden discusses Erasmus' remodeling of his Adages for the Aldine edition of 1508, a remodeling designed to foreground the fact that his work was his private property which he offered to his readers identified as a group of like-minded friends. Jane Newman examines race in the works of Hugo Grotius, showing how he imagined the Christian Ethiopians not as barbarous Others, but as being just like Christian Europeans, provided one stripped away the "accidental" features of the Christianity they practiced. Finally, in one of the best essays in the collection, Lorna Hutson argues against the centrality usually granted to Ernst Kantorowicz's theory of the king's two bodies in analyses of Renaissance English thought on the body politic. H utson claims that one of Kantorowicz's chief sources, Edmund Plowden's Commentaries of 1571, was actually important in its own time for introducing into English common law Aristotle's notion of equity, a notion that led to the constitutional revolution of the seventeenth century and the English Civil War. Hutson then reads Shakespeare's second tetralogy of history plays as a reflection of this notion, an endorsement of the idea that the public good, embodied in the laws, is and must remain something separate from the king. Arguing against New Historicists and Cultural Materialists who see the plays as qualified endorsements of absolutism, Hutson stresses how they move from Richard's tyrannical misuse of the law in Richard II to Henry V's willingness to let his intentions be determined by the law (in the person of the Chief Justice) at the end of Henry 1W Part 2, thus making the tetralogy potentially subversive of monarchy's claim of absolute power.