Jaqueline Bemmer, a Marie S. Curie Fellow with the Research Group Medieval History at Leuven, will present in the Helsinki Legal History Series seminar on Thursday, May 22, from 3 pm - 4:30 pm in P673, Porthania, University of Helsinki. You may attend via Zoom. She will speak on "Rethinking the Margins: Early Irish Law and the Post-Roman Legal Landscape":
The early Irish laws, sometimes referred to as fénechas, constitute the largest extant body of vernacular legal writing in Europe outside the Graeco-Roman world – yet they remain largely unknown beyond a small specialist audience. Unlike the roughly contemporary Germanic edicts, these texts were not issued by kings but preserve the customary laws (or socio-legal customs) of the local population in early medieval Ireland. Committed to parchment in the 7th and 8th centuries by scholars trained in Irish and early Church law, grammar and poetry, this legal material reflects an oral tradition transmitted and transformed within monastic scriptoria. Notably, these jurists chose to write in Old Irish – a Goidelic Celtic language – rather than Latin, a decision paralleled only by the Anglo-Saxons who wrote in Old English.
The resulting legal texts are extraordinarily rich, and cover a wide array of social and legal topics. My current Marie Sklodowska-Curie project places these Irish laws in dialogue with contemporary post-Roman edicts from the Continent (often labeled ‘leges barbarorum’), to explore continuities and contrasts in legal thought across the early medieval West. In this talk, I will present aspects of this ongoing research and highlight the comparative potential of the Irish material in relation to developments in Francia, Lombardy, and beyond.
--Dan Ernst
