ANCIENT PRIVILEGES
"BEOWULF,LAW, AND THEMAKING OF GERMANIC ANTIQUITY"
This is a book of distinction. It is sober, lucid, precise, and illuminating. Even those with little interest in Old English may learn from its comments on the psychology of scholars, for whom inertia is so potent, and the echoing of one’s predecessors so very soft an option. Ancient Privileges, therefore, is an outstanding achievement, greatly to the credit of its author and of West Virginia University.' Yearbook of English Studies'This summary of Jurasinski’s arguments cannot do justice to the range of his evidence from the murky territory of nineteenth-century scholarship. Jurasinski proves himself to be a worthy successor of Allen Frantzen in challenging the appeals to consensus and authority that Frantzen believes have undermined much current writing about this poem.' Journal of English and Germanic Philology
'Jurasinski makes a major contribution to Beowulf studies with the publication of his monograph, Ancient Privileges.' Year’s Work in English Studies
'This book will make a notable contribution to the fields of Beowulf studies, Anglo-Saxonism, legal history, and nineteenth-century intellectual history.' Lisi Oliver, author The Beginnings of English Law
Stefan Jurasinski is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at SUNY Brockport. With R.D. Fulk, he is the editor of The Old English Canons of Theodore . He is currently at work on a monograph entitled Secular Law and the Old English Penitentials as well as a collaborative edition of The Laws of Alfred and Ine.
•Preface
•Introduction: “The Forests of Germany”: Legal History and the Inheritance of Philology
•Jakob Grimm, Legal Formalism, and the Editing of Beowulf
•“Public Land,” Germanic Egalitarianism, and Nineteenth-Century Philology
•The Ecstasy of Vengeance: Nineteenth-Century Germanism and the Finn Episode
•Feohleas Gefeoht: Accidental Homicide and the Hrethel Episode
•Conclusions: Law and the Archaism of Beowulf
•Works Cited
