Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England by Elliott Visconsi

Abstract

108 his analysis concerns Germany; only one of his two major chapters (out of nine), ‘‘Scholarship, the New Testament , and the English Defense of the Bible,’’ directly deals with the time of the Scriblerians, who are rarely mentioned . The following topics are covered: the beginnings of the vernacular Bible; the birth of the ‘‘Enlightenment’’ Bible, and English responses up to and including Richard Bentley, whom Sheehan makes seminal; German pietism’s incorporation of critical methodology; responses to philological research; approaches stressing moral pedagogy and the bible as poetry; the bible as stimulus for archival research; universalist and cultural readings; and the vagaries of higher criticism through 1850 in England and Germany . The thread that unites large and small essays on the English bible is translation . Mr. Sheehan regards those periods that created research without making the bible available to the public (as in translation ) as epicene and deficient; such periods fail to use the Bible as it should be used. He repeatedly inquires why English translation, after the Authorized Version of 1611, dried up. Interesting not only in itself, this question provides, in an age of writing about the Bible, a useful code for highlighting the wealth of the almost unmanageable theological writing around the year 1700. Other codes for ordering this material include methodologies of reason and faith; sectarian polemics; and doctrinal questions, especially the existence and nature of the Trinity. For Mr. Sheehan, the last code is extraneous. Trinitarian controversy, however, always ran along two tracks: philosophical argument about terms and texts, and philological argument about manuscripts and whether certain texts place the Trinity among the central doctrines of the Christian faith. Perhaps Mr. Sheehan might continue his resolute research by tracing the multiple sources of the no-translation theme in other important material within his grasp: the Unitarian pamphlets of the 1690s, for example, or the Boyle Lectures . Or perhaps this is to say that I disagree with using translation as a code for this period because its grasp is incomplete (as will be the grasp of all codes). The present work shows great familiarity with German and English texts, readily proves its point about interest in the Bible, and is a reference. Unfortunately, the Index is skimpy; there is no bibliography. Gerard Reedy College of the Holy Cross ELLIOTT VISCONSI. Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England. Ithaca: Cornell, 2008. Pp. xiv ⫹ 216. $39.95. Lest his title should call up Dickensian visions of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, Mr. Visconsi warns his readers that ‘‘this is not a book about the relation between literature and the seventeenthcentury equity courts’’ such as Chancery . The ‘‘equitable judgments’’ Mr. Visconsi has in view are literary rather than juridical, and the ‘‘lines’’ connecting them are thematic, not—as in English law—historical. Equity decisions, the OED points out, ‘‘were taken as precedents, and thus ‘equity ’ early became an organized system of rules, not less rigid and definite than those of law.’’ In order to carry on his dialogue with early modern literary texts, Mr. Visconsi brackets off prece- 109 dent along with the equity courts, much the way new historicists ignore historical context when it interferes with their Foucauldian hermeneutics. Mr. Visconsi ’s ‘‘fictionalization (perhaps mythopoesis ) of law’’ is therefore the diametric opposite of jurisprudence. His model for equity from Spenser’s ‘‘Legend of Justice ’’ is not the Isis episode, which Mr. Visconsi finds ‘‘positively odd,’’ but the Giant who, brushing aside precedent, vainly strives to fashion a utopia by weighing right and wrong in his scales. The literary history in this book is as reductive as the author’s legal history. In seeking to draw ‘‘lines’’ relating Davenant , Dryden, and Milton to Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, Behn, and Defoe, Mr. Visconsi traces a fantastic genealogy far removed from Shakespeare ’s ‘‘lines of life that life repair.’’ The texts Mr. Visconsi has chosen ‘‘confront a reader or audience with occasions for individual judgment of the nature of government, the extent of the rule of law, the limits of obedience, and the duties of sovereign and subject.’’ Running through these political texts is a thread of ‘‘imaginative originalism’’ that provokes readers to reexamine their national origins...