The Heart of the Court: The Role of Emotions in Shaping English Law, 1114-1288

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2022

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This dissertation analyzes the roles of emotions in the first century of the English common law. It complicates the view that the growth of law excluded emotions from the process of disputation. Instead, it argues that throughout the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, litigants and justices relied on emotions such as love, anger, and sadness to make sense of the law and to navigate the common law’s developing procedures. The importation of emotions created more continuity in approaches to dispute and relationship management before and after the advent of the common law than appears on the surface of legal records. The dissertation focuses on multiple facets of law: law books, the king’s court, monastic disputes, and out-of-court settlements. It also combines sources from a range of genres, including court records, chronicles, letters, charters, and literature in order to analyze law within its cultural context. The result is a new interpretation of the growth of the common law centering cultural values over administrative initiatives. Overall, the dissertation shows how emotions remained essential to how Anglo-Normans navigated the law. The common law’s ability to make space for these emotions was an important part of how it was able to expand through popular usage. Over time, the compatibility of the common law and emotions granted legal institutions, and the royal government behind them, more power over the personal lives of England’s subjects.

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Woolley, Meghan (2022). The Heart of the Court: The Role of Emotions in Shaping English Law, 1114-1288. Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/25244.

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