Introduction

The Handbook’s Sections divide contents thematically, with chapters by historians, literary critics, and legal historians. Analyses of literary and dramatic works are integrated into accounts of shifts in legal thought. Section I challenges commonplaces about legal and literary learning in the Inns, and Section II revises accounts of the lawyers’ professional identity and politics. Section III surveys the historiography of local government and considers how history plays elicit the audience’s desire for legal and administrative reform. Section IV engages with the extent to which spiritual life eludes jurisdiction. Section V focuses on how legal developments are registered in works of the imagination. Section VI considers how legal and regulatory practices inform interpretation of the politics of censorship and prosecutions for libel. Section VII concerns the emerging ideology of English common law. Section VIII examines literary dimensions of common law ideology relating to colonization of Ireland and America, to England’s title to Scotland, to the rise of international law, and to the legal rights of American colonial emigrants.