Table of Contents

Part I. Legal Contexts: 1. English law before the conquest Stefan Jurasinski; 2. Languages and law in late medieval England: English, French and Latin Gwilym Dodd; 3. Canon and civil law Peter D. Clarke; 4. Custom and common law Paul Raffield; 5. Magna Carta and statutory law Anthony Musson; 6. Treatises, tracts, and compilations Don C. Skemer; Part II. Literary Texts: 7. Treason Neil Cartlidge; 8. Complaint literature Wendy Scase; 9. Political literature and political law Andy Galloway; 10. William Langland Emily Steiner; 11. Geoffrey Chaucer Candace Barrington; 12. John Gower R. F. Yeager; 13. Lollards and religious writings Fiona Somerset; 14. Lancastrian literature Sebastian Sobecki; 15. Middle English romance and Malory's Le Morte Darthur Corinne Saunders; 16. Marriage and the legal culture of witnessing Emma Lipton.

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A comprehensive and wide-ranging account of the interrelationship between law and literature in Anglo-Saxon, Medieval and Tudor England.

About the Author

Candace Barrington is a Professor in the English Department of Central Connecticut State University. She has written multiple articles for journals and edited volumes and is the co-editor of The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England (with Emily Steiner, 2002). Sebastian Sobecki is Professor of Medieval English Literature at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands. He is the author of The Sea and Medieval English Literature (2007) and Unwritten Verities: The Making of England's Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463–1549 (2015).

Reviews

'The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature provides a useful introduction to the intersection of law and literature from the Middle Ages … this collection provides a rewarding read, and it will be of use to a broad array of literary scholars in later periods, as well as to those researching the origins of so many political and theological controversies in Anglo-American culture, many of which are shown to have their roots in medieval legal contexts.' Brian C. Lockey, Renaissance Quarterly