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.

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 ScandinaviaAmsterdam 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.

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. doi: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.