Law In Seventeenth-Century England Research Articles

Midwives’ oaths: everyday life and the law in seventeenth-century England

Abstract This article explores historical and legal approaches to past society, asking what each has to offer the other. Using early modern midwives’ oaths as a case study, it examines the extent to which the law shapes everyday life and society, and vice versa allowing us to situate early modern midwives at the intersection of a number of important and competing seventeenth-century institutions including state, church, society, and profession. We argue that a historico-legal approach to the practices of seventeenth-century midwives demands a reconsideration of the historiography of medical ethics and of the professions more broadly. It situates midwives as holders of formal office, and agents of the emergent early modern state and encourages reflection on the nature of ethical practice, and professional regulation within their social, cultural, and political context.

A Godly Law? Bulstrode Whitelocke, Puritanism and the Common Law in Seventeenth-Century England

Debates surrounding both the church and the law played an important role in the conflicts that marked seventeenth-century England. Calls for reform of the law in the Civil Wars and Interregnum complicated the apparent relationship between puritanism and the common law, as the first fragmented and the second came under attack in the 1640s and 1650s. This article first analyses the common lawyer Bulstrode Whitelocke's historical and constitutional writings that defended the common law against demands for its reform and argued that its legitimacy derived from its origins in, and resemblances to, the law of Moses. Refraining from the radical application of this model employed by some contemporaries, Whitelocke instead turned to British history to make his case. This article then examines Whitelocke's views of the relationship between common law and ecclesiastical jurisdiction in his own day, showing how, both as a lawyer and as a puritan, he navigated laws demanding religious conformity. Whitelocke's career therefore demonstrates how lawyers could negotiate the fraught relationship between the church and the law in the aftermath of the reconfigurations provoked by the Civil Wars and Restoration.

Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection by Matthew Crow

Reviewed by: Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection by Matthew Crow Mark G. Spencer Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection. By Matthew Crow. Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society. ( New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 282. $49.99, ISBN 978-1-107-16193-1.) Thomas Jefferson is often cast as an ahistorical thinker who championed natural rights. "'Our Revolution,'" he wrote, unlike the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, "'presented us an album on which we were free to write [End Page 142] what we pleased. We had no occasion to search into any musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry. We appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved on our hearts'" (p. 3). However, Matthew Crow claims in his engaging book, "Jefferson's forthright declaration was complete nonsense" (p. 4). "Jefferson was more attuned than most to the fact that Americans found themselves in a heated political contest over history, and … historiography" (p. 25). That realization played out in various ways over the course of Jefferson's life. Two opening chapters set the contexts "out of which Jefferson's concerns for collecting and reading legal history emerged" (p. 39). Chapter 1 explores "debates over the historical and textual authority of written law in seventeenth-century England" in works by Edward Coke, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and others (p. 11). In chapter 2 we see how Virginians such as William Byrd II and Robert Beverley "configured law as a fragile assemblage" that would be molded in the process of "forging historical identity" (pp. 42, 43). Law and history were "inseparable," and the Scottish Enlightenment taught Jefferson similar lessons (p. 45). His legal commonplace books were dominated by extracts from works by Henry Home, Lord Kames, especially Principles of Equity (1760). Kames's sense "that one could not study the law without studying it historically, without comparing it to other systems of jurisprudence, and without understanding the social and governmental contexts in which law had developed, was perhaps the single most important idea shaping Jefferson's approach to learning in the area of the law" (p. 80). The remaining chapters trace the ebbs and flows of the impact of equity jurisdiction on Jefferson. As a revolutionary, "[c]odification, and the sealing off of particular aspects of the life of the law from potential revision and contestation, was the chief target of Jefferson's constitutional criticism" (p. 83). For Jefferson, the imperial crisis was "a kind of jurisprudential problem" about who should judge (p. 99). Later settings provided different problems. Chapters 4 and 5 largely center on Jefferson's confrontation with race: first, as author of Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), and second, as a president who pursued an empire but "refused to see and take into account the complex histories" of North America's inhabitants (p. 232). A concluding chapter follows Jefferson in retirement. Jefferson had "another turn in thinking," and he now embraced the idea of a participatory government "'where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward republic'" (p. 235). For all its novel ideas and solid scholarship, this book is not without its shortcomings. Its argument would be clearer with fewer references to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and others, which do not much help us understand Jefferson. There are minor inconsistencies, including slips in book titles, repeated passages, and occasionally contradictory interpretations. And some avenues might have been more fully explored. For instance, Crow emphasizes Jefferson's engagement with David Hume's History of England (6 vols.; London, 1754–1762) without referencing its celebrated first American edition in 1795, which could have helped explain the urgency of Jefferson's critique. This is especially so given Crow's contention that "Jefferson was preoccupied in later years with designing a constitutional culture and a corresponding textual environment that could nurture a people in their capacity to judge in common [End Page 143] affairs" (p. 250). Hume's History would not be part of Jefferson's mix, as he banned it from the University of Virginia. Clearly, Jefferson appreciated all...

The Sociology and Paradoxes of Deconstruction: A Reply to Agger

he most distressing fact about Agger's (1994) critique of our paper (Fuchs and Ward 1994) is that he has nothing at all to say about the substance of our argument. We explain why different scientific organizations have different cognitive styles and why skepticism and relativism are more likely in some fields than in others. In brief, we argue that the sort of radical DECONSTRUCTION practiced by workers in postmodern cultural studies, literary theorists, and French poststructuralists indicates a crisis in social solidarity, organizational cohesion, and professional communication. This crisis triggers intellectual symptoms not unlike those accompanying the rare revolutionary upheavals described by Kuhn (1970), such as skepticism, antifoundationalism, and a good dose of cultural relativism. In highly decentralized fields with weak resources for producing facts, such a crisis can become permanent. This is typical in textual and humanistic fields, which are currently fragmented into fairly self-contained schools and incompatible ideological perspectives and have not established strong professional monopolies over their areas of expertise. When many schools and approaches coexist in this way, they can DECONSTRUCT each other's constructions as being selective and biased. They observe how others observe and so see and question from without what cannot be seen and questioned from within. Such fragmented fields and specialties are receptive to external political agendas and ideologies. Their organizational and material structure is conducive to a cognitive style that mixes disciplinary history and systematics, prefers commentary over theory and criticism over explanation, reads and rereads classics, and then questions all this and itself as not really scientific and representational. Compare this to closely coupled fields that have strong resources and professional networks for producing facts and objective knowledge. These are the fields that manage to blackbox many of their assumptions and presuppositions in algorithms, technical apparatus, and experimental habits. The premises for work in such fields or specialties are comparatively more routinized and institutionally entrenched than in decentralized fields. The workers are more likely to believe in facts, method, representation, and progress, and their working philosophy is some form of pragmatic realism. By themselves, workers in strong and prestigious scientific organizations do not normally become radical DECONSTRUCTIONISTS. They must be told that their knowledge is, indeed, a social and textual construct. For they have much work to do, must do it faster than others, get money and then more money for all this, and so have little time or reason to undermine the epistemic and social authority of their own practices as merely contingent and culturally relative. The blind spots of such organizations (i.e., the hows of their modes of perceiving and constructing their worlds) are protected and rendered more or less invisible. As opposed to conversational fields, factual fields do not view their basic constructions as constructions, but as the way reality is, or at least, as approaching Truth. This does not mean that what we find here are cozy mechanical Gemeinschaften. On the contrary, there is much stratification and intense competition. However, organizational and methodological strongholds temper mutual criticism. In such fields, radical DECONSTRUCTION is replaced by moderate deconstruction. Then, a set of strategies is available to economize on the costs of deconstruction. These strategies are similar in law and science, which can be partly explained by some common social and cognitive origins of science and law in seventeenth-century England. Agger is silent about this core of our argument. Instead, he questions our interpretation of Derrida. This side-stepping of substance is actually typical in weak and conversational fields, and so, ironically, Agger illustrates one of our main points: Instead of arguing the substantive and empirical merits of arguments,

The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England

Journal Article The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-century England Get access Herrup Cynthia B., The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. xviii, 232 pp. $44.50. J. H. Baker J. H. Baker St. Catharine's College, Cambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Journal of Legal History, Volume 34, Issue 2, April 1990, Pages 191–193, https://doi.org/10.2307/845523 Published: 01 April 1990

The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England. Cynthia B. HerrupThe Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar, 1590-1640. Wilfrid R. Prest

<i>The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England</i>. Cynthia B. Herrup<i>The Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar, 1590-1640</i>. Wilfrid R. Prest

The Common Peace. Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England, by Cynthia B. Herrup

<i>The Common Peace. Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England</i>, by Cynthia B. Herrup

The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England

The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England

The Structure of Judicial Administration and the Development of Contract Law in Seventeenth-Century England

The Structure of Judicial Administration and the Development of Contract Law in Seventeenth-Century England