Audun's Story is the tale of an Icelandic farmhand who buys a polar bear in Greenland for no other reason than to give it to the Danish king, half a world away. It can justly be listed among the finest pieces of short fiction in world literature. Terse in the best saga style, it spins a story of complex competitive social action, revealing the cool wit and finely-calibrated reticence of its three main characters: Audun, Harald Hardradi, and King Svein. The tale should have much to engage legal and cultural historians, anthropologists, economists, philosophers, and students of literature. The...

The present "revolution" in biological technology is leading lawyers to fundamentally reconsider the laws of human reproduction .What is at stake is not only the transmission of life but also the transmission of a certain order of the things on which society is based. This is the reason why the law has always sought to regulate the transmission of life. Covering themes from Canon and medieval Roman Law to the 1804 'Code civil', the work includes twenty-three articles on the history of law about a number of modern-day questions. They deal with the close connections long maintained between...

The Medieval Church taught that marriage was indissoluble and that consent was the key. Why then could a marriage be dissolved by one spouse joining a religious order after an exchange of consent but before consummation? This question vexed Thirteenth-century academics and, in the fourteenth century, Pope John XXII asked a group of leading theologians and lawyers to study the issue. Position-papers were produced to explain the exception to the rule of indissolubility for chaste monks and nuns, and to explore whether the pope had the power to extend it to celibate priests and deacons. These...

This book offers a fundamental reassessment of the origins of a central court in Scotland. It examines the early judicial role of Parliament, the development of "the Session" in the fifteenth century as a judicial sitting of the King's Council, and its reconstitution as the College of Justice in 1532. Drawing on new archival research into jurisdictional change, litigation and dispute settlement, the book breaks with established interpretations and argues for the overriding significance of the foundation of the College of Justice as a supreme central court administering civil justice. This...

Cain Lanamna "The Law of Couples," an Old Irish text dated to c. 700, is arguably the most important source of information concerning women and the household economy in early Ireland. The text describes all the recognized marriages and unions, both legal and illegal, and provides information regarding the allocation of property in the event of a divorce. The text was heavily glossed over a period of several centuries and provides insights into changes in the Irish legal system. This book provides, for the first time, an English translation of the entire text and all the accompanying...

Between the reigns of Clovis and Charlemagne (AD 511-768) at least eighty ecclesiastical synods assembled in the Kingdom of the Franks. This book defines the functions and modus operandi of the Frankish church council as an administrative body.

This book is the first to investigate the practice of summary justice in a late medieval Italian commune. In delineating the political and social context of that development in late medieval Bologna, it also is the first to study the phenomenon of oligarchy not only at the level of the executive body of a commune, but also in the broader councils of commune and popolo, as well as among the ranks of the enfranchised political class. The dominant popolo party constructed itself through multiple forms of exclusion that deeply affected the administration of justice and led to the rise of new...

Felix Liebermann's Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (1903-1916) remains the single most important contribution to the study of early English law. This volume marks the Gesetze's centenary by bringing together original essays by an international group of leading scholars specializing in medieval legal culture. The essays address not only Liebermann's life and legacy, but also major issues in the study of early law, including the relationship between Old English legal and penitential texts, the provenance of early English legal manuscripts, the composition and dating of pre-Magna Carta...

A strict definition of kinship - a canonical one - was in introduced in to the Nordic medieval legislation. This replaced a looser definition. According to a canonical definition of kinship - constructed after the Church's incest prohibitions, you were obligated towards all your blood-relatives. This doctrine applies where: 1) The kin group acted as a legal person towards a third party in cases about paying of wergeld, and where the kinsmen collectively took an oath. 2) Rights and obligations between the kindred regulated land transactions either by inheritance, donations or sale. Here the...

Llawysgrif Pomffred presents for the first time an edition of an overlooked Welsh law manuscript, Peniarth 259B. This is an important and groundbreaking edition which will contribute to our understanding of the relationship and development of the Welsh law texts. The manuscript contains a law text of the Cyfnerth redaction, seen to be the earliest of the Welsh law redactions, and it also has a lengthy tail of additional material which is largely practical in nature, and seems to reflect the legal situation in the March of Wales, with English and Welsh legal customs being mixed. The...