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Canon law rules of marriage became the legal means for policing forbidden sex in Iceland during the Middle Ages. These rules were adapted to various needs: enforcing morality, encouraging adherence to Christian sexual norms, and managing inheritance practices and property rights. This chapter explores sex in Iceland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by focusing on legal regulation, the archbishops’ and bishops’ statutes, and selected court cases. In all the Nordic countries the regulation of sexuality was highly influenced by canon law, but a study of sex in Iceland needs to be understood in relation to the special character of the society. It was highly literate, because of Christianity, but decentralized, with no towns and a distant royal administration. There had never been a strong executive authority in Iceland, and its absence seems to have encouraged widespread interest in documenting personal disputes and property rights. This makes Iceland special. Written documents and historical writing were mostly kept at the farms of leading families, for use in disputes over property rights in the local courts. This differs from more urbanized societies elsewhere in Europe.
Sulgenus Sapiens, Sulien the Wise of Llanbadarn Fawr in Ceredigion, was twice bishop of St David's. Quotations and allusions imply that Rhygyfarch and Ieuan had studied, first in the classical and Late Latin tradition, Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, Juvencus, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, Caelius Sedulius, Boethius, and possibly Statius, Horace and Juvenal. Second, the prose Lives imply that Rhygyfarch and Ieuan had studied the works of the primary Cambro-Latin author, Gildas: De excidio Brittanniae, Epistolae, and Penitential. In the third place, both brothers knew the earliest Armorico-Latin hagiographic text, the eighth-century Vita Sancti Samsonis. Rhygyfarch borrowed from the Life of Gregory and the Life of Samson stories about the golden-beaked dove, bringing them into play earlier in the Life of David and closer to his person than in the sources. Ieuan's poem in praise of his father records extended periods during which Sulien had studied in Ireland and in Scotland.
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