The Old English Penitentials and Anglo-Saxon Law

This is the first book-length study of the four penitentials composed in Old English.

Stefan Jurasinski (Author)

9781107083417, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 May 2015

247 pages, 3 b/w illus. 3 tables
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.9 cm, 0.49 kg

'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

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.

1. The Old English penitentials and their reception
2. Legal change, vernacular penitentials, and the chronology of Old English prose
3. The law of the estate: bishops, masters, and slaves
4. The law of the household: marriage and sexuality
5. Caring for the body: law, penitentials, and English 'sick-maintenance'
6. Caring for the mind: pollution and mental liability
Conclusion: vernacular penitentials and secular lawmaking.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], British & Irish history [HBJD1]