Abstract:

What makes a home and why? It is the place where we rest our head at night, eat our meals, store our things. It is a space that we share with those closest to us. The importance of the human need for a safe place wherein to develop our lives undisturbed is a universal one, and some sort of legal protections for the home can be identified already in the oldest written legal systems. But the nature and extent of these protections has by no means been constant, and where these lines are drawn can tell us much about the society in which they applied. In this talk, Fraser Miller discusses how the legal sanctity, or peace, of the home developed in the Nordic countries in the High Middle Ages, c. 1150-1350. This was no passive, linear development from weaker to stronger legal protections in line with the development of a state. Rather, the imposition of such protections was an incredibly contested political process. An exploration of the negotiation of agency and violence in the medieval home provides an important historical perspective to current questions related to state powers and where we define their limits.