The Old English Penitentials and Anglo-Saxon Law
eBook - PDF

The Old English Penitentials and Anglo-Saxon Law

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Old English Penitentials and Anglo-Saxon Law

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access The Old English Penitentials and Anglo-Saxon Law by Stefan Jurasinski in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & British History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Year
2015
Print ISBN
9781107083417
eBook ISBN
9781316028520
Topic
History
Subtopic
British History
Index
History

Table of contents

  1. Half-title
  2. Series information
  3. Title page
  4. Copyright information
  5. Dedication
  6. Table of contents
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Introduction: Legislation, Custom, and the Sources of Early English Law
  9. 1 The Old English Penitentials and Their Reception
  10. 2 Legal Change, Vernacular Penitentials, and the Chronology of Old English Prose
  11. 3 The Law of the Estate
  12. 4 The Law of the Household
  13. 5 Caring for the Body
  14. 6 Caring for the Mind
  15. Conclusion: Vernacular Penitentials and Secular Lawmaking
  16. Bibliography
  17. Index