Full Description
This collection of essays by British, American and French scholars uses the records of the law in Western Europe from the fall of Rome to the nineteenth century in an attempt to outline a social history of the West considered as a history of human relations. The primary themes are dispute, arbitration and conjugal relations; the primary influences considered are feud, Christianity and the state. The contributions are discussed overall by an anthropologist lawyer, Simon Roberts, who writes an anthropological introduction, and by the editor in a short historical postscript. The aim has been to strike a new note in social history by attending more closely to actual people and their actual relations; by drawing on the resources of anthropology, legal history, the history of religious feelings and institutions, and of states, to illuminate their behaviour; and by combining the efforts of scholars representing a diversity of intellectual traditions and a long perspective of human experience.
Contents
Editor's note; 1. The study of dispute: anthropological perspectives Simon Roberts; 2. Beati pacifici: bishops and the law in sixth-century Gaul Edward James; 3. Law and love in the Middle Ages Michael Clanchy; 4. Sumptuary law and social relations in Renaissance Italy Diane Owen Hughes; 5. The blood feud in Early Modern Scotland Jenny Wormald; 6. A golden age of litigation: Castile, 1500-1700 Richard L. Kagan; 7. 'Such disagreement betwyx neighbours': litigation and human relations in Early Modern England J. A. Sharpe; 8. Household disputes and the law in Early Modern Andalusia James Casey; 9. The arbitration of disputes under the Ancien Régime Nicole Castan; 10. Conjugal settlements: resort to Clandestine and common law marriage in England and Wales, 1650-1850 John R. Gillis; 11. Postscript John Bossy; Index.
