Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta by Jennifer Jahner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta by Jennifer Jahner Tom Johnson Jennifer Jahner. Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. $85.00. "To accept domination by an abstract idea has never been a weakness of England," wrote Ernst Kantorowicz in The King's Two Bodies, his famous analysis of medieval sovereignty, "though a useful fiction might more readily be accepted." And indeed, historians have long noted the fictive qualities of the legal texts that make up the English constitution. As long ago as 1965, Jim Holt pointed to the rhetorical and highly partial histories that underlay baronial claims in Magna Carta, as they looked back to rights supposedly granted to them in the coronation charter of Henry I and the laws of Edward the Confessor (J. C. Holt, Magna Carta [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965]). But historians are rarely prepared to attend to the broader understandings of fictionality within which these useful constitutional fictions are constructed. In this impressive new book, Jennifer Jahner shows the compelling breadth of interpretations afforded by literary readings of English law during its period of critical formation. Central to her claim is the premise that law was "dependent both procedurally and theoretically on the flexible capacities of metaphor and fiction" (6). This means that it is the grammar classroom, rather than the law-book, to which we must look in order to understand the formation of the constitutional imagination in this period. Jahner ably exposes this connection in the first half of the book. But she also pursues a bolder argument, which is that through a literary attention to jurisdiction, we can more easily critique the vexed teleological narratives that frame constitutionalism as a progressive process that gradually clarifies the nation state. Borrowing from the legal scholar Richard T. Ford, she sees two mutually constitutive concepts of jurisdiction, representing either a "synthetic" state bureaucracy or an "organic" autonomous community, [End Page 409] embedded in the very foundations of English constitutionalism. These concepts can both act as vehicles for discourse framed around the nation, but the creative tensions between them ought to be understood as a jurisdictional poetics. Their incommensurability, Jahner suggests, prefigure the binary conflicts between different powers—king and baron, Church and state, regnal and local—that characterize subsequent constitutional struggles over the nature of political legitimacy. Writing as a captive passenger in the front seat of the Brexit death-drive, this emphasis seems to me a useful explanation for England's longue durée pyschodrama with authority, in the Middle Ages and beyond. It is a mark of Jahner's range and subtlety that she turns, in the final word, not to these obvious resonances with contemporary Britain, but to Carter Revard, the Osage medievalist-turned-poet. In a poignant meditation on his poem "Starring America" in the coda to the book, Jahner suggests the possibilities of poetic composition as a way of exploding the flattened vision of empire. But these more explorative reflections build upon an extremely scholarly account of the literary and legal culture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The first chapter explores the "paradigmatic jurisdictional drama" of the Becket controversy, which works to set up some of the broader arguments about law and its exemptions and to provide a sketch of the range of literary education in this period, encompassing both the trivium, and the emerging disciplines of canon and civil law. The main analysis focuses upon John of Salisbury's Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum, a poem often understood as an inferior, early draft of the Policraticus. Jahner draws out not only the text's juxtaposition of the "law" of grammar with jurisdictional order, but the way in which it exposes the tensions of the just royal counselor's position, caught between king and conscience. Becket's rhetorical mastery thus comes to be framed by his supporters not as courtly guile, but as a consequence of his ethical idealism; his capacity to speak freely is paired with his status as a living embodiment of ecclesiastical liberty. The second chapter moves these themes forward by examining the development of a new educational form, the...