Alison A. Chapman. Courts, jurisdictions, and law in John Milton and his contemporaries; Alison A. Chapman. The legal epic: Paradise Lost and the early modern law

Abstract

The review is concerned with two books by Alison Chapman, professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (USA). In her first book, Chapman offers a new interpretation of J. Milton’s Paradise Lost in the context of 17th-c. English legal discourse. Chapman demonstrates that precise understanding of early European law is necessary to perceive one of the poem’s key problems— that of theodicy, summarised by Milton in the very first lines as one of his major tasks— to vindicate God’s ways in the eyes of people. The monograph mentions such characteristics of historical jurisprudence as its isolation from other disciplines, the so-called legal history ghetto. It is particularly true for interaction between legal practices and religion — the two fields that exchanged nourishing energies during Milton’s day; something barely imaginable today. Chapman’s second book focuses on Milton’s political treatises, showing how Milton achieves his goals through references to Roman, common or ecclesiastical law.