ABSTRACT
This chapter 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 chapter has two aims. First, 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. Second, to highlight some profound differences that exist between this legal history and Foucault’s historical account of the monster. In pursuing these aims, it will become clear that an English legal history of the monster category offers a series of valuable insights for future study, particularly in the areas of legal history, philosophy and feminist theory. The chapter 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.
