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Medieval Violence provides a detailed analysis of the practice of
medieval brutality, focusing on a thriving region of northern
France in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It
examines how violence was conceptualised in this period, and uses
this framework to investigate street violence, tavern brawls, urban
rebellions, student misbehaviour, and domestic violence. The
interactions between these various forms of violence are examined
in order to demonstrate the complex and communicative nature of
medieval brutality. What is often dismissed as dysfunctional
behaviour is shown to have been highly strategic and socially
integral. Violence was a performance, dependent upon the spaces in
which it took place. Indeed, brutality was contingent upon social
and cultural structures. At the same time, the common stereotype of
the thoughtlessly brutal Middle Ages is challenged, as attitudes
towards violence are revealed to have been complex, troubled, and
ambivalent. Whether violence could function effectively as a form
of communication which could order and harmonise society, or
whether it inevitably degenerated into chaotic disorder where
meaning was multivalent and incomprehensible, remained a matter of
ongoing debate in a variety of contexts. Using a variety of source
material, including legal records, popular literature, and sermons,
Hannah Skoda explores experiences of, and attitudes towards,
violence, and highlights profound contemporary ambiguity concerning
its nature and legitimacy.
How can the concept of nostalgia illuminate the culturally specific
ways in which societies understand the contested relationship
between the past, present, and future? The word nostalgia was
invented in the late seventeenth century to describe the
debilitating effects of homesickness. Now widely defined as a sense
of longing for a lost past, initially it was more closely linked
with dislocation in space. By exploring some of its many textual,
visual and musical manifestations in the tumultuous period between
c. 1350 and 1800, this volume resists the assumption that nostalgia
is a distinctive by-product of modernity. It also forges a fruitful
link between three lively areas of current scholarly enquiry:
memory, temporality, and emotion. The contributors deploy nostalgia
as a tool for investigating perceptions of the passage of time and
historical change, unsettling experiences of migration and
geographical displacement, and the connections between remembering
and forgetting, affect and imagination. Ranging across Europe and
the Atlantic world, they examine the moments, sites and communities
in which it arose, alongside how it was used to express both
criticism and regret about the religious, political, social and
cultural upheavals that shaped the early modern world. They
approach it as a complex mixed feeling that opens a new window into
individual subjectivities and collective mentalities.
The complexity of the interplay and relationships over various
borders in medieval Europe is here fully teased out. The processes
by which ideas, objects, texts and political thought and experience
moved across boundaries in the Middle Ages form the focus of this
book, which also seeks to reassess the nature of the boundaries
themselves; it thus appropriately reflects a major theme of Dr
Malcolm Vale's work, which the essays collected here honour. They
suggest ways of breaking down established historiographical
paradigms of Europe as a set of distinct polities, achieving a more
nuanced picture in which people and objects were constantly moving,
and challenging previous conceptions of units and borders. The
first section examines the construction of boundaries and units in
the later Middle Ages, via topics ranging from linguistic units to
social stratifications, and geographically from the Netherlands and
Scotland to Gascony and the Iberian peninsula; it reveals how much
the relationship between exchange and boundaries was reciprocal.
The second section considers the mechanisms by which it took place,
from West Africa to Italy and Flanders, and discusses the actual
exchange of people, texts, and unusual artefacts. Overall, the
essays bear witness to the constant interplay and interconnections
throughout medieval Europe and beyond. Contributors: Paul Booth,
Maria Joao Violante Branco, Rita Costa-Gomes, Mario Damen, Jan
Dumolyn, Jean Dunbabin, Jean-PhilippeGenet, Michael Jones, Maurice
Keen, Frederique Lachaud, Patrick Lantschner, Guilhem Pepin, R.L.J.
Shaw, Hannah Skoda, Erik Spindler, John Watts.
Medieval Violence provides a detailed analysis of the practice of
medieval brutality, focusing on a thriving region of northern
France in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It
examines how violence was conceptualised in this period, and uses
this framework to investigate street violence, tavern brawls, urban
rebellions, student misbehaviour, and domestic violence. The
interactions between these various forms of violence are examined
in order to demonstrate the complex and communicative nature of
medieval brutality. What is often dismissed as dysfunctional
behaviour is shown to have been highly strategic and socially
integral. Violence was a performance, dependent upon the spaces in
which it took place. Indeed, brutality was contingent upon social
and cultural structures. At the same time, the common stereotype of
the thoughtlessly brutal Middle Ages is challenged, as attitudes
towards violence are revealed to have been complex, troubled, and
ambivalent. Whether violence could function effectively as a form
of communication which could order and harmonise society, or
whether it inevitably degenerated into chaotic disorder where
meaning was multivalent and incomprehensible, remained a matter of
ongoing debate in a variety of contexts. Using a variety of source
material, including legal records, popular literature, and sermons,
Hannah Skoda explores experiences of, and attitudes towards,
violence, and highlights profound contemporary ambiguity concerning
its nature and legitimacy.
Law and law-like institutions are visible in human societies very
distant from each other in time and space. When it comes to
observing and analysing such social constructs historians,
anthropologists, and lawyers run into notorious difficulties in how
to conceptualize them. Do they conform to a single category of
'law'? How are divergent understandings of the nature and purpose
of law to be described and explained? Such questions reach to the
heart of philosophical attempts to understand the nature of law,
but arise whenever we are confronted by law-like practices and
concepts in societies not our own. In this volume leading
historians and anthropologists with an interest in law gather to
analyse the nature and meaning of law in diverse societies. They
start from the concept of legalism, taken from the anthropologist
Lloyd Fallers, whose 1960s work on Africa engaged, unusually, with
jurisprudence. The concept highlights appeal to categories and
rules. The degree to which legalism in this sense informs people's
lives varies within and between societies, and over time, but it
can colour equally both 'simple' and 'complex' law. Breaking with
recent emphases on 'practice', nine specialist contributors
explore, in a wide-ranging set of cases, the place of legalism in
the workings of social life. The essays make obvious the need to
question our parochial common sense where ideals of moral order at
other times and places differ from those of modern North Atlantic
governance. State-centred law, for instance, is far from a 'central
case'. Legalism may be 'aspirational', connecting people to wider
visions of morality; duty may be as prominent a theme as rights;
and rulers from thirteenth-century England to sixteenth-century
Burma appropriate, as much they impose, a vision of justice as
consistency. The use of explicit categories and rules does not
reduce to simple questions of power. The cases explored range from
ancient Asia Minor to classical India, and from medieval England
and France to Saharan oases and southern Arabia. In each case they
assume no knowledge of the society or legal system discussed. The
volume will appeal not only to historians and anthropologists with
an interest in law, but to students of law engaged in legal theory,
for the light it sheds on the strengths and limitations of abstract
legal philosophy.
In this second volume of the groundbreaking survey, Michael J.
Pfeifer edits a collection of essays that illuminates lynching and
other extrajudicial "rough justice" as a transnational phenomenon
responding to cultural and legal issues. The volume's
European-themed topics explore why three communities of medieval
people turned to mob violence, and the ways exclusion from formal
institutions fueled peasant rough justice in Russia. Essays on
Latin America examine how lynching in the United States influenced
Brazilian debates on race and informal justice, and how shifts in
religious and political power drove lynching in twentieth-century
Mexico. Finally, scholars delve into English Canadians' use of
racist and mob violence to craft identity; the Communist Party's
Depression-era campaign against lynching in the United States; and
the transnational links that helped form--and later emanated
from--Wisconsin's notoriously violent skinhead movement in the late
twentieth century. Contributors: Brent M. S. Campney, Amy Chazkel,
Stephen P. Frank, Dean J. Kotlowski, Michael J. Pfeifer, Gema
Santamaria, Ryan Shaffer, and Hannah Skoda.
In this volume, ownership is defined as the simple fact of being
able to describe something as 'mine' or 'yours', and property is
distinguished as the discursive field which allows the articulation
of attendant rights, relationships, and obligations. Property is
often articulated through legalism as a way of thinking that
appeals to rules and to generalizing concepts as a way of
understanding, responding to, and managing the world around one. An
Aristotelian perspective suggests that ownership is the natural
state of things and a prerequisite of a true sense of self. An
alternative perspective from legal theory puts law at the heart of
the origins of property. However, both these points of view are
problematic in a wider context, the latter because it rests heavily
on Roman law. Anthropological and historical studies enable us to
interrogate these assumptions. The articles here, ranging from
Roman provinces to modern-day piracy in Somalia, address questions
such as: How are legal property regimes intertwined with economic,
moral-ethical, and political prerogatives? How far do the
assumptions of the western philosophical tradition explain property
and ownership in other societies? Is the 'bundle of rights' a
useful way to think about property? How does legalism negotiate
property relationships and interests between communities and
individuals? How does the legalism of property respond to the
temporalities and materialities of the objects owned? How are
property regimes managed by states, and what kinds of conflicts are
thus generated? Property and ownership cannot be reduced to natural
rights, nor do they straightforwardly reflect power relations: the
rules through which property is articulated tend to be conceptually
subtle. As the fourth volume in the Legalism series, this
collection draws on common themes that run throughout the first
three volumes: Legalism: Anthropology and History, Legalism:
Community and Justice, and Legalism: Rules and Categories
consolidating them in a framework that suggests a new approach to
legal concepts.
In this second volume of the groundbreaking survey, Michael J.
Pfeifer edits a collection of essays that illuminates lynching and
other extrajudicial "rough justice" as a transnational phenomenon
responding to cultural and legal issues. The volume's
European-themed topics explore why three communities of medieval
people turned to mob violence, and the ways exclusion from formal
institutions fueled peasant rough justice in Russia. Essays on
Latin America examine how lynching in the United States influenced
Brazilian debates on race and informal justice, and how shifts in
religious and political power drove lynching in twentieth-century
Mexico. Finally, scholars delve into English Canadians' use of
racist and mob violence to craft identity; the Communist Party's
Depression-era campaign against lynching in the United States; and
the transnational links that helped form--and later emanated
from--Wisconsin's notoriously violent skinhead movement in the late
twentieth century. Contributors: Brent M. S. Campney, Amy Chazkel,
Stephen P. Frank, Dean J. Kotlowski, Michael J. Pfeifer, Gema
Santamaria, Ryan Shaffer, and Hannah Skoda.
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