Professor Charles Zika (UniMelb)

This lecture will explore some of the key emotional and visual strategies used by artists to identify witches as dangerous others.

Elizabeth Papp Kamali (University of Michigan): The Devil’s Daughter of Hell Fire: The Role of Anger in Medieval English Felony Adjudication

This paper expands upon my earlier analysis of the meaning of felony, in which I posited that the medieval paradigm of felony was an act that involved deliberation and forethought, the exercise of a person’s reasoning capacity and volition in the absence of necessity, and moral blameworthiness, sometimes rising to the level of evil. Here I grapple with the complications raised by the issue of anger. On the one hand, anger was seen to be a product of an ill-formed conscience. This potentially placed anger within the felonious area of moral blameworthiness. On the other hand, anger in its more extreme manifestations was seen to inhibit a person’s ability to reason and to inspire behavior resembling insanity, thereby possibly pointing toward a partial excuse. Relying on legal records, religious writings, and literature, this paper excavates the understandings of anger that informed jurors’ attitudes toward felony defendants.

Image: The seven bowls of God's wrath, Thesaurus Novi Testamenti elegantissimis iconibus expressus continens historias atque miracula do[mi] ni nostri Iesu ChristIcones Revelationum S Iho[anne]s Evangeliste in Pathmo, 1585, Copyright, The Trustees of the British Museum

Prof. Hans Jacob Orning talks on “Once again I’m in trouble, as I have received the wrath of my master”. Law, anger and mercy in Norwegian courts in the High Middle Ages. Orning delivered this talk at the Emotions in the Courtroom symposium presented by The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100 - 1800) and the Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature, University of St Andrews at St Andrews in May 2015.

In this paper he discussed the relationship between legal procedures, religious penitence and political power in high medieval Norway, using a court trial between the Orcadian Earl Harald Maddadsson and the Norwegian King Sverre Sigurdsson from 1195 as a point of departure. This trial was one out of several in which the king summons magnates to answer for accusations of treachery or disloyalty. These processes are interesting, because they show that the legal idiom is intertwined with religious associations in terms of supplication and penitence, as well as the granting of mercy. Moreover, the traditional way of solving conflicts through mediation and compromise shines through in the agents’ understanding of such trials. In my presentation, I will define and discuss these different ways of understanding conflict, at the same time as I will underline the interconnectedness of these conceptions, demonstrating that the courtroom is indeed filled with emotions.