Law, Law-Consciousness and Lawyers as Constitutive of Early Modern England : Christopher W. Brooks’s Singular Journey

Sugarman, David (2019) Law, Law-Consciousness and Lawyers as Constitutive of Early Modern England : Christopher W. Brooks’s Singular Journey. In: Law, Lawyers and Litigants in Early Modern England : Essays in Memory of Christopher W. Brooks. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 32-57. ISBN 9781108491723

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Abstract

During the last half-century, Christopher W. Brooks (1948–2014) established himself as the foremost historian of law in early modern English society. Through his scholarship, his teaching, and the generations of students he advised and supervised, and as a friend and colleague, Brooks exercised, from the early 1990s onwards, an increasingly significant influence on writing about early modern English history. He was the leading exponent of a history of earlymodern England that transcended the boundaries of social, political and legal history, and which placed law and lawyers centre stage. In doing so, he challenged major premises of the dominant vision of law-in-history in writing about English history. This chapter brings a critical, if friendly, eye to Brooks’s work, focusing on how Brooks beat his own path through the methodological thickets to create a distinctive vision of law in history, and on the strengths and weaknesses of that vision.