Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales (The Middle Ages Series)

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. Cover 1 Contents 8 Introduction. Reading Law 10 PART I. IMAGINED LANDSCAPES 36 Chapter 1. Britain and Wales 38 Chapter 2. Court and Country 65 PART II. BODY AND BAWDY 98 Chapter 3. Bodies and Nobodies 100 Chapter 4. Humor and the Household 137 Chapter 5. Sex and Marriage 158 PART III. VIOLENCE 190 Chapter 6. Dogs in the Nighttime 192 Conclusion. Law and the Imagination 221 List of Abbreviations 234 Notes 238 Bibliography 294 Index 326 A 326 B 327 C 328 D 330 E 330 F 330 G 331 H 332 I 333 J 333 K 334 L 334 M 335 N 336 O 337 P 337 Q 338 R 338 S 339 T 339 U 340 V 340 W 341 Y 341 Z 341 Acknowledgments 342 Robin Chapman Stacey. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.