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England's Legal Monsters

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Abstract

This article offers a history of the English legal category monster, a legal category that entered English law in the mid-thirteenth and survived until the mid-nineteenth century. The aim of the article is to provide a close textual analysis of an otherwise absent legal history and to locate law's monsters, and the anxieties that they suggest, within their appropriate contexts: social, political, religious and legal. However, while the principal aim of the article is to address a lacuna in legal historical scholarship, and perhaps precisely because of this fact, the history to be detailed offers a series of valuable insights for future study, particularly in the areas of legal history, philosophy and feminist theory. While full elaboration of these themes is beyond its ambit, the article will draw attention to four different and specific contexts in relation to which future scholarship might benefit from an historical study of England's legal monsters.

Publication Date Jan 1, 2009
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Law, Culture and the Humanities
Print ISSN 1743-8721
Publisher SAGE Publications
Pages 100 - 130
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872108096865
Keywords monster, Foucault, bestial human, conjoined twins, hermaphrodite, abnormal individual
Publisher URL http://lch.sagepub.com/content/5/1/100

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