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.
Author(s): Larissa Tracy (ed.)
Publisher: The Boydell Press
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: XIV+486
City: Woodbridge
List of Illustrations and Tables vii
Acknowledgements viii
Contributors ix
List of Abbreviations xiv
Introduction: Murder Most Foul / Larissa Tracy 1
I. MURDER ON TRIAL: JUSTICE, LAW AND SOCIETY
1. Secret Killing and Murder by Magic in the Law of Adomnán / Bridgette Slavin 19
2. Discursive Murders: The St. Brice’s Day Massacre, 'Beowulf' and 'Morðor' / Jay Paul Gates 47
3. Mourning Murderers in Medieval Jewish Law / Pinchas Roth 77
4. Treacherous Murder: Language and Meaning in French Murder Trials / Jolanta N. Komornicka 96
5. 'Mordre wol out': Murder and Justice in Chaucer / Larissa Tracy 115
II. THE PUBLIC HERMENEUTICS OF MURDER: INTERPRETATION AND CONTEXT
6. Bringing Murder to Light: Death, Publishing and Performance in Icelandic Sagas / Ilse Schweitzer VanDonkelaar 139
7. 'I Think This Bacon is Wearing Shoes': Comedy and Murder in the Old French Fabliaux / Anne Latowsky 159
8. 'Chevaliers ocirre': Manslaughter, Morality and Meaning in the 'Queste del Saint Graal' / Lucas Wood 179
9. Murder, Manslaughter and Reputation: Killing in Malory’s 'Le Morte Darthur' / Dwayne C. Coleman 206
10. Poisoning as a Means of State Assassination in Early Modern Venice / Matthew Lubin 227
11. Defamation, a Murder More Foul?: The 'Second Murder' of Louis, Duke of Orleans (d. 1407) Reconsidered / Emily J. Hutchison 254
12. 'A general murther, an universal slaughter': Strategies of Anti-Jesuit Defamation in Reporting Assassination in the Early Modern Period / Andrew McKenzie-McHarg 281
III. MURDER IN THE COMMUNITY: GENDER, YOUTH AND FAMILY
13. Negotiating Murder in the 'Historiae' of Gregory of Tours / Jeffrey Doolittle 311
14. Poisoning, Killing and Murder in the 'Edictus Rothari' / Thomas Gobbitt 333
15. Murder, Foul and Fair, in Shota Rustaveli’s 'The Man in the Panther Skin' / G. Koolemans Beynen 350
16. A Multiple Poisoning in the City of Valencia: Sanxo Calbó’s Crime (1442) / Carmel Ferragud 371
17. A Case of Mariticide in Late Medieval France / Patricia Turning 395
18. Monstrous Un-Making: Maternal Infanticide and Female Agency in Early Modern England / Dianne Berg 417
19. Imps of Hell: Young People, Murder and the Early English Press / Ben Parsons 434
Conclusion / Hannah Skoda 456
Select Bibliography 468
Index 482
