Time out of mind: The poetics of custom and common law in early modern England
The formal and rhetorical elements of the texts I analyze are likewise shaped by common-law custom, particularly its emphasis on repetition and its foundation in communal consensus. Custom lends new valences to More's ubiquitous use of proverbs, the copia of Sidney's prose romance, Spenser...
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| Format: | Thesis Book |
| Language: | English |
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| Summary: | The formal and rhetorical elements of the texts I analyze are likewise shaped by common-law custom, particularly its emphasis on repetition and its foundation in communal consensus. Custom lends new valences to More's ubiquitous use of proverbs, the copia of Sidney's prose romance, Spenser's project to classicize English verse, and Clifford's diary form. But the connection between explicit and formal invocations of custom reveals over and again that, rather than uncritically availing themselves of England's legal concept of custom, these authors examine and question the fundamental distinctions that constituted it -- conquest and consent, written and unwritten, foreign and native This dissertation argues for the centrality of a category whose importance has been occluded by modernity's relentless demand for novelty: custom in early modern literature. It seeks to account for custom's appeal to early modern writers in verse and prose, particularly as they confronted the history of their generic forms, they language, and their native land. When discussed by literary scholars, custom usually is employed as a loose synonym for popular, rustic traditions. But, as intellectual historians have long recognized, early modern lawyers and historians considered custom to be synonymous with England's common law, imagined to have existed since "time out of mind." I argue that writers such as Thomas More, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Anne Clifford draw upon the legal discourse of custom in order to construct national and literary history in terms of a continuous, unbroken past. While the appeal to custom might work to entrench backward looking impulses, I propose that it also opened up poetic and political possibilities at a time when novelty was viewed as anarchic and insurrectionary. A legally-inflected iteration of custom forms the basis of More's society without private property and repairs Sidney's ideal kingdom; it authorizes Clifford's resistance against patriarchal inheritance and Spenser's imposition of Latin meter onto English verse and of English law onto Irish land. Custom, which governed the ownership and devolution of land, emerges conspicuously in these texts when land holding is at issue, whether in familial property disputes or in large-scale imperial claims |
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| Item Description: | Adviser: Margreta de Grazia Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 72-05, Section: A, page: 1655 |
| Physical Description: | 201 pages Also available in print |
| Format: | Mode of access: World Wide Web |
| ISBN: | 9781124515748 |
| Access: | Restricted for use by site license |