Table Of ContentOUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/20, SPi
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/20, SPi
Custom, Common Law, and the
Constitution of English
Renaissance Literature
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/20, SPi
LAW AND LITERATURE
The Law and Literature series publishes work that connects legal ideas to literary and
cultural history, texts, and artefacts. The series encompasses a wide range of historical
periods, literary genres, legal fields and theories, and transnational subjects, focusing
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are themselves subject to scrutiny.
Series Editors
Robert Spoo, University of Tulsa
Simon Stern, University of Toronto
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Custom, Common Law,
and the Constitution
of English Renaissance
Literature
STEPHANIE ELSKY
1
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1
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For Ari and Felix
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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 30/07/20, SPi
Acknowledgments
The benefit of working on a book since what feels like time immemorial is the
many debts of gratitude I have accumulated in that time. I am so delighted to
finally have a chance to enumerate them here. First and foremost, I would like to
thank Margreta de Grazia, who has had a profound influence not only on my
thinking about this period but also on my thinking about how we think about
periods. I continually seek to live up to the model of intellectual curiosity, gener-
osity, and integrity that she has provided. Her unstinting commitment to the
intellectual lives of her students combined with her deep care for their personal
well-being is nothing short of astonishing. The longer I spend in academia, the
more deeply I come to admire it. From Philadelphia to London, she has been my
best critic and supporter.
This project began as a dissertation, with Margreta as its director, and I thank
the rest of my dissertation committee for going well beyond the call of duty:
Zachary Lessary, Ania Loomba, and Melissa Sanchez. Rita Copeland, Jed Esty,
Suvir Kaul, Heather Love, Peter Stallybrass, Emily Steiner, and David Wallace
were sources of support and inspiration throughout grad school and afterward.
I had the privilege of being at Penn during yet another renaissance of Renaissance
graduate students, and I am particularly grateful to Catherine Nicholson, Thomas
Ward, Urvashi Chakravarty, Bronwyn Wallace, Megan Cook, Miriam Jacobson,
and Marissa Nicosia for friendships marked by generosity and intellectual
excitement. My path to this project can be said to have begun when I had the
good fortune to be taught as an undergraduate by Julie Crawford, Jenny Davidson,
Jean Howard, David Kastan, Julie Peters, and Jim Shapiro.
My academic career has taken me to a number of different institutions, and at
each I was fortunate to find camaraderie and mentorship. Thank you to Jonathan
Wilson, Kevin Dunn, and Judith Haber at the Center for the Humanities and the
English Department at Tufts; to that excellent trio of female role models at
UC-Davis, Margie Ferguson, Fran Dolan, and Gina Bloom, as well as Seeta
Chaganti, Liz Miller, Matthew Stratton, and Joshua Clover. At Amherst College, I’d
like to thank the inimitable members of the Department of Law, Justice, and Social
Thought: Austin Sarat, Adam Sitze, Martha Umphrey, Lawrence Douglas, David
Delaney, and the late Nasser Hussain. I’d also like to thank Anston Bosman, Jane
Degenhardt, and Adam Zucker for welcoming me into the Western Massachusetts
Renaissance community. At the Freie Universität, I would like to thank Anita
Traninger, Andrew James Johnston, Andreas Mahler, and Björn Quirig.
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viii Acknowledgments
At the University of Wisconsin, I was surrounded by a vibrant group of
Renaissance scholars, including Elizabeth Bearden, Karen Britland, Joshua
Calhoun, and Ullrich Langer, all of whom I thank for contributing to my thinking
in this project. Thank you especially to David Loewenstein for his mentorship
during his time there and afterward. I would like to thank the UW Center for the
Humanities First Book Program for giving me the opportunity to bring together
scholars from Madison and elsewhere to read an earlier version of this manu-
script. Thank you to Russ Castronovo, Lynn Keller, Mitra Sharafi, Ralph
Gruenwald, and Daniel Kapust for their incisive feedback. I am also deeply grate-
ful to Caroline Levine, Susan Bernstein, and Lisa Cooper for their guidance; and
to Jordan Zweck, Colin Gillis, Ramzi Fawaz, Aida Levy-Hussen, Bridget Fielder,
Jonathan Senchyne, Nandini Pandey, and Danielle Evans for their inspiring
friendship. Thank you, too, to the excellent undergraduate and graduate students
at all of these institutions.
Most recently, I have found a wonderful home at Rhodes College. Leslie Petty
has been a supportive chair in all ways, while Scott Newstok has been an ideal
Renaissance colleague and Brian Schaffer an exemplary dean. My writing group,
Hannah Barker, Lori Garner, Judy Haas, Clara Pascal-Arguente, and Laura Loth,
provided much needed sustenance and company during the long process of book
revision. Amy Benson, Chanelle Benz, Gordon Bigelow, Marshall Boswell, Chris
Brunt, Rebecca Finlayson, Jason Richards, Rashna Richards, Seth Rudy, and Caki
Wilkinson make me look forward to coming to my office every day. Thank you,
too, to the English Department at University of Mississippi, especially Ivo Kamps
and Karen Raber, for making me feel so welcome in my move to the mid-South.
Many people have read many versions of parts of this book or spent hours
discussing it with me. I want to thank especially Bradin Cormack and Victoria
Kahn for their infallible advice on a full draft of the manuscript as part of the UW
First Book Program. J.K. Barret, Crystal Bartolovich, Cathy Nicholson, Debapriya
Sarkar, and Thomas Ward also deserve special mention for their invigorating
responses to the project, which always kept me excited about continuing to work
on it during moments of frustration and confusion. My work is all the stronger
for the engagement of Kevin Curran, Kathleen Davis, Rayna Kalas, Lucy Munro,
Björn Quirig, and Sebastian Sobecki with it during a 2016 conference I organized
at the Freie Universität in Berlin, “Common Eras: Law, Literature, and the
Rhetorics of Commonality in Medieval and Renaissance England.” Reid Barbour,
Ayelet Ben-Yishai, Katie Brokaw, Jim Bromley, Drew Daniel, Topher Davis,
Heather Dubrow, Will Fisher, Penny Geng, Linda Gregerson, Jane Grogan, Liora
Halperin, Steve Hindle, Gavin Hollis, Jeff Knight, András Kiséry, Tatiana
Korneeva, Rebecca Lemon, Russ Leo, Ivan Lupić, Julia Lupton, Jenny Mann,
Carla Mazzio, Steven Mullaney, Molly Murray, Christopher Pye, Ben Robinson,
Amy Rodgers, Jennie Row, Marjorie Rubright, Michael Schoenfeldt, Sasha
Senderovich, Dan Shore, Nigel Smith, Alan Stewart, Gin Strain, Valerie Traub,
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Acknowledgments ix
Scott Trudell, Henry Turner, Wendy Wall, Brian Walsh, Tiffany Werth, Will West,
and Jessica Wolfe have all offered feedback, encouragement, and general good
cheer at multiple points during this project.
I have also benefited from thoughtful audiences at the Renaissance Society of
America Annual Convention; the Modern Language Association Annual
Convention; Indiana University’s Renaissance Studies Program; Miami University’s
Early Modern Studies Collective; the Renaissance Center at the University of
Massachusetts; and the Early Modern Seminar at University College London.
Thank you to Penelope Anderson, Hall Bjørnstad, Jim Bromley, Catherine
Gillepsie, Jane Degenhardt, Katherine Ibbett, and Alexander Samson for their
invitations to share my work in these venues, and to Chris Pye, Rebecca Lemon,
and Penny Geng for organizing generative and productive seminars at the
Shakespeare Association of America’s Annual Convention. I received essential and
generous support from UW-Madison’s Anonymous Fund; the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation and VolkswagenStiftung; and the Henry E. Huntington Library.
Thank you to English Literary Renaissance; Law Culture, and the Humanities; and
Spenser Studies for permission to reproduce previously printed material here, and
to the readers and editors who helped strengthen that material. An earlier version
of Chapter 2 appeared as “Common Law and the Commonplace in Thomas More’s
Utopia” (English Literary Renaissance 43.2, May 2013); of Chapter 3 as “ ‘Wonne
with Custome’: Conquest and Etymology in the Spenser-Harvey Letters and A
View of the Present State of Ireland” (Spenser Studies Vol. XXVIII, 2013); and of
Chapter 6 as “Ernst Kantorowicz, Shakespeare, and the Humanities’ Two Bodies”
(Law Culture and the Humanities 13.1, 2017).
Friendships old and new have sustained my spirit during the many moves that
accompanied the process of writing this book. Thank you to GerShun Avilez,
Rachel Buurma, Laura Heffernan, Ori Weisberg, Ilana Blumberg, Alan Itkin, Mira
Seo, Carrie Wood, Mearah Quinn-Brauner, Ari Eisenberg, Charles Hughes,
Cristie Ellis, Dan Stout, Rachel Federman, Daniella Kevelson, Barbara Chubak,
and Rachela Elias.
I am profoundly grateful to Simon Stern and Robert Spoo for believing in this
project and giving it a home in their Law and Literature series. Their feedback on
the manuscript has been invaluable. Thank you to Kevin Curran, who kindly
revealed himself as one of the readers, for his generous and generative report and
an anonymous reader for sharing their wealth of knowledge of English legal
history. Thank you to Jacqueline Norton at Oxford University Press for guiding
the project through publication, and Aimee Wright, Christine Fleischer, Emily
Loney, Kate Lechler, Claire Cronin, Michal Loren, Francesca White, Scott Garner,
and everyone who was involved in preparing the manuscript. I could not have
finished this project without the support of Anne Amienne.
Finally, my family has lived through the ups and downs of this project,
celebrating my successes and feeling my setbacks as their own. My sister Julie has
