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.

Jennifer Jahner is Dean of Undergraduate Studies and 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.

• 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