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centuries, which interdict infant abandonment, with the exception of deformity, arguing that ‘[p]hysically impaired children … if reared, would present too great a demand on resources and in the future would be limited in providing for themselves and contributing to the community's economy’. 28 In addition to the sagas and law codes, which mention child abandonment with some frequency, archaeological evidence supports this practice as a fact of early medieval life. Archaeologists have, for several decades, discussed the
important bearings on the issue of continuity. Also of great interest is the relationship between the secular and the sacred when both call for the needs of the Church to be provided for. Was it envisaged that people could simply be ordered to provide? Or was this a matter of religious exhortation? Alongside the law codes and the legislation of particular rulers, we have a raft of normative material produced by the Church. This consists of the rulings of church councils, episcopal orders and statutes, and the customs of religious houses. It is in these sources that we
paradoxical personal sovereignty will be, of course) very few remain who are able to enjoy the sight, taste and smell of anything 136 136 Perception shaped by other means that purports to project law, coded order, structure, hierarchy, or inevitable development. In an age of aspiring sovereigns, very few are willing to be part of a Great Chain of Being. Aspiring sovereigns cannot even bear to contemplate the very idea. They cannot bear to look it in the eye. They simply cannot bring themselves to look at it. Mason’s sculpture is unbearable to watch in an age of aspiring
women’s organizations has been almost insultingly cursory, showing an astonishing degree of condescension and disregard for women’s perspectives on public policy. For example, in the recent process of reforming the country’s Islamic family law code, the Moudouana, managed by the King, women’s organizations were only peripherally consulted. They were contacted in writing; public debate and the risk of conflict were avoided. Not a single woman from the women’s movement sat on the commission charged with revising this critical piece of legislation. The resulting
creation of (Offa’s) Mercian law code.89 She is the mother of the heir to the kingdom, who was under age. She ruled as a powerful widow in the stead of a minor and after her death her son took over. Thus she is situated within a family context, ruling for her son. Women in contemporary society were at the most powerful stage of the female life cycle as widows, so Geoffrey here draws on a cultural norm to reinforce his message because Marcia’s situation as a widow was one with which secular society could identify.90 Happy marriages feature in Geoffrey, for example the
contemporary female ascetics, even of the tantric variety (Denton 2004), who have chosen to renounce traditional marriage and householder rules. The regulations derived from the Dharma Shastras (the sacred law codes) as propounded in the Laws of Manu (1969) – written somewhere between the second century BCE and the second century CE – have none the less provided the principal guidelines for women’s conduct, though they have not been ubiquitous throughout India.14 In the Brahmanic tradition, a woman’s 132 Irigaray's eastern excursion husband is regarded as her god – she is
posits it against his concept of divine violence. Mythical violence, for Benjamin, is that violence which is both law-preserving and law-making. In Benjamin's analysis, mythical violence thus inevitably relates to existing state structures that prescribe, though laws, codes and norms, either a reaffirmation (preservation) of existing political structures or indeed the making of new laws and codes, thus also prescribing or reaffirming the normativity of
understanding of early medieval England as a largely oral/aural culture, and evidence from surviving medical texts, law codes, and the archaeological record indicates a range of sensory perception that seems to have been widely recognized. The entries in Bald’s Leechbook suggest a worldview in which the capacity for hearing, though important in many contexts, was not assumed. Rather, the faculty of hearing itself is described as changing and changeable, in terms of experience rather than identity. Accordingly, the Old English
issued fueros (law codes) and cartas pueblos (municipal charters) to the towns of newly conquered territories and placed the surrounding countryside in the jurisdiction of the towns. These fueros and cartas pueblos conceded a range of privileges ( privilegios ), exemptions (exenciónes or franquezas ), and freedoms ( libertades ). 8 The fueros were upheld by the Cortes (parliaments) and represented a constitutional arrangement. This meant that the Iberian Peninsula could be described as a
), whose name and situation were linked with Greece, is the first western text to name lepers ‘lazars’, lazari , after Saint Lazarus, echoing the designation given to them by Basil’s brother, Saint Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394). 46 With respect to the Byzantines, it was fashionable on the western side, from Liutprand of Cremona and his famous embassy to Constantinople in 968 onwards, to criticise the culpable negligence of the Greeks with regard to the poor. For example, attention was drawn to the inadequate provision for the poor in the Épanagôgè (the law code