Download or read book Law Literature and Social Regulation in Early Medieval England written by Andrew Rabin and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-02-21 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Valuable new insights into the multi-layered and multi-directional relationship of law, literature, and social regulation in pre-Conquest English society. Pre-Conquest English law was among the most sophisticated in early medieval Europe. Composed largely in the vernacular, it played a crucial role in the evolution of early English identity and exercised a formative influence on the development of the Common Law. However, recent scholarship has also revealed the significant influence of these legal documents and ideas on other cultural domains, both modern and pre-modern. This collection explores the richness of pre-Conquest legal writing by looking beyond its traditional codified form. Drawing on methodologies ranging from traditional philology to legal and literary theory, and from a diverse selection of contributors offering a broad spectrum of disciplines, specialities and perspectives, the essays examine the intersection between traditional juridical texts - from law codes and charters to treatises and religious regulation - and a wide range of literary genres, including hagiography and heroic poetry. In doing so, they demonstrate that the boundary that has traditionally separated "law" from other modes of thought and writing is far more porous than hitherto realized. Overall, the volume yields valuable new insights into the multi-layered and multi-directional relationship of law, literature, and social regulation in pre-Conquest English society.
Download or read book Medieval and Early Modern Murder written by Larissa Tracy and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2021-03-19 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wealth of sources from different disciplines, the essays here provide a nuanced picture of how medieval and early modern societies viewed murder and dealth with murderers.
Download or read book The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature written by Elise Wang and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-23 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature explores the literary inheritance of criminal procedure in thirteenth to fifteenth century English law, focusing on felony, the gravest common law offense. Most scholarship in medieval law and literature has focused on statute and theory, drawing from the instantiating texts of English law: acts of Parliament, judicial treatises, the Magna Carta. But those whose job it was to write about the law rarely wrote about felony. Its definition was left to its practice--from investigation to conviction--and that procedure fell to local communities who were generally untrained in the law. Left with many practical and ethical questions and few legal answers, they turned to cultural ones, archived in sermons they had heard, plays they had seen, and poetry they knew. This book reads the documents of criminal procedure--coroners' reports, plea rolls, and gaol delivery records--alongside literary scenes of investigation, interrogation, and witnessing to tell a new intellectual history of criminal procedure's beginnings. The chapters of The Making of Felony Procedure guide the reader through the steps of a felony prosecution, from act to conviction, examining the questions local communities faced at each step. What evidence should be prioritized in a death investigation? Should the accused consider narrative satisfaction when building his plea? What are the dangers of a witnessing system that depends so heavily on a few "oathworthy" men? What can a jury do if the accused's guilt seems partial or complex? And what if the defendant-for whatever reason--refuses to participate in this new, still--delicate system of justice? The book argues that answers they found, and the sources that informed them, created the system that became modern criminal procedure. The epilogue offers some thoughts about the resilience and incoherence of the concept of felony, from the start of the jury trial to the present day.
Download or read book Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England written by Debby Banham and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interrogations of materiality and geography, narrative framework and boundaries, and the ways these scholarly pursuits ripple out into the wider cultural sphere. Early medieval England as seen through the lens of comparative and interconnected histories is the subject of this volume. Drawn from a range of disciplines, its chapters examine artistic, archaeological, literary, and historical artifacts, converging around the idea that the period may not only define itself, but is often defined from other perspectives, specifically here by modern scholarship. The first part considers the transmission of material culture across borders, while querying the possibilities and limits of comparative and transnational approaches, taking in the spread of bread wheat, the collapse of the art-historical "decorative" and "functional", and the unknowns about daily life in an early medieval English hall. The volume then moves on to reimagine the permeable boundaries of early medieval England, with perspectives from the Baltic, Byzantium, and the Islamic world, including an examination of Vercelli Homily VII (from John Chrysostom's Greek Homily XXIX), Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā's Arabic descriptions of Barṭīniyah ("Britain"), and an consideration of the Old English Orosius. The final chapters address the construction of and responses to "Anglo-Saxon" narratives, past and present: they look at early medieval England within a Eurasian perspective, the historical origins of racialized Anglo-Saxonism(s), and views from Oceania, comparing Hiberno-Saxon and Anglican Melanesian missions, as well as contemporary reactions to exhibitions of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and Pacific Island cultures. Contributors: Debby Banham, Britton Elliott Brooks, Caitlin Green, Jane Hawkes, John Hines, Karen Louise Jolly, Kazutomo Karasawa, Carol Neuman de Vegvar, John D. Niles, Michael W. Scott, Jonathan Wilcox
Download or read book Emotional Practice in Old English Literature written by Alice Jorgensen and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how emotions were practised and performed through Old English texts.Scholarship is increasingly interested in investigating concepts of emotion found in Old English literature. This study takes the next step, arguing that both heroic and religious texts were vehicles for emotional practice - that is, for doing things with emotion. Using case studies from heroic poetry (Beowulf, The Battle of Brunanburh and The Battle of Maldon), religious poetry (Christ I and Christ III) and homilies (selections from the Vercelli Book, Blickling Homilies and the works of Wulfstan), it shows via detailed close readings that texts could be used to act out emotional styles, manage the emotions arising from specific events, and negotiate relationships both within social groups and with God. Meanwhile, a chapter on the Old English Boethius explores how the control of unruly emotions is theorized as the transfer of attachment from the things of this world to the things of the divine. Overall, the volume offers new angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal. angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal.
Download or read book The Reigns of Edmund Eadred and Eadwig 939 959 written by Mary Elizabeth Blanchard and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays highlighting the importance of three kings - Edmund, Eadred and Eadwig - in understanding England in the tenth century. Much scholarly attention has been devoted to both the expanding kingdom of Alfred the Great, Edward the Elder, and Æthelstan, and to the larger and integrated realm of their more distant successors, Edgar and Æthelred II. However, the English kingdom in the 940s and 950s, and its three kings, Edmund (939-946), Eadred (946-955), and Eadwig (955-959), the men who inherited and held together the kingdom created by their immediate predecessors, have been somewhat neglected, with little research being dedicated to these men as kings, or the era in which they ruled. This volume offers a variety of approaches to the period. Its contributors bring to light royal legal innovations to ecclesiastical law, oaths, heriot, complex factional politics, including the crucial role of queens, differing perspectives on the final era of an independent northern kingdom of York, and developments in literary culture outside the domineering trend of the later monastic reformers.
Download or read book Law Liberty and the Constitution written by Harry Potter and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2015 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new approach to the telling of legal history, devoid of jargon and replete with good stories, which will be of interest to anyone wishing to know more about the common law - the spinal cord of the English body politic.
Download or read book Bonds of Secrecy written by Benjamin A. Saltzman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How beliefs about human and divine secrets informed medieval ideas about the mind and shaped the practices of literary interpretations What did it mean to keep a secret in early medieval England? It was a period during which the experience of secrecy was intensely bound to the belief that God knew all human secrets, yet the secrets of God remained unknowable to human beings. In Bonds of Secrecy, Benjamin A. Saltzman argues that this double-edged conception of secrecy and divinity profoundly affected the way believers acted and thought as subjects under the law, as the devout within monasteries, and as readers before books. One crucial way it did so was by forming an ethical relationship between the self and the world that was fundamentally different from its modern reflex. Whereas today the bearers of secrets might be judged for the consequences of their reticence or disclosure, Saltzman observes, in the early Middle Ages a person attempting to conceal a secret was judged for believing he or she could conceal it from God. In other words, to attempt to hide from God was to become ensnared in a serious sin, but to hide from the world while deliberately and humbly submitting to God's constant observation was often a hallmark of spiritual virtue. Looking to law codes and religious architecture, hagiographies and riddles, Bonds of Secrecy shows how legal and monastic institutions harnessed the pervasive and complex belief in God's omniscience to produce an intense culture of scrutiny and a radical ethics of secrecy founded on the individual's belief that nothing could be hidden from God. According to Saltzman, this ethics of secrecy not only informed early medieval notions of mental activity and ideas about the mind but also profoundly shaped the practices of literary interpretation in ways that can inform our own contemporary approaches to reading texts from the past.
Download or read book Sodomy Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature written by William E. Burgwinkle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-07-08 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Burgwinkle surveys poetry and letters, histories and literary fiction - including Grail romances - to offer a historical survey of attitudes towards same-sex love during the centuries that gave us the Plantagenet court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, courtly love, and Arthurian lore. Burgwinkle illustrates how 'sodomy' becomes a problematic feature of narratives of romance and knighthood. Most texts of the period denounce sodomy and use accusations of sodomitical practice as a way of maintaining a sacrificial climate in which masculine identity is set in opposition to the stigmatised other, for example the foreign, the feminine, and the heretical. What emerges from these readings, however, is that even the most homophobic, masculinist and normative texts of the period demonstrate an inability or unwillingness to separate the sodomitical from the orthodox. These blurred boundaries allow readers to glimpse alternative, even homoerotic, readings.
Download or read book Expectations of the Law in the Middle Ages written by Anthony Musson and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2001 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first systematic examination of the expectations people had of the law in the middle ages.
Download or read book Environment Society and Landscape in Early Medieval England written by Tom Williamson and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origins of England's regional cultures are here shown to be strongly influenced by the natural environment and geographical features. The Anglo-Saxon period was crucial in the development of England's character: its language, and much of its landscape and culture, were forged in the period between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. Historians and archaeologists have long been fascinated by its regional variations, by the way in which different parts of the country displayed marked differences in social structures, settlement patterns, and field systems. In this controversial and wide-ranging study, the author argues that such differences were largely a consequence of environmental factors: of the influence of climate, soils and hydrology, and of the patterns of contact and communication engendered by natural topography. He also suggests that such environmental influences have been neglected over recent decades by generations of scholars who are embedded in an urban culture and largely divorced from the natural world; and that an appreciation of the fundamental role of physical geography in shaping human affairs can throw much new light on a number of important debates about early medieval society. The book will be essential reading for all those interestedin the character of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian settlements, in early medieval social and territorial organization, and in the origins of the England's medieval landscapes. Tom Williamson is Professor of LandscapeHistory, University of East Anglia; he has written widely on landscape archaeology, agricultural history, and the history of landscape design.
Download or read book Old Age in Early Medieval England written by Thijs Porck and published by Anglo-Saxon Studies. This book was released on 2021-06-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First full-length study of the notion and concept of old age in early medieval England.
Download or read book Medical Texts in Anglo Saxon Literary Culture written by Emily Kesling and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Best First Monograph from the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England (ISSEME) 2021. An examination of the Old English medical collections, arguing that these texts are products of a learned intellectual culture.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature 1500 1700 written by Lorna Hutson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 833 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. For historians of early modern England, turning to legal archives and learning more about legal procedure has seemed increasingly relevant to the project of understanding familial and social relations as well as political institutions, state formation, and economic change. Literary scholars and intellectual historians have also shown how classical forensic rhetoric formed the basis both of the humanist teaching of literary composition (poetry and drama) and of new legal epistemologies of fact-finding and evidence evaluation. In addition, the post-Reformation jurisdictional dominance of the common law produced new ways of drawing the boundaries between private conscience and public accountability. This Handbook brings historians, literary scholars, and legal historians together to build on and challenge these and similar lines of inquiry. Chapters in the Handbook consider the following topics in a variety of combinations: forensic rhetoric, poetics and evidence; humanist and legal learning; political and professional identities at the Inns of Court; poetry, drama, and visual culture; local governance and legal reform; equity, conscience, and religious law; legal transformations of social and affective relations (property, marriage, witchcraft, contract, corporate personhood); authorial liability (libel, censorship, press regulation); rhetorics of liberty, slavery, torture, and due process; nation, sovereignty, and international law (the British archipelago, colonialism, empire).
Download or read book Royal Regulation of Loans and Sales in Medieval England written by Gwen Seabourne and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Financial legislation demonstrates the advancing role of law in the later middle ages.
Download or read book Maintenance in Medieval England written by Jonathan Rose and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-22 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book covering those who abused and misused the legal system in medieval England and the initial attempts of the Anglo-American legal system to deal with these forms of legal corruption. Maintenance, in the sense of intermeddling in another person's litigation, was a source of repeated complaint in medieval England. This book reveals for the first time what actually transpired in the resultant litigation. Extensive study of the primary sources shows that the statutes prohibiting maintenance did not achieve their objectives because legal proceedings were rarely brought against those targeted by the statutes: the great and the powerful. Illegal maintenance was less extensive than frequently asserted because medieval judges recognized a number of valid justifications for intermeddling in litigation. Further, the book casts doubt on the effectiveness of the statutory regulation of livery. This is a treasure trove for legal historians, literature scholars, lawyers, and academic libraries.
Download or read book Bishop thelwold His Followers and Saints Cults in Early Medieval England written by Alison Hudson and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of how Æthelwold and those he influenced deployed the promotion of saints to implement religious reform.
