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About the Book
Stories of murderous monks, tavern brawls, robberies gone wrong, tragic accidents and criminal gangs from court records reveal how the English of medieval Ireland governed and politicized death and collectively decided what passed for ‘truth’ in legal proceedings. This study of the social practices underlying the lordship’s legal culture centres on the coroner’s jurisdiction, homicides and sentences of capital punishment between 1257 and 1344. It highlights how the English of Ireland relied on collective memory, customary law, oral histories, common fame and social networks to assess truth in legal contexts. In the period when courts increasingly emphasized written evidence, the politics of death offered opportunities to employ these social practices to both strengthen and contest the authority of the written word. Exploring how they functioned alongside developing literate practices brings Ireland’s place in the history of medieval literacy into sharper focus.
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About the Author
I grew up in Chelmsford, Massachusetts; Stuttgart, Germany; and Huntingdonshire, England. I discovered my deep love for history when I was an undergraduate at the University of Alabama. Hungry for more, I enrolled part-time in the M.A. in history program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. That's where I met Dr. Aidan Breen, a brilliant medieval scholar who led me to Ireland's often overlooked primary sources and humored my interest in faerie folklore. He guided me in writing my thesis, a history of the Irish influence on the Island of Avalon in medieval literature.
In 2009, I embarked on the toughest and most rewarding challenge of my life, the University of Connecticut's medieval studies Ph.D. program. After 12 years of researching, writing, rewriting, editing, and proofreading, Dublin's Four Courts Press published my transformed dissertation in 2023.
I began investigating haunted houses in 2012, and the Oliver House in Middleborough, Massachusetts, quickly became a favorite haunt. This led me to my current work in progress, a history of the house and its hauntings with coauthor Richard Estep. My other research interests center on social memory and literacy in early modern witchcraft trials.​
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