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England's Legal Monsters

School of Law, Keele University, a.sharpe{at}law.keele.ac.uk

This article offers a history of the English legal category monster, a legal category that entered English law in the mid-thirteenth and survived until the mid-nineteenth century. The aim of the article is to provide a close textual analysis of an otherwise absent legal history and to locate law's monsters, and the anxieties that they suggest, within their appropriate contexts: social, political, religious and legal. However, while the principal aim of the article is to address a lacuna in legal historical scholarship, and perhaps precisely because of this fact, the history to be detailed offers a series of valuable insights for future study, particularly in the areas of legal history, philosophy and feminist theory. While full elaboration of these themes is beyond its ambit, the article will draw attention to four different and specific contexts in relation to which future scholarship might benefit from an historical study of England's legal monsters.

Key Words: monster • Foucault • bestial human • conjoined twins • hermaphrodite • abnormal individual

Law, Culture and the Humanities, Vol. 5, No. 1, 100-130 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1743872108096865


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