Literary lawmaking: Poetry, statutes, and the production of knowledge in medieval England

This dissertation considers what literature has to do with lawmaking: to what extent can literature create law and how does poetry both participate in and record historical change? More specifically, my project explores the rich intersections between literary production and statute (royal) law in medieval England, illustrating how vernacular poetry served both as a source of statutory jurisprudence and a model of its writing. The close association of literature and law in the medieval period is revealed not only by the contents of these discourses, but by the forms in which they are preserved. The most complete records of royal law in medieval England were contained in statute books (informal collections of the king's commands). Mass-produced beginning in the 1290s for reference use by judges and lawyers, these legal texts typically contain statutes from Magna Carta (England's first) to the 1285 Statute of Westminster. Surprisingly, a significant number of these statute books also contain poems. For example, interspersed among the statutes contained in a certain late thirteenth-century London statute book (now Bodleian MSS Douce 132+137) are copies of the romance Horn and Robert Grosseteste's Le Chateau d'amour.;Recovering the literary character of early statutory discourse enables me to reconstruct the history of statute law in medieval England as a process of what I call "literary lawmaking." By tracing the influence of literary forms, structures, and ideologies on statutory theory and practice, I show how the making of medieval jurisprudence is fundamentally a literary enterprise. Furthermore, I argue that how literature creates law is just as important as the form that this law takes. Through close readings and legal-historical analyses, I demonstrate how vernacular poetry reconceptualizes existing models of royal authority and invents new ones in order to construct and revise definitions of kingship, subjectivity, and personhood.