HYBRIDITY AND IDENTITY IN OLD ENGLISH LAW CODES
| dc.contributor.author | Sprenkle, Abigail | |
| dc.contributor.chair | Zacher, Samantha | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Galloway, Andrew Scott | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Falk, Oren | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2021-09-09T17:41:04Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2023-06-09T06:00:43Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2021-05 | |
| dc.description | 181 pages | |
| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation integrates contemporaneous legal and literary discourses to offer a new way of reading Old English legal texts. While the Old English legal corpus has generally served as a useful resource for scholars seeking explanations for cultural phenomena or social norms, my project asks instead how these documents generate ethnic and national identities to make sense of constantly shifting demographics in Britain before the Norman Conquest. Building on the work of postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Françoise Lionnet, I use the term hybridity to explain how these legal texts imagine the English as a fundamentally diverse coalition of groups with porous borders that are able to incorporate newcomers and withstand new conquests as they occur. The laws of the late ninth century and early tenth century offer ideal test-cases for uncovering a rhetoric of hybridity. The codes and treaties of Alfred the Great and his West-Saxon successors ruling in the time of the Danish invasions are particularly instructive, since these leaders legislate an English identity that is entangled with those of the other groups settled in the British Isles. Therefore, while medieval law has often been understood as largely prescriptive and therefore adverse to an unstable concept like hybridity, my project argues that the Old English law codes imagine their subjects to be combining and comingling into new social configurations. These possibilities allow English kings and their counsellors to shore up their claim to authority over the different groups who lived and settled in Britain. Reading law through a literary lens—that is alongside and considering legal corpora—affords important insights into the discourses of power in Pre-Conquest England. It demonstrates how medieval identity formation can blur cultural and legal boundaries even as it seeks to create them | |
| dc.identifier.doi | https://doi.org/10.7298/d2gq-k886 | |
| dc.identifier.other | Sprenkle_cornellgrad_0058F_12531 | |
| dc.identifier.other | http://dissertations.umi.com/cornellgrad:12531 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1813/109804 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.subject | Beowulf | |
| dc.subject | Hybridity | |
| dc.subject | Medieval Law | |
| dc.subject | nationalism | |
| dc.subject | Old English | |
| dc.subject | postcolonial theory | |
| dc.title | HYBRIDITY AND IDENTITY IN OLD ENGLISH LAW CODES | |
| dc.type | dissertation or thesis | |
| dcterms.license | https://hdl.handle.net/1813/59810 | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Medieval Studies | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | Cornell University | |
| thesis.degree.level | Doctor of Philosophy | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph. D., Medieval Studies |
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