Laws of the Alamans and Bavarians

Laws of the Alamans and Bavarians PDF Author: Theodore John Rivers
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512805955
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The survival of Germanic law codes affords us invaluable insight into pre­feudal society. The inviolability of custom and the spontaneity of punishment so characteristic of primitive law served to perpetuate a rigid class structure in which the principal crimes were settled by a monetary recompense based on the victim 's social status. The codes reflect the principles of this culture. For example, the murderer of a freeman was required to pay one hundred and sixty solidi to the victim's family, but a slave's life required a payment of only twenty solidi to his owner. In the Introduction to the first English translation of these early medieval codes of law, the Lex Alamannorum and the Lex Baiuvariorum. Rivers provides a history of the Alamans and Bavarians from their migration into the provinces of the Roman Empire and their settlement in southern Germany to their final assimilation into the Carolingian Empire. He discusses the influence of economic conditions, the Church, and the judicial traditions of the Franks and other tribes upon them. His sensible rendering of texts that are nearly twelve centuries old remains as close as possible to the Latin, allowing the laws to speak for themselves. In addition to an introduction Rivers' translation is accompanied by extensive notes that supply historical and editorial information: a glossary of Germanic and Latin terms; a bibliography to the scholarship on the laws and to the literature on Germanic kingdoms in general, and an ample index.

Laws of the Alamans and Bavarians

Laws of the Alamans and Bavarians PDF Author: Theodore John Rivers
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512805955
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
The survival of Germanic law codes affords us invaluable insight into pre­feudal society. The inviolability of custom and the spontaneity of punishment so characteristic of primitive law served to perpetuate a rigid class structure in which the principal crimes were settled by a monetary recompense based on the victim 's social status. The codes reflect the principles of this culture. For example, the murderer of a freeman was required to pay one hundred and sixty solidi to the victim's family, but a slave's life required a payment of only twenty solidi to his owner. In the Introduction to the first English translation of these early medieval codes of law, the Lex Alamannorum and the Lex Baiuvariorum. Rivers provides a history of the Alamans and Bavarians from their migration into the provinces of the Roman Empire and their settlement in southern Germany to their final assimilation into the Carolingian Empire. He discusses the influence of economic conditions, the Church, and the judicial traditions of the Franks and other tribes upon them. His sensible rendering of texts that are nearly twelve centuries old remains as close as possible to the Latin, allowing the laws to speak for themselves. In addition to an introduction Rivers' translation is accompanied by extensive notes that supply historical and editorial information: a glossary of Germanic and Latin terms; a bibliography to the scholarship on the laws and to the literature on Germanic kingdoms in general, and an ample index.

Households

Households PDF Author: Robert McC. Netting
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520322940
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

The Beast Within

The Beast Within PDF Author: Joyce E. Salisbury
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113576431X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Praise for the first edition: "...a brave and fascinating exploration of an area that has so far been rather neglected by both historical and literary critics. The Beast Within provides extremely valuable information on the legal and cultural background of the human-animal relationship..." -- Studies in the Age of Chaucer This important book offers a unique exploration of the use of and attitude towards animals from the 4th to the 14th centuries. The Beast Within explores the varying roles of animals as property, food and sexual objects, and the complex relationship that this created with the people and world around them. Joyce E. Salisbury takes an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, weaving a historical narrative that includes economic, legal, theological, literary and artistic sources. The book shows how by the end of the Middle Ages the lines between humans and animals had blurred completely, making us recognise the beast that lay within us all. This new edition has been brought right up to date with current scholarship, and includes a brand new chapter on animals on trial and animals as human companions, as well as expanded and updated discussions on fables and saints, and a new section on ‘bestial humans’. This important and provocative book remains a key work on the historical study of animals, as well as in the field of environmental history more generally, and also provides crucial context to ongoing debates on animal rights and the environment.

Science Translated

Science Translated PDF Author: Michèle Goyens
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9058676714
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 491

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Book Description
Mediaevalia Lovaniensia 40Medieval translators played an important role in the development and evolution of a scientific lexicon. At a time when most scholars deferred to authority, the translations of canonical texts assumed great importance. Moreover, translation occurred at two levels in the Middle Ages. First, Greek or Arabic texts were translated into the learned language, Latin. Second, Latin texts became source texts themselves, to be translated into the vernaculars as their importance across Europe started to increase.The situation of the respective translators at these two levels was fundamentally different: whereas the former could rely on a long tradition of scientific discourse, the latter had the enormous responsibility of actually developing a scientific vocabulary. The contributions in the present volume investigate both levels, greatly illuminating the emergence of the scientific terminology and concepts that became so fundamental in early modern intellectual discourse. The scientific disciplines covered in the book include, among others, medicine, biology, astronomy, and physics.

Regna and Gentes

Regna and Gentes PDF Author: Hans-Werner Goetz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004125248
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 720

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Book Description
This book is the first comprehensive and comparative study of the difficult relationship between ethnic identities and political organisation in the post-Roman and early medieval kingdoms. 16 authors (historians, archaeologists and linguists) deal with ten important kingdoms of this period and with its political and legal context.

The Old English Penitentials and Anglo-Saxon Law

The Old English Penitentials and Anglo-Saxon Law PDF Author: Stefan Jurasinski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316033333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Some of the earliest examples of medieval canon law are penitentials - texts enumerating the sins a confessor might encounter among laypeople or other clergy and suggesting means of reconciliation. Often they gave advice on matters of secular law as well, offering judgments on the proper way to contract a marriage or on the treatment of slaves. This book argues that their importance to more general legal-historical questions, long suspected by historians but rarely explored, is most evident in an important (and often misunderstood) subgroup of the penitentials: composed in Old English. Though based on Latin sources - principally those attributed to Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (d.690) and Halitgar of Cambrai (d.831) - these texts recast them into new ordinances meant to better suit the needs of English laypeople. The Old English penitentials thus witness to how one early medieval polity established a tradition of written vernacular law.

Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe

Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe PDF Author: James A. Brundage
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226077896
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 714

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Book Description
This monumental study of medieval law and sexual conduct explores the origin and develpment of the Christian church's sex law and the systems of belief upon which that law rested. Focusing on the Church's own legal system of canon law, James A. Brundage offers a comprehensive history of legal doctrines–covering the millennium from A.D. 500 to 1500–concerning a wide variety of sexual behavior, including marital sex, adultery, homosexuality, concubinage, prostitution, masturbation, and incest. His survey makes strikingly clear how the system of sexual control in a world we have half-forgotten has shaped the world in which we live today. The regulation of marriage and divorce as we know it today, together with the outlawing of bigamy and polygamy and the imposition of criminal sanctions on such activities as sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, and bestiality, are all based in large measure upon ideas and beliefs about sexual morality that became law in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages. "Brundage's book is consistently learned, enormously useful, and frequently entertaining. It is the best we have on the relationships between theological norms, legal principles, and sexual practice."—Peter Iver Kaufman, Church History

Money, Language, and Thought

Money, Language, and Thought PDF Author: Marc Shell
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801846939
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In Money, Language, and Thought, Marc Shell explores the interactions between linguistic and economic production as they inform discourse from Chretien de Troyes to Heidegger. Close readings of works such as the medieval grail legends, The Merchant of Venice, Goethe's Faust, and Poe's "The Gold Bug" reveal how discourse has responded to the dissociation of symbol from thing characteristic of money, and how the development of increasingly symbolic currencies has involved changes in the meaning of meaning. Pursuing his investigations into the modern era, Shell points out significant internalization of economic form in Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. He demonstrates how literature and philosophy have been driven to account self-critically for a "money of the mind" that pervades all discourse, and concludes the book with a discomforting thesis about the cultural and political limits of literature and philosophy in the modern world.

Empires and Communities in the Post-Roman and Islamic World, C. 400-1000 CE

Empires and Communities in the Post-Roman and Islamic World, C. 400-1000 CE PDF Author: Walter Pohl
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190067942
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
"Empires are not an under-researched topic. Recently, there has been a veritable surge in comparative and conceptual studies, not least of pre-modern empires. The distant past can tell us much about the fates of empires that may still be relevant today, and contemporary historians as well as the general public are generally aware of that. Tracing the general development of an empire, we can discern a kind imperial dynamic which follows the momentum of expansion, relies on the structures and achievements of the formative period for a while, and tends to be caught in a downward spiral at some point. Yet single cases differ so much that a general model is hardly ever sufficient.There is in fact little consensus about what exactly constitutes an empire, and it has become standard in publications about empires to note the profusion of definitions.Some refer to size-for instance, 'greater than a million square kilometers', as Peter Turchin suggested. Apart from that, many scholars offer more or less extensive lists of qualitative criteria. Some of these criteria reflect the imperial dynamic, for instance, the imposition of some kind of unity through 'an imperial project', which allows moving broad populations 'from coercion through co-optation to cooperation and identification'"--

God's Peace and King's Peace

God's Peace and King's Peace PDF Author: Bruce R. O'Brien
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 151280522X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Sometime before the middle of the twelfth century, an anonymous English writer composed the Leges Edwardi, a treatise purporting to contain the laws that had been in force under the Anglo-Saxon King Edward the Confessor (1042-1066), cousin of William the Conqueror. The laws were said to have been spoken to William shortly after the Conquest by "English nobles who were wise men and learned in their law," recounting "the rules of their laws and customs" for the invading Norman king. When they had finished, the king wondered whether it might not be better for all of them to live under the law of his Viking ancestors; the English, however, protested that they preferred to live by their own preconquest laws. The king acquiesced, and thus, goes the story, were the laws of King Edward the Confessor authorized. Looking through the lens of this important—if spurious—treatise, God's Peace and King's Peace offers the first ground-level view of English law during the century in which the common law was born. Bruce R. O'Brien compares the Leges Edwardi to other memorials of legal policy and practice from before and after 1066, in both Normandy and England, and advances conclusions about the treatises' reliability on specific points of law. He also shows how the Laws of Edward the Confessor, taken as a record of English law at the conquest, came to be used as authoritative evidence behind the Magna Carta that the king was under the law, and how it was eventually declared a notorious forgery by seventeenth-century antiquaries and Enlightenment historians.