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What constituted a crime 2,500 years ago, and how was criminal
activity dealt with? How has our definition of justice evolved over
time alongside developments in law, society, religion and class
structures? 36 experts address these pressing questions in a
six-volume reference set that spans 2,500 years of human history.
Integrating perspectives from history, cultural studies, philosophy
and classics, this globally-focused work traces developments in the
ever-changing criminal and justice worlds against a variety of
social, legal and cultural contexts. Individual volume editors
ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as
possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the
volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period
in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by
reading the relevant chapter in each of the six. The six volumes
cover: 1. Antiquity (500 BCE - 800 CE); 2. Medieval Age (800 -
1450); 3. Renaissance (1450 - 1650) ; 4. Age of Enlightenment (1650
- 1800); 5. Age of Empire (1800 - 1920); 6. Modern Age (1920 -
2000+). Themes include crime, types of criminal, law enforcement,
sanctions and representations of crime and punishment. The page
extent is approximately 1,728 pp. with c. 300 illustrations. Each
volume opens with notes on contributors, a series preface and an
introduction, and concludes with notes, bibliography and an index.
The institution of marriage is commonly thought to have fallen
into crisis in late medieval northern France. While prior
scholarship has identified the pervasiveness of clandestine
marriage as the cause, Sara McDougall contends that the pressure
came overwhelmingly from the prevalence of remarriage in violation
of the Christian ban on divorce, a practice we might call "bigamy."
Throughout the fifteenth century in Christian Europe, husbands and
wives married to absent or distant spouses found new spouses to
wed. In the church courts of northern France, many of the
individuals so married were criminally prosecuted.In "Bigamy and
Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne," McDougall traces
the history of this conflict in the diocese of Troyes and places it
in the larger context of Christian theology and culture. Multiple
marriage was both inevitable and repugnant in a Christian world
that forbade divorce and associated bigamy with the unchristian
practices of Islam or Judaism. The prevalence of bigamy might seem
to suggest a failure of Christianization in late medieval northern
France, but careful study of the sources shows otherwise: Clergy
and laity alike valued marriage highly. Indeed, some members of the
laity placed such a high value on the institution that they were
willing to risk criminal punishment by entering into illegal
remarriage. The risk was great: the Bishop of Troyes's judicial
court prosecuted bigamy with unprecedented severity, although this
prosecution broke down along gender lines. The court treated male
bigamy, and only male bigamy, as a grave crime, while female bigamy
was almost completely excluded from harsh punishment. As this
suggests, the Church was primarily concerned with imposing a high
standard on men as heads of Christian households, responsible for
their own behavior and also that of their wives.
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