The Sentence and Affidavit of John Church, the Obelisk Preacher

Dowling, Joseph AugustusProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 1.8
Word count
13K words
Chapters
2

Tags

English Originals ReligionLaw Public OpinionEnglish SocietyDeception TacticsUrban RomanceCriminal PsychologySocial CritiqueMoral DilemmaDocumentary NarrativeSatirical StyleReligious Fraud

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Sentence and Affidavit of John Church, the Obelisk Preacher by DowlingAuthor: Dowling, Joseph Augustus,Language: English, Class: KD: Law in general, Comparative and uniform law, Jurisprudence: United Kingdom and Ireland, Release Date: Oct 5, 2018

Editor's review

This book is another legal document in the Project Gutenberg collection related to John Church, compiled by Joseph Augustus Dowling, containing the sentence and affidavit. Compared with a mere trial record, it focuses more on the judgment and written testimony, showing how the case was formally articulated and fixed after the trial. As an electronic text in the British and Irish law category, its value as historical material exceeds its reading pleasure; it is suitable for comparing wording differences among different documents of the same case and observing the writing conventions of judicial documents. The text is in English and bears the linguistic features of early printed documents, requiring patience in reading. Reading the two documents on the same case side by side gives a more complete understanding of the process from trial to sentencing; read alone, it is better as supplementary material for legal history research than as an introductory text.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the judgment section first, then the affidavit, to clarify the connections between the documents.
  2. Read alongside the trial record of the same case, noting differences in wording and emphasis.
  3. Mark legal terms and fixed expressions while reading to build a corpus of judicial documents.
  4. If consulting only for reference, first check the table of contents or section headings to locate the needed content.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2

FAQ

What is the difference between this book and the trial record? The trial record focuses on the statements and exchanges during the proceedings, while this book contains the sentence and affidavit, leaning toward formal documents after the trial. The two are complementary; reading them side by side gives a more complete view of the documentary chain from trial to sentencing.
What role does the affidavit play in the book? An affidavit is a written testimony provided under oath, used to fix the statements of the persons involved. It has formal legal effect in legal documents, and readers can use it to observe the written format and expressive conventions of testimony at the time and to understand the evidence stage in judicial procedure.
Is this book suitable as introductory material for legal English? Not very suitable. The text dates from an early period, its language habits differ from modern legal English, and the content centers on a specific case without systematic explanation. If you already have a foundation, it can serve as supplementary corpus material; beginners should first use contemporary legal English textbooks.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Dowling, Joseph Augustus Author

Public information on Joseph Augustus Dowling is currently limited: his life, nationality, and dates of birth and death are unknown. Only one work by him is held in the collection, The Sentence and Affidavit of John Church, the Obelisk Preacher. The title indicates that the book concerns the sentence and affidavit of John Church, known as the "Obelisk Preacher." Texts of this kind are usually compilations of judicial documents and materials relating to controversies surrounding religious figures, and are historical in nature rather than literary works. Given the lack of further information about Dowling's identity and writing activities, it is difficult at present to determine his specific role in compiling this material or to assess how widely the work circulated and what influence it had at the time. Readers wishing to learn about Dowling should focus on the judicial and religious controversies presented in this work and bear in mind the limitations of the available public information.