Jessica Winston

Idaho State University, English and Philosophy, Faculty Member

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Chair of English and Philosophy, and Professor of English, at Idaho State University. Founding Chair, Teaching Literature Book Award.

My expertise lies in early modern literature and culture (c. 1485-1642), with a specialization in early modern drama and allied expertise in poetry. My research aims to reframe critical understandings of Tudor literature, a period long neglected by scholars, who viewed it as “drab” as compared to a Shakespearean “golden age” (to use C.S. Lewis’s enduring terms). In the past decade, critics have sought to revive interest in this literature, showing that it contributed in significant ways to the period’s major cultural transformations. My first book, Lawyers at Play, advanced this work, examining how the the literary culture of the Inns of Court responded to and shaped transformations in the English legal profession in the 1560s. My new book project “Tudor Drama in Modern Performance” further reframes Tudor studies by recovering modern traditions of performance and by offering a framework for addressing forms of performance other than full stagings, such as staged readings, radio plays, and audiobooks.
Supervisors: Richard Helgerson (dissertation chair), Mark Rose, Patricia Fumerton
Address: Dept. of English and Philosophy
Idaho State University
921 S 8th Ave, Stop 8056
Pocatello, ID 83209-8056

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Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558-1581. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 270pp. Awarded Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award, 2017, American Association of Law Libraries.

Many early modern poets and playwrights were also members of the legal societies the Inns of Cour... more Many early modern poets and playwrights were also members of the legal societies the Inns of Court, and these authors shaped the development of key genres of the English Renaissance, especially lyric poetry, dramatic tragedy, satire, and masque. How did the Inns come to be literary centres in the first place, and why were they especially vibrant at particular times? Early modernists have long understood that urban setting and institutional environment were central to this phenomenon: in the vibrant world of London, educated men with time on their hands turned to literary pastimes for something to do. "Lawyers at Play" proposes an additional, more essential dynamic: the literary culture of the Inns intensified in decades of profound transformation in the legal profession. Focusing on the 1560s, the decade when a large literary network first developed around the societies, the book demonstrates that this literary surge grew out of and responded to a period of rapid expansion in the legal profession and in the career prospects of members. Poetry, translation, and performance were recreational pastimes; however, these activities also defined and elevated the status of inns-of-court men as qualified, learned, and ethical participants in England’s ‘legal magistracy’: those lawyers, judges, justices of the peace, civic office holders, town recorders, and gentleman landholders who managed and administered local and national governance. Lawyers at Play maps the literary terrain of a formative but understudied period in the English Renaissance, but it also offers a framework for understanding connections between the literary and legal cultures of the Inns over the whole of the early modern period.

Awarded Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award, American Association of Law Libraries, 2017

Contents

List of Figures
Abbreviations and Symbols

Introduction: Lawyers at Play

I. SOCIETY AT THE EARLY MODERN INNS OF COURT
1. An Intellectual Topography of the Early Modern Inns of Court
2. ‘Minerva’s Men’: The Inns of Court in the 1560s

II. THE TRANSLATION OF LEARNING
3. Lyric Poetry: Forming a Professional Community
4. Translatio Studii in Early Elizabethan England

III. LITERARY-POLITICAL PRECEDENTS
5. The Mirror for Magistrates: Political Discourse and the Legal Magistracy
6. Senecan Tragedy in Early Elizabethan England

IV. TO FASHION AN INSTITUTION
7. Gorboduc in the Political Nation
8. Marriage Plays at the Inns: Negotiating Professional Jurisdiction

Conclusion: Lawyers at Play Redux

APPENDICES
1. Literary Men of the Inns of Court, 1558–72
2. First Editions of Classical Translations, 1558–81
3. Description of Gorboduc at the Inner Temple

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