Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance PDF Download

Author: Robert Stuart Sturges
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503533094
Category : Constitutional history
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
Sovereignty, law, and the relationship between them are now among the most compelling topics in history, philosophy, literature and art. Some argue that the state's power over the individual has never been more complete, while for others, such factors as globalization and the internet are subverting traditional political forms. This book exposes the roots of these arguments in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The thirteen contributions investigate theories, fictions, contestations, and applications of sovereignty and law from the Anglo-Saxon period to the seventeenth century, and from England across western Europe to Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Particular topics include: Habsburg sovereignty, Romance traditions in Arthurian literature, the duomo in Milan, the political theories of Juan de Mariana and of Richard Hooker, Geoffrey Chaucer's legal problems, the accession of James I, medieval Jewish women, Elizabethan diplomacy, Anglo-Saxon political subjectivity, and medieval French farce. Together these contributions constitute a valuable overview of the history of medieval and Renaissance law and sovereignty in several disciplines. They will appeal to not only to political historians, but also to all those interested in the histories of art, literature, religion, and culture.

Author: Kathleen Davis
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812207416
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 199

View

Book Description
Despite all recent challenges to stage-oriented histories, the idea of a division between a "medieval" and a "modern" period has survived, even flourished, in academia. Periodization and Sovereignty demonstrates that this survival is no innocent affair. By examining periodization together with the two controversial categories of feudalism and secularization, Kathleen Davis exposes the relationship between the constitution of "the Middle Ages" and the history of sovereignty, slavery, and colonialism. This book's groundbreaking investigation of feudal historiography finds that the historical formation of "feudalism" mediated the theorization of sovereignty and a social contract, even as it provided a rationale for colonialism and facilitated the disavowal of slavery. Sovereignty is also at the heart of today's often violent struggles over secular and religious politics, and Davis traces the relationship between these struggles and the narrative of "secularization," which grounds itself in a period divide between a "modern" historical consciousness and a theologically entrapped "Middle Ages" incapable of history. This alignment of sovereignty, the secular, and the conceptualization of historical time, which relies essentially upon a medieval/modern divide, both underlies and regulates today's volatile debates over world politics. The problem of defining the limits of our most fundamental political concepts cannot be extricated, Davis argues, from the periodizing operations that constituted them, and that continue today to obscure the process by which "feudalism" and "secularization" govern the politics of time.

Author: Walter Ullmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : de
Pages : 360

View

Book Description
Walter Ullmann's contribution to the study of medieval political and legal thought needs no emphasis. In the present volume are collected a number of the early articles which it was not possible to include in his previous collections, together with others published since those volumes appeared. The articles display a striking consistency of approach, though in the more than forty years separating the earliest from the latest there is an obvious development in his thought. Ullman held the view that the law must be studied in its own historical context, as a function of society and a product of the factors which shaped social life; equally, he stressed the central position of the law in the study of medieval history, for its precise character meant that it could provide a more reliable probe into medieval beliefs and doctrine than any other form of evidence.

Author: Heinrich Albert Rommen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780865971615
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
Originally published in German in 1936, The Natural Law is the first work to clarify the differences between traditional natural law as represented in the writings of Cicero, Aquinas, and Hooker and the revolutionary doctrines of natural rights espoused by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Beginning with the legacies of Greek and Roman life and thought, Rommen traces the natural law tradition to its displacement by legal positivism and concludes with what the author calls "the reappearance" of natural law thought in more recent times. In seven chapters each Rommen explores "The History of the Idea of Natural Law" and "The Philosophy and Content of the Natural Law." In his introduction, Russell Hittinger places Rommen's work in the context of contemporary debate on the relevance of natural law to philosophical inquiry and constitutional interpretation. Heinrich Rommen (1897–1967) taught in Germany and England before concluding his distinguished scholarly career at Georgetown University. Russell Hittinger is William K. Warren Professor of Catholic Studies and Research Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa.

Author: Kenneth Pennington
Publisher: University of California Presson Demand
ISBN: 9780520079953
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

View

Book Description
"Specialists will find it not merely interesting, but exciting and significant."--Robert L. Benson, University of California, Los Angeles "A work of synthesis that at the same time introduces new material to the treasury of studies on medieval political thought."--Stanley Chodorov, University of California, San Diego "Specialists will find it not merely interesting, but exciting and significant."--Robert L. Benson, University of California, Los Angeles

Author: Daniel Lee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191062456
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 375

View

Book Description
Popular sovereignty - the doctrine that the public powers of state originate in a concessive grant of power from "the people" - is the cardinal doctrine of modern constitutional theory, placing full constitutional authority in the people at large, rather than in the hands of judges, kings, or a political elite. This book explores the intellectual origins of this influential doctrine and investigates its chief source in late medieval and early modern thought - the legal science of Roman law. Long regarded the principal source for modern legal reasoning, Roman law had a profound impact on the major architects of popular sovereignty such as François Hotman, Jean Bodin, and Hugo Grotius. Adopting the juridical language of obligations, property, and personality as well as the classical model of the Roman constitution, these jurists crafted a uniform theory that located the right of sovereignty in the people at large as the legal owners of state authority. In recovering the origins of popular sovereignty, the book demonstrates the importance of the Roman law as a chief source of modern constitutional thought.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004446265
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 320

View

Book Description
The essays in this volume explore the theories and practices of sovereignty in the context of state-building in the early modern Northern and Southern Low Countries. The book approaches this historical debate from three angles: (1) political theoretical, (2) legal, and (3) politico-historical.

Author: Robin Chapman Stacey
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812295420
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

View

Book Description
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.

Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110294583
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 612

View

Book Description
All societies are constructed, based on specific rules, norms, and laws. Hence, all ethics and morality are predicated on perceived right or wrong behavior, and much of human culture proves to be the result of a larger discourse on vices and virtues, transgression and ideals, right and wrong. The topics covered in this volume, addressing fundamental concerns of the premodern world, deal with allegedly criminal, or simply wrong behavior which demanded punishment. Sometimes this affected whole groups of people, such as the innocently persecuted Jews, sometimes individuals, such as violent and evil princes. The issue at stake here embraces all of society since it can only survive if a general framework is observed that is based in some way on justice and peace. But literature and the visual arts provide many examples of open and public protests against wrongdoings, ill-conceived ideas and concepts, and stark crimes, such as theft, rape, and murder. In fact, poetic statements or paintings could carry significant potentials against those who deliberately transgressed moral and ethical norms, or who even targeted themselves.

Author: Wilfried Hartmann
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813214912
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 457

View

Book Description
This latest volume in the ongoing History of Medieval Canon Law series covers the period from Gratian's initial teaching of canon law during the 1120s to just before the promulgation of the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX in 1234.