Law has been a primary locus and vehicle of contact across human history—as a system of ideas embodied in people and enacted on bodies; and also as a material, textual, and sensory "thing." This volume analyzes a variety of legal encounters ranging from South Asia to South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. The seven essays also explore various material expressions of law that reveal the complexity and intensity of cross-cultural contact in this pivotal era.

This collection assembles work by some of the foremost English-speaking scholars of pre-modern thought and culture and is the fruit of the Australian Research Council's ground-breaking Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion. The impact of war, a human activity that is both public and politically charged, is examined as it affects private human lives caught up in public and political situations. The essays, many of them influenced by the burgeoning field of study in the history of emotions, examine the often unconsidered effects of war—on the individual and on the commune—as revealed in the study of well-known texts such as Beowulf, Piers Plowman, Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, as well as other lesser-known works that mirror the concerns of the society in which they were conceived. These latter range from the twelfth-century chansons of the Crusades, through the fifteenth-century French and English political works of Alain Chartier, to the twentieth-century anti-war satirical films of Mario Monicelli.

Traditional scholarship argues that the changes fostered by the growth of royal power and feudalism in Western Europe directly impacted women’s public power and authority in the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Focusing on the inheriting countesses of Boulogne (1160–1260) and their neighbours in northern France, this monograph investigates the influence of the rise of centralized government on elite women’s power. This chronological and comparative analysis highlights successive countesses’ governance of inherited lands, the roles they played in their spouses’ lands and in political affairs outside their inherited lands, along with crucial assessments of the social identity and status of the family. It challenges the established interpretation and shows that the establishment of feudalism and the elaboration of bureaucracy did not curtail elite women’s access to or exercise of lordship to any significant degree.