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IMC 2013: Sessions

Session 211: Chronicles and Legal Texts in 13th-Century England: Problems of Composition and the Construction of the Past

Monday 1 July 2013, 14.15-15.45

Organiser:Alice Taylor, Department of History, King's College London
Moderator/Chair:Björn Weiler, Department of History & Welsh History, Aberystwyth University
Paper 211-aAnnalitical Practice and Authorship in the So-Called Barnwell Chronicle
(Language: English)
Cristian Ispir, Department of History, King's College London
Index terms: Archives and Sources, Historiography - Medieval, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Monasticism
Paper 211-bNames, Networks, and Questions of Composition in the Leges Anglorum Londoniis Collectae
(Language: English)
Katherine Har, St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford
Index terms: Law, Local History, Politics and Diplomacy, Social History
Paper 211-cThe Question of Authorship in the Liber de Antiquis Legibus of London
(Language: English)
Ian Stone, Department of History, King's College London
Index terms: Archives and Sources, Law, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Social History
Paper 211-d'A remembratif evir hereaftir': Legal Records and Their Writers in Medieval English Towns
(Language: English)
Kitrina Lindsay Bevan, Centre for Legal History Research, University of Exeter
Index terms: Law, Literacy and Orality, Local History, Manuscripts and Palaeography
Abstract

Each of the four papers in this session will focus on a 13th-century text that falls somewhere on the spectrum between law and chronicle writing. The texts examined are the London Collection of the Leges Anglorum, the Liber de antiquis legibus attributed to Arnold fitz Thedmar, and the so-called Barnwell Chronicle. All the papers will address the difficult relation between authorship and composition, and how the distant past was understood through the process of compilation by contemporary writers in England. As such, the session will contribute to our knowledge of how the distant past was understood and constructed by 13th-century writers, the circulation of 'ancient' legal and historical texts and, even, reassess the relationship between the supposedly separate fields of law and history in 13th-century England.