Medieval Irish texts reveal distinctive and unexpected constructions of gender. Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland illuminates these ideas through its fresh and provocative re-readings of a wide range of texts, including saga, romance, legal texts, Fenian narrative, hagiography, and ecclesiastical verse. This ground-breaking collection presents new research by emerging and established scholars, who explore a variety of perspectives on sexual difference in medieval Irish culture. The contributors examine the intersections of gender with narrative, visuality, law, speech acts, transgression, and performance - painting a compelling picture of the many ways in which authors and audiences conceptualized gender in medieval Ireland.

Medieval Irish texts reveal distinctive and unexpected constructions of gender. Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland illuminates these ideas through its fresh and provocative re-readings of a wide range of texts, including saga, romance, legal texts, Fenian narrative, hagiography, and ecclesiastical verse.

Despite several decades of research on Supreme Court decision-making by specialists in judicial politics, there is no good answer to a key question: if each justice's behavior on the Court were motivated solely by some kind of "liberal" or "conservative" ideology, what patterns should be expected in the Court's decision-making practices and in the Court's final decisions? It is only when these patterns are identified in advance that political scientists will be able to empirically evaluate theories which assert that the justices' behavior is motivated by the pursuit of their personal policy preferences. This book provides the first comprehensive and integrated model of how strategically rational Supreme Court justices should be expected to behave in all five stages of the Court's decision-making process. The authors' primary focus is on how each justice's wish to gain as desirable a final opinion as possible will affect his or her behavior at each stage of the decision-making process.

Despite several decades of research on Supreme Court decision-making by specialists in judicial politics, there is no good answer to a key question: if each justice's behavior on the Court were motivated solely by some kind of "liberal" or "conservative" ideology, what patterns should be expected in the Court's decision-making practices and in the Court's final decisions? It is only when these patterns are identified in advance that political scientists will be able to empirically evaluate theories which assert that the justices' behavior is motivated by the pursuit of their personal policy preferences. This book provides the first comprehensive and integrated model of how strategically rational Supreme Court justices should be expected to behave in all five stages of the Court's decision-making process. The authors' primary focus is on how each justice's wish to gain as desirable a final opinion as possible will affect his or her behavior at each stage of the decision-making process.