Contains two individual titles bound together.

Lawyer, politician, poet, teacher and architect, William Blackstone was a major figure in 18th century public life, and pivotal in the history of law. Despite the influence of his work, Blackstone the man remains little known. This book, Blackstone's first scholarly biography, sheds light on the life, work, and society of a neglected figure.

The story of Oxford University Press spans five centuries of printing and publishing. This first volume traces the beginnings of the University Press, its relationship with the University, and developments in printing and the book trade, as well as the growing influence of the Press on the city of Oxford.

The second volume of the history of Cambridge University Press covering the 1690s to 1872.

One of the most celebrated works in the Anglo-American legal tradition, William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-9) has recently begun to attract renewed interest from legal and other scholars. The Commentaries no longer dominate legal education as they once did, especially in North America during the century after their first publication. But they continue to be regularly cited in the judgments of superior courts of review on both sides of the Atlantic, and elsewhere throughout the common-law world. They also provide constitutional, cultural, intellectual and legal historians with a remarkably comprehensive account of the role of law, lawyers and the courts in the imperial superpower that was England on the cusp of the industrial revolution. The life and character of Blackstone himself, the nature and sources of his jurisprudence as expounded in the Commentaries, and the impact of his great book, both within and beyond his native shores, are the main themes of this collection. Individual essays treat Blackstone's early architectural treatises and their relationship to the Commentaries; his idiosyncratic book collecting; his views of the role of judges, interpretation of statutes, the law of marriage, the status of wives, natural law, property law and the legalities of colonisation, and the varied reception of the Commentaries in America and continental Europe. Blackstone's bibliography and iconography also receive attention. Combining the work of both eminent and emerging scholars, this interdisciplinary venture sheds welcome new light on a legal classic and its continued influence. I Life 1 Blackstone and Biography - Wilfrid Prest 2 A 'Model of the Old House': Architecture in Blackstone's Life and Commentaries - Carol Matthews 3 'A Mighty Consumption of Ale': Blackstone, Buckler, and All Souls College, Oxford - Norma Aubertin-Potter 4 William Blackstone and William Prynne: an Unlikely Association? - Ian Doolittle II Thought 5 Blackstone on Judging - John H Langbein 6 Blackstone's Rules for the Construction of Statutes - John V Orth 7 Blackstone and Bentham on the Law of Marriage - Mary Sokol 8 Coverture and Unity of Person in Blackstone's Commentaries -Tim Stretton 9 Blackstone's Commentaries on Colonialism: Australian Judicial Interpretations - Thalia Anthony 10 Restoring the 'Real' to Real Property Law: A Return to Blackstone? - Nicole Graham III Influence 11 American Blackstones - Michael Hoeflich 12 Did Blackstone get the Gallic Shrug? - John Emerson 13 Blackstone in Germany - Horst Dippel IV Sources 14 Bibliography - Morris Cohen 15 Iconography - J H Baker and Wilfrid Prest Contributors -Thalia Anthony lectures in law at the University of Sydney. -Norma Aubertin-Potter is Librarian-in-Charge of the Codrington Library, All Souls College, Oxford. -J H Baker, Downing Professor of the Laws of England at the University of Cambridge, is Literary Director of the Selden Society. -Morris Cohen, Professor Emeritus and Professorial Lecturer in Law, is the former Librarian of Yale Law School. -Horst Dippel is Professor of British and American Studies at the University of Kassel. -Ian Doolittle, formerly a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, is a partner in the law firm Trowers and Hamlins LLP in London. -John Emerson holds a Visiting Research Fellowship in the Law School, University of Adelaide. -Nicole Graham is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University of Technology, Sydney. -Michael Hoeflich is John H and John M Kane Distinguished Professor in the Law School, University of Kansas. -John Langbein is Sterling Professor of Law and Legal History at Yale Law School. -Carol Matthews teaches in the School of History and Politics at the University of Adelaide. -John V Orth holds the William Rand Kenan Jr Chair of Law at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. -Wilfrid Prest is Professor Emeritus and Visiting Research Fellow in the Law School and School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide. -Mary Sokol holds an Honorary Research Fellowship in the Bentham Project at University College London. -Tim Stretton teaches history at St Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England assesses the contribution of the business press and the publication of print to the economic transformation of England. The impact of non-book printing has been long neglected. A raft of jobbing work serviced commerce and finance while many more practical guides and more ephemeral pamphlets on trade and investment were read than the books that we now associate with the foundations of modern political economy. A pivotal change in the book trades, apparent from the late seventeenth century, was the increased separation of printers from bookseller-publishers, from the skilled artisan to the bookseller-financier who might have no prior training in the printing house but who took up the sale of publications as another commodity. This book examines the broader social relationship between publication and the practical conduct of trade; the book asks what it meant to be 'published' and how print, text and image related to the involvement of script. The age of Enlightenment was an age of astonishing commercial and financial transformation offering printers and the business press new market opportunities. Print helped to effect a business revolution. The reliability, reputation, regularity, authority and familiarity of print increased trust and confidence and changed attitudes and behaviours. New modes of publication and the wide-ranging products of printing houses had huge implications for the way lives were managed, regulated and recorded. JAMES RAVEN is Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex and a Fellow of Magdalene College Cambridge.

A major new account of one of the leading philosopher-statesmen of the eighteenth century Edmund Burke (1730–97) lived during one of the most extraordinary periods of world history. He grappled with the significance of the British Empire in India, fought for reconciliation with the American colonies, and was a vocal critic of national policy during three European wars. He also advocated reform in Britain and became a central protagonist in the great debate on the French Revolution. Drawing on the complete range of printed and manuscript sources, Empire and Revolution offers a vivid reconstruction of the major concerns of this outstanding statesman, orator, and philosopher. In restoring Burke to his original political and intellectual context, this book overturns the conventional picture of a partisan of tradition against progress and presents a multifaceted portrait of one of the most captivating figures in eighteenth-century life and thought. A boldly ambitious work of scholarship, this book challenges us to rethink the legacy of Burke and the turbulent era in which he played so pivotal a role.

This book is the first monograph to analyse the workings of Scotland’s legal profession in its early modern European context. It is a comprehensive survey of lawyers working in the local and central courts; investigating how they interacted with their clients and with each other, the legal principles governing ethical practice, and how they fulfilled a social role through providing free services to the poor and also services to town councils and other corporations. Based heavily on a wide range of archival sources, and reflecting the contemporary importance of local societies of lawyers, John Finlay offers a groundbreaking yet accessible study of the eighteenth-century legal profession which adds a new dimension to our knowledge of Enlightenment Scotland.

William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) is perhaps the most elegant and influential legal text in the history of the common law. By one estimate, Blackstone has been cited well over 10,000 times in American judicial opinions alone. Prominent in recent reassessment of Blackstone and his works, Wilfrid Prest also convened the Adelaide symposia which have now generated two collections of essays: Blackstone and his Commentaries: Biography, Law, History (2009), and Re-Interpreting Blackstone's Commentaries: A Seminal Text in National and International Contexts (2014). This third collection focuses on Blackstone's critics and detractors. Leading scholars examine the initial reception of the Commentaries in the context of debates over law, religion and politics in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. Having shown Blackstone's volumes to be a contested work of the Enlightenment, the remaining chapters assess critical responses to Blackstone on family law, the status of women and legal education in Britain and America. While Blackstone and his Commentaries have been widely lauded and memorialised in marble, this volume highlights the extent to which they have also attracted censure, controversy and disparagement.