Introduction

Summary

THIS SECTION IS structured around the idea of legalism. We ask why law matters as an organizing principle for categories of deviance, and how and why it is brought into play. Like religious and political ideologies, law clearly does not operate autonomously, even if legal authority in modern societies rests upon this claim. Equally problematic is our often ready assumption that law maps neatly onto morality and ethics, political power and religion. It does not: conflicts and tensions between these normative frameworks are rife, and it is often in the interstices between them that historical change happens.

The chapters in this section pick up on a range of themes. Developing and changing legal frameworks are shown to be key to the contingency of definitions of what is right and wrong across societies. Law can provide opportunities for minority or oppressed groups to articulate their goals and sense of community; but, of course, it can also be used to repress and reinforce power. Legalism in this period was most often aligned with religious ideologies, but could nevertheless produce conflicting outcomes. If legalism produces a relatively black and white framing of right and wrong, religious frameworks, coupled with the messy complexity of human life, might produce more nuanced parameters and might also suggest the importance of flexible responses and the exercise of mercy. Yet, as these chapters show, even these assumptions about legalism versus religion prove more complex, as legalism itself is revealed to be surprisingly flexible and capacious in many cases.

The part opens with a section on theft. In many ways, the theme of theft goes to the heart of deviance in a universal sense. Rare is the human society which does not put respect for property at its core. Even rarer, though, is the society which is not alarmed by the idea of secret actions. This seems to be the aspect of theft which caused most concern in the medieval period: theft undermines the trust binding together sociopolitical communities, precisely because it relies on deception and secrecy.

Ephraim Shoham-Steiner presents a view of theft in European Jewish communities in the later Middle Ages. He reminds us that categories of deviance do, of course, arise from actual acts of deviance. This is not just a process of invented wrongs, but real choices by real individuals must lie at the heart of the analysis.