(Source: University of Pennsylania Press)
The University
of Pennsylvania Press has published a book on legal writing as a form of
political fiction in Medieval Wales.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In Law and the
Imagination in Medieval Wales, Robin Chapman Stacey explores the idea of law as
a form of political fiction: a body of literature that blurs the lines
generally drawn between the legal and literary genres. She argues that for
jurists of thirteenth-century Wales, legal writing was an intensely imaginative
genre, one acutely responsive to nationalist concerns and capable of
reproducing them in sophisticated symbolic form. She identifies narrative
devices and tropes running throughout successive revisions of legal texts that
frame the body as an analogy for unity and for the court, that equate maleness
with authority and just rule and femaleness with its opposite, and that employ
descriptions of internal and external landscapes as metaphors for safety and
peril, respectively.
Historians
disagree about the context in which the lawbooks of medieval Wales should be
read and interpreted. Some accept the claim that they originated in a council
called by the tenth-century king Hywel Dda, while others see them less as a
repository of ancient custom than as the Welsh response to the general
resurgence in law taking place in western Europe. Stacey builds on the latter
approach to argue that whatever their origins, the lawbooks functioned in the
thirteenth century as a critical venue for political commentary and debate on a
wide range of subjects, including the threat posed to native independence and
identity by the encroaching English; concerns about violence and disunity among
the native Welsh; abusive behavior on the part of native officials; unwelcome
changes in native practice concerning marriage, divorce, and inheritance; and
fears about the increasing political and economic role of women.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robin Chapman
Stacey is Professor of History at the University of Washington. She is author
of The Road to Judgment: From Custom to Court in Medieval Ireland and Wales and
Dark Speech: The Performance of Law in Early Ireland, both available from the
University of Pennsylvania Press.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction. Reading
Law
PART I. IMAGINED
LANDSCAPES
Chapter 1.
Britain and Wales
Chapter 2. Court
and Country
PART II. BODY
AND BAWDY
Chapter 3.
Bodies and Nobodies
Chapter 4. Humor
and the Household
Chapter 5. Sex
and Marriage
PART III.
VIOLENCE
Chapter 6. Dogs
in the Nighttime
Conclusion. Law
and the Imagination
List of
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
More information
here
No comments:
Post a Comment