Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe

Rudolph M. Lapp

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9780300145557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This book is the first interdisciplinary study of the relation of law and rhetoric in the early modern period in Europe. It brings together the work of eminent social and legal historians, literary scholars, and historians of rhetoric and of political theory.

The book provides a historical perspective on such issues as the role of contract law in the production of the modern subject, the intersection of rhetoric and law in the construction of gender and sexuality, and the contribution of theories of equity to early modern notions of intention and political agency. The contributors include Kathy Eden, Carla Freccero, Peter Goodrich, Lorna Hutson, Constance Jordan, Victoria Kahn, Jane O. Newman, Annabel Patterson, David Harris Sacks, Barbara J. Shapiro, Johann P. Sommerville, Alan Stewart, and Luke Wilson.

Victoria Kahn is professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Lorna Hutson is professor of English literature at the University of Hull.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. The Promise and the Contract in Early Modern England: Slade’s Case in Perspective
• 2. Classical Rhetoric and the English Law of Evidence
• 3. Archives in the Fiction: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron
• 4. Gay Science and Law
• 5. Bribery, Buggery, and the Fall of Lord Chancellor Bacon
• 6. Ben Jonson and the Law of Contract
• 7. Not the King’s Two Bodies: Reading the “Body Politic” in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2
• 8. Law and Political Reference in Montaigne’s “Apologie de Raimond Sebond”
• 9. Mens sine Affectu? Algernon Sidney’s Ideal of Law
• 10. “The Duty to Love”: Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political Theory
• 11. Intellectual Property and the Adages of Erasmus: Coenobium v. Ercto non cito
• 12. “Race,” Religion, and the Law: Rhetorics of Sameness and Difference in the Work of Hugo Grotius
• 13. Selden, Grotius, and the Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Revolution in Moral and Political Theory
• Index