tailieunhanh - THE RADICAL FACE OF THE ANCIENT CONSTITUTION

I have had the good fortune of growing up in a department filled with first-rate scholars and gentle colleagues, who over the years have supported and sustained me in any number of ways. Successive chairmen - the late Richard Hunt, Peter Karsten, Seymour Drescher, Richard Smethurst, Edward Muller, and Reid Andrews - have encouraged and prodded in equal measure, and I am genuinely grateful to them. My friends and colleagues have also been ever ready to serve as sounding boards and to read whatever I handed them, responding with incisive and on-the-mark criticisms | THE RADICAL FACE OF THE ANCIENT CONSTITUTION St. Edward s Laws in Early Modem Political Thought Building upon the seminal work of J. c. Holt and J. G. A. Pocock this book deals with the ways in which medieval and early modern historians lawyers and politicians deployed their own national history to justify opposition to the English kingship. In particular it is a study of the origins and development of the historical construct known as the radical ancient constitution a version of the past that originated in the eleventh twelfth and thirteenth centuries from three sources of conspicuous importance the Modus tenendi Parliamentum the Mirror of Justices and most important of all the so-called laws of Edward the Confessor. The book tells how a cult of kingship centered around Edward s laws was transformed from a cult that sacralized the upstart Norman dynasty into one which desecrated the Stuart monarchy. In telling the whole story of the ancient constitution from the middle ages down to the eighteenth century the book also corrects two widely held assumptions about Stuart England first that the so-called whig version of history was concocted by seventeenth-century dissidents who deliberately distorted medieval history in the service of their own agendas and second that argument from history was inherently conservative while argument from natural law and natural rights was inherently radical. Finally the author s arguments serve as a corrective to revisionist histories that erase revolution from the century of revolution and reduce the role played by political principle in seventeenth-century England. JANELLE GREENBERG is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Her previous publications include Subjects and Sovereigns the Grand Controversy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England 1981 with Corinne c. Weston . THE RADICAL FACE OF THE ANCIENT CONSTITUTION St. Edward s Laws in Early Modern Political Thought JANELLE GREENBERG M Cambridge UNIVERSITY .