Resumen de The selective memorialization of Sir John Fortescue in Early Modern England: a short case study in legal antiquarianism
The late fifteenth-century jurist, Sir John Fortescue, occupies a place among those historical figures whom English lawyers during the early modern period re-conceptualized as part of their quest to find new meaning in England's legal history. This article briefly traces the place of Fortescue, and his notion of the English constituion as dominium politicum et regale, within an admittedly thin slice of the socio-political disputes that revolutionized Tudor and Stuart society. The general purpose is to examine some of the ways in which exponents, on both sides of those disputes, memorialized Fortescue in aid of their respective legal, jurisdictional and constitutional causes. After previewing Fortescue's life and principal literary achievements, the article briefly discusses how -as part of a process of recollection rooted firmly in an antiquarian consciousness- Fortescue's authority grew as a preeminent source from England's jurisprudential past.
