Emotion, Violence, Vengeance and Law in the Middle Ages

Emotion, Violence, Vengeance and Law in the Middle Ages
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004366377

Contributions to this Festschrift for the renowned American legal and literary scholar William Ian Miller reflect the extraordinary intellectual range of the honorand, who is equally at home discussing legal history, Icelandic sagas, English literature, anger and violence, and contemporary popular culture. Professor Miller's colleagues and former students, including distinguished academic lawyers, historians, and literary scholars from the United States, Canada, and Europe, break important new ground by bringing little-known sources to a wider audience and by shedding new light on familiar sources through innovative modes of analysis. Contributors are Stuart Airlie, Theodore M. Andersson, Nora Bartlett, Robert Bartlett, Jordan Corrente Beck, Carol J. Clover, Lauren DesRosiers, William Eves, John Hudson, Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Kimberley-Joy Knight, Simon MacLean, M.W. McHaffie, Eva Miller, Hans Jacob Orning, Jamie Page, Susanne Pohl-Zucker, Amanda Strick, Helle Vogt, Mark D. West, and Stephen D. White.

Vengeance in the Middle Ages

Vengeance in the Middle Ages
Author: Asst Prof Susanna A Throop
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-06-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1409480631

This volume aims to balance the traditional literature available on medieval feuding with an exploration of other aspects of vengeance and culture in the Middle Ages. A diverse assortment of interdisciplinary essays from scholars in Europe and North America contest or enlarge traditional approaches to and interpretations of vengeance in the Middle Ages. Each essay attempts to clarify the multifaceted experience of vengeance within a specific medieval context—a particular region, a particular text, a particular social movement. By asking what relationship a distinct factor like authorship or religion has with the concept of vengeance, each author points towards the breadth of meanings of medieval vengeance, and to the heart of the deeper and broader questions that spur scholarly interest in the subject. Geographically, the essays in the volume highlight Western Europe (particularly the Anglo-Norman world), Scotland, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. Thematically, the essays are concerned with heroic cultures of vengeance, vengeance as a legal and political tool, Christian justification and expression of vengeance, literature and the distinction between discourse and reality, and the emotions of vengeance. Methodologically, these interdisciplinary studies incorporate tools borrowed from anthropology, the study of emotion, and modern social and literary theories. This volume is aimed at professional scholars and graduate students within the broad field of medieval studies, including the subfields of history, literature, and religious studies, and is intended to inspire further research on medieval vengeance. However, this collection will also prove interesting to non-medievalists interested in the history of emotion, the justification of human conflict, and the concept of feud and its applicability to specific historical periods.

Vengeance in Medieval Europe

Vengeance in Medieval Europe
Author: Daniel Lord Smail
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442601264

How did medieval society deal with private justice, with grudges, and with violent emotions? This ground-breaking reader collects for the first time a number of unpublished or difficult-to-find texts that address violence and emotion in the Middle Ages. The sources collected here illustrate the power and reach of the language of vengeance in medieval European society. They span the early, high, and later middle ages, and capture a range of perspectives including legal sources, learned commentaries, narratives, and documents of practice. Though social elites necessarily figure prominently in all medieval sources, sources concerning relatively low-status individuals and sources pertaining to women are included. The sources range from saints' lives that illustrate the idea of vengeance to later medieval court records concerning vengeful practices. A secondary goal of the collection is to illustrate the prominence of mechanisms for peacemaking in medieval European society. The introduction traces recent scholarly developments in the study of vengeance and discusses the significance of these concepts for medieval political and social history.

Balaam's Ass: Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation

Balaam's Ass: Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation
Author: Nicholas Watson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 617
Release: 2022-06-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812298349

For over seven hundred years, bodies of writing in vernacular languages served an indispensable role in the religious and intellectual culture of medieval Christian England, yet the character and extent of their importance have been insufficiently recognized. A longstanding identification of medieval western European Christianity with the Latin language and a lack of awareness about the sheer variety and quantity of vernacular religious writing from the English Middle Ages have hampered our understanding of the period, exercising a tenacious hold on much scholarship. Bringing together work across a range of disciplines, including literary study, Christian theology, social history, and the history of institutions, Balaam's Ass attempts the first comprehensive overview of religious writing in early England's three most important vernacular languages, Old English, Insular French, and Middle English, between the ninth and sixteenth centuries. Nicholas Watson argues not only that these texts comprise the oldest continuous tradition of European vernacular writing, but that they are essential to our understanding of how Christianity shaped and informed the lives of individuals, communities, and polities in the Middle Ages. This first of three volumes lays out the long post-Reformation history of the false claim that the medieval Catholic Church was hostile to the vernacular. It analyzes the complicated idea of the vernacular, a medieval innovation instantiated in a huge body of surviving vernacular religious texts. Finally, it focuses on the first, long generation of these writings, in Old English and early Middle English.

Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England

Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England
Author: Elizabeth Papp Kamali
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2019-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108498795

Explores the role of criminal intent in constituting felony in the first two centuries of the English criminal trial jury.

Wergild, Compensation and Penance

Wergild, Compensation and Penance
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2021-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004466126

This volume offers the first comprehensive account of the monetary logic that guided the payment of wergild and blood money in early medieval conflict resolution. In the early middle ages, wergild played multiple roles: it was used to measure a person’s status, to prevent and end conflicts, and to negotiate between an individual and the agents of statehood. This collection of interlocking essays by historians, philologists and jurists represents a major contribution to the study of law and society in Western Europe during the early Middle Ages. Contributors are Lukas Bothe, Warren Brown, Stefan Esders, Wolfgang Haubrichs, Paul Hyams, Tom Lambert, Ralph W. Mathisen, Rob Meens, Han Nijdam, Lisi Oliver, Harald Siems, Karl Ubl, and Helle Vogt. See inside the book.

Freedom, Imprisonment, and Slavery in the Pre-Modern World

Freedom, Imprisonment, and Slavery in the Pre-Modern World
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-04-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110731797

Contrary to common assumptions, medieval and early modern writers and poets often addressed the high value of freedom, whether we think of such fable authors as Marie de France or Ulrich Bonerius. Similarly, medieval history knows of numerous struggles by various peoples to maintain their own freedom or political independence. Nevertheless, as this study illustrates, throughout the pre-modern period, the loss of freedom could happen quite easily, affecting high and low (including kings and princes) and there are many literary texts and historical documents that address the problems of imprisonment and even enslavement (Georgius of Hungary, Johann Schiltberger, Hans Ulrich Krafft, etc.). Simultaneously, philosophers and theologians discussed intensively the fundamental question regarding free will (e.g., Augustine) and political freedom (e.g., John of Salisbury). Moreover, quite a large number of major pre-modern poets spent a long time in prison where they composed some of their major works (Boethius, Marco Polo, Charles d'Orléans, Thomas Malory, etc.). This book brings to light a vast range of relevant sources that confirm the existence of this fundamental and impactful discourse on freedom, imprisonment, and enslavement.

Empire, Humanism and Rights

Empire, Humanism and Rights
Author: José María Beneyto
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2021-12-10
Genre: Law
ISBN: 303082487X

This book deals with Vitoria, Charles V and Erasmus. Vitoria’s ideas had a major influence on Charles V and his European and American policy. In turn, Erasmus’ humanism was decisive in the formation of a new international order intellectually discussed by Vitoria and put into practice by the Emperor. Shedding new light on the influence of Francisco de Vitoria and Erasmus on Charles V’s imperial policy, the book’s goal is to explore the impact of Vitoria’s thought with regard to the history of, and contemporary issues in, international law, while also comparing his thinking with that of the well-known humanist Erasmus and assessing their respective influences on the imperial policy of Charles V.

Records and Processes of Dispute Settlement in Early Medieval Societies

Records and Processes of Dispute Settlement in Early Medieval Societies
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2023-11-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004683003

How can dispute records shed light on the study of dispute settlement processes and their social and political underpinnings? This volume addresses this question by investigating the interplay between record-making, disputing process, and the social and political contexts of conflicts. The authors make use of exceptionally rich charter materials from the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Scandinavia, including different types of texts directly and indirectly related to conflicts, in order to contribute to a comparative survey of early medieval dispute records and to a better understanding of the interplay between judicial and other less formal modes of conflict resolution. Contributors are Isabel Alfonso, José M. Andrade, François Bougard, Warren C. Brown, Wendy Davies, Julio Escalona, Kim Esmark, Adam J. Kosto, Juan José Larrea, André Evangelista Marques, Josep M. Salrach, Igor Santos Salazar, and Francesca Tinti.