Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Natural Law in history and Renaissance literature
- 2 The heritage of classical Natural Law
- 3 The reception of Natural Law in Renaissance England
- 4 Law and literature in sixteenth-century England
- 5 More's Utopia
- 6 ‘Love is the fulfilling of the law’: Arcadia and Love's Labour's Lost
- 7 ‘Hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree’: The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure
- 8 Shakespeare's The History of King Lear
- 9 Milton and Natural Law
- Epilogue: Hobbes and the Demise of classical Natural Law
- Appendix: Aquinas on the right to own private property
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Natural Law in history and Renaissance literature
- 2 The heritage of classical Natural Law
- 3 The reception of Natural Law in Renaissance England
- 4 Law and literature in sixteenth-century England
- 5 More's Utopia
- 6 ‘Love is the fulfilling of the law’: Arcadia and Love's Labour's Lost
- 7 ‘Hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree’: The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure
- 8 Shakespeare's The History of King Lear
- 9 Milton and Natural Law
- Epilogue: Hobbes and the Demise of classical Natural Law
- Appendix: Aquinas on the right to own private property
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Law rational therefore, which men commonly use to call the Law of Nature, meaning thereby the Law which human Nature knoweth itself in reason universally bound unto, which also for that cause may be termed most fitly the Law of Reason; this Law, say I, comprehendeth all those things which men by the light of their natural understanding evidently know, or at leastwise may know, to be beseeming or unbeseeming, virtuous or vicious, good or evil for them to do.
Natural Law is law which ‘authorises’ all positive, human laws. According to its classical exponents it is located in the purity of human reason, and, to its Christian theorists, in reason and conscience, motivated by an instinctive need to guarantee human survival. It is a form of knowledge which spurs us to follow virtue and shun vice. The concept dominated Renaissance thought and, through its literary equivalent, later to be called poetic justice, it influenced all English writers of the period in fundamental ways. There was a sceptical and resistant tradition dating from Calvin and summated by Hobbes, suggesting that after the Fall Natural Law existed, not, as Aquinas held, in the human mind and heart, but in God's will and the sovereign's fiat, but even this line of argument necessarily worked within the terms laid down by Aquinas.
Natural Law may be regarded simply as an intellectual ‘model’, since in the realm of observation it has ‘never really existed’. No actual society has ever been built upon its premises.
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- Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature , pp. xi - xviiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996