Description
Book SynopsisTheorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England is a collection of eleven essays that explore what might be distinctly medieval and particularly English about legal personhood vis-à-vis the jurisdictional pluralism of late medieval England. Spanning the mid-thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries, the essays in this volume draw on common law, statute law, canon law and natural law in order to investigate emerging and shifting definitions of personhood at the confluence of legal and literary imaginations. These essays contribute new insights into the workings of specific literary texts and provide us with a better grasp of the cultural work of legal argument within the histories of ethics, of the self, and of Eurocentrism. Contributors are Valerie Allen, Candace Barrington, Conrad van Dijk, Toy Fung Tung, Helen Hickey, Andrew Hope, Jana Mathews, Anthony Musson, Eve Salisbury, Jamie Taylor and R.F. Yeager.
Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgments vii List of Figures viii List of Contributors ix 1 Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England 1 Andreea Boboc 2 Royal Personhood and The Owl and the Nightingale 29 Jana Mathews 3 Carried Away by the Law: Chaucer and the Poetry of Abduction 50 Eve Salisbury 4 John Gower’s Poetry and the ‘Lawyerly Habit of Mind’ 71 R.F. Yeager 5 The Spectral Advocate in John Gower’s Trentham Manuscript 94 Candace Barrington 6 Vengeance and the Legal Person: John Gower’s Tale of Orestes 119 Conrad van Dijk 7 Impossible Piety 142 Valerie Allen 8 Controlling Human Behaviour? The Last Judgment in Late Medieval Art and Architecture 166 Anthony Musson 9 Legal Personhood and the Inquisitions of Insanity in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series 192 Helen Hickey 10 Of Adam’s Rib, Cannibalism, and the Construction of Otherness through Natural Law 218 Toy-Fung Tung 11 Thomas More and Humphrey Monmouth: Conscience and Coercion in Reformation England 244 Andrew Hope 12 Animal Rights, Legal Agency, and Cultural Difference in The Testament of the Buck 270 Jamie Taylor Index 291
