Pretexts of Authority describes the Renaissance rhetoric of authorship and authority by examining the textual locus where this rhetoric appears in its most concentrated and complex form - the preface. In the process, it shows how the notion of authorship changed in a shift of systems of authorization during the Renaissance, a shift that coincides with the roots of the modern public sphere and with the change from religion to science and the public good as the intellectual court of appeal for legitimizing authorship. The author focuses on prefatory materials to kinds of texts that most fully exemplify the problem of self-authorization during the Renaissance. First, he examines Protestant prefaces, notably Luther's preface to his collected works and Milton's antiprelatical tracts. These works stand at the center of a rhetorical crisis; having abrogated the authority of the Catholic church through an appeal to the conscience of the individual, reformers found it necessary to forge a persona that could authorize their discourse without implying an authorizing will independent of God's. At the same time, these texts must attempt to close off means of authorization to potentially proliferating imitators. The second group of prefaces the author examines is to scientific works, notably those of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, who faced problems analogous to those of the Protestant reformers in their attempts to set aside Aristotelian authority without seeming to establish a personal authority that interrupts the transparent, impersonal discourse of scientific inquiry. The book argues that in both sets of texts the rhetorical quandary can be resolved only through recourse to the nascent notion of common sense, which allows an author to garner authority from an assumed bond with the audience. Authors no longer need to posit a privileged and suspect relation with the "master texts of Scripture" and the "Book of Nature," but can instead assume the mutual intelligibility of their text. This assumption is seen as the cause of the decline of the full-blown prefatory practice of the Renaissance.

Through its many and varied manifestations, authority has frequently played a role in the communication process in both manuscript and print. This volume explores how authority, whether religious, intellectual, political or social, has enforced the circulation of certain texts and text versions, or acted to prevent the distribution of books, pamphlets and other print matter. It also analyzes how readers, writers and printers have sometimes rebelled against the constraints and restrictions of authority, publishing controversial works anonymously or counterfeiting authoritative texts; and how the written or printed word itself has sometimes been perceived to have a kind of authority, which might have had ramifications in social, political or religious spheres. Contributors look at the experience of various European cultures-English, French, German and Italian-to allow for comparative study of a number of questions pertinent to the period. Among the issues explored are local and regional factors influencing book production; the interplay between manuscript and print culture; the slippage between authorship and authority; and the role of civic and religious authority in cultural production. Deliberately conceived to foster interdisciplinary dialogue between the history of the book, and literary and cultural history, this volume takes a pan-European perspective to explore the ways in which authority infiltrates and is in turn propagated or undermined by book culture.

John Skelton and Poetic Authority is the first book-length study of Skelton for almost twenty years, and the first to trace the roots of his poetic theory to his practice as a writer and translator. It demonstrates that much of what has been found challenging in his work may be attributed to his attempt to reconcile existing views of the poet's role in society with discoveries about the writing process itself. The result is a highly idiosyncratic poetics that locates the poet's authority decisively within his own person, yet at the same time predicates his 'liberty to speak' upon the existence of an engaged, imaginative audience. Skelton is frequently treated as a maverick, but this book places his theory and practice firmly in the context of later sixteenth as well as fifteenth-century traditions. Focusing on his relations with both past and present readers, it reassess his place in the English literary canon.

How did we first come to believe in a correspondence between writers' lives and their works? When did the person of the author—both as context and target of textual interpretation—come to matter so much to the way we read? This book traces the development of author centrism back to the scholarship of early Renaissance humanists. Working against allegoresis and other traditions of non-historicizing textual reception, they discovered the power of engaging ancient works through the speculative reconstruction of writers' personalities and artistic motives. To trace the multi-lingual and eventually cross-cultural rise of reading for the author, this book presents four case studies of resolutely experimental texts by and about writers of high ambition in their respective generations: Lorenzo Valla on the forger of the Donation of Constantine, Erasmus on Saint Jerome, the poet George Gascoigne on himself, and Fulke Greville on Sir Philip Sidney. An opening methodological chapter and exhortative conclusion frame these four studies with accounts of the central lexicon—character, intention, ethos, persona—and the range of genre evidence that contemporaries used to discern and articulate authorial character and purpose. Constellated throughout with examples from the works of major contemporaries including John Aubrey, John Hayward, Galileo, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare, this volume resurrects a vibrant culture of biographism continuous with modern popular practice and yet radically more nuanced in its strategic reliance on the explanatory power of probabilism and historical conjecture—the discursive middle ground now obscured from view by the post-Enlightenment binaries of truth and fiction, history and story, fact and fable.

A Smithsonian Best History Book of the Year Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize Winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award Winner of the Order of the Coif Award Winner of the Sidney M. Edelstein Prize Winner of the David J. Langum Sr. Prize in American Legal History Winner of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize “From traffic stops to parking tickets, Seo traces the history of cars alongside the history of crime and discovers that the two are inextricably linked.” —Smithsonian When Americans think of freedom, they often picture the open road. Yet nowhere are we more likely to encounter the long arm of the law than in our cars. Sarah Seo reveals how the rise of the automobile led us to accept—and expect—pervasive police power, a radical transformation with far-reaching consequences. Before the twentieth century, most Americans rarely came into contact with police officers. But in a society dependent on cars, everyone—law-breaking and law-abiding alike—is subject to discretionary policing. Seo challenges prevailing interpretations of the Warren Court’s due process revolution and argues that the Supreme Court’s efforts to protect Americans did more to accommodate than limit police intervention. Policing the Open Road shows how the new procedures sanctioned discrimination by officers, and ultimately undermined the nation’s commitment to equal protection before the law. “With insights ranging from the joy of the open road to the indignities—and worse—of ‘driving while black,’ Sarah Seo makes the case that the ‘law of the car’ has eroded our rights to privacy and equal justice...Absorbing and so essential.” —Paul Butler, author of Chokehold “A fascinating examination of how the automobile reconfigured American life, not just in terms of suburbanization and infrastructure but with regard to deeply ingrained notions of freedom and personal identity.” —Hua Hsu, New Yorker

In this fifth volume of his groundbreaking series on rabbinic authority, Rabbi Warburg discusses the case of the modern-day agunah, a wife who is unable to obtain a divorce due to her husband' s recalcitrance. For the first time in English, this monograph discusses utilizing the technique of the double halakhic doubt (sefek sefeika de'dina) as a vehicle to void a marriage, in order to address the plight of the agunah. This volume is devoted primarily to demonstrate how a beit din or rabbinical authority(ies) can take care of this complicated issue, especially for those decisors who reject the various other options to void a marriage.

Now in paperback, an important account of ten Supreme Court cases that changed the fate of Native Americans, providing the contemporary historical/political context of each case, and explaining how the decisions have adversely affected the cultural survival of Native people to this day.

The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500-1640 is the only current overview of early modern English prose writing. The aim of the volume is to make prose more visible as a subject and as a mode of writing. It covers a vast range of material vital for the understanding of the period: from jestbooks, newsbooks, and popular romance to the translation of the classics and the pioneering collections of scientific writing and travel writing; from diaries, tracts on witchcraft, and domestic conduct books to rhetorical treatises designed for a courtly audience; from little known works such as William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, probably the first novel in English, to The Bible, The Book of Common Prayer and Richard Hooker's eloquent statement of Anglican belief, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The work not only deals with the range and variety of the substance and types of English prose, but also analyses the forms and styles of writing adopted in the early modern period, ranging from the Euphuistic nature of prose fiction inaugurated by John Lyly's mannered novel, to the aggressive polemic of the Marprelate controversy; from the scatological humour of comic writing to the careful modulations of the most significant sermons of the age; and from the pithy and concise English essays of Francis Bacon to the ornate and meandering style of John Florio's translation of Montaigne's famous collection. Each essay provides an overview as well as comment on key passages, and a select guide to further reading.