Lawyers at Play: Literary and Political Culture of the Inns of Court, 1558-1572

FAIN: FB-55839-11

Jessica Lynn Winston
Idaho State University (Pocatello, ID 83201-5377)

"Lawyers at Play" examines the literary and political community of the English law schools, the Inns of Court, in the 1560s in order to revise the long-held idea that the poetry, translations, and drama of the decade are "drab" works that merely laid the ground for a later Elizabethan "golden age." I argue that the Inns were literary, professional, and political communities, showing that literary activity helped members to understand their political world and to participate in and comment on it. In addition to providing a new framework for appreciating the literature of the 1560s, "Lawyers at Play" contributes to recent work on the emergence of public political discourse in early modern England, promoting a shift in literary criticism on the early modern public sphere from the political ideas in literary texts to their discursive contexts--more specifically, the associational and physical contexts in which these texts were produced and that structured political discourse itself.

Associated Products

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581 (Book)
Title: Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581
Author: Jessica Winston
Abstract: Many early modern poets and playwrights were also members of the legal societies the Inns of Court, and these authors shaped the development of key genres of the English Renaissance, especially lyric poetry, dramatic tragedy, satire, and masque. How did the Inns come to be literary centres in the first place, and why were they especially vibrant at particular times? Early modernists have long understood that urban setting and institutional environment were central to this phenomenon: in the vibrant world of London, educated men with time on their hands turned to literary pastimes for something to do. Lawyers at Play proposes an additional, more essential dynamic: the literary culture of the Inns intensified in decades of profound transformation in the legal profession. Focusing on the 1560s, the decade when a large literary network first developed around the societies, the book demonstrates that this literary surge grew out of and responded to a period of rapid expansion in the legal profession and in the career prospects of members. Poetry, translation, and performance were recreational pastimes; however, these activities also defined and elevated the status of inns-of-court men as qualified, learned, and ethical participants in England’s ‘legal magistracy’: those lawyers, judges, justices of the peace, civic office holders, town recorders, and gentleman landholders who managed and administered local and national governance. Lawyers at Play maps the literary terrain of a formative but understudied period in the English Renaissance, but it also offers a framework for understanding connections between the literary and legal cultures of the Inns over the whole of the early modern period.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/lawyers-at-play-9780198769422?q=Lawyers%20at%20Play&lang=en&cc=us#
Primary URL Description: Book listing on OUP website.
Access Model: For purchase.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780198769422
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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