An exploration of the thirteenth-century law code known as Siete Partidas Conceived and promulgated by Alfonso X, King of Castile and León (r. 1252-1282), and created by a workshop of lawyers, legal scholars, and others, the set of books known as the Siete Partidas is both a work of legal theory and a legislative document designed to offer practical guidelines for the rendering of legal decisions and the management of good governance. Yet for all its practical reach, which extended over centuries and as far as the Spanish New World, it is an unusual text, argues Jesús R. Velasco, one that introduces canon and ecclesiastical law in the vernacular for explicitly secular purposes, that embraces intellectual disciplines and fictional techniques that normally lie outside legal science, and that cultivates rather than shuns perplexity. In Dead Voice, Velasco analyzes the process of the Siete Partidas's codification and the ways in which different cultural, religious, and legal traditions that existed on the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages were combined in its innovative construction. In particular, he pays special attention to the concept of "dead voice," the art of writing the law in the vernacular of its clients as well as in the language of legal professionals. He offers an integrated reading of the Siete Partidas, exploring such matters as the production, transmission, and control of the material text; the collaboration between sovereignty and jurisdiction to define the environment where law applies; a rare legislation of friendship; and the use of legislation to characterize the people as "the soul of the kingdom," endowed with the responsibility of judging the stability of the political space. Presenting case studies beyond the Siete Partidas that demonstrate the incorporation of philosophical and fictional elements in the construction of law, Velasco reveals the legal processes that configured novel definitions of a subject and a people.

Publisher Description

With an aging population, declining marriage and childbirth rates, and a rise in single households, more Japanese are living and dying alone. Many dead are no longer buried in traditional ancestral graves where descendants would tend their spirits, and individuals are increasingly taking on mortuary preparation for themselves. In Being Dead Otherwise Anne Allison examines the emergence of new death practices in Japan as the old customs of mortuary care are coming undone. She outlines the proliferation of new industries, services, initiatives, and businesses that offer alternative means---ranging from automated graves, collective grave sites, and crematoria to one-stop mortuary complexes and robotic priests---for tending to the dead. These new burial and ritual practices provide alternatives to long-standing traditions of burial and commemoration of the dead. In charting this shifting ecology of death, Allison outlines the potential of these solutions to radically reorient sociality in Japan in ways that will impact how we think about the end of life, identity, tradition, and culture in Japan and beyond.

England has traditionally been understood as a latecomer to the use of forensic medicine in death investigation, lagging nearly two-hundred years behind other European authorities. Using the coroner's inquest as a lens, this book hopes to offer a fresh perspective on the process of death investigation in medieval England. The central premise of this book is that medical practitioners did participate in death investigation – although not in every inquest, or even most, and not necessarily in those investigations where we today would deem their advice most pertinent. The medieval relationship with death and disease, in particular, shaped coroners' and their jurors' understanding of the inquest's medical needs and led them to conclusions that can only be understood in context of the medieval world's holistic approach to health and medicine. Moreover, while the English resisted Southern Europe's penchant for autopsies, at times their findings reveal a solid understanding of internal medicine. By studying cause of death in the coroners' reports, this study sheds new light on subjects such as abortion by assault, bubonic plague, cruentation, epilepsy, insanity, senescence, and unnatural death.

Brain death-the condition of a non-functioning brain, has been widely adopted around the world as a definition of death since it was detailed in a Report by an Ad Hoc Committee of Harvard Medical School faculty in 1968. It also remains a focus of controversy and debate, an early source of criticism and scrutiny of the bioethics movement. Death before Dying: History, Medicine, and Brain Death looks at the work of the Committee in a way that has not been attempted before in terms of tracing back the context of its own sources-the reasoning of it Chair, Henry K Beecher, and the care of patients in coma and knowledge about coma and consciousness at the time. That history requires re-thinking the debate over brain death that followed which has tended to cast the Committee's work in ways this book questions. This book, then, also questions common assumptions about the place of bioethics in medicine. This book discusses if the advent of bioethics has distorted and limited the possibilities for harnessing medicine for social progress. It challenges historical scholarship of medicine to be more curious about how medical knowledge can work as a potentially innovative source of values.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1838.