Lorna Hutson
Biographic Data
| ID | 1019865 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lorna Hutson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lorna |
| FAMILY NAME | Hutson |
| SIGNATURE | HUTSON L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4712-6551 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 9 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
England's Insular Imagining: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland
On the Knees of the Body Politic
This paper analyzes the fullest theoretical elaboration of the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies in the Elizabethan period, Edmund Plowden's Treatise on the Succession (1567). It argues that Plowden here deploys the King's Two Bodies not, as has been thought, as a legal proof against the foreign birth of Mary Queen of Scots, but as a way of embodying and sacralizing the disputed historical relations of England and Scotland. Plowden's sacralizing …
Birthrights and the Due Course of Law
At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the concept of law as the Englishman’s ‘birthright’ replaced older metaphors of ‘inheritance’. Arising in part from the story of Esau and Jacob, the term ‘birthright’ carried a specific theological charge. It enabled Englishmen to claim a spiritual right to specific procedures that defined law’s ‘due course’. In the 1640s and 1650s, these claims developed into calls for the widening of law’s…
The Monarchical Republic, Constitutionality, and the Legal Profession
This chapter analyses the theme of constitutionality, arguing that the symbolism of the Elizabethan Inns of Court revels involves elements of ‘monarchical republicanism’. It analyses Gerard Legh’s description of his visit to the Inner Temple revels of 1561/62, at which Gorboduc was originally performed. It interprets Gorboduc in relation to Elizabethan political literature (notably Sir Thomas Smith’s De republica Anglorum) and to Sir John Fortesc…
‘Attentive Mindes and Serious Wits’
This chapter considers early indigenous drama at the Inns of Court alongside evidence of legal education. Whilst the availability of rhetorical training has divided scholars, contemporaneous reports express a desire for humanist reform. At a time when the majority of members of Inns had not previously attended one of the universities, an overwhelming number of those involved in writing plays had university experience and thereby imported their kn…
Base Slavery and Roman Yoke
Unlike ‘race’, with which ‘slavery’ is often associated in today’s society, early modern language relating to servitude is under-investigated. Using Shakespeare’s dramatic works as its primary archive, this chapter explores two forms of extra-legal slavery which, it is argued, facilitate discursive exchange between intra-European or intra-British modes of degradation and those employed in Anglo-colonialism. It begins with a study of ‘slave’ as a …
Epieikeia and Conscience
St German changed the course of legal history by linking ‘equity’ with epieikeia. The Aristotelian concept originally denoted a personal virtue involving clemency and moderation, but could be taken to refer to a hermeneutic method requiring reconstruction of a law-maker’s intentions. St German’s understanding borrowed from Gerson the idea that laws tacitly incorporate ‘exceptions’ in the name of higher laws of God and nature. Equity/epieikeia was…
John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the “Satyres.”
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Henry V, Anachronism, and the History of International Law
Historians, literary scholars, and international lawyers interested in the early modern period have all grappled with the problem of anachronism, yet mostly independently of one another. This essay uses the question of war crime in Shakespeare’s Henry V to argue that early modernists interested in international law need not reject synchronic historicism for explicitly anachronistic or presentist approaches. Proposing as a new context for Shakespe…
The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700
This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. For historians of early modern England, turning to legal archives and learning more about legal procedure has seemed increasingly relevant to the project of understanding familial and social relations as well as political institutions, state formation, and economic change. Litera…
A Power to do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625
This article reviews Bradin Cormack’s A Power to do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625. It argues that Cormack’s focus on jurisdiction rather than law recasts the law and literature relationship as one in which both literature and law engage in producing and contesting authority at administrative or distributive boundaries. Examined from the vantage point of particular jurisdictional disputes or crises…
Fictive Acts
Imagining Justice: Kantorowicz and Shakespeare
Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies is concerned with tracing the development, through the Middle Ages, of abstract concepts of the public good as separable from the monarch. Renaissance scholars, however, tend to read Kantorowicz as if English Renaissance drama collapses representations of the polity and public good into the monarch's sacred person. Renaissance equity, in particular, has recently been defined as the sacred monarch's prerog…
The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama
"The Invention of Suspicion argues that the English justice system underwent changes in the sixteenth-century which, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect and a decisive impact on the development of English Renaissance drama. The book offers an overarching account of epistemological change since the Reformation: even elements of Renaissance drama which can seem to be 'remnants of the sacred' may be seen to be, cruc…
The Invention of Suspicion
Rethinking Foucault: The Juridical Epistemology of English Renaissance Drama
This chapter considers the influence on the criticism of English Renaissance drama of Michel Foucault's analysis of penal torture as part of the early modern state's appropriation of the juridical epistemology of the medieval Church. It argues that the application of the Foucauldian model to English Renaissance drama disregards significant differences between developments in English and French criminal law in the 16th century, most notably the fa…
Forensic Aspects of Renaissance Mimesis
Current approaches to Renaissance drama, rejecting the older idea of mimesis as likeness to an essential "nature," have also rejected the assumption that Shakespeare's drama is especially mimetic. This article argues that these approaches neglect the contribution of narrative coherence or plot tomimesis and shows that a judicial conception of narrative underlies the mimesis of neoclassical Renaissance drama, including Shakespeare. Mimetic reading…
The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France
Andrea Frisch. The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France. North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 279. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 196 pp. bibl. $34.95. ISBN: 0-8078-9283-1. - Volume 58 Issue 3
"Rethinking the "Spectacle of the Scaffold: Juridical Epistemologies and English Revenge Tragedy
Michel Foucault's analysis of penal torture as part of a regime of truth production continues to be routinely applied to the interpretation of English Renaissance drama. This paper argues that such an application misleadingly overlooks the lay participation that was characteristic of English criminal justice. It goes on to explore the implications of the epistemological differences between continental inquisitorial models of trial and the jury tr…
The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in 16th Century England
Civility and Virility in Ben Jonson
THE EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE SAW the rise of a phenomenon known as ''civil conversation,'' according to which the arena of informal speech became significant for men's social advancement. At the same time, however, Renaissance literature inherited from the classics an evaluative language that denounced loquacity as effeminate. Hutson's article uses Ben Jonson's writings to explore the tension between the prescriptions of ''virile style'' and the soci…
Feminism And Renaissance Studies
Oxford Readings in Feminism Series Editors: Teresa Brennan and Susan James Oxford Readings in Feminism provide accessible, one-volume guides to the very best in contemporary feminist thinking, assessing its impact and importance in key areas of study. Collected together by scholars of outstanding reputation in their field, the articles chosen represent the most important work on feminist issues, and concise, lively introductions to each volume cr…
The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England
Survivors in Mexico
Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth-Century England
Research Article| January 01 1993 Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth-Century England Lorna Hutson Lorna Hutson Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (1993) 41: 83–103. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928678 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Ci…
The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700
This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. For historians of early modern England, turning to legal archives and learning more about legal procedure has seemed increasingly relevant to the project of understanding familial and social relations as well as political institutions, state formation, and economic change. Litera…
Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth-Century England
Research Article| January 01 1993 Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth-Century England Lorna Hutson Lorna Hutson Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (1993) 41: 83–103. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928678 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Ci…
Imagining Justice: Kantorowicz and Shakespeare
Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies is concerned with tracing the development, through the Middle Ages, of abstract concepts of the public good as separable from the monarch. Renaissance scholars, however, tend to read Kantorowicz as if English Renaissance drama collapses representations of the polity and public good into the monarch's sacred person. Renaissance equity, in particular, has recently been defined as the sacred monarch's prerog…
Civility and Virility in Ben Jonson
THE EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE SAW the rise of a phenomenon known as ''civil conversation,'' according to which the arena of informal speech became significant for men's social advancement. At the same time, however, Renaissance literature inherited from the classics an evaluative language that denounced loquacity as effeminate. Hutson's article uses Ben Jonson's writings to explore the tension between the prescriptions of ''virile style'' and the soci…
Henry V, Anachronism, and the History of International Law
Historians, literary scholars, and international lawyers interested in the early modern period have all grappled with the problem of anachronism, yet mostly independently of one another. This essay uses the question of war crime in Shakespeare’s Henry V to argue that early modernists interested in international law need not reject synchronic historicism for explicitly anachronistic or presentist approaches. Proposing as a new context for Shakespe…
A Power to do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625
This article reviews Bradin Cormack’s A Power to do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625. It argues that Cormack’s focus on jurisdiction rather than law recasts the law and literature relationship as one in which both literature and law engage in producing and contesting authority at administrative or distributive boundaries. Examined from the vantage point of particular jurisdictional disputes or crises…
Forensic Aspects of Renaissance Mimesis
Current approaches to Renaissance drama, rejecting the older idea of mimesis as likeness to an essential "nature," have also rejected the assumption that Shakespeare's drama is especially mimetic. This article argues that these approaches neglect the contribution of narrative coherence or plot tomimesis and shows that a judicial conception of narrative underlies the mimesis of neoclassical Renaissance drama, including Shakespeare. Mimetic reading…
"Rethinking the "Spectacle of the Scaffold: Juridical Epistemologies and English Revenge Tragedy
Michel Foucault's analysis of penal torture as part of a regime of truth production continues to be routinely applied to the interpretation of English Renaissance drama. This paper argues that such an application misleadingly overlooks the lay participation that was characteristic of English criminal justice. It goes on to explore the implications of the epistemological differences between continental inquisitorial models of trial and the jury tr…
Survivors in Mexico
Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth-Century England
Research Article| January 01 1993 Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth-Century England Lorna Hutson Lorna Hutson Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (1993) 41: 83–103. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928678 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Ci…
The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England
Feminism And Renaissance Studies
Oxford Readings in Feminism Series Editors: Teresa Brennan and Susan James Oxford Readings in Feminism provide accessible, one-volume guides to the very best in contemporary feminist thinking, assessing its impact and importance in key areas of study. Collected together by scholars of outstanding reputation in their field, the articles chosen represent the most important work on feminist issues, and concise, lively introductions to each volume cr…
The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in 16th Century England
Civility and Virility in Ben Jonson
THE EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE SAW the rise of a phenomenon known as ''civil conversation,'' according to which the arena of informal speech became significant for men's social advancement. At the same time, however, Renaissance literature inherited from the classics an evaluative language that denounced loquacity as effeminate. Hutson's article uses Ben Jonson's writings to explore the tension between the prescriptions of ''virile style'' and the soci…
The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France
Andrea Frisch. The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France. North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 279. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 196 pp. bibl. $34.95. ISBN: 0-8078-9283-1. - Volume 58 Issue 3
"Rethinking the "Spectacle of the Scaffold: Juridical Epistemologies and English Revenge Tragedy
Michel Foucault's analysis of penal torture as part of a regime of truth production continues to be routinely applied to the interpretation of English Renaissance drama. This paper argues that such an application misleadingly overlooks the lay participation that was characteristic of English criminal justice. It goes on to explore the implications of the epistemological differences between continental inquisitorial models of trial and the jury tr…
Forensic Aspects of Renaissance Mimesis
Current approaches to Renaissance drama, rejecting the older idea of mimesis as likeness to an essential "nature," have also rejected the assumption that Shakespeare's drama is especially mimetic. This article argues that these approaches neglect the contribution of narrative coherence or plot tomimesis and shows that a judicial conception of narrative underlies the mimesis of neoclassical Renaissance drama, including Shakespeare. Mimetic reading…
The Invention of Suspicion
Rethinking Foucault: The Juridical Epistemology of English Renaissance Drama
This chapter considers the influence on the criticism of English Renaissance drama of Michel Foucault's analysis of penal torture as part of the early modern state's appropriation of the juridical epistemology of the medieval Church. It argues that the application of the Foucauldian model to English Renaissance drama disregards significant differences between developments in English and French criminal law in the 16th century, most notably the fa…
The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama
"The Invention of Suspicion argues that the English justice system underwent changes in the sixteenth-century which, because of the system's participatory nature, had a widespread effect and a decisive impact on the development of English Renaissance drama. The book offers an overarching account of epistemological change since the Reformation: even elements of Renaissance drama which can seem to be 'remnants of the sacred' may be seen to be, cruc…
Fictive Acts
Imagining Justice: Kantorowicz and Shakespeare
Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies is concerned with tracing the development, through the Middle Ages, of abstract concepts of the public good as separable from the monarch. Renaissance scholars, however, tend to read Kantorowicz as if English Renaissance drama collapses representations of the polity and public good into the monarch's sacred person. Renaissance equity, in particular, has recently been defined as the sacred monarch's prerog…
A Power to do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625
This article reviews Bradin Cormack’s A Power to do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625. It argues that Cormack’s focus on jurisdiction rather than law recasts the law and literature relationship as one in which both literature and law engage in producing and contesting authority at administrative or distributive boundaries. Examined from the vantage point of particular jurisdictional disputes or crises…
Birthrights and the Due Course of Law
At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the concept of law as the Englishman’s ‘birthright’ replaced older metaphors of ‘inheritance’. Arising in part from the story of Esau and Jacob, the term ‘birthright’ carried a specific theological charge. It enabled Englishmen to claim a spiritual right to specific procedures that defined law’s ‘due course’. In the 1640s and 1650s, these claims developed into calls for the widening of law’s…
The Monarchical Republic, Constitutionality, and the Legal Profession
This chapter analyses the theme of constitutionality, arguing that the symbolism of the Elizabethan Inns of Court revels involves elements of ‘monarchical republicanism’. It analyses Gerard Legh’s description of his visit to the Inner Temple revels of 1561/62, at which Gorboduc was originally performed. It interprets Gorboduc in relation to Elizabethan political literature (notably Sir Thomas Smith’s De republica Anglorum) and to Sir John Fortesc…
‘Attentive Mindes and Serious Wits’
This chapter considers early indigenous drama at the Inns of Court alongside evidence of legal education. Whilst the availability of rhetorical training has divided scholars, contemporaneous reports express a desire for humanist reform. At a time when the majority of members of Inns had not previously attended one of the universities, an overwhelming number of those involved in writing plays had university experience and thereby imported their kn…
Base Slavery and Roman Yoke
Unlike ‘race’, with which ‘slavery’ is often associated in today’s society, early modern language relating to servitude is under-investigated. Using Shakespeare’s dramatic works as its primary archive, this chapter explores two forms of extra-legal slavery which, it is argued, facilitate discursive exchange between intra-European or intra-British modes of degradation and those employed in Anglo-colonialism. It begins with a study of ‘slave’ as a …
Epieikeia and Conscience
St German changed the course of legal history by linking ‘equity’ with epieikeia. The Aristotelian concept originally denoted a personal virtue involving clemency and moderation, but could be taken to refer to a hermeneutic method requiring reconstruction of a law-maker’s intentions. St German’s understanding borrowed from Gerson the idea that laws tacitly incorporate ‘exceptions’ in the name of higher laws of God and nature. Equity/epieikeia was…
John Donne and Early Modern Legal Culture: The End of Equity in the “Satyres.”
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Henry V, Anachronism, and the History of International Law
Historians, literary scholars, and international lawyers interested in the early modern period have all grappled with the problem of anachronism, yet mostly independently of one another. This essay uses the question of war crime in Shakespeare’s Henry V to argue that early modernists interested in international law need not reject synchronic historicism for explicitly anachronistic or presentist approaches. Proposing as a new context for Shakespe…
The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700
This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. For historians of early modern England, turning to legal archives and learning more about legal procedure has seemed increasingly relevant to the project of understanding familial and social relations as well as political institutions, state formation, and economic change. Litera…
On the Knees of the Body Politic
This paper analyzes the fullest theoretical elaboration of the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies in the Elizabethan period, Edmund Plowden's Treatise on the Succession (1567). It argues that Plowden here deploys the King's Two Bodies not, as has been thought, as a legal proof against the foreign birth of Mary Queen of Scots, but as a way of embodying and sacralizing the disputed historical relations of England and Scotland. Plowden's sacralizing …
England's Insular Imagining: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland
Political science (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Art (15 works) · History (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Literature (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Politics (7 works) · Art history (6 works) · Drama (6 works)