Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580-1680
Christopher N. Warren
Abstract
This book is a literary history of international law in the age of Shakespeare, Milton, Grotius, and Hobbes. It tells the previously untold story of major English Renaissance writers who used literary genres like epic, tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, and history to help create modern international law. Whereas international law’s standard histories regularly omit literary figures and debates, Warren instead delights in the early modern contests over literary form that animated texts ranging from Hobbes’ Leviathan, Hugo Grotius’ De Jure Belli ac Pacis, and Alberico Gentili’s De Jure Belli to Sidn ... More
This book is a literary history of international law in the age of Shakespeare, Milton, Grotius, and Hobbes. It tells the previously untold story of major English Renaissance writers who used literary genres like epic, tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, and history to help create modern international law. Whereas international law’s standard histories regularly omit literary figures and debates, Warren instead delights in the early modern contests over literary form that animated texts ranging from Hobbes’ Leviathan, Hugo Grotius’ De Jure Belli ac Pacis, and Alberico Gentili’s De Jure Belli to Sidney’s New Arcadia, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Over seven chapters and a conclusion, the book develops insights from scholarship in law and literature, genre studies, and the history of international political thought. The book charts a new approach to early modern literature that challenges literary scholars to think anew about the legal entailments of genres and to reconsider the intellectual origins of categories like public international law, private international law, international legal personality, and human rights. Suggesting that the field of law and literature has tacitly accepted specious but politically consequential assumptions about whether international law is real law, this book provides a fresh account of English Renaissance literature.
Keywords:
Renaissance,
law of nations,
history of international law,
genre studies,
Milton,
Shakespeare,
Grotius,
Hobbes,
law and literature
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198719342 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198719342.001.0001 |
