Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court: Writing Communities (Early Modern Literature in History)

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 Rhatigan is 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. Author of Epistolary Courtiership and Dramatic Letters: Thomas Overbury and the Jacobean Playhouse (2024), she publishes on the intersection between law and drama, including essays in recent collections such as Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance (2022) and Shakespeare/Sense (2020).