Crime and Consequence in Early Modern Literature and Law: (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture)

In a period in which some three hundred crimes were designated as felonies and punishable by death, a consideration of crime must inevitably lead to a preoccupation with consequences. Crime and Consequence in Early Modern Literature and Law analyses contemporary literary and legal texts, including drama, poetry and commentaries on the law, and considers how 'proportionable' punishment was imagined in the early modern period and how the possibility of justice miscarried might influence that imagining.

Table of Contents:
AcknowledgementsNote on Spelling, Citation and Abbreviation Introduction 1. ‘Vipers in the bosom of our Law’: The Emergence of Perjury as a Common Law Offence 2. ‘Hollow-hearted angels’: Coins, Counterfeits and the Discourses of Treason 3. ‘The Woman’s Case put to the Lawyers’: Miscarriage of Justice and the Case of Anne Greene 4. Pardon and Oblivion: Pardon, Benefit of Clergy, Peine Forte et Dure 5. ‘England’s Rubidg’: Mary Carleton and the Early Use of Transportation Bibliography

About the Author :
Judith Hudson is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her articles have appeared in The Seventeenth Century and Textual Practice, as well as in several edited volumes. Her research focuses on early modern literature and law.

Review :
With this book, Hudson joins a rich and growing interdisciplinary conversation on law and literature in early modern England, artfully engaging with scholarship in history, literary studies, theory, and law... Crime and Consequence is a model contribution to this field, gracefully weaving together analysis of a broad range of scholarly interpretations and a rich tapestry of early modern sources, including court decisions, sermons, pamphlets, legal tomes, and numerous dramatic works. A probing study of criminal law, punishment, and the narratives that seek to justify or challenge them. Hudson considers crimes such as perjury and counterfeiting, which raise questions about invention and imagination, and examines them in relation to a wide range of legal, literary, and theological works that pose similar questions.