This chapter discusses two Middle English Charlemagne romances, The Siege of Milan and The Sultan of Babylon, to illuminate post-1291 anxieties about royal politics, Christian infighting, and God’s will and support. It brings these romances into conversation with two main bodies of literary and historical material. The first consists of writings that polemically engage with the question of whether English and French kings should prioritize domestic affairs or crusading activity. The second consists of poems, letters, and chronicles that, written by Christians following crusading defeats, feature wrathful rebukes of God and threats of conversion to Islam. I draw on this latter corpus to offer a new interpretation of the literary motif of the “afflicted Muslim” who vents his military frustration on his “gods,” arguing that such depictions should be understood as projections of Latin Christian anxieties about God’s lack of support to the crusading enterprise.

Electra presents us with a world in which Help Friends/Harm Enemies remains unquestioned. In the prologue Orestes announces his intention ’to shine out like a star against my enemies’, and when he reappears, declares that he will stop his laughing enemies in their tracks. Electra expresses similar sentiments, and makes loyalty to friends a cardinal principle. Like Orestes, she assumes that their enemies are indulging in hostile mockery. Clytemnestra prays that if her dream is hostile it may recoil on her enemies, and that she may enjoy prosperity with her present friends. The chorus console Electra with the assurance that Orestes is ’noble (esthlos), so as to help his friends’, and their general approval of Electra’s values is clear from their praise and sympathy. When they advise her to moderate her hatred, they are thinking of her welfare, and add that she should not forget it entirely. Neither they nor Chrysothemis, in their efforts to restrain her, maintain that she is wrong in principle. Clytemnestra does suggest that Electra should not treat her philoi as she does (518), but she casts no doubt on Help Friends/Harm Enemies – in fact her criticism of Electra depends on it.

Chapter 3 analyzes President Obama’s announcement on the killing of bin Laden to reveal the way discounting life is authorized and legitimized through extrajudicial, extraterritorial killing. Specifically, Obama’s celebratory narrative of the killing as a nation-healing, nation-securing achievement codes vengeance as “justice,” normalizes US imperialism, implicitly justifies “collateral damage,” and remakes the parameters of legitimate state conduct in relation to terrorism. Attending to how Obama’s announcement used image, narrative, political myth, and sound to manufacture necropolitical law’s authority, legitimacy, norms, and community, Chapter 3 argues that we are interpellated by the official announcement, not as liberal legality’s empowered citizenry but as docile spectator-subjects. Chapter 3 also shows how the announcement, in avoiding the category “law,” enables a lawyer-president-commander-in-chief to invest the category “justice” with a range of meanings that contradict liberal legality, in that they invite us, as subjects, to acquiesce in state secrecy and in necropolitical law’s extraterritorial, extrajudicial violence.

The idea of being overwhelmed by musical and visual effects is a recurrent theme in the critical reception of Cherubini’s three Parisian operas of the 1790s. The word ‘sublime’ is frequently employed, and in ways that suggest something more specific than a critical shorthand for excellence: a quality rooted in revolutionary experience. In Médée, it was the talents of the singer Julie-Angelique Scio in the title role that most attracted the term: the vengeful heroine murders her children and leaps into the flames that are consuming the palace. When Médée premiered in 1797, the nation was still recovering from the trauma of the Terror following the fall of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794: Parisians of all political stripes were coming to terms with this extended period of violence and vengeance. The power and vulnerability apparently conveyed by Scio in the role can be understood as allowing spectators to experience Médée’s sublimation of her fury as the sublimation of their own unresolved emotions following the Terror.

Chapter 8 examines divine responses to violence, and in particular, to bloodshed and the outcry of the victim. The restoration, or ‘redemption’, of blood by a divine גאל הדם (‘restorer of blood’) is one of the primary ways that biblical texts portray Yhwh’s response to bloodshed. Through a study of select texts, including several from 1–2 Samuel, the following claims are made. First, Yhwh acted as restorer of blood and legal adjudicator for those wrongly accused. He played the role of Mesopotamian kings who addressed cases for claimants and accused. If the human system failed, the poor had legal recourse. Second, because of the frequent emphasis on the cries of the afflicted and poor in ancient Israelite literature, some poetic and narrative traditions came to valorize the renunciation of one’s legal rights to (human) vengeance. Devotion and loyalty to Yhwh were characterized in terms of committing one’s case to Yhwh, not only when the legal system failed, but in recognition of Yhwh’s unique prerogative to intervene.

In keeping with Jessup’s project of constructively contesting legal doctrinal understandings of law, this chapter analyses the Situation Room Photograph to illustrate transnational law as drama. The metaphor of law as drama inheres in Jessup’s text. Yoking Jessup’s turn to drama with anthropologist Victor Turner’s notion of social drama, this chapter shows how, as a text of transnational law, the Situation Room photograph illuminates the normalizing and legitimizing of the national security state, even as gestures and representations of law associated with liberal democracy thread through the image.

This chapter discusses violence associated with the exercise of lordship and the culture of nobility in Europe from ca. 500-1500. For most of the twentieth century, historians argued that lordly violence rose and fell in inverse proportion to the power of ‘sovereign’ rulers, such as kings and emperors. It is now recognized that aristocrats in general and lords in particular played roles in medieval societies and polities that made their use of violence not just tolerable but also necessary. The practice of ‘feud’ has also come in for reassessment, increasingly understood not as anarchic or usurpatory, but re-envisaged as rule-based and self-limiting. Yet, if seigneurial violence now appears much more socially productive and politically intelligible to historians, it is important to realize that the exercise and experience of seigneurial violence varied a great deal according to social position and context. Aristocratic women were less likely than aristocratic men to be involved in such conflicts, and non-aristocrats, of both sexes, bore the brunt of the violence. This essay proceeds chronologically, examining changes in the ideas and practices that shaped how lords and nobles used violence in different regions.

This chapter explores the relationship between law, crime and violence. It begins by setting out a fairly standard historiographical narrative that, as polities coalesced and became more powerful over the course of the Middle Ages, so the law and legal mechanisms which underpinned political structures of power became more efficient.The rediscovery of Justinian’s Digest of Roman law in late eleventh-century Italy and a subsequent emphasis on Roman law in medieval Europe, is presented as pivotal. This paradigm is, however, then complicated in a number of ways. The legal prosecution of violence continued to be dependent upon the cooperation and involvement of communities. The courts’ growing interest in equity and the examination of fact as well as just law, further problematizes the picture. Roman law co-existed alongside customary law and canon law; this kind of pluralism is set beside the diffusion of justice across fragmented political units. Vengeance continued to be a powerful motivator both in episodes of interpersonal violence, and in the logic underpinning the law itself. Far from contributing to a state monopoly of violence, law most often aimed to channel and circumscribe violence rather than entirely to prohibit it. The essay ends by examining the methodological implications of these considerations.