TY - BOOK ID - 78532967 TI - The old English penitentials and Anglo-Saxon law PY - 2015 SN - 1316028526 1316392694 1316028046 1316029492 1107443857 1316029972 1316030938 1316015386 1316031896 9781316031896 9781316015384 9781107083417 1107083419 9781107443853 1316031411 PB - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Law -- England -- History. KW - Law, Anglo-Saxon. KW - Law. KW - Law, Anglo-Saxon KW - Law KW - Law - Non-U.S. KW - Law, Politics & Government KW - Law - Great Britain KW - Acts, Legislative KW - Enactments, Legislative KW - Laws (Statutes) KW - Legislative acts KW - Legislative enactments KW - Jurisprudence KW - Legislation KW - Anglo-Saxon law KW - History KW - History. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:78532967 AB - Some of the earliest examples of medieval canon law are penitentials - texts enumerating the sins a confessor might encounter among laypeople or other clergy and suggesting means of reconciliation. Often they gave advice on matters of secular law as well, offering judgments on the proper way to contract a marriage or on the treatment of slaves. This book argues that their importance to more general legal-historical questions, long suspected by historians but rarely explored, is most evident in an important (and often misunderstood) subgroup of the penitentials: composed in Old English. Though based on Latin sources - principally those attributed to Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury (d.690) and Halitgar of Cambrai (d.831) - these texts recast them into new ordinances meant to better suit the needs of English laypeople. The Old English penitentials thus witness to how one early medieval polity established a tradition of written vernacular law. ER -