Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature PDF
Preview Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/20, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/20, SPi Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/20, SPi LAW AND LITERATURE The Law and Literature series publishes work that connects legal ideas to literary and cultural history, texts, and artefacts. The series encompasses a wide range of historical periods, literary genres, legal fields and theories, and transnational subjects, focusing on interdisciplinary books that engage with legal and literary forms, methods, concepts, dispositions, and media. It seeks innovative studies of every kind, including but not limited to work that examines race, ethnicity, gender, national identity, criminal and civil law, legal institutions and actors, digital media, intellectual property, economic markets, and corporate power, while also foregrounding current interpretive methods in the humanities, using these methods as dynamic tools that are themselves subject to scrutiny. Series Editors Robert Spoo, University of Tulsa Simon Stern, University of Toronto OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/20, SPi Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature STEPHANIE ELSKY 1 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/20, SPi 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Stephanie Elsky 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019956697 ISBN 978–0–19–886143–0 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/20, SPi For Ari and Felix OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/20, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/20, SPi Acknowledgments The benefit of working on a book since what feels like time immemorial is the many debts of gratitude I have accumulated in that time. I am so delighted to finally have a chance to enumerate them here. First and foremost, I would like to thank Margreta de Grazia, who has had a profound influence not only on my thinking about this period but also on my thinking about how we think about periods. I continually seek to live up to the model of intellectual curiosity, gener- osity, and integrity that she has provided. Her unstinting commitment to the intellectual lives of her students combined with her deep care for their personal well-being is nothing short of astonishing. The longer I spend in academia, the more deeply I come to admire it. From Philadelphia to London, she has been my best critic and supporter. This project began as a dissertation, with Margreta as its director, and I thank the rest of my dissertation committee for going well beyond the call of duty: Zachary Lessary, Ania Loomba, and Melissa Sanchez. Rita Copeland, Jed Esty, Suvir Kaul, Heather Love, Peter Stallybrass, Emily Steiner, and David Wallace were sources of support and inspiration throughout grad school and afterward. I had the privilege of being at Penn during yet another renaissance of Renaissance graduate students, and I am particularly grateful to Catherine Nicholson, Thomas Ward, Urvashi Chakravarty, Bronwyn Wallace, Megan Cook, Miriam Jacobson, and Marissa Nicosia for friendships marked by generosity and intellectual excitement. My path to this project can be said to have begun when I had the good fortune to be taught as an undergraduate by Julie Crawford, Jenny Davidson, Jean Howard, David Kastan, Julie Peters, and Jim Shapiro. My academic career has taken me to a number of different institutions, and at each I was fortunate to find camaraderie and mentorship. Thank you to Jonathan Wilson, Kevin Dunn, and Judith Haber at the Center for the Humanities and the English Department at Tufts; to that excellent trio of female role models at UC-Davis, Margie Ferguson, Fran Dolan, and Gina Bloom, as well as Seeta Chaganti, Liz Miller, Matthew Stratton, and Joshua Clover. At Amherst College, I’d like to thank the inimitable members of the Department of Law, Justice, and Social Thought: Austin Sarat, Adam Sitze, Martha Umphrey, Lawrence Douglas, David Delaney, and the late Nasser Hussain. I’d also like to thank Anston Bosman, Jane Degenhardt, and Adam Zucker for welcoming me into the Western Massachusetts Renaissance community. At the Freie Universität, I would like to thank Anita Traninger, Andrew James Johnston, Andreas Mahler, and Björn Quirig. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/20, SPi viii Acknowledgments At the University of Wisconsin, I was surrounded by a vibrant group of Renaissance scholars, including Elizabeth Bearden, Karen Britland, Joshua Calhoun, and Ullrich Langer, all of whom I thank for contributing to my thinking in this project. Thank you especially to David Loewenstein for his mentorship during his time there and afterward. I would like to thank the UW Center for the Humanities First Book Program for giving me the opportunity to bring together scholars from Madison and elsewhere to read an earlier version of this manu- script. Thank you to Russ Castronovo, Lynn Keller, Mitra Sharafi, Ralph Gruenwald, and Daniel Kapust for their incisive feedback. I am also deeply grate- ful to Caroline Levine, Susan Bernstein, and Lisa Cooper for their guidance; and to Jordan Zweck, Colin Gillis, Ramzi Fawaz, Aida Levy-Hussen, Bridget Fielder, Jonathan Senchyne, Nandini Pandey, and Danielle Evans for their inspiring friendship. Thank you, too, to the excellent undergraduate and graduate students at all of these institutions. Most recently, I have found a wonderful home at Rhodes College. Leslie Petty has been a supportive chair in all ways, while Scott Newstok has been an ideal Renaissance colleague and Brian Schaffer an exemplary dean. My writing group, Hannah Barker, Lori Garner, Judy Haas, Clara Pascal-Arguente, and Laura Loth, provided much needed sustenance and company during the long process of book revision. Amy Benson, Chanelle Benz, Gordon Bigelow, Marshall Boswell, Chris Brunt, Rebecca Finlayson, Jason Richards, Rashna Richards, Seth Rudy, and Caki Wilkinson make me look forward to coming to my office every day. Thank you, too, to the English Department at University of Mississippi, especially Ivo Kamps and Karen Raber, for making me feel so welcome in my move to the mid-South. Many people have read many versions of parts of this book or spent hours discussing it with me. I want to thank especially Bradin Cormack and Victoria Kahn for their infallible advice on a full draft of the manuscript as part of the UW First Book Program. J.K. Barret, Crystal Bartolovich, Cathy Nicholson, Debapriya Sarkar, and Thomas Ward also deserve special mention for their invigorating responses to the project, which always kept me excited about continuing to work on it during moments of frustration and confusion. My work is all the stronger for the engagement of Kevin Curran, Kathleen Davis, Rayna Kalas, Lucy Munro, Björn Quirig, and Sebastian Sobecki with it during a 2016 conference I organized at the Freie Universität in Berlin, “Common Eras: Law, Literature, and the Rhetorics of Commonality in Medieval and Renaissance England.” Reid Barbour, Ayelet Ben-Yishai, Katie Brokaw, Jim Bromley, Drew Daniel, Topher Davis, Heather Dubrow, Will Fisher, Penny Geng, Linda Gregerson, Jane Grogan, Liora Halperin, Steve Hindle, Gavin Hollis, Jeff Knight, András Kiséry, Tatiana Korneeva, Rebecca Lemon, Russ Leo, Ivan Lupić, Julia Lupton, Jenny Mann, Carla Mazzio, Steven Mullaney, Molly Murray, Christopher Pye, Ben Robinson, Amy Rodgers, Jennie Row, Marjorie Rubright, Michael Schoenfeldt, Sasha Senderovich, Dan Shore, Nigel Smith, Alan Stewart, Gin Strain, Valerie Traub, OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/20, SPi Acknowledgments ix Scott Trudell, Henry Turner, Wendy Wall, Brian Walsh, Tiffany Werth, Will West, and Jessica Wolfe have all offered feedback, encouragement, and general good cheer at multiple points during this project. I have also benefited from thoughtful audiences at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Convention; the Modern Language Association Annual Convention; Indiana University’s Renaissance Studies Program; Miami University’s Early Modern Studies Collective; the Renaissance Center at the University of Massachusetts; and the Early Modern Seminar at University College London. Thank you to Penelope Anderson, Hall Bjørnstad, Jim Bromley, Catherine Gillepsie, Jane Degenhardt, Katherine Ibbett, and Alexander Samson for their invitations to share my work in these venues, and to Chris Pye, Rebecca Lemon, and Penny Geng for organizing generative and productive seminars at the Shakespeare Association of America’s Annual Convention. I received essential and generous support from UW-Madison’s Anonymous Fund; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and VolkswagenStiftung; and the Henry E. Huntington Library. Thank you to English Literary Renaissance; Law Culture, and the Humanities; and Spenser Studies for permission to reproduce previously printed material here, and to the readers and editors who helped strengthen that material. An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as “Common Law and the Commonplace in Thomas More’s Utopia” (English Literary Renaissance 43.2, May 2013); of Chapter 3 as “ ‘Wonne with Custome’: Conquest and Etymology in the Spenser-Harvey Letters and A View of the Present State of Ireland” (Spenser Studies Vol. XXVIII, 2013); and of Chapter 6 as “Ernst Kantorowicz, Shakespeare, and the Humanities’ Two Bodies” (Law Culture and the Humanities 13.1, 2017). Friendships old and new have sustained my spirit during the many moves that accompanied the process of writing this book. Thank you to GerShun Avilez, Rachel Buurma, Laura Heffernan, Ori Weisberg, Ilana Blumberg, Alan Itkin, Mira Seo, Carrie Wood, Mearah Quinn-Brauner, Ari Eisenberg, Charles Hughes, Cristie Ellis, Dan Stout, Rachel Federman, Daniella Kevelson, Barbara Chubak, and Rachela Elias. I am profoundly grateful to Simon Stern and Robert Spoo for believing in this project and giving it a home in their Law and Literature series. Their feedback on the manuscript has been invaluable. Thank you to Kevin Curran, who kindly revealed himself as one of the readers, for his generous and generative report and an anonymous reader for sharing their wealth of knowledge of English legal history. Thank you to Jacqueline Norton at Oxford University Press for guiding the project through publication, and Aimee Wright, Christine Fleischer, Emily Loney, Kate Lechler, Claire Cronin, Michal Loren, Francesca White, Scott Garner, and everyone who was involved in preparing the manuscript. I could not have finished this project without the support of Anne Amienne. Finally, my family has lived through the ups and downs of this project, celebrating my successes and feeling my setbacks as their own. My sister Julie has
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