Existing comment:
Magna Carta in Culture
For more than two centuries, Americans and English-speaking people throughout the world have made Magna Carta a part of their cultural heritage through works of art and popular culture. Magna Carta has been a popular topic among writers of romance novels, historical novellas, theater pieces, and even Hollywood films. Recently, it inspired the title of a hip-hop album. Public commemorations of the signing (sealing) of Magna Carta have given rise to popular artifacts and ephemera of all kinds, from postage stamps to full-costumed pageants, from sculptures to coffee mugs. Magna Carta appears regularly in the iconography of liberty in America. But the document's most lasting legacy is its role in the constitutional tradition of safeguarding individual liberties under the rule of law, a tradition that turned to Magna Carta again and again over the centuries for guidance and inspiration. |