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Legal custom & Lex Castrensis?: using law and literature to navigate the North-Sea neighbourhood in the late Viking Age (2021)
Book Chapter
Ruiter, K. (2021). Legal custom & Lex Castrensis?: using law and literature to navigate the North-Sea neighbourhood in the late Viking Age. In D. H. Steinforth, & C. C. Rozier (Eds.), Britain and its neighbours: cultural contacts and exchanges in Medieval and early modern Europe. London: Routledge

In his Lex Castrensis, the thirteenth-century Danish writer Sven Aggesen tells the story of the creation of a law that he attributes to Knútr inn ríki (Cnut the Great) as a means of governing his substantial military following of retainers, known as... Read More about Legal custom & Lex Castrensis?: using law and literature to navigate the North-Sea neighbourhood in the late Viking Age.

Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape: A study of three communities (2020)
Book
Kilby, S. (2020). Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape: A study of three communities. University of Hertfordshire Press

This compelling new study forms part of a new wave of scholarship on the medieval rural environment in which the focus moves beyond purely socio-economic concerns to incorporate the lived experience of peasants. For too long, the principal intellectu... Read More about Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape: A study of three communities.

Self-Defence and Its Limits in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls (2020)
Journal Article
Trombley, J. L. (2020). Self-Defence and Its Limits in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls. Nottingham Medieval Studies, 63, 129-151. https://doi.org/10.1484/j.nms.5.118197

This article examines how Marguerite Porete defended her ideas in her mystical treatise The Mirror of Simple Souls, which along with its author was condemned as heretical in 1310. Most scholarship has focussed on the final sixteen chapters of the Mir... Read More about Self-Defence and Its Limits in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls.

Berserks Behaving Badly: Manipulating Normative Expectations in Eyrbyggja saga (2020)
Book Chapter
Ruiter, K. (2020). Berserks Behaving Badly: Manipulating Normative Expectations in Eyrbyggja saga. In Narrating Law and Laws of Narration in Medieval Scandinavia (171-184). De Gruyter

A common thread running through the present volume is the consistent highlighting of the flexibility, negotiation, and pragmatism that is so apparent in narrated descriptions of law, legal norms, and legal practice in the medieval Scandinavian milieu... Read More about Berserks Behaving Badly: Manipulating Normative Expectations in Eyrbyggja saga.

Linking Law: Viking and Medieval Scandinavian Law in Literature and History (2020)
Journal Article
Ruiter, K. (2020). Linking Law: Viking and Medieval Scandinavian Law in Literature and History. The Historian, 8-12

This short magazine article highlights ongoing interdisciplinary scholarship which has cast light on the surprisingly sophisticated world of Viking-Age and Medieval Scandinavian law and its wide-ranging influence in these societies.

A Deviant Word Hoard: A Preliminary Study of Non-Normative Terms in Early Medieval Scandinavia (2019)
Book Chapter
Ruiter, K. (2019). A Deviant Word Hoard: A Preliminary Study of Non-Normative Terms in Early Medieval Scandinavia. In Social Norms in Medieval Scandinavia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press

Norms, normativity, and the transgression thereof have long been topics of special interest in the social sciences; however, these studies routinely demonstrate an inherent fluidity between normativity and deviance, making the study of either in isol... Read More about A Deviant Word Hoard: A Preliminary Study of Non-Normative Terms in Early Medieval Scandinavia.

Lousy revolutionaries: fiction, feminism, and failure in Ilene Segalove's The Riot Tapes (1984) (2019)
Journal Article
Bradnock, L. (2019). Lousy revolutionaries: fiction, feminism, and failure in Ilene Segalove's The Riot Tapes (1984). Oxford Art Journal, 42(1), 69-89. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcy031

In 1970, Ilene Segalove was a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, during a period of violent protests against the American Vietnam War. In 1984, as Ronald Reagan was elected to his second term as US President, Segalove made a vide... Read More about Lousy revolutionaries: fiction, feminism, and failure in Ilene Segalove's The Riot Tapes (1984).

Different strokes: judicial violence in Viking-Age England and Scandinavia (2019)
Journal Article
Ruiter, K., & Ashby, S. P. (2019). Different strokes: judicial violence in Viking-Age England and Scandinavia. Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 14, 153-184. https://doi.org/10.1484/j.vms.5.116393

This paper takes a fresh look at the use of judicial violence in the societies of Viking-Age England and Scandinavia. Using interdisciplinary methodologies, it considers legal, historical, literary, and archaeological evidence for judicially-prescrib... Read More about Different strokes: judicial violence in Viking-Age England and Scandinavia.

Pilgrimage and travel writing in early sixteenth-century England: the pilgrimage accounts of Thomas Larke and Robert Langton (2017)
Journal Article

By 1500 more than 500 written accounts of the Jerusalem pilgrimage alone had been produced in the West, and yet such works continued to be written and, increasingly, printed. How did these works retain their popularity, who was writing them and why?... Read More about Pilgrimage and travel writing in early sixteenth-century England: the pilgrimage accounts of Thomas Larke and Robert Langton.