I’m happy to join a collection of lawyers, historians, and literary theorists in Literature and the Legal Imaginary: Knowing Justice, a new book in the Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature series based out of Cambridge University. My own chapter (“The Common Consent of Words: An Aristotelian Element of Hobbesian Legal Rhetoric”) shows how a 1637 summary of Aristotle’s Rhetoric paradoxically draws out some important developments in Hobbes “scientific phase,” during which he reportedly turned away from the rhetorical and humanist texts of his early career and tried to ground his political philosophy in demonstrable proof.