A Power to do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625

Abstract

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, the early modern literary texts he examines emerge as similarly caught up in thinking about how things might look or feel or be judged if one drew the legal boundaries differently.