Medievalists reading and writing about and around authority-related themes lack clear definitions of its actual meanings in the medieval context. Authorities in the Middle Ages offers answers to this thorny issue through specialized investigations. This book considers the concept of authority and explores the various practices of creating authority in medieval society. In their studies sixteen scholars investigate the definition, formation, establishment, maintenance, and collapse of what we understand in terms of medieval struggles for authority, influence and power. The interdisciplinary nature of this volume resonates with the multi-faceted field of medieval culture, its social structures, and forms of communication. The fields of expertise include history, legal studies, theology, philosophy, politics, literature and art history. The scope of inquiry extends from late antiquity to the mid-fifteenth century, from the Church Fathers debating with pagans to the rapacious ghosts ruining the life of the living in the Sagas. There is a special emphasis on such exciting but understudied areas as the Balkans, Iceland and the eastern fringes of Scandinavia.

This book analyses the legal literacy, knowledge and skills of people in premodern and modernizing Europe. It examines how laymen belonging both to the common people and the elite acquired legal knowledge and skills, how they used these in advocacy and legal writing and how legal literacy became an avenue for social mobility. Taking a comparative approach, contributors consider the historical contexts of England, Finland, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden. This book is divided into two main parts. The first part discusses various groups of legal literates (scriveners, court of appeal judges and advocates) and their different paths to legal literacy from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The second part analyses the rise of the ownership and production of legal literature - especially legal books meant for laymen - as means for acquiring a degree of legal literacy from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

Fresh approaches to how premodern women were viewed in legal terms, demonstrating how this varied from country to country and across the centuries. There has been a tendency in scholarship on premodern women and the law to see married women as hidden from view, obscured by their husbands in legal records. This volume provides a corrective view, arguing that the extent to which the legal principle of coverture applied has been over-emphasized. In particular, it points up differences between the English common law position, which gave husbands guardianship over their wives and their wives' property, and the position elsewhere in northwest Europe, where wives' property became part of a community of property. Detailed studies of legal material from medieval and early modern England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Ghent, Sweden,Norway and Germany enable a better sense of how, when, and where the legal principle of coverture was applied and what effect this had on the lives of married women. Key threads running through the book are married women'srights regarding the possession of moveable and immovable property, marital property at the dissolution of marriage, married women's capacity to act as agents of their husbands and households in transacting business, and married women's interactions with the courts. Cordelia Beattie is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh; Matthew Frank Stevens is Lecturer in Medieval History at Swansea University Contributors: Lars Ivar Hansen, Shennan Hutton, Lizabeth Johnson, Gillian Kenny, Mia Korpiola, Miriam Muller, S.C. Ogilvie, Alexandra Shepard, Cathryn Spence.

This book analyses the legal literacy, knowledge and skills of people in premodern and modernizing Europe. It examines how laymen belonging both to the common people and the elite acquired legal knowledge and skills, how they used these in advocacy and legal writing and how legal literacy became an avenue for social mobility. Taking a comparative approach, contributors consider the historical contexts of England, Finland, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden. This book is divided into two main parts. The first part discusses various groups of legal literates (scriveners, court of appeal judges and advocates) and their different paths to legal literacy from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The second part analyses the rise of the ownership and production of legal literature - especially legal books meant for laymen - as means for acquiring a degree of legal literacy from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

The first systematic examination of the expectations people had of the law in the middle ages. This book represents the first systematic examination of the expectations people had of the law in the Middle Ages. Up until now historians have used medieval legal records to demonstrate the operation of legal rules, the functioning of legal institutions and the development of the legal profession, but they have rarely considered the attitudes that arose as a result of the processes of law. The papers in this volume investigate the way expectations of the law were generated, captured, revealed or replayed for posterity in medieval Europe in jurisprudential reasoning, the activity of charter writing, the framing of definitions of "liberty", the concern for historical justifications, and the phraseology of various forms of legislation and chancery bills. Attitudes and perceptions are also considered with regard to the active role played by rulers of European states in law-giving and in the organisation of legal institutions. Contextualising some of the developments in medieval law, this volume not only enables generalisations to be made about expectations of the law, but also highlights the existence of national and supra-national similarities as well as differences arising in medieval Europe. Contributors: RICHARD W. KAEUPER, D. HEIRBAUT, M. KORPIOLA, JUDITH EVERARD, CYNTHIA J. NEVILLE, JULIA C. CRICK, H. SUMMERSON, G. SEABOURNE, G. DODD, T. HASKETT, ANTHONY MUSSON, C. STEBBINGS, P. TUCKER