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In A Raven’s Battle-cry Charlene M. Eska presents a critical edition and translation of the previously unpublished medieval Irish legal tract Anfuigell. Although the Old Irish text itself is fragmentary, the copious accompanying commentaries provide a wealth of legal, historical, and linguistic information not found elsewhere in the medieval Irish legal corpus. Anfuigell contains a wide range of topics relating to the role of the judge in deciding difficult cases, including kingship, raiding, poets, shipwreck, marriage, fosterage, divorce, and contracts relating to land and livestock.
Essays exploring medieval castration, as reflected in archaeology, law, historical record, and literary motifs. Castration and castrati have always been facets of western culture, from myth and legend to law and theology, from eunuchs guarding harems to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century castrati singers. Metaphoric castration pervadesa number of medieval literary genres, particularly the Old French fabliaux - exchanges of power predicated upon the exchange or absence of sexual desire signified by genitalia - but the plain, literal act of castration and its implications are often overlooked. This collection explores this often taboo subject and its implications for cultural mores and cu...
The spectacle of the wounded body figured prominently in the Middle Ages, from images of Christ’s wounds on the cross, to the ripped and torn bodies of tortured saints who miraculously heal through divine intervention, to graphic accounts of battlefield and tournament wounds—evidence of which survives in the archaeological record—and literary episodes of fatal (or not so fatal) wounds. This volume offers a comprehensive look at the complexity of wounding and wound repair in medieval literature and culture, bringing together essays from a wide range of sources and disciplines including arms and armaments, military history, medical history, literature, art history, hagiography, and archaeology across medieval and early modern Europe. Contributors are Stephen Atkinson, Debby Banham, Albrecht Classen, Joshua Easterling, Charlene M. Eska, Carmel Ferragud, M.R. Geldof, Elina Gertsman, Barbara A. Goodman, Máire Johnson, Rachel E. Kellett, Ilana Krug, Virginia Langum, Michael Livingston, Iain A. MacInnes, Timothy May, Vibeke Olson, Salvador Ryan, William Sayers, Patricia Skinner, Alicia Spencer-Hall, Wendy J. Turner, Christine Voth, and Robert C. Woosnam-Savage.
In Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales, Robin Chapman Stacey explores the idea of law as a form of political fiction: a body of literature that blurs the lines generally drawn between the legal and literary genres. She argues that for jurists of thirteenth-century Wales, legal writing was an intensely imaginative genre, one acutely responsive to nationalist concerns and capable of reproducing them in sophisticated symbolic form. She identifies narrative devices and tropes running throughout successive revisions of legal texts that frame the body as an analogy for unity and for the court, that equate maleness with authority and just rule and femaleness with its opposite, and that employ...
Charlene M. Eska presents in this book a critical edition and translation of a newly discovered early Irish legal text on lost and stolen property, Aidbred. Although the Old Irish text itself is fragmentary, the copious accompanying commentaries provide a wealth of legal, historical, and linguistic information, thus presenting us with a complete picture of the legal procedures involved in reclaiming missing property. This book also includes editions of two other texts concerning property found on land, Heptad 64, and at sea, Muirbretha. The three texts edited together provide a complete picture of this aspect of the early Irish legal system.
Set against the framework of modern political concerns, Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame considers the various forms of treachery in a variety of sources, including literature, historical chronicles, and material culture creating a complex portrait of the development of this high crime.
The Mediterranean and its hinterlands were the scene of intensive and transformative contact between cultures in the Middle Ages. From the seventh to the seventeenth century, the three civilizations into which the region came to be divided geographically – the Islamic Khalifate, the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin West – were busily redefining themselves vis-à-vis one another. Interspersed throughout the region were communities of minorities, such as Christians in Muslim lands, Muslims in Christian lands, heterodoxical sects, pagans, and, of course, Jews. One of the most potent vectors of interaction and influence between these communities in the medieval world was inter-religious conve...
From images of Saint Bartholomew holding his skin in his arms, to scenes of execution in Havelok the Dane, to laws that prescribed it as a punishment for treason, this volume explores the idea and the reality of skin removal - flaying - in the Middle Ages. It interrogates the connection between reality and imagination in depictions of literal skin removal, rather than figurative or theoretical interpretations of flaying, and offers a multilayered view of medieval and early modern perceptions of flaying and its representations in European culture.
Spanning the island of Ireland over three centuries, this first history of Irish divorce places the human experience of marriage breakdown centre stage to explore the impact of a highly restrictive and gendered law, and its reform, on Irish society.
This book studies the Irish law dating from AD 697, called Lex Innocentium or the Law of the Innocents. It is also known as Cáin Adomnáin, being named after Adomnán (d. 704), ninth abbot of Iona, who was responsible for its drafting and promulgation. The law was designed to offer legislative protection for women, children, clerics and other non-arms-bearing people, primarily though not exclusively, in times of conflict. It will be of interest to historians, both professional and lay, in many fields, with special relevance for historians of warfare, the laws of war, and of attitudes towards violence in general. The study seeks to identify the place of this law in the history of the laws of war and, in so doing examines many of the relevant sources in the Christian West, with conclusions that some will find surprising.