Law & Literature最新文献

{"title":"Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages","authors":"Fiona Somerset","doi":"10.1080/1535685X.2021.1949805","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2021.1949805","url":null,"abstract":"Morton Bloomfield famously remarked that reading Piers Plowman “is like reading a commentary on an unknown text”: in this erudite and carefully argued book, Thomas persuasively demonstrates that in many places, that text may be canon law. In addition to looking past the poem’s material sources (that is, biblical and patristic originalia) to its formal sources (that is, legal and other writings in which these quotations are deployed) (66), Thomas also asks us to reconsider the purposes and practice of medieval commentary. Rather than providing an exposition of known truths within a “closed dogmatic system” (238), commentary invents old materials anew as it engages in current debates. Literary works reinvent these materials in a new and different way, giving us insight into how writers and readers who were not canon lawyers nor engaged in the practice of law might nonetheless “mobilize the discourse of canon law” (236) in pursuit of other goals. The five chapters of this book treat successively the stages of the penitential process—contrition, restitution, satisfaction, and the process as a whole—while the epilogue looks back on canon law from the perspective of Luther, suggesting that it was from a post-Reformation perspective that the law of the Catholic church began to appear closed and dogmatic. However, this book accomplishes more than a tour of the penitential process as it appears in a literary work. For scholars of Piers Plowman, Thomas provides a new account of the relationship between the B and C versions of the poem, focused on their treatments of canon law, but without assuming that C is a revision of B. He devotes two full chapters to revisiting the scenes treating Lady Mede, providing new insight into some of the most commented-upon passages of the poem. For medieval literary scholars more broadly, he gives a clear and straightforward introduction to the books of canon law and their principal commentators that may encourage more of them to explore them. And for interdisciplinary work on literature and law, he offers a new understanding of how literary works might deploy legal maxims to new ends, in a kind of poetic reshaping of canonist thought. Chapter one examines how penitential manuals and Piers Plowman alike present contrition, or remorse for sins, as set of behaviors that need to be taught and assessed for the quality and sincerity of their performance. Canonist writings allow Thomas to explain the norms that Mede violates by showing no remorse, and highlight how the friar’s failure to require contrition is a “legal infraction and not just a pastoral oversight” (49). Chapter two considers why and how the C version of Piers Plowman rewrites Mede’s discussion with Conscience to omit any mention of usury. Thomas provides a lucid exposition of the canon law debate over usury, and shows rare sensitivity to how complex and much-","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127052874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“The Monarck of Loves Crowne:” Love and Law in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus","authors":"D. Sokolov","doi":"10.1080/1535685X.2021.1954314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2021.1954314","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the intricacies of legal imagination in Lady Mary Wroth’s Petrarchan sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621). It focuses on the bond between the speaker, Pamphilia, and her ruler, Cupid, which Wroth insistently conceptualizes in juridical terms, as a relationship between feudal lord and his vassal. Reading these figures of law at a junction of legal and poetic histories, the article argues that Wroth’s language of erotic feudalism simultaneously refracts the juridical realities of early Stuart England, resonating with the debates about the law of conquest and the limits of sovereign power under James I, and draws on the medieval poetic tradition of amorous jurisprudence, which articulates the idea of legal governance of love outside of the structures of positive law. This cultural, temporal, and juridical complexity of Wroth’s legal imagination tests the limits of historicist legal thinking, for the idea of erotic legality at once acknowledges the authority of positive law and, through alternative procedures, norms, and decisions, interrogates its principles.","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"94 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121209563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Arena of Suspension: Carrie Mae Weems, Bryan Stevenson, and the “Ground” in the Stand Your Ground Law Era","authors":"S. E. Lewis","doi":"10.1080/1535685X.2021.1930414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2021.1930414","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract How are artists, and how are disciplines in the arts, humanities and law, responding to the hyper-visuality of racial injustices on American ground? This article explores a set of “groundwork” tactics in the Stand Your Ground Era in the United States. Stand Your Ground laws, first established in 2005, define the right to self-defense, to claim the ground on which one stands if there is a perception of “reasonable threat.” The law disproportionately affects black and brown lives today. The artworks under discussion in this article—Grace Notes: Reflections for Now by Carrie Mae Weems to honor lives lost to racial terror, and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI)’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice to lynching—prompt the question, What does it mean to not be able to “Stand Your Ground”? What are the representational tools available to show the frequent challenge to this upright position as a statement of sovereignty over one’s own life? How has the manifold meaning of the term “ground”—as both reason, fact, but also soil itself, opened up a mode of critical inquiry to address the injustices wrought at our feet? Just as the field of environmental studies has begun to consider its nexus with racial inequity, this article approaches these representations of the “ground” through the lens of racial formation, art history, and legal study in the United States.","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114748025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Myth of the Law through the Mirror of Humanities: Perspectives on Law, Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Aesthetics","authors":"A. Condello, Paolo Heritier","doi":"10.1080/1535685X.2021.1847784","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2021.1847784","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this Introduction, we present some of the themes currently at the core of law and literature and law and humanities scholarship in Italy. In doing so, we aim at relaunching a peculiar style in Italian law and literature scholarship, by giving value, peculiarly, to its rhetorical and humanistic roots, and especially to what can be traced back to the tradition of Italian thought, across various generations of scholars under the common purpose of depicting forms and modes of the relationship between the dishomogeneous codes of individuality and universality, across diverse methodologies, namely the literary and narrative forms, aesthetics and myth, and the intimate and collective dimensions at the core of psychoanalysis.","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"109 10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117155297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beyond the Corpse-Barbarian: The Radical (Mexican) Grammar of Death in the Works of Teresa Margolles and Sergio González Rodríguez","authors":"Luis Gómez Romero","doi":"10.1080/1535685X.2021.1919408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2021.1919408","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract, This article analyzes early works by Teresa Margolles (Lengua, 2000) and Sergio González Rodríguez (Huesos en el desierto, 2002) in terms of necrowriting, that is, a grammar among and for the dead in the wake of the Mexican War on Drugs, which aims at resisting the predatory power of exacerbated neoliberalism that sustains the conflict. On the basis of Margolles’ and González Rodríguez’ early necrowriting techniques, the article develops a jurisprudential critique of the systemic violence suffered by people in contemporary Mexico in order to outline a robust notion of political mourning.","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115195124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Holmes Reads Holmes: Reflections on the Real-Life Links Between the Jurist & the Detective in the Library, in the Courtroom, and on the Battlefield","authors":"W. Butler, Robert E. Rains","doi":"10.1080/1535685X.2021.1930890","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2021.1930890","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128353346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Listening for Silence","authors":"J. Pilcher","doi":"10.1080/1535685X.2021.1917886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2021.1917886","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Silence is a method of torture in Saydnaya Military Prison. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, audio investigator and artist, interviewed former prisoners as part of investigations into the detention facility by Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture. Abu Hamdan heard testimony of torture that would neither be admissible in a law court nor appear in the news media. In response he created several works of art for which he was jointly awarded the Turner Prize in 2019. The artworks invite a critical examination of the basis on which the law of evidence enables testimony to be evaluated and excluded from legal trials. The world is assumed by the law to be comprised of people, objects and words that are ontologically discrete, and which exist independently from each other. The extent of the participation of the law in the way in which the world is constituted by mutually implicated practices of knowing and becoming is overlooked. There is inadequate engagement with the significance of the processes of legal systems for the outcomes of trials. By contrast, the work of Abu Hamdan opens encounters with a world in which subject and object are co-constituted through material and discursive entanglements. His art is an invitation to listen for the silences of others and the sounds of the law.","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133504875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Victorian Inheritance, Speculation, and Middlemarch’s “Dead Hand”","authors":"Noa Reich","doi":"10.1080/1535685X.2021.1902640","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2021.1902640","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article reads George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871–2) in the context of what I argue is a recurring pattern in Victorian fiction: inheritance is recast as a form of “relational speculation” – a practice that imbricates the period’s rising logics of credit and contract with older structures of kinship, marriage, and property. Middlemarch draws on this pattern by aligning manipulative testators with expectant heirs, but also complicates it by placing these relational speculations within a longer history of tensions around ownership. Focusing on the recurring image of the “dead hand,” I reveal its complex allusion to the term mortmain. Originating in feudal law, mortmain statutes restricted the alienation of land to corporations and later came to limit bequests to charities, and yet mortmain’s role was still debated in the nineteenth century. Legal accounts reflect this lingering uncertainty, describing mortmain’s effects in terms of both limitless ownership and its curtailment or loss. I contend that Eliot draws on mortmain’s shifting history and multivalence, especially its association with restraint, to challenge relational speculation and outline a necessary constraint on speculative subjectivity. The paper concludes by suggesting that mortmain’s dynamic of curtailment emerges in the novel’s self-reflexive, interventionist narration and poetics of generative constraint.","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132919682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prodigal Heirs and Their Social Networks in Early Modern English Drama, 1590–1640","authors":"J. Ladegaard, R. Kristensen-McLachlan","doi":"10.1080/1535685X.2021.1902635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2021.1902635","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article combines computational social network analysis and contextualized close reading to study 20 English plays from 1590 to 1640 that draw for their main plot on the Biblical parable of the prodigal son. Often viewed as an inherently conservative comic subgenre that ends with the restoration of patriarchal authority, recent literary critics argue that many plays portray the prodigal heirs in a positive light, linking prodigality to risky economic speculation and the improvisational skills needed to navigate London’s expanding commercial economy. For the earlier plays in our corpus (ca. 1590-1610), we find evidence for this view in our analysis of two clusters of understudied minor characters related to the pleasures and punishment of prodigality. However, these clusters all but disappear in the later plays (ca. 1610-1640). Instead, we see a group of weightier, more individualized servants and stewards rise to structural prominence. Informed by close reading of plays like Thomas Heywood’s The English Traveller (1624) and Phillip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1626), we interpret this as a shift towards a more moralistic censure of prodigality as a threat to the patrilineal succession of elite households and the social hierarchy it buttressed.","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127252033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Risky Business: Con Artists, Speculation, and Inheritance in Early Modern English Drama","authors":"M. Dowd","doi":"10.1080/1535685X.2021.1902637","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2021.1902637","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the connection between inheritance and confidence schemes or other forms of financial speculation (such as gambling) in early modern English drama. Considering plays including Thomas Middleton’s Michaelmas Term (1604-6), John Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque (1611), and Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1605-6), I explore the cultural work done by dramatic narratives in which inheritance becomes a site of risk or speculation. I argue that the inheritance scam in early modern drama fulfills a cultural fantasy that extends well beyond the monetary, at times modeling or testing out new forms of socioeconomic behavior or injecting the possibility of fluidity into otherwise restrictive systems of wealth transfer and social mobility.","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129859018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}