Introduction: Thresholds

Abstract

‘What man of sense and judgement can read a single word of this word play without suffering weariness of heart as at a foul smell?’¹ It is strange, perhaps, to find that what François Hotman was describing here in 1567 was the study of law. It is odd to read early modern legal scholarship castigating its discipline as an ‘abyss’ of ‘uncertain conjectures and tenuous divinations’ (OL, p. 1), as ‘harsh, unsavoury, unpleasant, rude and barbarous’.² To its own students and practitioners, the law has a ‘loathsome savour’; the study of it is ‘fearful’, ‘dangerous’ and even maddening (OL, p. 2). Richard Burton in 1628 associates the law with a kind of individual and national melancholy, ‘[it is] a general mischief of our times, an unsensible plague’ (OL, pp. 4–5). These analyses suggest that there is possibly something of what we would term ‘the Gothic’ within the early modern rule of law.