Law and the Imagination
Robyn Chapman Stacey's book
Issue 09 — Fall 2022 — Session 08 —
Microliteratures, 2
By Jesús R. Velasco | Published on February 25, 2022
By Jesús R. Velasco | Published on February 25, 2022
"In Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales, Robin Chapman Stacey explores the idea of law as a form of political fiction: a body of literature that blurs the lines generally drawn between the legal and literary genres. She argues that for jurists of thirteenth-century Wales, legal writing was an intensely imaginative genre, one acutely responsive to nationalist concerns and capable of reproducing them in sophisticated symbolic form. She identifies narrative devices and tropes running throughout successive revisions of legal texts that frame the body as an analogy for unity and for the court, that equate maleness with authority and just rule and femaleness with its opposite, and that employ descriptions of internal and external landscapes as metaphors for safety and peril, respectively."
Through Quicksearch, at Yale, you can find an online copy of Robyn Chapman Stacey’s book. Read all you want, but you must read both the Introduction and the haunting Conclusion to the book.
