BOOK: Emma RHATIGAN, Jackie WATSON (eds.), Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court. Writing Communities [Early Modern Literature in History] (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), 295 p. 9783031774447

(Image source: Springer Nature)

About the book

This collection of essays presents recent research on the Inns of Court and their place in the literature and culture of the early modern world. The volume is structured in three sections. Section One looks at the institutional spaces of the Inns themselves. The chapters consider how the Innsmen’s identities and writings were shaped by their participation in the communal life of the legal Societies. Section Two looks at the Inns in the context of early modern London. The chapters attend to the intellectual and cultural traffic between the Inns and the city in which they were located by examining the role of Innsmen in the book trade, the circulation of manuscripts, playhouses, and musical culture. Finally, Section Three sets a wider international context. The chapters focus on the role of Innsmen in translation, nation-building, and early colonisation. Together these sections attend to the Innsmen not only as writing communities in themselves, but as participants in a complex of intersecting networks reaching out into London and beyond.

Table of contents:

Introduction: Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court (Emma Rhatigan, Jackie Watson)

WITHIN THE INNS

• Acting Like a Lawyer: Mooting, The Misfortunes of Arthur, and Legal Professional Identity (Jessica Winston)
• A ‘Fellowship in Sin’: John Donne and Community in the Lincoln’s Inn Pulpit (Emma Rhatigan)
• ‘Observe Him for the Love of Mockery’: Revelry, Satire, and Performance in the Late Elizabethan Middle Temple (Jackie Watson)
• Notebooks, Play, and Legal Education at Middle Temple (Blessin Adams)

WITHOUT THE INNS

• The Mad Butler of Gray’s Inn: Service, Mental Disability, and the Limits of Institutional Care (Penelope Geng)
• From Inns of Court Revels and Masques to John Playford’s The English Dancing Master (Sharon J. Harris)
• Mapping Selden’s Library (Joshua Eckhardt, Julian T. S. Neuhauser)
• Lewiston Fitzjames and Other Stray Poets of the Inns of Court (Arthur F. Marotti)

BEYOND THE INNS 

• George Gascoigne’s Proliferative Poetics (Felicity Brown)
• Gender, Revenge, and Legal Performance at the Inns of Court (Jessica Apolloni)
• Robert Ashley’s Translations and Paratexts (1589–1639) (Renae Satterley)
• Between Ship and Library: Global Knowledge and Spaces of Exchange at the Middle Temple, 1586–1636 (Lauren Working, Emily Stevenson)

About the editors

Emma Rhatigan is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research and publications focus on early modern texts in performance and their audiences. She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (2011) and is editing a volume of John Donne’s Inns of Court sermons for The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne.

Jackie Watson holds a PhD from Birkbeck College, UK, and is an independent scholar. Author of Epistolary Courtiership and Dramatic Letters: Thomas Overbury and the Jacobean Playhouse (2024), she publishes on the intersection between law and drama, including essays in recent collections such as Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance (2022) and Shakespeare/Sense (2020).

More information can be found here.

BOOK: Spike Gibbs, Lordship, State Formation and Local Authority in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). ISBN: 9781009311830

(Image source: Cambridge University Press)

ABOUT THE BOOK

Providing a new narrative of how local authority and social structures adapted in response to the decline of lordship and the process of state formation, Spike Gibbs uses manorial officeholding – where officials were chosen from among tenants to help run the lord's manorial estate – as a prism through which to examine political and social change in the late medieval and early modern English village. Drawing on micro-studies of previously untapped archival records, the book spans the medieval/early modern divide to examine changes between 1300 and 1650. In doing so, Gibbs demonstrates the vitality of manorial structures across the medieval and early modern era, the active and willing participation of tenants in these frameworks, and the way this created inequalities within communities

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Spike Gibbs is Junior Professor for the Economic History of the Middle Ages at the University of Mannheim. His writing on manorial officials, felony forfeiture and managing stray animals has been published in journals such as the Journal of British Studies and the English Historical Review. This is his first book.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

1. The changing role of manorial officers and manor courts

2. Manorial officeholding and selection processes: participation or restriction?

3. Manorial officeholding and unfreedom

4. Manorial officeholding and village governance: misconduct and landscape control

5. State formation I: the parish

6. State formation II: vills, quarter sessions and constables

Conclusion

Appendix 1: Categorising presentments

Appendix 2: Identifying individuals

Appendix 3: Population estimates.

More information can be found here.