Law & Humanities Workshop Series
Carolyn Sale
University of Alberta Department of English
The Matter of Heresy and the 'Substance of the Realm':
Christopher St. German's Contributions to the 'Battle of the Books'
(1532-1534)
Thursday, October 21, 2010
12:30 – 2:00
Faculty Common Room, Flavelle House
78 Queen’s Park
This selection from chapter 1 of “Common Properties: The Early Modern Writer and the Law, 1528-1628” returns to the 1530s “battle of the books” between Christopher St. German and Thomas More to read St. German’s contributions for the theory of the common law that emerges as he takes on More’s aggressive defence, as Lord Chancellor, of heresy prosecutions. Reading the “battle” for the side of the argument that has (puzzlingly) proved of such limited scholarly interest, we recover a vital dialectic of the early modern period, one that pits charity as hermeneutic principle against an orthodoxy so rigid it justifies the killing of individuals in order to suppress dissent. The structural reversal we witness across the “battle,” which sees St. German taking up the genre of dialogue even as More abandons it, takes us to the heart of St. German’s theory of the common law, which is predicated not only upon it as a branch of the "law of God" whose proper authority always arises from the "multitude," but also upon the necessity of it proceeding according to a “peaceable conversation” that assumes the contingency of all thinking — the contingency even of all "custom." Distinguishing St. German’s contributions to the “battle” from More’s as a matter of form, I pursue how St. German cultivates in his potential readership the sense that they are the true law-makers who must assert themselves to "break" "sore" laws and write new ones. This involves, for St. German, not only a detailed explication of particular laws that need addressing, but also engagement with the alleged "heresy" of the political philosophy of holding all things in common.
Carolyn Sale is an assistant professor in the Department of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She obtained her Ph.D. from Stanford University, and is currently completing the manuscript for her first book, “Common Properties: The Early Modern Writer and the Law, 1528-1628.” The book focuses on writing by both legal and literary writers that shaped, across a tumultuous hundred-year period in English history, the idea of the common law as the common property of the members of the realm. Her publications at the intersection of literary and legal studies include “The ‘Amending Hand’: Hales v. Petit, Eyston v. Studd and Equitable Action in Hamlet” in The Law in Shakespeare, eds. Karen Cunningham and Constance Jordan (Palgrave, 2007) and “‘The King is a Thing’: the King's Prerogative and the Treasure of the Realm in Plowden’s Report of the Case of Mines and Shakespeare’s Hamlet” in Shakespeare and the Law, eds. Paul Raffield and Gary Watt (Hart Publishing, 2008), and her article on early modern women writers and the courts will appear shortly in volume 2 of Palgrave’s The History of British Women’s Writing (eds. Jennifer Summit and Caroline Bicks).
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
