The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises (review)

The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises. By Theodore Ziolkowski. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. xiv + 322 pp. $52.50.

According to Theodore Ziolkowski, the Western legal system has developed through a succession of historical crises, each precipitated by a need to realign the forces of law and morality in the face of new injustices within the institution of the law. Since the search for social justice is an abiding theme in great works of literature, the emergence of major literary figures at critical moments in the evolution of Western law is thus hardly coincidental: "It is at those moments when the tension between law and morality is increased to the breaking point that the law is changed and its evolution lurches forward again. And it is precisely those epoch-making moments that great literature reflects" (16). Baldly stated, this thesis might reasonably be felt to be naive and reductive, a kind of crude legal Darwinianism used to justify an otherwise rather arbitrary selection of works, but such an objection would seriously undervalue this wide ranging, scholarly, and penetrating study. Thankfully, Ziolkowski has written a book that does not in the final analysis depend for its effect on the promulgation of a grand theory; in fact, The Mirror of Justice is at its most successful where the central argument retreats into the background, providing little more than a convenient peg on which to hang a series of highly stimulating discussions of literary works concerned with the law.

Ziolkowski appears to me to be most constrained by his central thesis in the earlier chapters, those dealing with the Oresteia, Njal's Saga, and the various recensions of the medieval beast epic Renard the Fox. There are two reasons for this. In the first place, he shows a rather facile tendency to associate oral customary law with backwardness and inequity, and codified legislation with progressiveness and social justice; in part, this derives from an over dependence on the lawyer and amateur anthropologist A. S. Diamond (see 9-13), whose "evolutionary typology of the law," despite Ziolkowski's claims to the contrary, is far from universally accepted nowadays. In fact, Diamond was virtually the last in a line of armchair ethnographers, reaching back to the influential Victorian Sir Henry Maine, to make such extravagant Darwinian claims for his subject. Secondly, the comparative scarcity of objective evidence for the state of the legal system at the time these works were written tends to encourage a certain circularity of argument; that is to say, the works themselves tend to be used as evidence of the legal crises to which they are supposedly a response. Thus, "the example of trial by ordeal, as it makes its way from heroic chanson by way of courtly epic through medieval popular narrative, not only reflects the reduction of an originally serious legal procedure to a quaint old practice, . . . [it] also attests the public disenchantment with the uncertainties that characterized the rituals of traditional customary law and hence, to a certain extent, with customary law itself" (80). In the case of the Oresteia and Njal's Saga this is perhaps excusable (sources of information on the law of fifth-century Athens and thirteenth-century Iceland are certainly limited), but it is less defensible with the Roman de Renart and Reinhart Fuchs; materials for the legal history of France and Germany in the high and late middle ages are copious and might have led to a more nuanced reading of this popular beast epic than Ziolkowski gives us here.

Once he reaches the renaissance Ziolkowski is on safer ground and my only real complaint is with the narrowing of his comparativist scope. While it is true that there is a brief discussion of Rabelais and a rather more extended one of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, from here on his study focuses primarily on Germany. When so much is covered, it is perhaps churlish to...