You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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...
Examines the institution of personal suretyship through the remarkable rich sources extant from medieval Ireland and Wales.
What does it mean to talk about law as theater, to speak about the "performance" of transactions as mundane as the sale of a pig or as agonizing as receiving compensation for a dead kinsman? In Dark Speech, Robin Chapman Stacey explores such questions by examining the interaction between performance and law in Ireland between the seventh and ninth centuries. Exposing the inner workings of the Irish legal system, Stacey examines the manner in which publicly enacted words and silences were used to construct legal and political relationships in a society where traditional hierarchies were very much in flux. Law in early Ireland was a verbal art, grounded as much in aesthetics as in the enforcem...
Focused in scope, and emphasizes methodological aspects of Celtic scholarship. This collection of original essays illuminates the importance of theoretical considerations in the study of early medieval sources.
Provides a portrait of life in Celtic Ireland, from A.D. 400 to 1200, through an examination of legends, ancient texts, artifacts, art, and architecture of the time.
Law and Language in the Middle Ages investigates the relationship between law and legal practice from the linguistic perspective, exploring not only how legal language expresses and advances power relations but also how the language of law legitimates power.
Significant contributions on Celtic history, law, archaeology and literature.
This is Not a Grail Romance provides answers to some of the most important questions surrounding the medieval Welsh Arthurian tale Historia Peredur vab Efrawc, one of the few surviving medieval Welsh narrative compositions, and an important member of the ‘Grail’ family of medieval European narratives. The study demonstrates that Historia Peredur is an original Welsh composition, rather than (as previous theories have suggested) being an adaptation of the twelfth-century French grail romance. The new analysis of the structure of Historia Peredur presented here shows it to be as complex as it has always been thought – but also more formal, and the result of intentional and intricate design. The seeming inconsistencies or oddities in Historia Peredur can be understood by reading it in its medieval Welsh cultural context, allowing the modern reader a greater appreciation of both the narrative and the culture that produced it.
A survey of attitudes to marriage as represented in medieval legal and literary texts.
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.