Sidney and Finch’s Nomotexnia (Art of Law): Religion, Politics, and Patronage?

Abstract

Abstract This essay brings to light a little-known manuscript on law and religion dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney: the earliest version of Henry Finch’s Nomotexnia (Art of Law). The manuscript’s two-part structure provides ‘Nomotexnia’, a Ramist-style synopsis of certain topics in English common law pertaining to possessions and criminal offences, followed by a supplement entitled ‘A Conference and Reformation of the Same Law by the Law of God’. Later manuscripts and printed witnesses for Finch’s expansion of the ‘Nomotexnia’ section did not include religious commentary. Material evidence alone places the first manuscript’s production after 1583 but leaves unconfirmed whether or not Sidney commissioned either section of its contents. This study reassesses the manuscript text with an eye to Finch’s and Sidney’s legal interests, family concerns, and religious politics in the mid-1580s. Textual and biographical evidence, combined with reasonable conjecture, suggests that Sidney probably commissioned the ‘Nomotexnia’ section, motivated by a desire for legal knowledge on inheritance and land use, and that Finch probably supplied the ‘Conference and Reformation’ section by his own initiative, asserting a polemical stance on the English church that Sidney would not have adopted.