The Ideological Foundations of Early Irish Law and Their Reception in Anglo-Saxon England, c. 600–c. 900

Old Testament Levites who considered the Law of Moses to be the living law: this has long been the established view among many scholars for how early Irish jurists perceived themselves, as well as how they saw the broader theoretical and religious bases of their jurisprudence. In this volume, however, Kristen Carella offers a timely reassessment of scholarly opinion, exploring Irish legal texts within the broader context of both vernacular Irish and Hiberno-Latin literature to argue that early Irish Christian intellectuals in fact saw themselves as gentile converts, subscribing to an orthodox Christian faith that was deeply infused with Pelagian theology.

Certain aspects of Irish legal ideology, particularly Irish views of divine history and pseudo-historical ideas about their own ethnogenesis, moreover, extended out of Ireland and into Anglo-Saxon England; their impact can be seen on lawmakers such as Alcuin, when he helped draft the Anglo-Latin Legatine Capitulary of 786, and King Alfred of Wessex, when he composed the Old English prologue to his law code in the late-ninth century. Through this approach, this volume not only challenges long-held scholarly views on Irish legal ideology and its influences beyond Ireland, but also provides a new paradigm for intellectual relations between early medieval Ireland and England.