This book’s Introduction sets out the key intellectual and historical contexts for its argument. It shows that religious belief gained an important cultural emphasis after the Reformation and that it was considered to be distinct from other kinds of belief or assent. Engaging with scholarly discussions of belief, this introduction suggests that the period from around 1580 to the 1650s witnessed an attempt to investigate what was particular about a specifically religious kind of belief. Its certainty and spiritual origin were compared to, and contrasted with, other kinds of assent that were generated by probable forms of argument. An important and widespread way of effecting this comparison involved considering religious belief alongside the kinds of assent generated in legal settings – when witness evidence is evaluated for its credibility. The introduction roots this discursive method in contemporary legal culture, before surveying recent scholarship on literary culture, law and religion.

What can a premodern narrative of legal change teach us? This brief epilogue raises the more complex question of the totalizing ambitions of states that operate from the assumption that law is a specialized practice, rather than something that emerges from daily life. The existence of a black-letter law urges states towards legislation as legal utopianism: the attempt to remake subjects in an optimal fashion and to exclude those they find problematic. This tendency towards utopianism - a form of state magic - is present in both late antique and modern contexts. Understanding the roots of it urges us towards humility with respect to our own projects of legal transformation.

The first substantive chapter uses a drinking song to tell the story of a man who travels to London from the countryside to attend an annual fair. As he cavorts with a prostitute behind a tent, she picks his pockets and he must leave the city with nothing to show for his time at the fair except a raging case of the pox. The chapter follows the fictional prostitute and the man through the streets, using actual medical cases and advertisements to piece together what each would have felt as their symptoms developed, as well as their desperate attempts to find affordable treatment. The main aim of the chapter is to establish much-needed context for the remainder of the book, both about the disease and about London’s ever-growing market in remedies for it. The chapter shows that those selling pox cures and those selling sex embodied the very same urban threats in writing of the era: in ballads and in medical writing, both prostitutes and purveyors of pox remedies were presumed to be deceptive, self-serving, and sexually aggressive. Their very existence personified the unbridled consumption and unchecked vice of the big city.

In 1651 Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan announced that the ‘question…by what door the Right, or Authority of Punishing…came in’ was one of ‘much importance’. In this he echoed Hugo Grotius who, while differing from Hobbes in the answer he provided, had written in 1625’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis [The Rights of War and Peace], that the ‘Origine and Nature’ of punishment had been ‘misunderstood…[giving] Occasion to Many Mistakes.’ This right to punish was seen by early modern political thinkers as needing justification. This was particularly true in the context of voluntarist models of legitimacy according to which individuals chose to become members of the political community and the right to enforce obedience wielded by the governors of these communities had its roots in the equal and natural rights of subjects themselves.

This chapter examines the case of María Geronima, an Iberian-born, free-Black woman who lived in Cartagena, Veracruz, and Mexico City before she was exiled to Cuba in 1636. In emphasizing Geronima’s remarkable mobility, the chapter asks how inchoate notions of caste, race, and community varied and transformed across space in the early modern world. In Geronima’s exile from New Spain, the chapter ultimately asks whether and how scholars can apply Mexico’s archival richness—as seen in cases such as Geronima’s—to understand the evolution and function of status elsewhere in the Atlantic world.

The term art and part in Scots law refers to a form of derivative liability. This doctrine extends criminal liability to individuals who may not have committed the actus reus and, in some cases, may not have had the mens rea. Our understanding of the legal developments associated with this doctrine is limited. This chapter therefore examines the historical evolution of the concept, tracing its roots through selected early sources of Scots and English law. It investigates the extent of legislative reform in the sixteenth century and evaluates, through selected homicide prosecutions from 1580 to 1650, the impact of these reforms on the administration of justice and the prosecution of art and part.

Voyages of discovery and their accounts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have rarely been considered in the context of periodising ideas of ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’. Though once such voyages are read not with the hindsight of the twenty-first century but from within the tradition of prior travel, the newness of the New World emerges as a modern construct with limited historical purchase. Texts and maps that verbalise voyages beyond the boundaries of what was known are situated as much in individual experience as in collective perspective; they are often more invested in their own reception than in measurable objects and dateable events.

The upbringing and professional career of Wu Jian (1462–1506) and his uncle, Wu Cong, shed light on two key issues. First is the gradual transformation of merit nobles within the Ming polity, particularly their role in dynastic defenses. Second is the dynasty’s continued efforts to secure military ability through instituting new practices, including the education and training of young merit nobles and entrusting capable civil officials with substantial military responsibilities. Before turning to Wu Jian’s career, however, we first consider the experiences of his mother and other women, whose abilities both in managing large, complex households and negotiating with the dynastic state, were essential to the fortunes of all merit noble families.

Recounting the experiences of Wu Ruyin and his son, Wu Weiying, who between them held the title of Marquis of Gongshun in succession from 1599 to 1643, this chapter and the preceding one address two overarching issues. First, they explore how institutions and administrators persevere amidst crisis. It may be tempting to caricature late Ming bureaucrats as obdurately clinging to the past, but men like Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying adapted to new demands by incorporating new technologies and new ways within established frameworks. Few felt the need to abandon the “institutions of the imperial forefathers.” Second, these chapters examine the place of merit nobles in late Ming society. Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying were not men of the people, but by function of their social circles, they actively engaged in the capital’s broader cultural activities, and by virtue of their jobs as senior military administrators, they commanded surprisingly detailed information about common soldiers and officers, war captives and refugees, and even rumors circulating through Beijing. This chapter first examines Wu Ruyin’s role as the emperor’s representative in ceremony, which included officiating at rituals, offering prayers, and hosting banquets, and second, considers his experiences as a military administrator in a time of acute challenges.

Using Wu Jin’s tenure as Marquis of Gongshun from 1449 to 1461, this chapter explores issues of ability and difference in a time of upheaval at the Ming court. It traces the Wu family as it shifted from immigrant family at the empire’s western edge to members of the capital elite. The chapter also explores the divergent experiences of other Mongolians and merit noble families within the Ming polity.

Recounting the experiences of Wu Ruyin and his son, Wu Weiying, who between them held the title of Marquis of Gongshun in succession from 1599 to 1643, this chapter and the next address two overarching issues. First, they explore how institutions and administrators persevere amidst crisis. It may be tempting to caricature late Ming bureaucrats as obdurately clinging to the past, but men like Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying adapted to new demands by incorporating new technologies and new ways within established frameworks. Few felt the need to abandon the “institutions of the imperial forefathers.” Second, these chapters examine the place of merit nobles in late Ming society. Wu Ruyin and Wu Weiying were not men of the people, but by function of their social circles, they actively engaged in the capital’s broader cultural activities, and by virtue of their jobs as senior military administrators, they commanded surprisingly detailed information about common soldiers and officers, war captives and refugees, and even rumors circulating through Beijing. This chapter first examines Wu Ruyin’s role as the emperor’s representative in ceremony, which included officiating at rituals, offering prayers, and hosting banquets, and second, considers his experiences as a military administrator in a time of acute challenges.

Using Wu Jijue’s career as a focal point, this chapter explores the power of appointment, the process of assessment, and the culture of patronage, before offering a few overarching observations about Wu Jijue’s experiences and what they say about China in the second half of the sixteenth century. The chapter also throws into clear relief how dramatically contemporary perceptions of the Wu family had changed from the early fifteenth century to the late sixteenth century. Once newly arrived immigrants at the edge of the realm whose Mongolian names and origins were obvious to all, the Wu family were now unquestionably “one-percenters,” a capital family ranking among the elites of the elites and whose foreign origins were completely overshadowed by its century-old ties to the imperial throne and service in the highest echelons of the dynastic administration.