The Elizabethan Rhetoric of Signs: Representations of Res Publica at the Early Modern Inns of Court

Abstract

The development of a secular legal profession in the 16th century compromised the sacerdotal role envisaged for common lawyers by Sir John Fortescue in De Laudibus Legum Angliae. During the Elizabethan era, lawyers were no longer perceived as oracles of divine wisdom, but rather as legal technocrats, beholden not to God but to a set of saleable rhetorical skills. This article suggests that the Elizabethan legal community, based at the Inns of Court in London, sought to redress the ethical deficit by creating an order of signs which synthesized the Renaissance tenets of Neoplatonic humanism with the imperatives of Judaeo-Christian theology. With particular emphasis on the description by Gerard Legh of his visit to the Inner Temple revels of Christmas 1561, in The Accedens of Armory, I consider the symbolism of images employed by the Inns of Court, and their status as iconic sign of immemorial authority.