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This book addresses one of the most acute moral and political dilemmas of the twelfth century: how did a judge determine how to punish an offender, and what was the purpose of such punishment? It examines how English judges weighed a choice which, if made wrongly, could endanger both the political community and their own souls. That choice was between two ideas which twelfth-century intellectual and legal thought understood as irreconcilable opposites: justice and mercy. By examining the moral pressures on English judges, Justice and Mercy provides a new way into medieval legal culture: rather than looking at the laws that judges applied, it reconstructs the moral world of the judges themselves. The book offers a fresh synthesis of the disciplines of intellectual history and legal history, examining theological commentaries, moral treatises, letters, sermons and chronicles in order to put the creation of the English common law into its moral context. This broad vision brings to light the shared language of justice and mercy, an idea which dominated twelfth-century discourse and had the potential to polarise political opinion. Justice and Mercy challenges many of the prevailing narratives surrounding the common law, suggesting that judges in church courts and royal courts looked strikingly similar, and that English judges had more in common with their continental counterparts than is often assumed.
A canon law parallel/parable This chapter begins with a plea for the indulgence of canon lawyers, for whom the central argument of this chapter – that the law had significant difficulties in coping with the status of mercy – may seem, prima facie, unsurprising. That is because the history of canon law has long accepted that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there were both theoretical and practical anxieties about how judges should reconcile the conflicting demands of mercy and justice. Part of the work of
The problem with mercy ( misericordia ), as has already been outlined, was twofold. In the schools, it lay in determining how to fit mercy within justice; in the courts, in fitting mercy within the law. This chapter examines the difficulties encountered by theologians who sought to give an account of both mercy and justice; the next chapter, the awkward place of mercy within law. While the ultimate aim of this book is to examine the substance of the connection between theology and law, for reasons of clarity in comprehending the intellectual
unexpected elements as well as through the more evidently related ones as in the first eight items. In addition, the physical features of even the seemingly uncharacteristic short Latin poems suggest that these folios, too, were written through, in accord with the rest of the manuscript. Indeed, following on these short Latin poems and four prayers are texts that embody the beliefs that provoke such prayers: these texts take the form of a series of narratives that share a specific affective purpose, to affirm the mercy offered by and through Christ and enacted through
The role of judicial exempla Where, then, did a twelfth-century judge turn to understand what justice looked like? How might the multiplicity of arguments addressed to those who sat in judgment be boiled down to provide some form of practical guidance? Central to the argument of this book is that one way of resolving the competing claims of justice and mercy was to emulate the most eminent historical judges. Twelfth-century judges had the history of their illustrious and distinguished predecessors to fall back on – a
thought Bridgeman had bested her. 5 They were very pleased when in October 1855 Bridgeman finally cut all ties with Nightingale and established her nuns as a completely independent community working under Sir John Hall. Nightingale, Croke wrote, was then ‘crest-fallen since the “Sisters of Mercy” had escaped from her fangs.’ 6 Doyle was more open-minded. When she set off for the East in the winter of 1854 she thought the English bigots. ‘We travel in our veils, in the face of proud, bigoted England,’ she wrote. ‘Will not this be a triumph for our holy religion.’ But
Wherever we are and however small our Branch may be, let us ever keep in mind that we are a cog in the great wheel of mercy, and its smooth and efficient running depends upon our individual and united efforts. So went Malcolm Galloway’s exhortation to the first national conference of the New Zealand Red Cross (NZRC) in 1940. Galloway, the Society’s national secretary, emphasised that the Red Cross was the ‘practical application of all that is noble in every creed’, providing a non-partisan banner under which the peoples of the world could find common
Tiessen , R. and Huish , R. (eds), Globetrotting or Global Citizenship? Perils and Potential of International Experiential Learning ( Toronto : University of Toronto Press ), pp. 230 – 57 . Glassford , S. ( 2018 ), Mobilizing Mercy: A History of the Canadian Red Cross ( Montreal and Kingston : McGill-Queen’s University Press ). Herriman , M. ( 2021 ), ‘ Social Media and Charities in Canada ’, in Phillips , S. D. and Wyatt , B. (eds), Innovations: Change for Canada’s Voluntary and Nonprofit Sector
, civil wars and concentration camps. If there was ever a time in history where there was no regard for either the principle of mercy or the value of human life, it was the ‘short twentieth century’ (1914–91) – far more than the last thirty years. The supposed decline in humanitarian norms is assumed to have resulted from the changing nature of contemporary conflicts, which are now intra-, rather than inter-, national. It is true that most post-Cold War conflicts have been
Reform Association – ‘the first nongovernmental, humanitarian campaign to use atrocity photographs to mobilize sustained, international protest’ (65) – in the first decade of the twentieth century. Reformers had to calibrate images and narratives to shame the perpetrators without bringing shame upon themselves (85). ‘The representation of atrocity must be,’ as Grant puts it, ‘tolerably shocking’ (64), a tricky balance at the mercy of the moral standards and