Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (review)

It is hard not to like a volume that devotes an entire chapter to a couple quarrelling over which one of them farted. This reviewer, for one, did not realise the antiquity of the legal principle that ‘he who smelt it, dealt it’ (p. 100). Apparently, though, this was a concept familiar to the author of the fifteenth-century French farce, The Fart, printed in full in this volume. This farce, translated by Sharon King, highlights the broad range of contexts where discourses about law and sovereignty may be found. Yet the contributions to this volume do not generally touch on the singular topic of ‘law and sovereignty’ – with a few notable exceptions – but rather address the twin topics of ‘law’ and ‘sovereignty’. It does not really fulfil the jacket’s claim to ‘constitute a valuable overview of the history of medieval and Renaissance law and sovereignty in several disciplines’. It does not pose a coherent overview of a developing sense of ‘sovereignty’, nor does every contribution provide a definitive sense of how pre-modern sovereignty was conceived, constructed and/or projected. Scholars looking for this will be disappointed. Law and Sovereignty rather explores these themes within certain medieval and early modern European contexts. Like much research of the period itself, it is a patchwork of aligned concepts and subjects, drawn from a variety of sources, and demanding a range of methodologies. It is perhaps more interesting for this than if it had fulfilled its claim.

A number of the chapters explore these themes within literature, or use literature to explore contemporary conceptions and practices. For instance, Albrecht Classen’s analysis of thirteenth-century Tristan romances highlights how fictionalized political contexts provide parameters of behaviour for their actors and limit the narrative outcome of those same fictions. At the centre of Erika Hess’s exploration of the argument between Nature and Nurture, found in thirteenth-century Arthurian romance, is the character of ‘Silence’, some cross-dressing, and a literary warning for contemporary readers against sovereigns breaking natural rights generally, or the right of female inheritance specifically. In another Arthurian analysis, Lee Manion argues for a ‘fluid sort of sovereignty’ (p. 79), but also raises the role of documentary evidence in medieval claims of sovereignty generally.

Some chapters touch on very particular historical discussions of sovereignty. Catherine Loomis highlights the role that poetry written upon the death of Elizabeth I and the accession of James I had in facilitating and explaining what may have been an otherwise difficult succession. Spanish conceptions of sovereignty are the subject of Aurelio Espinosa’s chapter where several perceptions of sovereignty ‘from below’ are presented, and the chapter provides interesting nuance and detail to the narrative of the Habsburg rise in the sixteenth century. Also Iberian, Harald Braun’s reanalysis of the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana’s 1599 De rege – ‘denounced as a radical theory of popular sovereignty’ (p. 47) – achieves a fascinating de-legalization of that text. Braun argues effectively that this text was not focused on sovereignty as such, but rather on political prudence.

A similar attempt to reconfigure a text is provided by Torrance Kirby, who revisits the English theologian Richard Hooker’s ‘theory of sovereignty’ and argues against what has been seen as an irreconcilable logic inherent in Hooker’s conception. The interdisciplinary nature of the volume is furthered by Adrienne Williams Boyarin’s art-historical analysis of ‘symbolic and historical instances of feminine legal authority’ (p. 258), which draws on a number of texts and illustrations.

Detailed document studies, with important methodological implications, are a particular treat in this book. Retha Warnicke’s detailed analysis of a particular diplomatic exchange between the Scottish embassy and Elizabeth I’s Court in 1583, as reported by the Spanish ambassador, highlights the problems with using early modern diplomatic reports uncritically. Any...