Chapter 6 considers the two earliest motets known to have been composed for Venetian ceremony: Ave corpus sanctum gloriosi Stefani (1329–39) and Marce, Marcum imitaris (ca. 1365), both anonymous. Situating these works within Andrea Dandolo’s midcentury chancery, this chapter argues for music’s embeddedness in the chancery’s most significant historiographical enterprises. I show how the same chancellors and scribes who copied and organized legal and diplomatic texts oversaw the production of historiographic, literary, and musical works as well. As readings of these motets bear out, the collapsing of chancery functions had aesthetic consequences; the rhetoric on display in both works straddles the humanist–conservatist divide for which the chancery—the engine of Venetian historiography—was known. My readings of Ave corpus sanctum and Marce, Marcum imitaris reveal them working in tandem with the chancery’s most significant historiographical enterprises. Not only do they bear strong thematic links to the topics most heavily elaborated within the midcentury chancery, but they exemplify an approach to history that matched the explicit charge of the chancery: to make the state sensible through the organization of its sundry items and documents.

In the spring of 1593, a spate of viciously xenophobic libels appeared throughout London. The most notorious of these, the so-called Dutch Church libel, landed Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe in some trouble, possibly due to its prominent allusions to Marlowe’s plays. This chapter argues that the collaborative, censored playscript Sir Thomas More reprises the incendiary confluence of libel, xenophobia, and drama that took place in 1593. The play’s opening scenes dramatize the anti-immigrant Evil May Day riot of 1517 with an eye to the 1590s, showing the strangers’ crimes and the violent resistance of London’s citizens. The citizens take their grievances public once all legal avenues for redress have failed. Yet libel and riot are not the only extralegal recourses in the play. The latter two-thirds of Sir Thomas More track the rise and fall of its titular character, who himself repeatedly confronts the limits of the law. Thomas More’s career extends the initial dramatization of libel into an extended meditation on the remedies available to any subject afflicted by unjust law, from bills and libels to riot to the vexed administration of equity and the vagaries of conscience.

The breakaway cardinals returned to Avignon, taking much of the administration with them. The Roman papacy adapted by imitating the type of letter called a ‘brief’ used by some secular systems. Briefs were written by a different set of men, and before long distinguished by humanistic script. From this time on a dual system operated: Chancery and Secretariate. Initially the latter was for high-level letters but in the later fifteenth century it took on routine business too. Another post-Schism innovation was the sale of offices. Apparently absurd, this bound the upper classes of Italy to the papacy. After the Council of Trent papal government was drastically reorganised. The book enters scantily researched territory in attempting to map the changes in the functioning of the Penitentiary, the processes behind the production of letters by the Chancery and of briefs by the secretaries, and at the Congregations of the Council and of the Inquisition. The documentation generated by these two-sub-systems on the problem of whether Calvinist baptism was valid (for example) is of a kind that medievalists can only envy.

Our penultimate chapter explores the extent to which the Tudor period saw a legal renaissance. It examines developments in the common law courts but also explores the development of new conciliar courts outside the common law, most notably star chamber and the court of equity, which were to prove influential. It also examines the further rise in the use and importance of statute law in this period, demonstrating that the Reformation statutes that split England from the Roman Catholic Church underscored the power of Parliamentary statute. Attention is also given to some developments in the common law courts during this period concerning the law of obligations (the development of the principle of consideration in contract law), property law (the development of the writ of ejectment that replaced the older land law writs and the origins of the law of trusts) and criminal law (the development of the distinction between murder and manslaughter).

In Chapter Four, I watch as South Carolina colonists adapted another, much older set of legal categories and procedures, transforming their local Chancery Court into a slave court. Analyzing unstudied manuscript litigation records reveals that colonists routinely asked Chancellors to recognize property interests in people and to facilitate the transfer of familial wealth in the form of slaves. In doing so, they relied upon procedures common to English equity courts, and they invoked familiar descriptions of equity as a concept. Whereas at common law complainants were constrained by traditional forms of action, Chancery procedures gave South Carolina colonists an opportunity to claim enslaved people when evidence had been destroyed, when relatives conspired to conceal slaves, or when witnesses could not be located. Using the relative openness of Chancery bill procedure to tell their complicated stories, they asked the Court to intervene and adjudicate the space between the customary and legal. In doing so, they lay bare the dense web of arrangements and assumptions involving human property that made their plantation economy work, and the Court’s role in perpetuating those arrangements. In a place where peopled were deemed objects at law, equity – a law rooted in notions of justice and fairness – ironically opened up space for litigants to articulate claims to human beings.