The commoning of the common law: Print, memory, and the intellectual history of legal communications, 1520--1640

This dissertation pursues an intellectual history of legal communications in Tudor and early Stuart England. The intertwined media of print, manuscript, oral tradition, and memory were more than means of dissemination. They also provoked attacks, called forth defenses, promised reallocations of power, and conjured aspiration and warning. My dissertation aims to recover those lost debates.; The first section asks how contemporaries thought about legal publishing. By the latter sixteenth century, an emerging group of skeptics, the "anti-publicists," argued for an apodictic rather than justified law that spoke in a voice of command, not persuasion. In reaction, publicists valorized lay rather than royal or guild "ownership" of law and brought out the latent constitutionalist implications of law printing.; The second section of this dissertation explores the crystallization of a "memorial culture" across various areas of English law after 1580. Precisely as print was slowly displacing memory as a carrier of law, memory became increasingly important in education, in historical and antiquarian writing, in the bar's understanding of its social role, in the organization of legal literature, in political argument, in mediation between national courts and local remembered law, and in the conceptualization of the ideal structure of legal knowledge. To English lawyers, memory became an intellectual keyword, a shelter, a badge of guild identity, and a forensic resource in political, jurisdictional and disciplinary conflicts. Viewed through the lens of memorial culture, the decades around 1600 appear as a "custodial moment" in English legal thought.; The two extended essays that comprise this dissertation have a unifying theme: the "commoning" of the common law. The intellectual dissemination and jurisdictional and social expansion of the Tudor and early Stuart common law provoked contrary reactions. The law threatened to become improperly and vulgarly common. And simultaneously, it was moving from being a guild possession to a national inheritance, changing from the laws of the realm of England to the laws of Englishmen. An intellectual history of legal communications provides a vantage point for exploring the diverse cultural and intellectual consequences of the law's commoning.