‘A More Exact Purity’: Legal Authority and Conspicuous Amalgamation in Early Modern English Law Guides and the Oxford Law Lectures of Sir Robert Chambers and Samuel Johnson

This paper finds that early modern and later texts explaining legal vocabulary and history to non-professionals bring into focus two vying conceptions of enforcing narrative and terminological purity (a notion inextricably bound up with the authority to produce legal narratives): decontamination, according to one perspective, and enrichment to strengthen an essence, according to another view. The lexicons generally promote a notion of ‘purity’ that does not connote the removal of contaminants or foreign matter but rather depends on adulteration and heterogeneous additions. This paper argues that legal guide writers believed that cultivating impressions, and even illusions, of corporate authorship was key to attracting readers, who (the writers expected) perceived conspicuous reliance on numerous, diverse (foreign as well as domestic) sources as a mark of legitimacy.