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16 - Marriage and the Legal Culture of Witnessing

from Part II - Literary Texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

By
Emma Lipton
Edited by
Candace Barrington  and
Sebastian Sobecki
Candace Barrington
Affiliation:
Central Connecticut State University
Sebastian Sobecki
Affiliation:
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands
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Summary

To understand the origins of the legal culture of witnessing, we will begin with institutional church history, specifically the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Better known in recent scholarship as a watershed in the history of confession, the Fourth Lateran Council catalysed a major shift in legal practice by promoting the witness trial and effectively outlawing the ordeal and trial by battle. In its aftermath, witness depositions became, in practice, the most common form of proof in late medieval English church courts. In contrast to the ordeal and trial by battle which relied on direct divine intervention to determine the outcome, the trial gave new power to ordinary people to act as witnesses in court. This emphasis on testimony in both ecclesiatical and secular courts led to the wide participation of the community in legal culture as victims, neighbours and jurors, ensuring that legal concepts of evidence were not, in Lorna Hutson’s words, ‘esoteric professional doctrine’, but widely diffused through society.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature , pp. 202 - 212
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Further Reading

Arnold, John H., ‘Margery’s Trials: Heresy, Lollardy and Dissent’ in A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Arnold, John H. and Lewis, Katherine J., Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004, 75–93.Google Scholar
Cannon, Christopher, ‘The Rights of Medieval English Women: Crime and the Issue of Representation’, in Medieval Crime and Social Control, ed. Hanawalt, Barbara A. and Wallace, David, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, 156–85.Google Scholar
Enders, Jody, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Gold, Penny, ‘The Marriage of Mary and Joseph in the Twelfth-Century Ideology of Marriage’, in Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church, ed. Bullough, Vern and Brundage, James, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1982, 102–17.Google Scholar
Horner, Olga, ‘“Us Make Lies”: Witness, Evidence and Proof in the York Resurrection’, Medieval English Theatre (1998), 24–76.Google Scholar
Hunt, Alison M, ‘Maculating Mary: The Detractors of the N-Town Cycle’s “Trial of Joseph and Mary”’, Philological Quarterly 73 (1994), 11–29.Google Scholar
King, Pamela M., ‘Contemporary Cultural Models for the Trial Plays in the York Cycle’, in Drama and Community: People and Plays in Medieval Europe, ed. Hindley, Alan, Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1999, 200–16.Google Scholar
Lipton, Emma, Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Lipton, Emma,‘Language on Trial: Performing the Law in the N-Town Trial Play’, in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, ed. Steiner, Emily and Barrington, Candace, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, 115–35.Google Scholar
McCarthy, Conor, Marriage in Medieval England: Law, Literature and Practice, Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2004.Google Scholar
McSheffrey, Shannon, Marriage, Sex and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Sheehan, Michael M., Marriage, Family and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies, ed. James K. Farge, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Taylor, Jamie K., Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature and Community in the Late Middle Ages, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013.Google Scholar

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