Gender and the social imaginary in medieval Welsh law

Sir John Rhys Memorial Lecture (Celtic Studies)

This lecture will explore the role played by gender in medieval Welsh legal writing. The lawbooks of medieval Wales, have recently been argued to have narrative qualities rendering them susceptible to several different kinds of analyses including standard historical readings, scrutiny as law, and more literary critical methods. Robin Chapman Stacey will examine the ways in which ideas about male and female inform lawbook depictions of space and time, animal and human bodies, and everyday practices such as farming.

Speaker: Professor Robin Chapman Stacey, Professor of History, University of Washington
Robin Chapman Stacey is Professor of History at the University of Washington. Her past books include The Road to Judgment: From Custom to Court in Medieval Ireland and Wales (1994); Dark Speech: The Performance of Law in Early Ireland (2007) and Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales (2018). She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies and is a past winner of the University of Washington’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Chair: Professor Thomas Charles-Edwards FBA, Emeritus Jesus Professor of Celtic, University of Oxford

Free, booking required

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Image, Folio 17v. from the Laws of Hywel Dda Manuscript © National Library of Wales