The essays collected in Law, Lawyers, and Litigants in Early Modern England form a fitting tribute to legal historian Christopher W. Brooks and the tremendous impact his work has had on our understanding of law and society in early modern England. To call Brooks a legal historian conveys a potentially misleading impression since he was much more than that term might imply. That is, he was not simply interested in how specific legal doctrines, courts, or proceedings evolved over time or in how lawyers in 1700 differed from those in 1400. Law, in his view, was not a closed system that could be studied in relative isolation from the rest of society. For him, the world of the law both reflected and shaped the social world that surrounded it.

Michael J. Braddick and David Sugarman provide opening chapters that describe what was so innovative about Brooks's thinking and the way that his ideas about law evolved over the course of his career. As Braddick points out, Brooks's groundbreaking work Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The “Lower Branch” of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England (1986) did for lawyers what a generation of earlier scholars did for early modern English clergy: demonstrated that larger narratives about the role of religion in early modern society had to take into account the lives and social circumstances of those men who served as the relay points for religion in their communities. As both Braddick and Sugarman argue, one result of Brooks's work is to make meaningless the idea of any functional dividing line between “law,” on the one hand, and “society,” on the other. They also draw attention to the way that Brooks combined a huge capacity for meticulous archival research with an affinity for grand historical narratives, a difficult balancing act that he made look easy.

I suspect Brooks would have enjoyed these essays because law as represented here is an elastic, malleable medium rather than a hard, inert tool. The contributors repeatedly discuss the way that local agents and communities shaped law to their own purposes rather than routinely apply a readymade instrument handed them by the state. To give some salient examples: John Walter shows how early modern crowds displayed a knowledge of law and developed canny workarounds to achieve collective ends; for instance, since the crime of riot was defined as three men working together to do mischief, locals who wanted to attack enclosures sent women in pairs. Peter Rushton shows how localities adopted overarching ideas of law but also improvised upon them to meet their own needs. Joanne Begiato argues that clandestine marriages took a wide variety of forms, especially outside of London, as a result of local and regional circumstances. Steve Hindle examines the spatial dimensions of a specific cluster of tithe disputes to show how litigation pulled neighbors into different alignments with and against one another. Adrian Green considers how the built environment of Durham—specifically, the buildings that were used for the conduct of law—made law part of the lived environment of the city. And Craig Muldrew provides a fascinating account of how the rise of conveyancing transformed credit markets and legal professions in smaller English towns.

The volume closes with two unpublished essays by Brooks himself in which he takes a wide-angle view of two major issues in early modern historiography and law (and his simultaneously bracing and conversational prose style is on full display). In “Law and Revolution,” Brooks considers the relationship between early modern law and the Civil War. Did legal changes help contribute to the war? Was the postwar legal landscape significantly different as a result of the war, or not? Were lawyers more apt to support one side than the other? More an exploration than an argument, this essay ranges broadly and could well serve as an introduction to seventeenth-century legal history. It was particularly welcome for its attention to legal issues after the Restoration, a corner of legal history that has been often neglected. In the concluding “Religion and Law in Early Modern England,” Brooks expands on the interest in religion that is evident in his earlier Law, Politics, and Society in Early Modern England. Although scholars have sometimes pointed to the overlaps between religion and law as broadly normative ways of conceiving of the world, Brooks is most interested in the divide that separated legal and religious thinking, and he connects this divide to the existence of the ecclesiastical courts. Brooks's careful attention to the canon law in post-Reformation England forms an especially useful addition to early modern legal historiography, one that builds on the work of R. H. Helmholz. Early modern law in this concluding essay—as in the essays that comprise the rest of the volume—is interestingly variegated and multiform.