Law Inscribed

"Pure and Pythie" Reporting the Law in Edmund Plowden’s Commentaries

Tudor lawyer Edmund Plowden pondered how to report credibly on the law, preserving a speaker's intent while necessarily selecting, condensing, and explicating. Accordingly, this early edition of Plowden’s Commentaries—recently added to UVA Law’s special collections—invites us to consider the blurred relationship between authority and evidence in sixteenth-century England.

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Curator

Evan Cheney

Evan Cheney is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. His dissertation, "Corporate Voice: Poetic Personation and Political Theology in Early Modern England," aims to revitalize the study of personification (personation), a trope of verbal attribution that Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare used to define striking developments in early modern poetics and political thought.

Exhibition

Law Inscribed

Legal texts carry the marks of their past, from the inscriptions of a reader to the stitched bindings and chain-lined paper of a printer. These marks of ownership and construction reveal what law was, how it was read, and how it worked. Curated by students from across UVA, this exhibit brings together inscribed legal texts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, selected from the Law Library’s Special Collections and the Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library. We invite you to explore the work of Law Inscribed, here and online.

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