Suchergebnisse

Collection of essays on Bengali literature & culture

Alfred the Great's domboc ('book of laws') is the longest and most ambitious legal text of the Anglo-Saxon period. Alfred places his own laws, dealing with everything from sanctuary to feuding to the theft of bees, between a lengthy translation of legal passages from the Bible and the legislation of the West-Saxon King Ine (r. 688-726), which rival his own in length and scope. This book is the first critical edition of the domboc published in over a century, as well as a new translation. Five introductory chapters offer fresh insights into the laws of Alfred and Ine, considering their backgrounds, their relationship to early medieval legal culture, their manuscript evidence and their reception in later centuries. Rather than a haphazard accumulation of ordinances, the domboc is shown to issue from deep reflection on the nature of law itself, whose effects would permanently alter the development of early English legislation

This edition of the laws promulgated by successive Anglo-Saxon rulers over a period of five centuries was published in three volumes between 1903 and 1916 by the German historian Felix Lieberman (1851-1925), and is still regarded as authoritative. This unique body of early medieval legal writing, unparalleled in other Germanic languages, provides valuable source material for scholars of Old English and of legal history, and Lieberman's thorough engagement with the manuscripts has never been surpassed. Volume 3 provides introductions to each set of laws presented in Volume 1, and detailed line-by-line explanatory notes that complement the dictionary and glossary of terms found in Volume 2. Frederick Attenborough's The Laws of the Early English Kings (1922), providing a modern English translation of early Anglo-Saxon laws, is also reissued in this series