Negotiating Space Contributor(s): Rosenwein, Barbara H. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0801435234 ISBN-13: 9780801435232 Publisher: Cornell University Press OUR PRICE: $128.70 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: January 1999 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - History | Europe - Medieval - Law | Legal History - Religion | Christian Church - History |
Dewey: 320.120 |
LCCN: 98-31501 |
Lexile Measure: 1520 |
Physical Information: 0.81" H x 6" W x 9" (1.25 lbs) 304 pages |
Themes: - Chronological Period - Medieval (500-1453) |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: Why did early medieval kings declare certain properties to be immune from the judicial and fiscal encroachments of their own agents? Did weakness compel them to prohibit their agents from entering these properties, as historians have traditionally believed? In a richly detailed book that will be greeted as a landmark addition to the literature on the Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein argues that immunities were markers of power. By placing restraints on themselves and their agents, kings demonstrated their authority, affirmed their status, and manipulated the boundaries of sacred space.Rosenwein transforms our understanding of an institution central to the political and social dynamics of medieval Europe. She reveals how immunities were used by kings and other leaders to forge alliances with the noble families and monastic centers that were central to their power. Generally viewed as unchanging juridical instruments, immunities as they appear here are as fluid and diverse as the disparate social and political conflicts that they at once embody and seek to defuse. Their legacy reverberates in the modern world, where liberal institutions, with their emphasis on state restraint, clash with others that encourage governmental intrusion. The protections against unreasonable searches and seizures provided by English common law and the U.S. Constitution developed in part out of the medieval experience of immunities and the institutions that were elaborated to breach them. |
Contributor Bio(s): Rosenwein, Barbara H.: - Barbara H. Rosenwein is Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe and To Be the Neighbor of Saint Peter: The Social Meaning of Cluny's Property, 909-1049, editor of Anger's Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages and coeditor of Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society, all from Cornell. She is also the editor of the Cornell series Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past. |