This excellent and elegantly written book provides another useful reminder that the great landmarks of common-law jurisprudence built their conclusions around stories drawn from both life and literature. Twenty-first-century jurists routinely cite Edward Coke's (1552–1634) writings and opinions as settled precedent. Before he cemented his status as a venerated legal authority, however, Coke argued for the defense in an unusual libel trial, as Hudson notes in a particularly telling example. The case stemmed from an apocryphal story printed in numerous editions of martyrologist John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563). In gruesome detail, Foxe described the dramatic and painful death of William Grimwood of Hitcham in Suffolk as evidence of providential punishment for perjury. When a local rector shared a version of this story from the pulpit with Grimwood (very much alive) in attendance, the aggrieved man opted to sue for damages. In court, Coke successfully argued that there had been no malicious intent in sharing the story, a new precedent that he would cite decades later as attorney general in the case of Brook v. Sir Henry Montague. “Obliquely, then,” Hudson concludes, “a perjured tale of a perjured man . . . was making its way into the heart of common-law authority” (46).

With this book, Hudson joins a rich and growing interdisciplinary conversation on law and literature in early modern England, artfully engaging with scholarship in history, literary studies, theory, and law. As she notes, her approach is not particularly novel. Instead, the analysis on display in these chapters embraces a broad consensus in legal studies that has effectively eroded false boundaries between law, literature, and the host of popular forms of storytelling through which instances of crime and punishment were digested and understood. Nevertheless, Crime and Consequence is a model contribution to this field, gracefully weaving together analysis of a broad range of scholarly interpretations and a rich tapestry of early modern sources, including court decisions, sermons, pamphlets, legal tomes, and numerous dramatic works.

The volume's principal analytical payoff stems from its focus on punishment. Each of the five chapters provides a case study in which the penal sanction specified in law failed to align with broader expectations for the consequences of crime both within and beyond the courtroom. In the case of perjury, addressed in chapter 1, many early modern commentators found the statutory penalties attached to this crime inadequate given its reputation as a particularly heinous form of blasphemy. What was an hour in the pillory, such critics railed, compared to the wrath of God. Elizabethan legislation established the crime of counterfeiting coins, the subject of chapter 2, as a form of treason. Here, however, Hudson's readings of three plays by Thomas Middleton suggests that contemporaries may have deemed the mandated punishments too severe for what many considered a victimless crime.

The remaining chapters include a thoughtful analysis of clemency and pardon sandwiched between the riveting and extraordinary stories of two women, Anne Greene and Mary Carleton, whose experiences inspired public reflection on themes of crime and consequence. Sentenced to death for infanticide, Greene survived her execution. Carleton, in contrast, violated the terms of a conditional pardon, returning illegally to England after having received a sentence of transportation to Barbados. Both cases resist any singular interpretation. Each chapter here provides a compelling portrait of the extent to which formal law emerged in and through engagement with other ways of framing narratives.

Hudson makes a strong case for tempering arguments about early modern law to account fully for the complexity of these histories. Nevertheless, her analysis states its questions far more clearly than any answers that might be gleaned from these examples, and this reviewer would have appreciated a conclusion after the final chapter. Small quibbles aside, Hudson offers a compelling case for the importance of sanctions to the processes of making and enforcing law. As she demonstrates convincingly, crafting punishments that fit the crime provided an important mechanism for making sense of the religious and political upheavals that played out in seventeenth-century England.