Judicial equity developed in England during the medieval period, providing an alternative access to justice for cases that the rigid structures of the common law could not accommodate. Where the common law was constrained by precedent and strict procedural and substantive rules, equity relied on principles of natural justice - or 'conscience' - to decide cases and right wrongs. Overseen by the Lord Chancellor, equity became one of the twin pillars of the English legal system with the Court of Chancery playing an ever greater role in the legal life of the nation. Yet, whilst the Chancery was commonly - and still sometimes is - referred to as a 'court of conscience', there is remarkably little consensus about what this actually means, or indeed whose conscience is under discussion. This study tackles the difficult subject of the place of conscience in the development of English equity during a crucial period of legal history. Addressing the notion of conscience as a juristic principle in the Court of Chancery during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the book explores how the concept was understood and how it figured in legal judgment. Drawing upon both legal and broader cultural materials, it explains how that understanding differed from modern notions and how it might have been more consistent with criteria we commonly associate with objective legal judgement than the modern, more 'subjective', concept of conscience. The study culminates with an examination of the chancellorship of Lord Nottingham (1673-82), who, because of his efforts to transform equity from a jurisdiction associated with discretion into one based on rules, is conventionally regarded as the father of modern, 'systematic' equity. From a broader perspective, this study can be seen as a contribution to the enduring discussion of the relationship between 'formal' accounts of law, which see it as systems of rules, and less formal accounts, which try to make room for intuitive moral or prudential reasoning.

Judicial equity developed in England during the medieval period, providing an alternative access to justice for cases that the rigid structures of the common law could not accommodate. Where the common law was constrained by precedent and strict procedural and substantive rules, equity relied on principles of natural justice - or 'conscience' - to decide cases and right wrongs. Overseen by the Lord Chancellor, equity became one of the twin pillars of the English legal system with the Court of Chancery playing an ever greater role in the legal life of the nation. Yet, whilst the Chancery was commonly - and still sometimes is - referred to as a 'court of conscience', there is remarkably little consensus about what this actually means, or indeed whose conscience is under discussion. This study tackles the difficult subject of the place of conscience in the development of English equity during a crucial period of legal history. Addressing the notion of conscience as a juristic principle in the Court of Chancery during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the book explores how the concept was understood and how it figured in legal judgment. Drawing upon both legal and broader cultural materials, it explains how that understanding differed from modern notions and how it might have been more consistent with criteria we commonly associate with objective legal judgement than the modern, more 'subjective', concept of conscience. The study culminates with an examination of the chancellorship of Lord Nottingham (1673-82), who, because of his efforts to transform equity from a jurisdiction associated with discretion into one based on rules, is conventionally regarded as the father of modern, 'systematic' equity. From a broader perspective, this study can be seen as a contribution to the enduring discussion of the relationship between 'formal' accounts of law, which see it as systems of rules, and less formal accounts, which try to make room for intuitive moral or prudential reasoning.

Conscience in Early Modern English Literature describes how poetry, theology, and politics intersect in the early modern conscience. In the wake of the Reformation, theologians attempt to understand how the faculty works, poets attempt to capture the experience of being in its grip, and revolutionaries attempt to assert its authority for political action. The result, Abraham Stoll argues, is a dynamic scene of conscience in England, thick with the energies of salvation and subjectivity, and influential in the public sphere of Civil War politics. Stoll explores how Shakespeare, Spenser, Herbert, and Milton stage the inward experience of conscience. He links these poetic scenes to Luther, Calvin, and English Reformation theology. He also demonstrates how they shape the public discourses of conscience in such places as the toleration debates, among Levellers, and in the prose of Hobbes and Milton. In the literature of the early modern conscience, Protestant subjectivity evolves toward the political subject of modern liberalism.

Kevin Killeen addresses one of the most enigmatic of seventeenth century writers, Thomas Browne (1605-1682), whose voracious intellectual pursuits provide an unparalleled insight into how early modern scholarly culture understood the relations between its disciplines. Browne's work encompasses biblical commentary, historiography, natural history, classical philology, artistic propriety and an encyclopaedic coverage of natural philosophy. This book traces the intellectual climate in which such disparate interests could cohere, locating Browne within the cultural and political matrices of his time. While Browne is most frequently remembered for the magnificence of his prose and his temperamental poise, qualities that knit well with the picture of a detached, apolitical figure, this work argues that Browne's significance emerges most fully in the context of contemporary battles over interpretative authority, within the intricately linked fields of biblical exegesis, scientific thought, and politics. Killeen's work centres on a reassessment of the scope and importance of Browne's most elaborate text, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, his vast encyclopaedia of error with its mazy series of investigations and through this explores the multivalent nature of early-modern enquiry.

Analyses how bankruptcy was litigated within the court to gain a more nuanced understanding of early modern bankruptcy. This book examines cases involving bankruptcy brought before the court of Chancery - a court of equity which dealt with civil disputes - between 1674 and 1750. It uncovers the numerous meanings attached to financial failure in early modern England. In its simplest sense, personal financial failure occurred when an individual defaulted on their debts. Because they had not fulfilled their responsibilities and behaved in a trustworthy and credible manner, bankrupt individuals were seen to be immoral. And yet bankruptcy was linked to wider notions of credibility, trustworthiness, and morality. Financial failure was described and debated not just in economic terms, but came to rely on a combination of social, community, and religious values. Bankruptcy cases involved an interconnected network of indebtedness, often including relatives, neighbours, and traders from the local community. As such, conceptions of failure implicated individuals beyond just the bankrupt. As people began to look back and appraise the actions and words of those involved in trade, a far wider network of creditors, debtors, and middlemen were blamed for the knock-on effect of an individual failure. Ultimately, the book investigates the negative aspects of early modern trade networks and the active role of the court when such networks broke down, providing unique access to contemporary understandings of what was considered right and wrong, honourable and deceitful, and criminal and compassionate within the moral landscape of debt recovery during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This is an examination of how early modern poets attempt to capture the experience of being in the grip of conscience.

In this book leading literary scholars, cultural critics, and historians of ideas and visual media, currently engaged both with early modern and contemporary conceptions of biography, reflect on the problems of writing lives from the various perspectives of their own research and in the form of case studies informed by new questions.

An exploration of the cultural contexts of law-breaking and criminal prosecution in England, 1550-1750.

The central thesis of this book is that skepticism was instrumental to the defense of orthodox religion and the development of the identity of the Church of England. Examining the presence of skepticism in non-fiction prose literature at four transitional moments in English Protestant history during which orthodoxy was challenged and revised, Melissa Caldwell argues that a skeptical mode of thinking is embedded in the literary and rhetorical choices made by English writers who straddle the project of reform and the maintenance of orthodoxy after the Reformation in England. Far from being a radical belief simply indicative of an emerging secularism, she demonstrates the varied and complex appropriations of skeptical thought in early modern England. By examining a selection of various kinds of literature-including religious polemic, dialogue, pamphlets, sermons, and treatises-produced at key moments in early modern England’s religious history, Caldwell shows how the writers under consideration capitalized on the unscripted moral space that emerged in the wake of the Reformation. The result was a new kind of discourse--and a new form of orthodoxy--that sought both to exploit and to contain the skepticism unearthed by the Reformation.