Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Old English Penitentials and Anglo-Saxon Law
  • Cited by 18
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781316015384
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316015384
Subjects:
Legal History, Law, Regional and World History: General Interest, History, British History Before 1066
Series:
Studies in Legal History
Information

Book description

Some of the earliest examples of medieval canon law are penitentials - texts enumerating the sins a confessor might encounter among laypeople or other clergy and suggesting means of reconciliation. Often they gave advice on matters of secular law as well, offering judgments on the proper way to contract a marriage or on the treatment of slaves. This book argues that their importance to more general legal-historical questions, long suspected by historians but rarely explored, is most evident in an important (and often misunderstood) subgroup of the penitentials: composed in Old English. Though based on Latin sources - principally those attributed to Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (d.690) and Halitgar of Cambrai (d.831) - these texts recast them into new ordinances meant to better suit the needs of English laypeople. The Old English penitentials thus witness to how one early medieval polity established a tradition of written vernacular law.

Reviews

'This stimulating and original book makes use of the Old English Penitentials to examine important aspects of Anglo-Saxon legal, social, and religious culture. The Old English Penitentials diverge significantly from their Latin sources, and the specific divergences may indicate ecclesiastical attitudes in Anglo-Saxon England. Particularly interesting are the book’s discussions of the laws of marriage and of slavery. The volume is a very welcome extension to the range of reading available to Anglo-Saxonists.'

John Hudson - University of St Andrews

'Many people think Law sets life’s rules. But the same churchmen who wrote law codes for kings gave moral instructions to all Christians. The Old English Penitentials told people what they must pay for their sins. Stefan Jurasinski intelligently re-inserts these penances into the conversation on Anglo-Saxon law to make it a single discourse again.'

Paul Hyams - Cornell University, New York

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.