Penguins on Parade: Magna Carta!

Some Penguin Classics are legitimate scholarly landmarks. Not as many as you might expect, and for the clear reason that the overriding purpose of any classics-reprint line is actually the opposite of originality: a new Introduction here, a pretty new cover there, but the heart of Dover, Signet, Bantam, Penguin and all other reprint lines is mainly to present the familiar, not the new.

Penguin excels in this, of course. Their editions of classics both well-known and, shall we say, speculative, are lovely, handy, and efficient; when I want to re-read a canonical work of which I have half a dozen editions (*sigh* – don’t get me started), I almost invariably reach first for a Penguin Classics. But typically, if I want a scholarly, critical edition of a canonical work, I hunt down some other edition – the Norton Critical War and Peace, for instance, or the John Shawcross edition of Milton’s poetry, and so on.

There’ve been exceptions: the recent three-volume edition of the Arabian Nights, for instance, or the recent David Norton edition of the King James Bible. And to that short, distinguished list must now be added Penguin’s meaty new edition of the Magna Carta, the famous charter King John’s barons wrung out of him in June of 1215 on a field at Runnymede. Magna Carta itself winds down in well under 4000 words, but this new edition, edited by David Carpenter, is nearly 600 pages long, and such a staggering discrepancy would seem to defy justification. But as Carpenter points out early and often, the elaborate extent of the critical attention is well warranted by the sheer bombshell importance of the document itself:

The Charter’s impact in the thirteenth century was actually very great. Its arrival does mark a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in English history. For a start, the efforts at publication and enforcements meant that the fact of the Charter was enormously well known. Even for those who knew merely the fact and not the details, the fact was massive, for it embodied the basic principle of the Charter. The king was now subject to the law. This idea had, of course, a long pedigree, but now its truth was proved in a document of unimpeachable authority and overwhelming fame.

Carpenter’s edition of Magna Carta is a stunning scholarly performance from start to finish. The document is presented in all its sniveling glory, with English-Latin facing pages, but the glory of Carpenter’s endeavor is its consummate contextualizing. After the presentation of the text (copiously annotated), Carpenter writes what amounts to a political and social biography of King John and his times. We get wonderfully readable discussions of Magna Carta and the poor, Magna Carta and women, Magna Carta and English law, Magna Carta and the monarchy, Magna Carta and subsequent ages, and a dozen other historical permutations.

All this great surging current of scholarly support works to present the entire world and significance of Magna Carta in one elegant paperback volume, so it’s perfect for students coming to the subject for the first time, but it also digs as deeply as a great many works of specialist scholarship, so it’s perfect for readers who come to the volume already knowing something about the subject. That’s no mean feat of scholarship, and Carpenter makes it look easy. And occasionally, there are even some very faint hints of skepticism about holy worth of Magna Carta itself:

The Charter has indeed become one of the most famous documents in world constitutional history, regarded as a fundamental protection against arbitrary and tyrannical rule. In some ways, this illustrious history is as undeserved as it was unintended. Magna Carta, as originally conceived, certainly did not offer equal protection to all the king’s subjects. It was, in many ways, a selfish document in which the baronial elite looked after its own interests.

That hint – that the substitution of twenty, thirty, a hundred armed and mercenary tyrants for one single tyrant might not have been a purely good thing in “constitutional history” – isn’t extensively pursued, since the aforementioned illustrious history isn’t going anywhere any time soon. But Carpenter’s towering achievement in this volume is the best thing on Magna Carta to appear in this 800th anniversary year of King John’s capitulation to his subjects.