Within sacred boundaries: the limitations of saintly justice in the province of Narbonne around the year 1000

ABSTRACT

Around the year 1000, judges from the ecclesiastical province of Narbonne (southern France and Catalonia) crafted judicial strategies that reinforced the region's Visigothic Code with the power of saints – conceived as gatekeepers to God's heavenly courtroom – to validate the oaths of witnesses. This practice merged liturgically grounded ideas about supernatural forces and space with a law code that prioritised secular authority. To forestall opposition to rulings, officials sometimes held proceedings in churches. This paper examines two unusual cases illustrating the challenges such strategies faced, given the perception that saints were not omnipresent. These disputes raise questions about the nature of saints, the degree of agency humans attributed to them and the utility of sacred spaces for legal ritual. In the province, saints were powerful, but constrained by their inability to act beyond the walls of consecrated sanctuaries housing their relics. This relegated saints to supplementary roles in law.     

Land Reform in the Time of Neoliberalism: A Many‐Splendored Thing

Abstract: Over the past 20 years, land reform – defined here as the redistribution of land from large to small properties – has emerged as an important political issue in the Global South. Actors with widely differing ideological perspectives have claimed land reform as central to their political, social and economic platforms. In this paper, I compare reforms championed under the neoliberal auspices of the World Bank (the so‐called Market Led Agrarian Reforms) with those supported by popular grassroots actors such as the Movement of Landless Workers (the MST) in Brazil. I argue that although these two approaches to land reform are often considered antithetical to one another, they share a common theoretical foundation. Both are rooted in a labor theory of property that attributes the fruits of one's labor to the laborer. Where the two differ is in their interpretation of the “original sin” through which land and labor came to be misaligned: neoliberal actors see the state as the key source of land‐related inefficiency while popular grassroots actors identify the market as the key source. I analyze case material from northeastern Brazil and suggest that the institutionalization of the labor theory of property (across civil society, state and market in the region) has generated insecurities for new land reform beneficiaries who must protect their property rights with visible evidence of their productivity.     

Late Holocene vegetation and palaeoenvironmental history of the Dunadd area,Argyll, Scotland: chronology of events

This paper focuses on the chronology and environmental significance of a sediment sequence from an alluvial locality in the vicinity of the historic site of Dunadd, Scotland. It outlines the rationale and statistical validity of an age model derived for a sequence of floodplain sediments from which detailed pollen-stratigraphical and plant macrofossil records have been derived. A series of radiocarbon dates are calibrated using a Bayesian modelling approach, the results of which can be refined by incorporating two independent age estimates based on tephra layers of known age. Analysis of the entire floodplain sequence for volcanic glass shards revealed the presence of discrete but geochemically very similar tephra layers within the upper (late Holocene) part of the sequence. Comparison with published geochemical data obtained from Icelandic tephras of historical age indicates strong statistical correlations with the Hekla 1947 AD and Hekla 1510 AD. While the Hekla 1510 AD tephra has previously been reported from sites within Britain and Ireland, the Dunadd sequence affords the first record of the Hekla 1947 AD tephra layer within Scotland. When the ages and stratigraphic positions of both tephra layers are incorporated into the Bayesian age model, an overall centennial to decadal precision for the late Holocene is achieved, with archaeological and environmental transitions discriminated with highest-likelihood age uncertainty ranges of 20–50 years at 95% confidence. The local environmental record is assessed in the light of this new chronological framework: the data support previously reported proposals for two periods of significant climatic deterioration with increased wetness, the first during the early Medieval period and the second during the late 16th and 17th centuries AD.