Kathryn D Temple | Georgetown University (original) (raw)
Papers by Kathryn D Temple
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
This chapter examines what Blackstone referred to as “the tenderness of the law” in light of the ... more This chapter examines what Blackstone referred to as “the tenderness of the law” in light of the English practice of peine forte et dure (pressing). By using gothic tropes in his discussion of what was a common English, not French, practice, Blackstone attempts but fails to distance ideas of English justice from the European acceptance of torture. Buried beneath the surface of his text are experiences such as those of Nathaniel Hawes, a young rebel robber “persuaded” to comply with the law through the judicial application of peine forte et dure. Blackstone's treatment of peine forte et dure offers analogies to recent US discussions of torture at Guantanamo Bay, but also provides an opening for what has in recent years become a new understanding of the value of tenderness, with its implied partners, empathy and sympathy, as a legal standard.
Literature Compass, 2004
In this essay on eighteenth-century authorship, Kathryn Temple sketches a history of authorship f... more In this essay on eighteenth-century authorship, Kathryn Temple sketches a history of authorship from the perspective of the cultural, regional, and national conflicts that led to modern authorship's emergence. Arguing that the figure of the modern author arose in the mid-to late-eighteenth century, not from an uncontested common moral and ethical center, but from a maelstrom of conflicting practices and standards emanating from an amazingly varied array of national, class, and gendered sources, she suggests that 'literary scandals' played a special role in the construction of a nationalized author in that they brought high, low, and official juridical culture together to construe what authorship would come to mean in the modern world.
New York University Press eBooks, May 22, 2020
How do people develop loyalty to the legal system they inhabit? This book focuses on legal emotio... more How do people develop loyalty to the legal system they inhabit? This book focuses on legal emotions in William Blackstone's transformative, bestselling Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), a collection of volumes that deeply impacted English legal culture and became an icon for English common law values across the British Empire. Blackstone, not only a lawyer and judge, but a poet who believed that “the only true and natural foundations of society are the wants and fears of individuals,” was ideally situated to condense English law into a form that evoked emotions. Using a history of emotions and Law and Humanities approach, the book argues that in enlisting an affective aesthetics to invoke emotions such as desire, disgust, melancholia, embarrassment, terror, tenderness, and happiness, Blackstone encouraged readers to feel as much as reason their way to justice in ways that have continued to influence the Western world. This book treats the Commentaries—reinterpreted here in affective, aesthetic, and real-world contexts—as offering a complex map of our affective relationship to juridical culture, one that illuminates both individual and communal understandings of our search for justice and is crucial for understanding both justice and injustice today.
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Apr 27, 2021
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
By examining “zones of desire” and “zones of disgust,” first in Blackstone's poetry and then ... more By examining “zones of desire” and “zones of disgust,” first in Blackstone's poetry and then in the Commentaries, this chapter unpacks Blackstone's reliance on these twinned emotions as instrumental to his efforts to construct a new understanding of and loyalty to the English common law. Marriage law and orientalism are interrelated here with a discussion of Blackstone's celebration of the trial as a unique English contribution to justice. In these discussions, desire and disgust worked together to suggest an English legal tradition able to accommodate the forces of commodification and expansion that defined modernity.
Kathryn Temple Scandal Nation: Law and Authorship in Britain, 1750-1832 Kathryn Temple Kathryn Te... more Kathryn Temple Scandal Nation: Law and Authorship in Britain, 1750-1832 Kathryn Temple Kathryn Temple argues that eighteenth-century Grub Street scandals involving print piracy, forgery, and copyright violation played a crucial role in the formation of British identity. Britain's expanding print culture demanded new ways of thinking about business and art. In this environment, print scandals functioned as sites where national identity could be contested even as it was being formed.Temple draws upon cases involving Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, Catharine Macaulay, and Mary Prince. The public uproar around these controversies crossed class, gender, and regional boundaries, reaching the Celtic periphery and the colonies. Both print and spectacle, both high and low, these scandals raised important points of law, but also drew on images of criminality and sexuality made familiar in the theater, satirical prints, broadsides, even in wax museums. Like print culture itself, the "scandal" of print disputes constituted the nation?and resistance to its formation. Print transgression destabilized both the print industry and efforts to form national identity. Temple concludes that these scandals represent print's escape from Britain's strenuous efforts to enlist it in the service of nation.
Emotions, Aug 7, 2018
This essay explores the value of the ‘mixed emotions’ of love and resentment for constitutional p... more This essay explores the value of the ‘mixed emotions’ of love and resentment for constitutional patriotism through a close reading of the Declaration of Independence set in the context of first, the history of resentment, and secondly, theories of justice. After introducing the conceptual framework through a discussion of mixed emotions and constitutional patriotism, the essay turns to a discussion of the Declaration as a ‘sticky’ emotional object meant to evoke both love and resentment. A brief historical account of shifts in understandings of resentment suggests the value of this emotion as a democratic emotion related to justice. Finally, the essay offers some contemporary examples of expressions of resentment in relation to the Declaration to advocate for a redirection of resentment. It concludes by arguing that the love for democratic ideals is inseparable from the resentment inspired by failing to enact those ideals in daily life. Thus, resentment, if directed at the appropriate targets, can be a useful emotion for mobilising constitutional patriotism.
The Eighteenth Century, 2017
The language of enthusiasm, and of all those passions that strongly agitate the soul, is naturall... more The language of enthusiasm, and of all those passions that strongly agitate the soul, is naturally incoherent, and may appear even extravagant to those, who cannot enter into the views of the speaker, or form an idea of what is passing in his mind.. .. The imagination of a critick must, in respect of vivacity, be able to keep pace with that of the authors, whom he assumes the privilege of judging.-James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783) 1 Like James Beattie, Mary Wollstonecraft references agitation at key moments. Agitation was a heavily weighted word with both personal and political connotations, a word essential to understanding Wollstonecraft's contribution not only to feminist thought, but also to theories of legal subjectivity. 2 When writing to Gilbert Imlay, for instance, upset by his inattentiveness, Wollstonecraft announces that she "shall not attempt to give bent to the different emotions which agitate my heart," 3 while in the opening pages of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she promises her readers that she does not mean "violently to agitate the contested question respecting the equality and inferiority of the sex." 4 These disavowals of agitation ("I shall not attempt" seems a favorite construction) may strike us as disingenuous. Did she really refuse the opportunity to "give bent to the different emotions which agitate my heart" when she wrote her highly emotional letters to Imlay? She certainly focused on these in many of the letters she sent him. Was she really refusing "violently to agitate" questions of women's equality in the Vindication, a document obsessed with such questions? Such "softeners" can, of course, be read as efforts to produce a more reader-friendly text, to seduce readers into a false sense of security, and to secure those readers to her cause. But they also operate as formal representations of the operations of agitation in themselves. These sentences move between disavowal and avowal, between the "not" and the "yes," as if in themselves they cannot settle on one position. Agitation is then not something Woll
The Eighteenth Century, 2012
When Patricia Meyer Spacks published Gossip in 1985, she opened up an intriguing area of inquiry,... more When Patricia Meyer Spacks published Gossip in 1985, she opened up an intriguing area of inquiry, demonstrating that gossip is an important social form worthy of study, closely related to literary history and literary form. 1 Since then, several studies of gossip in different periods have appeared, most drawing on Spacks's reading of gossip as a privatized mode of resistance engaged in by marginalized groups. Like these, Nicola Parsons's Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) expands our understanding of the role gossip plays in many different types of politicized discourse. The book focuses not on gossip so much as on new ways of disseminating and channeling information (what Parsons at one point calls the "information business" [65]) to an ever-growing and interested public. Along the way, Parsons takes up the constructions of authorship and audience during Queen Anne's reign in their relation to text, readers, and the state. We do not find here any attempt to offer a taxonomy of gossip, as Spacks does brilliantly and authoritatively, nor an extended discussion of the differences between gossip and other forms, like scandal and tattle, even though Parsons discusses them. We also do not find a history of usage or a review of sociological approaches to gossip, such as in Susan Phillips's wonderful Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England. 2 Instead, Parsons investigates the overlay between gossip and print culture, situating gossip in the political and historical context defined by Queen Anne's reign and by public sphere theory writ large. Parsons argues that publicity could become normative only when compared to the non-normative discourses represented by gossip. She relies on this comparative method to argue that whereas James I had emphasized secrecy rather than communication in government, Anne's reign saw the rise of publicity as "an organizing political principle" (3). At times Parsons seems to insist that gossip "reified" (as she puts it) in print can be mapped directly on to oral gossip (8). In this, Parsons faces the problems that all scholars face when dealing with oral culture: to analyze oral events, we need recourse to texts. Parsons cannot access
The Eighteenth Century, 2014
This essay considers Lauren Berlant's call to “reimagine state/society relations . . . in whi... more This essay considers Lauren Berlant's call to “reimagine state/society relations . . . in which consumer forms of collectivity were not the main way people secure or fantasize securing everyday happiness” in light of William Blackstone’s early poetry and his important Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765). The encounter with justice was, for Blackstone, a central emotional and aesthetic experience, available to anyone, associated not with vengeance or self-satisfaction, but with a pure form of happiness. The essay traces this relation between happiness and justice, especially as the Commentaries are invoked in Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Eighteenth-century fiction, 2010
What shall we say of the pleasure which a man takes in the reading of a Defamatory libel?-Joseph ... more What shall we say of the pleasure which a man takes in the reading of a Defamatory libel?-Joseph Addison citing Pierre Bayle, Spectator no. 451 in october 1709, Delarivier Manley, author of the bestseller The New Atalantis (1709), "the publication that did the most harm to the Ministry" during that year, was arrested for what is common ly referred to as seditious libel. 1 She was held without bail for a little
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
<p>This brief coda takes up the value of sympathy in the context of resistance. Inspired by... more <p>This brief coda takes up the value of sympathy in the context of resistance. Inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft's agitated reaction to Blackstone, the coda rereads agitation as a trigger for sympathetic review in light of a recent Texas case in which an agitated defendant undermined the court's "decorum." Wollstonecraft was quieted by an early death and the cultural suppression of her work; the Texas defendant discussed in this coda was silenced by the administration of seizure-inducing electric shocks amounting to torture. Both Wollstonecraft and the Texas defendant, the hapless Terry Lee Morris, offered threats to form, to the formal trappings of justice, to its harmonic balance, or to what is termed "decorum" in the Texas case. Thus, their agitation can be reinterpreted in light of recent work on "excessive subjectivity." Read at a slant, decorum seems just another name for harmonic justice, agitation another word for resistance.</p>
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
This chapter focuses on loss to develop a reading of Blackstone&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;a... more This chapter focuses on loss to develop a reading of Blackstone&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;s melancholic treatment of the gaps in the English legal historical record as an extended elegy in the graveyard poets’ tradition. In his analysis of real property, Blackstone reifies traditions that reinforce lineage and the retention of estates across multiple generations. His preservation of remnants of Saxon property law stands in for the preservation of property as a concept and as a memorial to the lost bodies of the past; that property would forever be attached to a genetic heritage would seem an attempt to thwart not only the mortality of the human body, but the mortality of the English common law system.
The American Historical Review, Oct 1, 2008
Rutgers University Press eBooks, Nov 4, 2019
Routledge eBooks, Jun 8, 2022
Rutgers University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2019
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
This chapter examines what Blackstone referred to as “the tenderness of the law” in light of the ... more This chapter examines what Blackstone referred to as “the tenderness of the law” in light of the English practice of peine forte et dure (pressing). By using gothic tropes in his discussion of what was a common English, not French, practice, Blackstone attempts but fails to distance ideas of English justice from the European acceptance of torture. Buried beneath the surface of his text are experiences such as those of Nathaniel Hawes, a young rebel robber “persuaded” to comply with the law through the judicial application of peine forte et dure. Blackstone's treatment of peine forte et dure offers analogies to recent US discussions of torture at Guantanamo Bay, but also provides an opening for what has in recent years become a new understanding of the value of tenderness, with its implied partners, empathy and sympathy, as a legal standard.
Literature Compass, 2004
In this essay on eighteenth-century authorship, Kathryn Temple sketches a history of authorship f... more In this essay on eighteenth-century authorship, Kathryn Temple sketches a history of authorship from the perspective of the cultural, regional, and national conflicts that led to modern authorship's emergence. Arguing that the figure of the modern author arose in the mid-to late-eighteenth century, not from an uncontested common moral and ethical center, but from a maelstrom of conflicting practices and standards emanating from an amazingly varied array of national, class, and gendered sources, she suggests that 'literary scandals' played a special role in the construction of a nationalized author in that they brought high, low, and official juridical culture together to construe what authorship would come to mean in the modern world.
New York University Press eBooks, May 22, 2020
How do people develop loyalty to the legal system they inhabit? This book focuses on legal emotio... more How do people develop loyalty to the legal system they inhabit? This book focuses on legal emotions in William Blackstone&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;s transformative, bestselling Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), a collection of volumes that deeply impacted English legal culture and became an icon for English common law values across the British Empire. Blackstone, not only a lawyer and judge, but a poet who believed that “the only true and natural foundations of society are the wants and fears of individuals,” was ideally situated to condense English law into a form that evoked emotions. Using a history of emotions and Law and Humanities approach, the book argues that in enlisting an affective aesthetics to invoke emotions such as desire, disgust, melancholia, embarrassment, terror, tenderness, and happiness, Blackstone encouraged readers to feel as much as reason their way to justice in ways that have continued to influence the Western world. This book treats the Commentaries—reinterpreted here in affective, aesthetic, and real-world contexts—as offering a complex map of our affective relationship to juridical culture, one that illuminates both individual and communal understandings of our search for justice and is crucial for understanding both justice and injustice today.
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Apr 27, 2021
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
By examining “zones of desire” and “zones of disgust,” first in Blackstone's poetry and then ... more By examining “zones of desire” and “zones of disgust,” first in Blackstone's poetry and then in the Commentaries, this chapter unpacks Blackstone's reliance on these twinned emotions as instrumental to his efforts to construct a new understanding of and loyalty to the English common law. Marriage law and orientalism are interrelated here with a discussion of Blackstone's celebration of the trial as a unique English contribution to justice. In these discussions, desire and disgust worked together to suggest an English legal tradition able to accommodate the forces of commodification and expansion that defined modernity.
Kathryn Temple Scandal Nation: Law and Authorship in Britain, 1750-1832 Kathryn Temple Kathryn Te... more Kathryn Temple Scandal Nation: Law and Authorship in Britain, 1750-1832 Kathryn Temple Kathryn Temple argues that eighteenth-century Grub Street scandals involving print piracy, forgery, and copyright violation played a crucial role in the formation of British identity. Britain's expanding print culture demanded new ways of thinking about business and art. In this environment, print scandals functioned as sites where national identity could be contested even as it was being formed.Temple draws upon cases involving Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, Catharine Macaulay, and Mary Prince. The public uproar around these controversies crossed class, gender, and regional boundaries, reaching the Celtic periphery and the colonies. Both print and spectacle, both high and low, these scandals raised important points of law, but also drew on images of criminality and sexuality made familiar in the theater, satirical prints, broadsides, even in wax museums. Like print culture itself, the "scandal" of print disputes constituted the nation?and resistance to its formation. Print transgression destabilized both the print industry and efforts to form national identity. Temple concludes that these scandals represent print's escape from Britain's strenuous efforts to enlist it in the service of nation.
Emotions, Aug 7, 2018
This essay explores the value of the ‘mixed emotions’ of love and resentment for constitutional p... more This essay explores the value of the ‘mixed emotions’ of love and resentment for constitutional patriotism through a close reading of the Declaration of Independence set in the context of first, the history of resentment, and secondly, theories of justice. After introducing the conceptual framework through a discussion of mixed emotions and constitutional patriotism, the essay turns to a discussion of the Declaration as a ‘sticky’ emotional object meant to evoke both love and resentment. A brief historical account of shifts in understandings of resentment suggests the value of this emotion as a democratic emotion related to justice. Finally, the essay offers some contemporary examples of expressions of resentment in relation to the Declaration to advocate for a redirection of resentment. It concludes by arguing that the love for democratic ideals is inseparable from the resentment inspired by failing to enact those ideals in daily life. Thus, resentment, if directed at the appropriate targets, can be a useful emotion for mobilising constitutional patriotism.
The Eighteenth Century, 2017
The language of enthusiasm, and of all those passions that strongly agitate the soul, is naturall... more The language of enthusiasm, and of all those passions that strongly agitate the soul, is naturally incoherent, and may appear even extravagant to those, who cannot enter into the views of the speaker, or form an idea of what is passing in his mind.. .. The imagination of a critick must, in respect of vivacity, be able to keep pace with that of the authors, whom he assumes the privilege of judging.-James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783) 1 Like James Beattie, Mary Wollstonecraft references agitation at key moments. Agitation was a heavily weighted word with both personal and political connotations, a word essential to understanding Wollstonecraft's contribution not only to feminist thought, but also to theories of legal subjectivity. 2 When writing to Gilbert Imlay, for instance, upset by his inattentiveness, Wollstonecraft announces that she "shall not attempt to give bent to the different emotions which agitate my heart," 3 while in the opening pages of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she promises her readers that she does not mean "violently to agitate the contested question respecting the equality and inferiority of the sex." 4 These disavowals of agitation ("I shall not attempt" seems a favorite construction) may strike us as disingenuous. Did she really refuse the opportunity to "give bent to the different emotions which agitate my heart" when she wrote her highly emotional letters to Imlay? She certainly focused on these in many of the letters she sent him. Was she really refusing "violently to agitate" questions of women's equality in the Vindication, a document obsessed with such questions? Such "softeners" can, of course, be read as efforts to produce a more reader-friendly text, to seduce readers into a false sense of security, and to secure those readers to her cause. But they also operate as formal representations of the operations of agitation in themselves. These sentences move between disavowal and avowal, between the "not" and the "yes," as if in themselves they cannot settle on one position. Agitation is then not something Woll
The Eighteenth Century, 2012
When Patricia Meyer Spacks published Gossip in 1985, she opened up an intriguing area of inquiry,... more When Patricia Meyer Spacks published Gossip in 1985, she opened up an intriguing area of inquiry, demonstrating that gossip is an important social form worthy of study, closely related to literary history and literary form. 1 Since then, several studies of gossip in different periods have appeared, most drawing on Spacks's reading of gossip as a privatized mode of resistance engaged in by marginalized groups. Like these, Nicola Parsons's Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) expands our understanding of the role gossip plays in many different types of politicized discourse. The book focuses not on gossip so much as on new ways of disseminating and channeling information (what Parsons at one point calls the "information business" [65]) to an ever-growing and interested public. Along the way, Parsons takes up the constructions of authorship and audience during Queen Anne's reign in their relation to text, readers, and the state. We do not find here any attempt to offer a taxonomy of gossip, as Spacks does brilliantly and authoritatively, nor an extended discussion of the differences between gossip and other forms, like scandal and tattle, even though Parsons discusses them. We also do not find a history of usage or a review of sociological approaches to gossip, such as in Susan Phillips's wonderful Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England. 2 Instead, Parsons investigates the overlay between gossip and print culture, situating gossip in the political and historical context defined by Queen Anne's reign and by public sphere theory writ large. Parsons argues that publicity could become normative only when compared to the non-normative discourses represented by gossip. She relies on this comparative method to argue that whereas James I had emphasized secrecy rather than communication in government, Anne's reign saw the rise of publicity as "an organizing political principle" (3). At times Parsons seems to insist that gossip "reified" (as she puts it) in print can be mapped directly on to oral gossip (8). In this, Parsons faces the problems that all scholars face when dealing with oral culture: to analyze oral events, we need recourse to texts. Parsons cannot access
The Eighteenth Century, 2014
This essay considers Lauren Berlant's call to “reimagine state/society relations . . . in whi... more This essay considers Lauren Berlant's call to “reimagine state/society relations . . . in which consumer forms of collectivity were not the main way people secure or fantasize securing everyday happiness” in light of William Blackstone’s early poetry and his important Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765). The encounter with justice was, for Blackstone, a central emotional and aesthetic experience, available to anyone, associated not with vengeance or self-satisfaction, but with a pure form of happiness. The essay traces this relation between happiness and justice, especially as the Commentaries are invoked in Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Eighteenth-century fiction, 2010
What shall we say of the pleasure which a man takes in the reading of a Defamatory libel?-Joseph ... more What shall we say of the pleasure which a man takes in the reading of a Defamatory libel?-Joseph Addison citing Pierre Bayle, Spectator no. 451 in october 1709, Delarivier Manley, author of the bestseller The New Atalantis (1709), "the publication that did the most harm to the Ministry" during that year, was arrested for what is common ly referred to as seditious libel. 1 She was held without bail for a little
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
<p>This brief coda takes up the value of sympathy in the context of resistance. Inspired by... more <p>This brief coda takes up the value of sympathy in the context of resistance. Inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft's agitated reaction to Blackstone, the coda rereads agitation as a trigger for sympathetic review in light of a recent Texas case in which an agitated defendant undermined the court's "decorum." Wollstonecraft was quieted by an early death and the cultural suppression of her work; the Texas defendant discussed in this coda was silenced by the administration of seizure-inducing electric shocks amounting to torture. Both Wollstonecraft and the Texas defendant, the hapless Terry Lee Morris, offered threats to form, to the formal trappings of justice, to its harmonic balance, or to what is termed "decorum" in the Texas case. Thus, their agitation can be reinterpreted in light of recent work on "excessive subjectivity." Read at a slant, decorum seems just another name for harmonic justice, agitation another word for resistance.</p>
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
This chapter focuses on loss to develop a reading of Blackstone&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;a... more This chapter focuses on loss to develop a reading of Blackstone&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;s melancholic treatment of the gaps in the English legal historical record as an extended elegy in the graveyard poets’ tradition. In his analysis of real property, Blackstone reifies traditions that reinforce lineage and the retention of estates across multiple generations. His preservation of remnants of Saxon property law stands in for the preservation of property as a concept and as a memorial to the lost bodies of the past; that property would forever be attached to a genetic heritage would seem an attempt to thwart not only the mortality of the human body, but the mortality of the English common law system.
The American Historical Review, Oct 1, 2008
Rutgers University Press eBooks, Nov 4, 2019
Routledge eBooks, Jun 8, 2022
Rutgers University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2019