Contributions to this Festschrift for the renowned American legal and literary scholar William Ian Miller reflect the extraordinary intellectual range of the honorand, who is equally at home discussing legal history, Icelandic sagas, English literature, anger and violence, and contemporary popular culture. Professor Miller's colleagues and former students, including distinguished academic lawyers, historians, and literary scholars from the United States, Canada, and Europe, break important new ground by bringing little-known sources to a wider audience and by shedding new light on familiar sources through innovative modes of analysis. Contributors are Stuart Airlie, Theodore M. Andersson, Nora Bartlett, Robert Bartlett, Jordan Corrente Beck, Carol J. Clover, Lauren DesRosiers, William Eves, John Hudson, Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Kimberley-Joy Knight, Simon MacLean, M.W. McHaffie, Eva Miller, Hans Jacob Orning, Jamie Page, Susanne Pohl-Zucker, Amanda Strick, Helle Vogt, Mark D. West, and Stephen D. White.

This volume aims to balance the traditional literature available on medieval feuding with an exploration of other aspects of vengeance and culture in the Middle Ages. A diverse assortment of interdisciplinary essays from scholars in Europe and North America contest or enlarge traditional approaches to and interpretations of vengeance in the Middle Ages. Each essay attempts to clarify the multifaceted experience of vengeance within a specific medieval context—a particular region, a particular text, a particular social movement. By asking what relationship a distinct factor like authorship or religion has with the concept of vengeance, each author points towards the breadth of meanings of medieval vengeance, and to the heart of the deeper and broader questions that spur scholarly interest in the subject. Geographically, the essays in the volume highlight Western Europe (particularly the Anglo-Norman world), Scotland, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. Thematically, the essays are concerned with heroic cultures of vengeance, vengeance as a legal and political tool, Christian justification and expression of vengeance, literature and the distinction between discourse and reality, and the emotions of vengeance. Methodologically, these interdisciplinary studies incorporate tools borrowed from anthropology, the study of emotion, and modern social and literary theories. This volume is aimed at professional scholars and graduate students within the broad field of medieval studies, including the subfields of history, literature, and religious studies, and is intended to inspire further research on medieval vengeance. However, this collection will also prove interesting to non-medievalists interested in the history of emotion, the justification of human conflict, and the concept of feud and its applicability to specific historical periods.

How did medieval society deal with private justice, with grudges, and with violent emotions? This ground-breaking reader collects for the first time a number of unpublished or difficult-to-find texts that address violence and emotion in the Middle Ages. The sources collected here illustrate the power and reach of the language of vengeance in medieval European society. They span the early, high, and later middle ages, and capture a range of perspectives including legal sources, learned commentaries, narratives, and documents of practice. Though social elites necessarily figure prominently in all medieval sources, sources concerning relatively low-status individuals and sources pertaining to women are included. The sources range from saints' lives that illustrate the idea of vengeance to later medieval court records concerning vengeful practices. A secondary goal of the collection is to illustrate the prominence of mechanisms for peacemaking in medieval European society. The introduction traces recent scholarly developments in the study of vengeance and discusses the significance of these concepts for medieval political and social history.

Explores the role of criminal intent in constituting felony in the first two centuries of the English criminal trial jury.

This volume offers the first comprehensive account of the monetary logic that guided the payment of wergild and blood money in early medieval conflict resolution. In the early middle ages, wergild played multiple roles: it was used to measure a person’s status, to prevent and end conflicts, and to negotiate between an individual and the agents of statehood. This collection of interlocking essays by historians, philologists and jurists represents a major contribution to the study of law and society in Western Europe during the early Middle Ages. Contributors are Lukas Bothe, Warren Brown, Stefan Esders, Wolfgang Haubrichs, Paul Hyams, Tom Lambert, Ralph W. Mathisen, Rob Meens, Han Nijdam, Lisi Oliver, Harald Siems, Karl Ubl, and Helle Vogt. See inside the book.

Contrary to common assumptions, medieval and early modern writers and poets often addressed the high value of freedom, whether we think of such fable authors as Marie de France or Ulrich Bonerius. Similarly, medieval history knows of numerous struggles by various peoples to maintain their own freedom or political independence. Nevertheless, as this study illustrates, throughout the pre-modern period, the loss of freedom could happen quite easily, affecting high and low (including kings and princes) and there are many literary texts and historical documents that address the problems of imprisonment and even enslavement (Georgius of Hungary, Johann Schiltberger, Hans Ulrich Krafft, etc.). Simultaneously, philosophers and theologians discussed intensively the fundamental question regarding free will (e.g., Augustine) and political freedom (e.g., John of Salisbury). Moreover, quite a large number of major pre-modern poets spent a long time in prison where they composed some of their major works (Boethius, Marco Polo, Charles d'Orléans, Thomas Malory, etc.). This book brings to light a vast range of relevant sources that confirm the existence of this fundamental and impactful discourse on freedom, imprisonment, and enslavement.

Disputes lie at the heart of the sagas. Consequently, literary texts have been treated as sources of legal practice – narrations of law – while the sagas themselves and the handling of legal matters by the figures adhere to ‘laws of narration’. The volume addresses this intricate relationship between literature and social practice from the perspective of historians as well as philologists. The contributions focus not only on disputes and their solution in saga literature, but also on the representation of law and its history in sagas and Latin historiography from Scandinavia as well as the representation of laws and norms in mythological texts. They demonstrate that narrations of law provide an indispensable insight into legal culture and its connection to a wider framework of social norms, adjusting the impression given by the laws. The philological approaches underline that the narrative texts also have an agenda of their own when it comes to their representation of law, providing a mirror of conduct, criticising inequity, reinforcing the political and juridical position of kings or negotiating norms in mythological texts. Altogether, the volume underlines the unifying force exerted by a common fiction of law beyond its letter.

This book deals with Vitoria, Charles V and Erasmus. Vitoria’s ideas had a major influence on Charles V and his European and American policy. In turn, Erasmus’ humanism was decisive in the formation of a new international order intellectually discussed by Vitoria and put into practice by the Emperor. Shedding new light on the influence of Francisco de Vitoria and Erasmus on Charles V’s imperial policy, the book’s goal is to explore the impact of Vitoria’s thought with regard to the history of, and contemporary issues in, international law, while also comparing his thinking with that of the well-known humanist Erasmus and assessing their respective influences on the imperial policy of Charles V.

How can dispute records shed light on the study of dispute settlement processes and their social and political underpinnings? This volume addresses this question by investigating the interplay between record-making, disputing process, and the social and political contexts of conflicts. The authors make use of exceptionally rich charter materials from the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Scandinavia, including different types of texts directly and indirectly related to conflicts, in order to contribute to a comparative survey of early medieval dispute records and to a better understanding of the interplay between judicial and other less formal modes of conflict resolution. Contributors are Isabel Alfonso, José M. Andrade, François Bougard, Warren C. Brown, Wendy Davies, Julio Escalona, Kim Esmark, Adam J. Kosto, Juan José Larrea, André Evangelista Marques, Josep M. Salrach, Igor Santos Salazar, and Francesca Tinti.

21st Century Medievalisms. Between the Global and Individual is an edited volume consisting of 14 chapters by scholars interested in contemporary medievalisms across the world. It is a timely contribution to the growing scholarship on medievalisms offering chapters that consider both the individual experiences of medievalisms, as well as those of societies and cultures at large. The chapters of the book are grouped into three parts, the first explores stereotypes and myths in medievalisms; the second examines medievalisms that speak to particular communities and audiences; and the third studies how medievalisms are impacted by or stimulate conversations of politics and gender. These chapters all reflect a growing interest in medievalisms, and the appreciation of how they are present, materialise and evolve in different contexts and offers insights into medievalisms in politics, popular culture, social activism and more. Throughout the book, examples and case studies demonstrate how medievalisms in the modern age are at times individual experiences, at other times global phenomena and sometimes are in between. Therefore these medievalisms can speak to different audiences at the same time, showcasing how the Middle Ages and their memory continue to be a pertinent topic of study within the wider field of medieval studies.