...Peter C. Herman © by Duke University Press 2000 Rastell’s Pastyme of People: Monarchy and the Law in Early Modern Historiography Peter C. Herman San...

..., Lincolnshire at Ashby Heath. In these instances, perambulators used the occasion of the public recognition of property boundaries as an opportunity to stage a complaint in an act of “performative law.” The complainants asserted their rights and liberties by means of a theatrical form that invited participants...

... legislators were disappearing from their laws, as discussion of their intentions in establishing them was viewed by historians with increasing disfavor. Even today, commentary on early English royal legislation seldom acknowledges that these texts enjoyed (or were intended to enjoy) the force of law in any...

... allow us to make the hypothesis that physiognomy, in the early modern period, was not just a part of judicial procedure, being among the clues judges could take into account before making an actual judgment. At a certain point, another level of interaction between law and physiognomy appeared, which...

...Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli The ample record of medieval and early modern sumptuary laws represents an extensive historical period and a broad geographical area. Though scholars have not completely ignored these laws, they deserve far more attention and should be explored from many critical...

..., the festive colors fade; it is no longer a grand carnival procession passing by, but humanity itself with all its miseries and follies, with all the infinite discord of its beliefs and its laws; it is a pilgrimage of debased peoples and fallen races; an immensity...

...Astrid Giugni This article traces the response to the Elizabethan Poor Laws in two parishes in Jacobean London. The Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601 attempted to create a system of reliable poor relief in response to a series of late sixteenth‐century economic and population crises...

...Brett F. Parker In 1604, the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries examined three components of King James’s proposed Anglo-Scottish union: the unity of name, law, and Parliament. As members of the Society reconstructed English history in their papers, a variety of historical and constitutional...

... and witness to promote civic authority and engage the local history of York’s negotiations with royal authority. York’s charters combine the material geography of the city’s boundaries with abstract concepts of legal rights. Medieval law defined witnesses as neighbors close enough to have seen and heard...

... but also represents her as a captive of erotic desire, a slave of unruly passion, and a prisoner of the law. This multifaceted vision of royal incarceration is animated by a heterogeneous tradition of ideological writing in medieval and early modern England and Scotland. Three strands of a rich mosaic...

...John Jeffries Martin In early modern Europe, judges read the bodies of victims and suspects through a variety of lenses shaped by popular beliefs, Renaissance notions of physiognomy, and by the study of medicine, classical rhetoric, and natural law theory. This article explores the writings...

... itself between a myth of medieval kingship as limited, contingent, and responsive to human need, on the one hand, and on the other, a myth of Tudor pragmatism as a sovereign assertion of law, the play offers two alternatives to the absolutism of Stuart monarchy without endorsing either. © 2017 by Duke...

... the universe and its immutable laws, but also the metaphysical principles of living beings, the totality of corruptible things, and creatures from the domain of physis . Engaging with the idea of nature as plastic and multifaceted in its richness, this article shows that contradiction is a dialectical...

... by King James’s refusal to offer military support to his son-in-law, Frederick V, against the Catholic Habsburg invasion of Protestant Bohemia, a conflict interpreted in apocalyptic-chivalric terms. Originally responding to the Gunpowder Plot, the reappearance of Dekker’s play in 1619 encourages a broader...

... in many ways. Articles in this special issue measure these losses by looking to the later medieval period in particular (with contributions also from the early medieval and early modern periods), when intention rose dramatically as a heuristic tool in many discursive fields, notably in criminal law...

... of personality in the visual and literary arts of the period. But nowhere was its influence greater than in the practice of criminal law. This special issue explores the varied ways that jurists and judges drew on theories—ancient and modern—of how to read the human body, the face especially, in order to help...

...Susan Zimmerman The phenomenon of disease played an important role in the development of premodern European culture, and in the reciprocal exchanges between Europe and the New World. Its understanding and regulation involved all sectors of society–religion, politics, science, law, commerce...

..., Asia, Africa, and the New World—was challenged by a range of cultural transformations: changes in the style of clothing, the categories of people who wore particular fashions, the disappearance of fashions over time and through political changes, and the infringement of sumptuary laws. Vecellio...