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  3. Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      17 September 2009
      28 November 1996
      ISBN:
      9780511553400
      9780521481427
      9780521032896
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553400
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.62kg, 308 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.465kg, 308 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Law: General Interest, Literature, Renaissance and Early Modern Literature, Law
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    Subjects:
    Law: General Interest, Literature, Renaissance and Early Modern Literature, Law
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    Book description

    Natural law, whether grounded in human reason or divine edict, encourages men to follow virtue and shun vice. The concept dominated Renaissance thought, where its literary equivalent, poetic justice, underpinned much of the period's creative writing. R. S. White's study examines a wide range of Renaissance texts, by More, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare and Milton, in the light of these developing ideas of Natural Law. It shows how writers as radically different as Aquinas and Hobbes formulated versions of Natural Law which served to maintain socially established hierarchies. For Aquinas, Natural Law always resided in the individual's conscience, whereas Hobbes thought individuals had limited access to virtue and therefore needed to be coerced into doing good by the state. White shows how the very flexibility and antiquity of Natural Law enabled its appropriation and application by thinkers of all political persuasions in a debate that raged throughout the Renaissance and which continues in our own time.

    Reviews

    "This fine, groundbreaking study analyzes the literature of the period from More to Milton for its engagement of the tradition of natural law, once crucial but now hardly ever remembered until very recently. This is a rich and important book." Anthony Dimatteo, Spenser Newsletter

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