2025: First Place, Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice
Reading Satire in The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights (1632)
by Herin Han Norris
Winner, Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice (2025)
Abstract:
The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights (1632) is the first English treatise dedicated to expounding the legal concerns of women. In scholarship on early modern women’s legal status and property rights it is routinely cited as an authority and interpreted either as a guide for female litigants or resource for students at the Inns. This essay departs from these readings by offering a literary analysis of the treatise attentive to its formal ambiguities, stylistic idiosyncrasies and generic affinities with Erasmus’s Encomium matrimonii (1518), its defence (1519) and the Praise of Folly (1551). It argues that The Lawes Resolutions is best understood as a work of humanist satire written in serio ludere, belonging to the Renaissance tradition of mock-encomiastic prose. Rather than undermining the treatise’s informative value, it argues that its contents are more fully appreciated and properly understood within a literary humanist context where style is integral to argument.
Biography:
Herin Han Norris is a doctoral candidate in the English Faculty at Magdalen College, Oxford, writing about the interrelation of literary form and legal thought. Her thesis considers how an emerging conception of women’s chastity as personal property in sixteenth century England stylistically transformed poetic and dramatic fictions of the ‘female voice’ in Renaissance verse and drama. It is supported by the AHRC, Clarendon Fund and Magdalen College. Before beginning this research, she read for a BA in English at UCL and an M.St. in English (1550-1700) at Merton College, Oxford.