Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature

Cover
Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction: Custom and Renaissance Literature
	I. Custom, Common Law, and the Problem of Novelty
	II. The Politics of Custom and the Commons
	III. Law, Rhetoric, Form
	IV. Custom and the Art of Diachronic Innocence
	V. Chapter Descriptions
1: Time Out of Mind: Custom and the Politics and Poetics of Duration
	I. Law and/or Custom
	II. Time Immemorial in Local Memory and Common Law
	III. The Time of Custom, i: Common Learning and Case Law
	IV. The Time of Custom, ii: Time Immemorial and the Norman Conquest
	V. Custom and the Politics and Poetics of the Ancient Constitution
2: The Commonwealth of Custom in Thomas More’s Utopia
	I. Custom in English Common Law and the Classical Commonplace
	II. Utopia’s Commonplaces
	III. More’s Mores: Utopia’s Customs
	IV. Friends Hold All Things in Common? Utopia’s English Readers
3: Inventing Custom: Meter, Etymology, and Conquest in the Spenser–Harvey Letters and Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland
	I. The Gaping Accent
	II. A Quiet Companye of Wordes
	III. Laws to Fit the People, People to Fit the Laws
	IV. Words Mingled of English and Irish Together
4: Performing Custom: Poetry and the Aporia of Constitutional Authorship in Sidney’s Old Arcadia
	I. Euarchus Among the Protestants
	II. Custom as “Pompous Ceremon[y]”
	III. The Old Arcadia’s Narrative Aporia
	IV. The “Unthought-On Song:” Performance and Transcription in the Eclogues
5: Cultivating Custom: The Poetics of the Commonplace in Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay
	I. The Paradox of the Private in “The Letter to the Auctor”
	II. Commonplacing London
	III. Custom and the Temporality of the Garden
	IV. Whitney’s Poetics of the Commonplace
	V. The Future of Custom in “the Wyll”
6: Forgetting Custom?: Rebellion, Revolution, and Narratio in Sir Thomas More and Shakespeare’s Hamlet
	I. The Horrible Shape of Innovation
	II. More’s Proverbs on the Scaffold
	III. Hamlet, Custom, and Sacred Kingship
	IV. Custom and Revolution
	V. (Un)Periodizing Revolution
Conclusion: Custom’s Futures
Bibliography
	Primary Sources
	Printed Books
	Secondary Sources
Index