Table of Contents

Introduction: Lawyers at Play
Part I: Society at the Early Modern Inns of Court
1: An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court
2: 'Minerva's Men': The Inns of Court in the 1560s
Part II: The Translation of Learning
3: Lyric Poetry: Forming a Professional Community
4: Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England
Part III: Literary-Political Precedents
5: A Mirror for Magistrates: Political Discourse and the Legal Magistracy
6: Senecan Tragedy in Early Elizabethan England
Part IV:To Fashion an Institution
7: Gorboduc in the Political Nation
8: Marriage Plays at the Inns: Negotiating Professional Jurisdiction
Conclusion: Lawyers at Play Redux
Appendices
app. 1: Literary Men of the Inns of Court, 1558DS1572
app. 2: First Editions of Classical Translations, 1558DS1581
app. 3: Description of Gorboduc at the Inner Temple

About the Author

Jessica Winston is Professor of English at Idaho State University, where she specializes in sixteenth-century literature and Shakespeare. She is the author of numerous articles on the early modern Inns of Court and, with James Ker, she is co-editor of Elizabethan Seneca: Three Tragedies (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2012).

Reviews

Winston is to be congratulated on a learned study which illuminates the cultural predilections of the early modern Inns, and the hitherto understudied social and political imperatives which informed them.
*Philip Major, Modern Language Review*

Each chapter is full of telling details, compelling argument, and, as a whole, the book succeeds in both its project of recovery and revaluation and in demonstrating how the culture of the Inns responds to profound changes in the Elizabethan polity. Lawyers at Play is an excellent book, a major contribution to the field of law and literature and early modern studies generally.
*Edward Gieskes, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England*

Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 15581581 brings together over a decade's worth of articles, book chapters and new research in illustrating both how and why the Inns of Court grew into one of Englands most vibrant and major literary communities during the middle part of the sixteenth century.
*Emily Buffey (University of Birmingham), Journal of the Northern Renaissance*

Winston skilfully and successfully addresses the subject of the interface between law, lawyers and poetry during the Elizabethan period. In nine tautly written chapters, she provides a lucid account of the peculiar contribution of lawyer-poets at the Inns to the juridical and political culture of the Elizabethan state.
*Paul Raffield, Law and Humanities*

Overall it is impossible to do justice to this rich and densely packed volume, with its extensive bibliography. It certainly reinforces the idea that that culture is intimately connected with political outlook.
*Anna Brunton (University of Oxford), British Society for Literature and Science*

A long overdue examination of the literary network that coalesced around the legal societies of the Inns of Court in the 1560s.
*Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900*

Winston's analyses are ... patient, careful and illuminating, such that this book offers more than a few valuable correctives to commonplace notions of the Inns and verdicts on the literature produced there. It encourages one to look forward to future studies, whether by Winston or by those whom this book will inspire, on the clusters of early modern Inns writers that came subsequently: in the 1590s; in the 1610s; in the 1630s-40s.
*J. Christopher Warner, English Historical Review*