Review: Liam Breatnach, ed.,Córus Bésgnai: An Old Irish Law Tract on the Church and Society.(Early Irish Law Series 7.) [Dublin]: Dundalgan Press for the School of Celtic Studies,Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 2017. Pp. xii, 346.€40. ISBN: 978-1-85500-232-6.doi:10.1086/703898

INTRODUCTION The historical roots of early Irish law stretch back into antiquity and were passed on in the rich oral history, poetry, sagas, law and wisdom-texts, that have come down to us. The body of law is frequently referred to as Brehon Law, so-called as it was applied by judges named breitheamhuin or brehons, in the Irish language. The more appropriate term is fenechas defined as ‘law of the Feni [freemen], customary or traditional law, [or] native law’. Promulgated or written law, much of it developed by the church, was known as Cain law. The primary old Irish law-text is the Senchas Mar (great tradition). This grounding document constitutes a third of all surviving law-texts. Reputedly originally assembled at the insistence of St. Patrick in the fifth century of the common era (CE), the Senchas Mar as we now know it was compiled in the seventh century CE and brings together a number of distinct texts, addressing a range of civil and political as well as economic and social matters. An understanding of old Irish law also requires recourse to a wide range of other law-texts, as well as oral tradition captured in the sagas, poems and wisdom-texts. Law-texts on issues as diverse as the law of bee-keeping, the status of poets (who were key to the learning and transmission of the law), the principal remedies for civil and criminal harm, and canon law demonstrate the breadth and depth of old Irish law. Although law in Ireland was not primarily legislative or king-made there was long tradition of national and local assemblies, such as the Feis of Tara, which may have served to ‘preserve [customary] laws and rules’. While kings could issue ordinances in times of emergency, law was primarily derived from custom and was found and interpreted by the legal class (poets and brehons) with strong clerical influences — an influence probably exercised by druids in earlier times. Though justice was primarily adjudicated by brehons, kings were linked to the process and may have adjudicated certain cases and/or played a role in approving the decision of a brehon. The Senchas Mar shows the significant influence of the church in revision of the law and may be seen as the end result of a collaborative process to reconcile ‘native oral custom with written Christian doctrine’.

Although the surviving written texts must be our evidence, they are not identical with the subject to be investigated. The great bulk of legal activity was oral, and on this the written sources often shed only an indirect light. In spite of this difficulty, however, we must be concerned with the totality, both written and unwritten, since otherwise explanation will be impossible. It will also be necessary to examine the principal Irish text of canon law, the ‘Collectio canonum Hibernensis’. I shall refer to the vernacular texts as native Irish law or as secular Irish law.

Bethany Dumas was a scholar of forensic linguistics whose specialties were the discourse of product warning labels and the comprehensibility of pattern jury instructions. Bethany K. Dumas (1937–2021) was a scholar of language and law whose contributions in a broad range of domains helped set the agenda for the emerging field of forensic linguistics. Dumas received her PhD in Linguistics in 1971 from the University of Arkansas with a concentration in dialectology. In 1974, following teaching posts at Southwest Missouri State University and Trinity University, Dumas was granted a professorship at the main University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville, where she taught, researched, and published for the remainder of her lengthy career. Dumas later earned her JD from the University of Tennessee in 1985—a qualification that enhanced her scholarly and professional impact at the interface of language and law. Prior to developing her central focus on forensic linguistics, Dumas taught and researched in a number of related academic and pedagogical domains: dialectology, women's language, discourse analysis, applied linguistics, bilingual education, and student writing, among others. Two of these merit at least brief additional attention.

The emergence since the 1970s of social scientific and humanistic studies of law that orient to its linguistic, discursive, and textual features has added both empirical and critical theoretical perspectives to a study of legal language that diverges dramatically from what once was the domain of technicians of legal text and rhetoric. Resonant with the “linguistic turn” of the social sciences and the “sociocultural turn” of humanities, researchers with backgrounds in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, semiotics, and literature, among others, have converged around the structure and use of language and discourse in the expression and operation of the law. The earliest work in this area focused on the face-to-face interactions that constitute the legal process, including witness examination, judge-lawyer or judge-litigant exchanges, plea barging discourses, and even juror deliberation and lawyer-client interactions that happen out of public view. Much of it was conducted by social scientists and legal scholars taking seriously the main thesis of American legal realism, that law must be understood in the details of its actual processes, discursive or otherwise, and not just through the interpretive logics and internal histories of its legislative and judicial texts. More recently however, law and humanities scholars, as well as some social scientists, have returned to the language of legal texts, analyzing how their content is informed by narrative tropes from their sociocultural surround, but likewise by their materiality and mediation as documents, records, and files, of which the circulation between social actors figure importantly in law’s making. While their different disciplinary commitments result in different positions on a variety of methodological concerns—i.e., the need for empirical data to support their claims, the possibility and necessity of posing larger critical and/or normative interventions, and/or the value of offering policy reform recommendations, among others—most of these studies nonetheless concur on a basic vision of language use as a medium not only for reference to, but fundamentally for construction of social realities and orders. Legal language is thus understood as a central mode for the exercise of social power through law, and, increasingly, a focus of inquiry that figures centrally in sociolegal studies that considers how law is always a hermeneutic and empirical phenomenon. What counts as legal language scholarship is necessarily broadly scoped, ever widening, and susceptible to varied opinions about how to delimit it. Legal language scholarship is taken here to be all analyses of law—from both the social sciences and the humanities—that suggest a commitment to understanding law’s discursive and textual dimensions and their impact in shaping law’s force in the world. In the following sections, provided first is a list of texts that offers an overview of law and language scholarship, then a section listing Journals dedicated to sociolinguistic, semiotic, and interpretive approaches to law. The article then presents organized additional key scholarship, according to its origins in social scientific or humanities disciplines, with subheadings in each of these sections as relevant to important themes in the law and language literature.

In this monograph, Caroline Laske traces the advent of consideration in English contract law, by analysing the doctrinal development, in parallel with the corresponding terminological evolution and semantic shifts between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is an innovative, interdisciplinary study, showcasing the value of taking a diachronic corpus linguistics-based approach to the study of legal change and legal development, and the semantic shifts in the corresponding terminology. The seminal application in the legal field of these analytical methodologies borrowed from pragmatic linguistics goes beyond the content approach that legal research usually practices and it has allowed for claims of semantic change to be objectified. This ground-breaking work is pitched at scholars of legal history, law & language, and linguistics.

abstract: This article concerns the fragmentarily attested early Irish legal text Fidbretha ‘Tree-Judgments’. Although this text is often mentioned by scholars of early Irish law as an important source of information about early Irish trees, no edition or translation of the text has been published thus far. Fidbretha is compared with other sources related to trees and forests and an edition and translation of the text appears in the Appendix.

The fragmentary nature of evidence for the Early Christian period makes an interdisciplinary approach essential for the reconstruction of past landscapes and settlement patterns.1 Despite the efforts of the Group for the Study of Irish Historical Settlement to foster interdisciplinary links, much modern research remains unconcerned with the need to present an integrated understanding of the past.2 Would-be practitioners of a multidisciplinary approach may have been discouraged by the hostile reception which greeted Smyth’s innovative contributions to Early Christian studies.3 Although one such critic professed ‘unqualified admiration’ for his multidisciplinary approach,4 Smyth was attacked for his dependence on secondary sources, especially his reliance on Ancient Laws of Ireland, the flawed Victorian English-language translation of early Irish law. More importantly, Smyth was justifiably admonished for minimising the importance of early Irish law as a source for settlement history.5Would these attacks have been less virulent, and shorter, if the academic in question had not strayed beyond the boundaries of his core discipline? In another instance illustrating the pitfalls of interdisciplinary research, considerable space has been given by an archaeologist to changes in the social hierarchy of the period based on an outdated theory from the field of Early Irish Law.6Thus, multidisciplinarians become uneasy consumers of a published product beyond their individual expertise, of works whose limitations are often known only to those at the core of individual disciplines. Despite these inherent dangers, this chapter reviews recent developments in a wide range of specialisms which have improved our understanding of Early Christian settlement.

Early Irish law texts appear frequently to draw upon a particular numerical series. The numbers in this series are 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 30. In status texts this series is supplemented by the numbers 2, 20, 42. A method for generating these numbes is suggested. This method also provides a solution to anomalies in the ordering of grades in some texts.

Einleitung in das Neue Testament: Evangelien und Apostlegeschichte

This chapter gives an overview of Leavis’s life and work, his intellectual heritage and legacy. The first part of the life takes us up to the completion of Leavis’s doctoral studies, with an intervening period of nearly four years’ service in the Great War. The middle period is the Leavis of maximum influence, of the establishing of the Cambridge English School, the journal Scrutiny, the major educational statement Education and the university and ground-breaking critical texts such as The great tradition. During this time Leavis, despite institutional discouragement and lack of recognition, exerts considerable sway over the contemporary literary and educational scene. A third stage opens with his retirement from teaching at Cambridge amid the controversy aroused by his valedictory attack on C. P. Snow’s The two cultures. This stage is marked by Leavis’s association with the University of York, and the issuing of several texts on literary and socio-educational themes. The chapter considers the grounding of Leavis’s cultural critique and the subsequent development of Leavis studies.

Early Irish Literature and Law (2006–7)

Extract Writing a book is as much a reclusive task as it is not. While I certainly tend to retreat from public life whenever I am in the middle of a writing process, I am very aware of those many individuals who have supported me and contributed to the working process up to this point and have allowed me to complete the book. I cannot mention all of the individuals to whom I owe encouragement and inspiration but would like to name at least some without whom I would probably never have had the idea to write a book on the language of canon law. Being part of a lively campus university is a tremendous help when undertaking an interdisciplinary study, as it makes it much easier to cross paths with scholars from other disciplines, such as linguists. I am particularly pleased to have made the acquaintance of Stefanie Dipper, professor of computer linguistics at Ruhr University Bochum, quite early on when I started working in Bochum in 2010. I will never forget her famous and infamous inaugural lecture “Ente Apfelmus” (“Duck Applesauce”), which was not only hilariously funny but also provided one impulse for me to start thinking about the relevance of linguistics for canon law. I also look back with much gratitude upon my time as a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” at the University of Bonn in 2015 and 2016, during which I was fortunate enough to meet renowned and enthusiastic scholars of law and language as well as of law and literature, including Lawrence Solan, Sabine Meyer, and Joachim Harst.

This book focuses on legal concepts from the dual perspective of law and terminology. While legal concepts frame legal knowledge and take center stage in law, the discipline of terminology has traditionally been about concept description. Exploring topics common to both disciplines such as meaning, conceptualization and specialized knowledge transfer, the book gives a state-of-the-art account of legal interpretation, legal translation and legal lexicography with special emphasis on EU law. The special give-and-take of law and terminology is illuminated by real-life legal cases which demystify the ways courts do things with concepts. This original approach to the semantics of legal concepts is then incorporated into the making of a legal dictionary, thus filling a gap in the theory and practice of legal lexicography. With its rich repertoire of examples of legal terms in different languages, the book provides a blend of theory and practice, making it a valuable resource not only for scholars of law, language and lexicography but also for legal translators and students.

In many respects, Jack Zipes's most recent anthology of fairy tales and critical texts has as its primary objective to trace the history and development of the literary fairy tale in Western Europe, a genre that first took root in sixteenth-century Italy, then came to flourish in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, only to prosper in Germany by the beginning of the nineteenth century. This "chronology" of the genre's history is reflected in the organization of tales, which in each section moves from Italian tales by Straparola and Basile, to French tales by authors like d'Aulnoy and Perrault, and finally to German versions mostly by the Grimms. Rather than organize the tales according to the Aarne-Thompson system of classification, Zipes groups the tales based on affinities that highlight relations of direct, indirect, or mutual influences between tales coming from different national traditions. [End Page 295] Zipes hesitates characterizing the development of the genre in terms of diachrony, and complicates this linear evolution by pointing out in the short introductions to each group of tales, in his essays, and in the choice of critical essays the various "synchronic" influences on each national tradition, such as the sociopolitical context and ideological objectives of the particular writer, the influence of contemporary oral versions of the tales, and literary trends of the period.

In Defense of Our Critical Commentaries:Individual Authors' Responses to david [sic] McCraw's Review Charles H. Egan, Xinda Lian, Shuen-fu Lin, Maija Bell Samei, and Xiaofei Tian Charles H. Egan's Response The reviewer misrepresents what I said—not once but three times—and thereby sets up paper tigers he then criticizes with irrelevant or specious evidence. He writes that I claim "alphabetic writing systems lead you to write in vernacular" (p. 33). In fact, I said pretty much the opposite: in languages that use alphabets, "the written generally follows the vernacular" (p. 201). This should be obvious. Has he tried to read Chaucer lately? The vernaculars change very quickly, and written forms follow when alphabets are used to record sound and speech. That written forms of classical, Church, and Vulgar Latin at one time coexisted proves my point, not McCraw's, especially since Latin then gave way to the written forms of the various Romance languages. In contrast, classical Chinese changed very slowly and developed not in the direction of easy communicability or even clear referentiality, but toward dense, concise, and erudite presentation. It was a literary language, and it grew and changed primarily through intertextual interplay between new and old texts, and less so through vernacular change or dialect influence. One reason for this change is that characters were not read the same way as we read spelled words. There was no particular pressure for the written language to mimic the spoken, and the two diverged widely. Earlier in his review, McCraw notes, "In fact, characters by themselves do not tell us how to read them" (p. 22). Exactly! Next, the reviewer quotes me as having described classical Chinese as "undergrammaticalized and ambiguous," and accuses me of a "grandiose fallacy" (p. 33). What I actually wrote was "It [classical Chinese] tended toward monosyllabism and was undergrammaticalized and ambiguous relative to the spoken language" (p. 201), which is very different from what the reviewer asserted. As a literary language practiced by a homogenous group of people, classical Chinese became a sort of shorthand communication. Words and ideas that might reasonably be inferred from context were frequently omitted, and parts of speech remained fluid. My students—even native readers/writers of modern Chinese—are often stymied by that age-old classical Chinese game of "find the subject," and lines such as Confucius's "junjun chenchen fufu zizi" 君君臣臣父父 子子 can mystify them. Chinese poetic language is even more subject to interpretation because of the preference for shizi 實字 over xuzi 虛字. Finally, McCraw falsely quotes me by saying that "it is unlikely that [Tang quatrains] were actually sung in the Tang." The key words here are "Tang quatrains," which McCraw supplies but I never wrote. The line (on p. 203) pertains specifically to pentasyllabic quatrains in a yuefu 樂府 style; the great musical tradition of the Six Dynasties, which produced hundreds of pentasyllabic quatrains that still delight us, such as those in the Wusheng 吳聲 and Xiqu 西曲 categories, had all but died out by the early Tang.1 It was replaced by a new musical tradition [End Page 44] in which the heptasyllabic quatrain became the dominant song lyric form. I state this fact clearly: "Qijue [七絕] developed along with Tang popular music, for which it was the major song form" (p. 213). Following his bald misstatement of my position, McCraw attempts to "prove me wrong" with his pièce de résistance—the well-known anecdote of a quatrain song contest featuring Wang Changling, Gao Shi, and Wang Zhihuan, as translated and discussed by Stephen Owen. Yet Owen states—and McCraw fails to mention—that the incident is almost certainly apocryphal.2 Moreover, McCraw's assertion that the incident is based on eighth-century accounts is highly suspect—where did he get this information? Owen does not say so (he specifies the early ninth century). Indeed, dates in the Tangshu Yiwenzhi 唐書藝文志 for the activities of Xue Yongruo 薛用弱, author of the Jiyiji 集異記 (Record of collected wonders), in which the anecdote first appears, range from 821 to 835. Gu Tianhong uses internal evidence from the entries considered most reliably to be by Xue to suggest a date for the collection of about 850.3 Jiyiji...