Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries

"John Milton is well known as the poet of liberty and freedom. But his commitment to justice, which runs throughout his prose works, great and small, is often opaque to us when glimpsed at distance in the twenty-first century. Alison A. Chapman aims to provide literary scholars with a working knowledge of the multiple, jostling, real-world legal systems in conflict in seventeenth-century England, and to help us distinguish among Milton's use of the various legal systems and vocabularies of the time--natural versus positive law, for example, and the differences among canon, civil, and common jurisprudence, whichever system best suited Milton's purpose. Surveying the early and divorce tracts, late political tracts, and major prose works in comparison with the writings and cases of some of Milton's contemporaries (including George Herbert, John March, Ben Jonson, and John Bunyan), Chapman alerts us to the variety and nuance in Milton's juridical tool-kit and his subtle use of competing legal traditions in pursuit of justice"--