Introduction

Vengeance certainly draws a crowd. Back at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in July 2005, the audience for the session on medieval vengeance spilled out into the hallway. But as anthropologists and social scientists continue to demonstrate, the different words used for vengeance, and the variety of different ways in which a desire for vengeance may be expressed or sanctioned within different cultures, is truly boggling. Vengeance seems universal, in that some sort of relative concept appears throughout history and across cultures. Vengeance seems a purely negative phenomenon that creates anarchy and chaos and points a society towards a time when "man is wolf to man"yet it emerges from study that vengeance can be used constructively within a society to bolster the social fabric and enhance social stability. And so on and so forth.