These are wonderful times to write and read in the place where law, history, and literature intersect. Recent works by Bradin Cormack, Bernadette Meyler, Paul Raffield, Deborah Shuger, and others have generated insights that cross-disciplinary enterprises often promise yet rarely achieve. Elliott Visconsi suggests just how much more we can do at this fruitful place.

Visconsi provides a series of terrific readings of texts “in which the nexus between literature and equitable judgment is exaggerated” (31). Aristotle was the first to identify the proximity of poesis and epieikeia—of literary production and equitable judgment—each of which offers “an invitation to hermeneutic deliberation in the service of ethical development” (23). In accepting this invitation, seventeenth-century writings—and Visconsi's twenty-first-century readings—pursued an “imaginative originalism” (34) concerned with the beginnings of law. Those familiar with debates in American jurisprudence may find this use of originalism too clever. But by considering how Restoration literature conceived law's origins, Visconsi asks us to think again about how we might do the same.

Writers taught readers to be judges after 1660. Properly instructed, the judicious reader, reading by equity rather than by rule, looked past the letter of the law—and of literary productions—to find its spirit. “Poesis, like equitable judgment, looks not to the part but the whole. … Like equity, poesis solicits a sympathetic bond between a character and the judging audience” (23). Writers performed the same “equitable function” as a chancellor, guiding the “audience's ethical deliberations” (37). And so Visconsi guides our own deliberations about a Restoration poesy concerned with the generation of law. Making law meant making the savage civilized and made otherwise barbaric peoples into nations. But making law did not of itself entail justice. There would have to be equity. But where might it be found?

Visconsi begins with two plays by John Dryden. Justice does not triumph in The Indian Emperour: the inversion of law performed by Spain's imperial conquest crushes the noble Montezuma's embodiment of “aristocratic honor, justice, and sovereign equity” (45). In Troilus and Cressida, Dryden explores England's “Trojan originalism” (65) generated by the legend of Brutus and his followers, who came to the banks of the Thames after the fall of Troy. The “inherent barbarism of the English race” (65) thereby showed itself at the moment of the nation's making. Employing Trojan mythology to critique English mythologies of creation, Dryden shows how even an imagined past “exerts a normative claim upon the present” (74), a claim that can only be controlled once that past is reconceived with the poet's help.

In chapter 3, Visconsi turns from Trojan to Christian mythology as viewed from the very different aesthetic-political position of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Milton rejects originalism, refusing to acknowledge any “historicist-inflected claims of the normative force of original intentions or first principles in human government” (80). After all, accepting that law could be made at an identifiable moment would entail admitting Satan's claim—like that of any earthly king—to play lawgiver. Following St. Paul on the relationship of Gospel to law, Milton's equity—obedient to the saving constraints of Christian liberty—recovers law's spirit from its dead letter. In the crucifixion, equity transcends judicial interpretation, becoming “a creedal commitment to realizing mercy and grace through action” (103). Justice now triumphs, but only because it accepts the demands of law—through the death that Adam must suffer—while simultaneously escaping it at the end of time through the “merciful remedy” (109).

Visconsi explores very different materials in chapter 4: Henry Neville's prose fiction, The Isle of Pines, and the trials of Henry Vane and Algernon Sidney. In their trials, Vane and Sidney became synecdoches, by which the details of a virtuous man's life are transformed “into a generalized fiction” (134) about the public good. If in handling these republican heroes Visconsi sometimes employs caricatures of Charles II and his political and legal supporters, a correction appears in chapter 5, on Aphra Behn. Behn brings us back to where Visconsi started: to the equity of the just prince. Like Dryden, Behn critiqued a native English barbarism—emboldened by whiggish mobocracy—that appeared most vividly in colonial contexts. Behn's Oroonoko, like Dryden's Montezuma, manifests “naturalized aristocratic virtues and royal prerogative” (165). The alternative to the prince's equity becomes apparent in Behn's The Widow Ranter. In the wilds of Virginia, the vulgarity of democracy is on full display as Justices Timorous, Boozer, and Whimsey make law into an instrument of self-indulgence.

Perhaps Visconsi tries to find too many things at once in the texts he reads: “imaginative originalism,” English nationhood, and even “modern epistemology” as revealed by ostensibly novel political-legal anxieties. Was imaginative originalism really “the age's most sustained public language for considering … questions of justice” (34)? Certainly many languages concerned with justice were not concerned with origins. Were the writers Visconsi discusses really “at the leading edge of modernity” (34)? Perhaps not. And some may wish that Visconsi had drawn together his insights at the close, rather than treat us with an admittedly interesting coda on Crusoe that ends, if not quite concludes, his consideration of law's imagined beginnings.

The injudicious historian might thus be tempted to focus on what seem to be overstatements or worrisome claims with a temporally specific character; lawyers may be uncomfortable about the instability of the term equity as it runs through the book. But to read and thus judge from within a rule-bound disciplinary logic would be to miss Visconsi's central point; we would mistake the letter for the spirit. And that would mean we have learned nothing from a writer who, like his own subjects, has so much to teach his readers about how to read, and therefore how to judge, like the equitable prince.