Journal of the British Academy, 8, 267–293 DOI https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/008.267 Posted 11 December 2020 Gender and the social imaginary in medieval Welsh law Robin Chapman Stacey Sir John Rhŷs Memorial Lecture, read 26 March 2019. Abstract: This talk explores the role played by gender in the social imaginaries implicit in medieval Welsh law. It takes as its starting point the lawbooks of medieval Wales, which have narrative qualities rendering them susceptible to analyses of several dif- ferent kinds, from standard historical readings, to scrutiny as law, to more literary critical methods. Of particular interest in this lecture are the ways in which ideas about male and female inform lawbook depictions of space and time, sexuality in both animal and human bodies, and everyday practices such as farming. Keywords: Gender, Welsh law, space, farming, sexuality, social imaginary. Note on the author: Robin Chapman Stacey is Professor of History at the University of Washington. She is the author of several books and articles on medieval Irish and Welsh law, including The Road to Judgment: From Custom to Court in Medieval Ireland and Wales (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), Dark Speech: The Performance of Law in Early Ireland (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), and Law and the Imagination in Medieval Wales (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
[email protected] © The author(s) 2020. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License 268 Robin Chapman Stacey It was an honour to be invited to deliver the Sir John Rhŷs Memorial Lecture, not least because of the opportunity afforded me by this occasion to pay tribute to the achievements of Sir John Rhŷs himself, the very first professor of Celtic at Oxford University and a scholar whose work continues to inspire more than a century after his death.