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Adam and Lucifer: a Royal Example

Abstract If a person says he will make an example out of you, he is telling you that you are going to be punished. In European countries the theories of legal punishment were for centuries explicitly and expressively linked to religious theories of exemplarity. In this article I will be considering this history by regarding one of its beginnings and one of its ends. More specifically, I am writing about the history of capital punishment in Norway, but the ideas central to this history and their modes of application will easily be recognized in other contexts. The point of departure is a book called The King’s Mirror, written in approximately ce 1250. It can be considered the first learned essay on law written in Norwegian. The book was written a few decades before the laws of private vengeance were replaced by criminal law. The paper examines how The King’s Mirror explains criminal law and capital punishment through interpretations of the Christian myth of creation. This point of departure is then mirrored by a point of arrival, provided by the last public executions performed in Norway in the winter of 1876.