Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales

Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales PDF Author: Robin Chapman Stacey
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812295420
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
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 descriptions of internal and external landscapes as metaphors for safety and peril, respectively. Historians disagree about the context in which the lawbooks of medieval Wales should be read and interpreted. Some accept the claim that they originated in a council called by the tenth-century king Hywel Dda, while others see them less as a repository of ancient custom than as the Welsh response to the general resurgence in law taking place in western Europe. Stacey builds on the latter approach to argue that whatever their origins, the lawbooks functioned in the thirteenth century as a critical venue for political commentary and debate on a wide range of subjects, including the threat posed to native independence and identity by the encroaching English; concerns about violence and disunity among the native Welsh; abusive behavior on the part of native officials; unwelcome changes in native practice concerning marriage, divorce, and inheritance; and fears about the increasing political and economic role of women.

Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales

Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales PDF Author: Robin Chapman Stacey
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812295420
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 descriptions of internal and external landscapes as metaphors for safety and peril, respectively. Historians disagree about the context in which the lawbooks of medieval Wales should be read and interpreted. Some accept the claim that they originated in a council called by the tenth-century king Hywel Dda, while others see them less as a repository of ancient custom than as the Welsh response to the general resurgence in law taking place in western Europe. Stacey builds on the latter approach to argue that whatever their origins, the lawbooks functioned in the thirteenth century as a critical venue for political commentary and debate on a wide range of subjects, including the threat posed to native independence and identity by the encroaching English; concerns about violence and disunity among the native Welsh; abusive behavior on the part of native officials; unwelcome changes in native practice concerning marriage, divorce, and inheritance; and fears about the increasing political and economic role of women.

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ISBN: 0812250516
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description


The Legal Triads of Medieval Wales

The Legal Triads of Medieval Wales PDF Author: Sara Elin Roberts
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
"Medieval Wales had a separate system of law to that found in England, and the law has been preserved in several medieval manuscripts. Whilst the purpose of the law manuscripts was to lay down the legal complexities of the era, what has been preserved can also be read as fascinating literature in medieval Welsh. An important element to the law manuscripts is the large collections of legal triads (lists of threes), probably composed for educational, mnemonic purposes, which offer a real insight into the workings of medieval Welsh law." "The Legal Triads of Medieval Wales is an new study and the first full exploration into the legal triads - among the largest collections of triads found in Welsh - covering almost every aspect of medieval Welsh law. Each triad is set in its literary and legal context, with a full edited text, translation and notes for each triad found in the law manuscripts." --Book Jacket.

Excavating the Memory Palace

Excavating the Memory Palace PDF Author: Seth Long
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022669528X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
With the prevalence of smartphones, massive data storage, and search engines, we might think of today as the height of the information age. In reality, every era has faced its own challenges of storing, organizing, and accessing information. While they lacked digital devices, our ancestors, when faced with information overload, utilized some of the same techniques that underlie our modern interfaces: they visualized and spatialized data, tying it to the emotional and sensory spaces of memory, thereby turning their minds into a visual interface for accessing information. In Excavating the Memory Palace, Seth David Long mines the history of Europe’s arts of memory to find the origins of today’s data visualizations, unearthing how ancient constructions of cognitive pathways paved the way for modern technological interfaces. Looking to techniques like the memory palace, he finds the ways that information has been tied to sensory and visual experience, turning raw data into lucid knowledge. From the icons of smart phone screens to massive network graphs, Long shows us the ancestry of the cyberscape and unveils the history of memory as a creative act.

The Medieval World

The Medieval World PDF Author: Peter Linehan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136500057
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 766

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Book Description
This groundbreaking collection brings the Middle Ages to life and conveys the distinctiveness of this diverse, constantly changing period. Thirty-eight scholars bring together one medieval world from many disparate worlds, from Connacht to Constantinople and from Tynemouth to Timbuktu. This extraordinary set of reconstructions presents the reader with a vivid re-drawing of the medieval past, offering fresh appraisals of the evidence and modern historical writing. Chapters are thematically linked in four sections: identities beliefs, social values and symbolic order power and power-structures elites, organizations and groups. Packed full of original scholarship, The Medieval World is essential reading for anyone studying medieval history.

Introducing the Medieval Dragon

Introducing the Medieval Dragon PDF Author: Thomas Honegger
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786834707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
Arnold, Martin. 2018. The Dragon. Fear and Power. London: Reaktion Books. My book is much shorter and focusses on the medieval (European) dragon, while Martin’s book covers all centuries and also the Asian tradition.

Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl PDF Author: Damian Walford Davies
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1783169427
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Published to mark the centenary of Roald Dahl’s (Welsh) birth, Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected breaks new ground by revealing the place of Wales in the imagination of the writer known as ‘the world’s number one storyteller’. Exploring the complex conditioning presence of Wales in his life and work, the essays in this collection dramatically defamiliarise Dahl and in the process render him uncanny. Importantly, Dahl is encountered whole – his books for children and his fiction for adults are read as mutually invigorating bodies of work, both of which evidence the ways in which Wales, and the author’s Anglo-Welsh orientation, demand articulation throughout the career. Recognising the impossibility of constructing a monolithic ‘Welsh’ Dahl, the contributors explore the compound and nuanced ways in which Wales signifies across the oeuvre. Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected takes Dahl studies into new territory in terms of both subject and method, showing the new horizons that open up when Dahl is read through a Welsh lens. Locating Dahl in illuminating new textual networks, resourcefully offering fresh angles of entry into classic Dahl texts, rehabilitating neglected Dahl texts, and analysing the layered genesis of (seemingly) familiar works by excavating the manuscripts, this innovative volume brings Dahl ‘home’ in order to render him invigoratingly unhomely. The result is not a parochialisation of Dahl, but rather a new internationalisation.

Welsh Gothic

Welsh Gothic PDF Author: Jane Aaron
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 0708326099
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Welsh Gothic, the first study of its kind, introduces readers to the array of Welsh Gothic literature published from 1780 to the present day. Informed by postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory, it argues that many of the fears encoded in Welsh Gothic writing are specific to the history of Welsh people, telling us much about the changing ways in which Welsh people have historically seen themselves and been perceived by others. The first part of the book explores Welsh Gothic writing from its beginnings in the last decades of the eighteenth century to 1997. The second part focuses on figures specific to the Welsh Gothic genre who enter literature from folk lore and local superstition, such as the sin-eater, cŵn Annwn (hellhounds), dark druids and Welsh witches. Contents Prologue: ‘A Long Terror’ PART I: HAUNTED BY HISTORY 1. Cambria Gothica (1780s–1820s) 2. An Underworld of One’s Own (1830s–1900s). 3. Haunted Communities (1900s–1940s). 4. Land of the Living Dead (1940s–1997). PART II: ‘THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE CELTIC TWILIGHT’ 5. Witches, Druids and the Hounds of Annwn. 6. The Sin-eater Epilogue: Post-devolution Gothic Notes Select Bibliography Index

Savages, Romans, and Despots

Savages, Romans, and Despots PDF Author: Robert Launay
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022657539X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Europeans struggled to understand their identity in the same way we do as individuals: by comparing themselves to others. In Savages, Romans, and Despots, Robert Launay takes us on a fascinating tour of early modern and modern history in an attempt to untangle how various depictions of “foreign” cultures and civilizations saturated debates about religion, morality, politics, and art. Beginning with Mandeville and Montaigne, and working through Montesquieu, Diderot, Gibbon, Herder, and others, Launay traces how Europeans both admired and disdained unfamiliar societies in their attempts to work through the inner conflicts of their own social worlds. Some of these writers drew caricatures of “savages,” “Oriental despots,” and “ancient” Greeks and Romans. Others earnestly attempted to understand them. But, throughout this history, comparative thinking opened a space for critical reflection. At its worst, such space could give rise to a sense of European superiority. At its best, however, it could prompt awareness of the value of other ways of being in the world. Launay’s masterful survey of some of the Western tradition’s finest minds offers a keen exploration of the genesis of the notion of “civilization,” as well as an engaging portrait of the promises and perils of cross-cultural comparison.

In the Shadow of the Pulpit

In the Shadow of the Pulpit PDF Author: M. Wynn Thomas
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 0708323421
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Ranging from the nineteenth-century to the present, this book explores several central aspects of the ways in which the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales has responded to what was, for a crucial period of a century or so, the dominant culture of Wales: the culture of Welsh Nonconformity. In the introduction, the author reflects on why no sustained attempt has hitherto been made to investigate one of the formative cultural influences on modern 'Anglo-Welsh' literature, the Nonconformist inheritance. The importance of addressing this strange and significant cultural deficit is then explained, and a preliminary attempt made to capture something of the spirit of Welsh Nonconformity. The succeeding chapters address and seek to answer such questions as: What exactly did the Welsh chapels believe and do? Why have the English-language writers of Wales, from Caradoc Evans and Dylan Thomas to R.S. Thomas and the authors of today, been so fascinated by them? How accurate are the impressions we've been given of chapel life and chapel people in the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales? The answers offered may alter our views both of the Welsh Nonconformist past and of Welsh writing in English. One of the ideas advanced is that many of Wales' most important writers went to war with the preachers in their texts, and that their work is therefore the site of cultural struggle. Theirs was a war in words waged to determine who would have the last word on modern Welsh experience.