This dissertation stages an unprecedented dialogue between the maritime, the literary, and the legal within the context of the English Renaissance. It positions the ocean as an essentially legal space and argues that law mediates all human-ocean interactions. Additionally, it contends that an understanding of legal conceptions of the sea is essential to developing a cultural awareness of maritime space. Therefore, my project resituates early modern literary engagements with the ocean within a complex body of legal and political discourses and argues that in an island nation such as England, knowledge of the sea was widespread. Consequently, the ubiquitous maritime references in the period’s literature were founded on real legal knowledge that literary scholars can consider in their readings of these texts. Through its synthesis of canonical literary works such as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) and Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622) and legal texts such as William Welwood’s An Abridgement of all Sea-Lawes (1613), Alberico Gentili’s Hispanicae advocationis libri duo (1613), and John Selden’s Mare clausum (1635), this dissertation offers four case studies that illuminate the rich possibilities when maritime law inhabits the same scholarly space as English Renaissance literature.

Rape shows up with remarkable frequency in English novels written in the eighteenth century. It also shows up with depressing regularity in the court records of the times. This thesis examines rape both as it occurred in fact (by examining legal records) and in fiction (by examining a wide variety of novels). The thesis begins with a brief look at the history of rape laws in England, then undertakes an extensive review of rape cases from the Old Bailey Sessions Papers and from the Select Trials. Fictional representations of rape in novels are then considered, with special attention paid to the reasons (fictional) men commit rape and the reasons (fictional) women were often seen as complicit in their own rapes. A chapter is devoted to Clarissa, as this novel's complex representation of rape raises a number of important issues about the connections between rape in reality and rape in fiction. A concluding chapter attempts to draw some conclusions about the differences between rape as it happened in eighteenth-century England and as it is used by novelists from Behn to Richardson.