Boydell and Brewer is publishing
a new book on how medieval and early modern societies viewed murder and dealt
with murderers.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Murder - the perpetrators,
victims, methods and motives - has been the subject of law, literature,
chronicles and religion, often crossing genres and disciplines and employing
multiple modes of expression and interpretation. As the chapters in this volume
demonstrate, definitions of murder, manslaughter and justified or unjustified
homicide depend largely on the legal terminology and the laws of the society.
Much like modern nations, medieval societies treated murder and murderers
differently based on their social standing, the social standing of the victim,
their gender, their mental capacity for understanding their crime, and intent,
motive and means.
The three parts of this volume
explore different aspects of this crime in the Middle Ages. The first provides
the legal template for reading cases of murder in a variety of sources. The
second examines the public hermeneutics of murder, especially theways in which
medieval societies interpreted and contextualised their textual traditions:
Icelandic sagas, Old French fabliaux, Arthuriana and accounts of assassination.
Finally, the third part focuses on the effects of murder within the community:
murder as a social ill, especially in killing kin.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
LARISSA TRACY is Professor of
Medieval Literature at Longwood University.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Murder Most Foul -
Larissa Tracy
Secret Killing and Murder by
Magic in the Law of Adoman - Bridgette Slavin
Discursive Murders: The St.
Brice's Day Massacre, Beowulf and Mordor - Jay Paul Gates
Mourning Murderers in Medieval
Jewish Law - Pinchas Roth
Treacherous Murder: Language and
Meaning in French Murder Trials - Jolanta Komornicka
'Mordre wol out': Murder and
Justice in Chaucer - Larissa Tracy
Bringing Murder to Light: Death,
Publishing and Performance in Icelandic Sagas - Ilse Schweitzer VanDonkelaar
'I Think This Bacon is Wearing
Shoes': Comedy and Murder in the Old French Fabliaux - Anne Latowsky
'Chevaliers ocirre':
Manslaughter, Morality and Meaning in the Queste del Saint Graal - Lucas Wood
Murder, Manslaughter and
Reputation: Killing in Malory's Le Morte Darthur - Dwayne Coleman
Poisoning as a Means of State
Assassination in Early Modern Venice - Matthew Lubin
Defamation, a Murder More Foul?:
The 'Second Murder' of Louis, Duke of Orleans (d.1407) Reconsidered - Emily
Hutchison
'A general murther, an universal
slaughter': Strategies of Anti-Jesuit Defamation in Reporting Assassination in
the Early Modern Period - Andrew McKenzie-McHarg
Negotiating Murder in the
Historiae of Gregory of Tours - Jeffrey Doolittle
Poisoning, Killing and Murder in
the Edictus Rothari - Thomas Gobbitt
Murder, Foul and Fair, in Shota
Rustaveli's The Man in the Panther Skin - G. Koolemans Beynen
A Multiple Poisoning in the City
of Valencia: Sanxo Calbo's Crime (1442) - Carmel Ferragud
A Case of Mariticide in Late
Medieval France - Patricia Turning
Monstrous Un-Making: Maternal
Infanticide and Female Agency in Early Modern England - Dianne Berg
Imps of Hell: Young People,
Murder and the Early English Press - Ben Parsons
Conclusion - Hannah Skoda
Select Bibliography
More info here
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