This study of poetry and political thought in late twelfth- and thirteenth-century England explores how Latin, French, and Middle English political poetry and Latin grammar and rhetoric shaped ideas about constitutional governance, the common good, and just rule.

• Introduction: The Poetics of Jurisdiction


• 1: The Grammar of Sacrifice: Becket, Learning, and Libertas


• 2: Classroom Historicisms: Interdict and the Poetria nova


• 3: Inventing Magna Carta


• 4: Jurisdictional Formalism: Robert Grosseteste and the Pastoral Model of Governance


• 5: Conjuring England: Crusade, Violence, and Communitas


• Coda: The Jurisdictions of Form


• Bibliography

Jennifer Jahner is Assistant Professor of English at Caltech. She is co-editor, with Emily Steiner and Elizabeth Tyler, of Historical Writing in Britain and Ireland, 500-1550, and publishes on the intersections of law, poetics, and pedagogy in the high and later Middle Ages.