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Beating Up On Women And Old Men And Other Enormities: A Social Historical Inquiry Into Literary Sources, William I. Miller
Beating Up On Women And Old Men And Other Enormities: A Social Historical Inquiry Into Literary Sources, William I. Miller
Articles
The Icelandic sagas, besides being one of the most impressive literatures existing in any language, preserve detailed accounts of feud and legal action, and describe with intelligence and care the general techniques and strategies of dispute processing. They also contain, incidental to the narrative, information about values and law, marriage and death, householding arrangements and the systems of exchange, naming patterns, and so on, for those who care to coax such information from the texts.
Ordeal In Iceland, William I. Miller
Ordeal In Iceland, William I. Miller
Articles
Ordeal holds a strange fascination with us. It appalls and intrigues. We marvel at the mentality of those cultures that officialize it; we feel a sense of horror as we imagine ourselves intimately involved with boiling water or glowing irons. And we don't feel up to it. So our terror and cowardice becomes their brutality and irrationality. I am not about to urge to reinstitution of ordeals, although most practicing lawyers will tell you that that is still what going to law is, a crapshoot they say. What I want to do is call attention to the difficulty of not …
Some Aspects Of Householding In The Medieval Icelandic Commonwealth, William I. Miller
Some Aspects Of Householding In The Medieval Icelandic Commonwealth, William I. Miller
Articles
There has been much, mostly inconclusive, discussion about how to define the household in a manner suitable for comparative purposes. Certain conventional criteria are not very useful in the Icelandic context, where it appears that a person could be attached to more than one household, where the laws suggest it was possible for more than one household to be resident in the same uncompartmentalised farmhouse; and where headship might often be shared. Definitions, for example, based on co residence or on commensalism do not jibe all that well with the pastoral transhumance practised by the Icelanders. Sheep were tended and …