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This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. One of the areas on which surviving legal evidence provides some of the most contradictory views is the legal and administrative framework itself. I will take the written word and feuding as examples. Surviving texts can give very different impressions of the importance of written documents, and it is possible to read early medieval evidence either to support a literate, almost bureaucratic vision of legal rights, or to view literate forms as a distorting sideshow. I suggest this shows that the importance of the written word depended not on stable assumptions about the value of writing, but instead on a collective agreement about how important it was going to be in any particular case.

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. The legal framework for slavery was long thought by historians to have been carried over from the ancient world long after it had ceased to hold any relevance to the ways early medieval power and dependence (in their own ways brutal, but different) were exercised or experienced. This is a key example of a field in which legal representations remained effective precisely because they allowed – indeed, demanded, in order to be discussed in legal terms at all – a radical reinterpretation of reality, in which lords of tenants might take on the roles of masters of slaves along Roman lines.

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. This lecture looks at early medieval families, and the types of misconstruing involved in constituting them and their members as legal concepts. This, like the example of slavery, will lead us to reconsider the issue of gaps in normative legal material, and the possible reasons for density of regulation. Which human relationships were most and least densely legally defined and rule-bound seems to have had very little to do with which relationships were most open to becoming fraught or conflict-ridden, or with the levels of coercion required to keep them going.

This lecture will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants.

This workshop will take place online. Registration is required, click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants.