Bøker av Andrew Rabin

Valuable new insights into the multi-layered and multi-directional relationship of law, literature, and social regulation in pre-Conquest English society.Pre-Conquest English law was among the most sophisticated in early medieval Europe. Composed largely in the vernacular, it played a crucial role in the evolution of early English identity and exercised a formative influence on the development of the Common Law. However, recent scholarship has also revealed the significant influence of these legal documents and ideas on other cultural domains, both modern and pre-modern. This collection explores the richness of pre-Conquest legal writing by looking beyond its traditional codified form. Drawing on methodologies ranging from traditional philology to legal and literary theory, and from a diverse selection of contributors offering a broad spectrum of disciplines, specialities and perspectives, the essays examine the intersection between traditional juridical texts - from law codes and charters to treatises and religious regulation - and a wide range of literary genres, including hagiography and heroic poetry. In doing so, they demonstrate that the boundary that has traditionally separated "e;law"e; from other modes of thought and writing is far more porous than hitherto realized. Overall, the volume yields valuable new insights into the multi-layered and multi-directional relationship of law, literature, and social regulation in pre-Conquest English society.

Arguably, more legal texts survive from pre-Conquest England than from any other early medieval European community. The corpus includes roughly seventy royal law-codes, to which can be added well over a thousand charters, writs, and wills, as well as numerous political tracts, formularies, rituals, and homilies derived from legal sources. These texts offer valuable insight into early English concepts of royal authority and political identity. They reveal both the capacities and limits of the king's regulatory power, and in so doing, provide crucial evidence for the process by which disparate kingdoms gradually merged to become a unified English state. More broadly, pre-Norman legal texts shed light on the various ways in which cultural norms were established, enforced, and, in many cases, challenged. And perhaps most importantly, they provide unparalleled insight into the experiences of Anglo-Saxon England's diverse inhabitants, both those who enforced the law and those subject to it.

The relationship between Anglo-Saxon kingship, law, and the functioning of power is explored via a number of different angles.The essays collected here focus on how Anglo-Saxon royal authority was expressed and disseminated, through laws, delegation, relationships between monarch and Church, and between monarchs at times of multiple kingships and changing power ratios. Specific topics include the importance of kings in consolidating the English "e;nation"e;; the development of witnesses as agents of the king's authority; the posthumous power of monarchs; how ceremonial occasions wereused for propaganda reinforcing heirarchic, but mutually beneficial, kingships; the implications of Ine's lawcode; and the language of legislation when English kings were ruling previously independent territories, and the delegation of local rule. The volume also includes a groundbreaking article by Simon Keynes on Anglo-Saxon charters, looking at the origins of written records, the issuing of royal diplomas and the process, circumstances, performance and function of production of records. GALE R. OWEN-CROCKER is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester. Contributors: Ann Williams, Alexander R. Rumble, Carole Hough, Andrew Rabin, Barbara Yorke, Ryan Lavelle, Alaric Trousdale

The continued influence and significance of the legend of Arthur are demonstrated by the articles collected in this volume.The rich vitality of both the Arthurian material itself and the scholarship devoted to it is manifested in this volume. It begins with an interdisciplinary study of swords belonging to Arthurian and other heroes and of the smithswho made them, assessed both in their literary contexts and in "e;historical"e; references to their existence as heroic relics. Two essays then consider the use of Arthurian material for political purposes: a discussion of Caradog's Vita Gildae throws light on the complex attitudes to Arthur of contemporaries of Geoffrey of Monmouth in a time of political turmoil in England, and an investigation into borrowings from Geoffrey's Historia in a chronicle of Anglo-Scottish relations in the time of Edward I, a well-known admirer of the Arthurian legend, argues that they would have appealed to the clerical elite. Romance motifs link the subsequent pieces: women and their friendships in Ywain and Gawain, the only known close English adaptation of a romance by Chretien, and the mixture of sacred and secular in The Turke and Gawain, with fascinating alchemical parallels for a puzzling beheading episode. This is followed by a discussion of the views on native and foreign sources of three sixteenth-century defenders of Arthur, John Leland, John Prise and Humphrey Llwyd, and their responses to the criticisms of Polydore Vergil. In twentieth-century reception history, John Steinbeck was an ardent Arthurian enthusiast: an essay looks at the significance of his annotations to his copy of Malory as he worked on his adaptation, The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights. The volume moves to even more recent territory with an exploration of the adaptations of Malory and other Arthurian writers that occur in the comic books by Geoff Johns about Arthur Curry, aka Aquaman, King of Atlantis. The book is completed by a reprint of a classic essay by Norris Lacy on the absence and presence of the Grail in Arthurian texts from the twelfth century on. ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD is Professor of English Studies at Durham University, and Principal of St Cuthbert's Society; DAVID F. JOHNSON is Professor of English at Florida State University, Tallahassee. Contributors: Richard Barber, Mary Bateman, Christopher Berard, William J. Fowler, Natalie Goodison, Norris Lacy, Andrew Rabin, Carl Sell, Elaine Treharne, Usha Vishnuvajjala