So I'm reading part of a fairly mediocre book called Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law by Alan Hunt, a Carleton University (Ottawa) professor who also (co-)penned such classics as Foucault and Law and Marx and Engels on Law. I find an interesting reference on p. 322:
The sudden repeal of the sumptuary laws seems attributable, therefore, solely to opposition on constitutional grounds and not to any intrinsic opposition to the sumptuary project itself (Hooper 1915: 447–49).
Hooper 1915 turns out to be Wilfrid Hooper, "The Tudor Sumptuary Laws," English Historical Review 30 (1915): 433–49. The relevant bit:
The sudden repeal of the sumptuary laws seems attributable, therefore, solely to opposition excited on constitutional grounds and not to any perception of their futility or to any reaction in sumptuary feeling.
No, the citation does not excuse dear Professor Hunt. Much of the preceding page's-worth of text in Governance is also pretty much cribbed from Hooper, albeit with more language fiddling; one gets the sense that by the end of the (long) paragraph, Hunt just got bored and started copying. And just as Kaavya Viswanathan's plagiarism was more egregious because she continued to claim originality even after Scandal 1.0 broke ("I wrote about what I knew, my personal experiences…I’m an Indian-American girl who got good grades from New Jersey, who wanted to go to an Ivy League school, and I drew upon my own experiences, upon quirks of the people around me and my culture, to create my character Opal Mehta"), and just as Victoria "Literally" Ilyinsky's example-thieving was more egregious because she acted like she was plucking the quotations from memory ("who doesn’t remember Fitzgerald’s description of Jay Gatsby: 'He literally glowed?'"), Hunt's Hooper rip-off is — yup — more egregious because he makes himself out to be the real expert.
"The standard account" of the end of sumptuary law, he writes, "is mere invention" — but "there is a longer version of the history of this period that introduces a significant question mark" (321). Hunt's got the straight-up dope, boys and girls! Don't listen to those other historians; they're fakers. Hunt, on the other hand, has hell of dates and legal language; he certainly seems to know what he's talking about. It's not until many sentences down the line that we see the cryptic Hooper citation. Does it refer to just the previous sentence, or to the entire previous paragraph? The answer is the latter, but Hunt profits from the ambiguity; he comes across as the chief scholar. I'd bet a dollar that he never looked at any of the primary sources that Hooper looked at, but he writes as if he did: e.g. "When debate resumed the Bill was passed, the Commons' Journal explaining that 'it repealeth all former laws touching apparel.'" And that's just a horrendous sentence in its own right.
Asshole. I guess I should have expected as much from a Canadian Foucauldian who writes in his preface, "I have used notes in an intentionally informal manner…This book has intentionally been left with many loose ends."
Anyway: back to work.
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