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Law And Fiction In Medieval Iceland: The Story In The Gragas Manuscripts, Thomas J. Mcsweeney
Law And Fiction In Medieval Iceland: The Story In The Gragas Manuscripts, Thomas J. Mcsweeney
Studio for Law and Culture
Medieval Icelandic law has been appropriated for modern purposes as diverse as creating a history for European democracy and proving that a libertarian legal system can work in practice. It has been put to so many modern uses because it presents us with a picture of the Icelandic Commonwealth (ca. 930-1262) as a society of free and relatively equal farmers who operated with no king, no nobility, and minimal government. The laws represent Iceland as an exceptional polity, strikingly different from the monarchies and hierarchical societies that dominated Western Europe in the middle ages. This exceptionalism resonates strongly with modern …