Name: Medieval and Early Modern Murder: Legal, Literary and Historical Contexts
Brand: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
SKU: 9781783273119
Price: 1729.00 HKD
Availability: InStock
Author: Larissa Tracy
ISBN: 9781783273119

Medieval and Early Modern Murder: Legal, Literary and Historical Contexts

By Larissa Tracy

Boydell & Brewer Ltd June 2018

Specifications

ISBN-13: 9781783273119
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Publication: June 2018
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Countri(es) for reference only

Details

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 the ways 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.