The Moral Crisis of Medieval Irish Laws

In Mesopotamia, the origins of patriarchy in ancient greek, the word for honor was time. A man's ability to protect the women of his family is an essential part of that honor. forcing him to surrender a woman of his family to perform menial and degrading chores in another's household is the ultimate blow to his honor. The mediaeval irish laws seem so peculiar from our perspective because their exponents had not the slightest discomfort with putting an exact monetary price on human dignity. These are precisely the thingsthat ought to be considered beyond all possibility of quantification.