TY  - BOOK
AU  - Stacey,Robin Chapman
TI  - Dark Speech: The Performance of Law in Early Ireland 
T2  - The Middle Ages Series
SN  - 9780812239898
AV  - KDK156.S73 2007 
U1  - 349.41509 
PY  - 2016///]
CY  - Philadelphia : 
PB  - University of Pennsylvania Press, 
KW  - Law
KW  - Ireland
KW  - History
KW  - Language
KW  - Law, Medieval
KW  - Sociological jurisprudence
KW  - HISTORY / Medieval
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - Medieval and Renaissance Studies
N1  - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Introduction --; 1. The Play's the Thing --; 2. Jurists on Stage --; 3. The Power of the Word --; 4. Voicing Over --; 5. Voices Within the Law --; Conclusion: The Dangers of Performance --; List of Abbreviations --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index --; Acknowledgments; restricted access; Issued also in print
N2  - What does it mean to talk about law as theater, to speak about the "performance" of transactions as mundane as the sale of a pig or as agonizing as receiving compensation for a dead kinsman? In Dark Speech, Robin Chapman Stacey explores such questions by examining the interaction between performance and law in Ireland between the seventh and ninth centuries.Exposing the inner workings of the Irish legal system, Stacey examines the manner in which publicly enacted words and silences were used to construct legal and political relationships in a society where traditional hierarchies were very much in flux.Law in early Ireland was a verbal art, grounded as much in aesthetics as in the enforcement of communal norms. In contrast with modern law, no sharp distinction existed between art and politics. Visualizing legal events through the lens of procedure, Stacey helps readers recognize the creative, fluid, and inherently risky nature of these same events.While many historians have long realized the mnemonic value of legal drama to the small, principally nonliterate societies of the early Middle Ages, Stacey argues that the appeal to social memory is but one aspect of the role played by performance in early law. In fact, legal performance (like other more easily recognized forms of verbal art) created and transformed as much as it recorded
UR  - https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812294040
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780812294040
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780812294040/original
ER  -