Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court: Writing Communities

This collection of essays presents recent research on the Inns of Court and their place in the literature and culture of the early modern world. The volume is structured in three sections. Section One looks at the institutional spaces of the Inns themselves. The chapters consider how the Innsmen’s identities and writings were shaped by their participation in the communal life of the legal Societies. Section Two looks at the Inns in the context of early modern London. The chapters attend to the intellectual and cultural traffic between the Inns and the city in which they were located by examining the role of Innsmen in the book trade, the circulation of manuscripts, playhouses, and musical culture. Finally, Section Three sets a wider international context. The chapters focus on the role of Innsmen in translation, nation-building, and early colonisation. Together these sections attend to the Innsmen not only as writing communities in themselves, but as participants in a complex of intersecting networks reaching out into London and beyond.

Emma Rhatiganis Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research and publications focus on early modern texts in performance and their audiences. She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (2011) and is editing a volume of John Donne’s Inns of Court sermons for The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne.

Jackie Watson holds a PhD from Birkbeck College, UK, and is an independent scholar. She is one of the co-chairs of the Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court project, and recent publications show her interest in the intersection between law and drama. These include a chapter on Innsmen playgoers and Lording Barry’s Ram Alley in Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance, edited by Simon Smith and Emma Whipday(2022); another on Middle Templars perception of Twelfth Night in Shakespeare/Sense, edited by Simon Smith(2020); and an article on letters and The White Devil in Forum for Modern Language Studies special issue, ’In Pursuit of Truth: Law and Emotion in Early Modern Europe’, edited by Rachel Holmes and Toria Johnson (January 2018).