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Abstract
This dissertation argues that the sentence of outlawry in Old Norse-Icelandic sources from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was a sentence derived from and continually influenced by the ecclesiastical sanction of excommunication. I make this argument in detail across six chapters.
In the first chapter I provide a brief account of Iceland's medieval history, focusing on political developments and the Church. The second half of this chapter argues for the use of medieval Icelandic sagas (Biskupas6gur, samti$ars6gur and islendingas6gur) as historical sources in a way that addresses both their use of storytelling elements and the distance between most sagas and the events that they narrate, offering my position on a much discussed theme in medieval Icelandic studies.
In chapter two I offer an account of the legal phenomenon of excommunication with special reference to its presentation in Icelandic sources ( Biskupa Sögur, Grágás, Kristinréttr Árna Þorlákssonar, and diplomatic sources). In chapter three I give an account of the legal concept of outlawry, the assumptions that are often made about it, and present a detailed examination of the evidence that directly documents how full and lesser outlawry were defined in medieval Iceland. One of my key arguments is that the notion of outlawry that we have access to is the outlawry of the thirteenth century and later. This chronology is based on the dating of the manuscripts that survive to document the idea, most of which are from the thirteenth century and later, even if some of the narrative material refers to the tenth and eleventh centuries.
In chapter four I consider the often-observed similarities between excommunication and outlawry in northern sources from the Middle Ages. I argue that these similarities are best explained by viewing outlawry as an outgrowth or adaptation of Christian excommunication into secular justice systems. It is difficult to prove this argument but possible to support it by making recourse to a variety of evidence from legal materials, the dating of manuscripts, and the examination of common assumptions about outlawry.
In the final two chapters of this dissertation, I examine narrative sources and show the close interplay in them between excommunication and outlawry. Chapter five concentrates on Sturla Þórðarson's telling of the conflict between Bishop Guðmundr Arason and Kolbeinn Tumason, a conflict in which both outlawry and excommunication were frequently deployed as sanctions. Chapter six focuses on stories about the Icelandic outlaw Aron Hjörleifsson, who was outlawed in the 1220s but escaped to Norway.
My study suggests that outlawry borrowed many of its legal attributes from the growing field of canon law, and that an outlaw, although not excommunicated, was treated in many ways as if he was.