The Fine Script: Legal Marginalia, 1100-1700

We have word of The Fine Script, a conference exploring comparative approaches to legal marginalia circulating in Europe and the Middle East between 1100 and 1700, will be held on Monday, August 31 and Tuesday, September 1, from 10 AM-3:30 PM.  The conference will" connect the present with the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period—placing Ireland within Europe, and Europe in its relationship with the Middle East and the Byzantine Sphere."  It can be attended in-person in Paris at the Centre Culturel Irlandais or online (the zoom link will be circulated via email prior to the event).

--Dan Ernst.  Schedule after the jump. 

Christensen-Nugues on Forced Marriages and the Apostolic Penitentiary

Charlotte Christensen-Nugues, Lund University, has published, open-access,  Consent and Coercion: Forced Marriages in Supplications to the Apostolic Penitentiary, 1484-92, in the Journal of Medieval History:

In the late Middle Ages, hundreds of Christians from all over Europe sent supplications to the Papal Curia to be freed from promises made under duress. This article analyses the supplications about forced marriages that were submitted to the Apostolic Penitentiary during the pontificate of Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92). The study is based on mainly unedited source material that has not been investigated before. The article examines who turned to the Penitentiary for annulment because of force (age, gender, and social status), who was designated as the compelling party, and, finally, what kind of coercion the petitioners had been subjected to. Particular focus is given to the narrative strategies of the petitioners and how their stories relate to legal theory and cultural norms in late medieval society.

--Dan Ernst 

Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West

New from Oxford University Press: Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West, edited by Isabella Lazzarini, Luciano Piffanelli, and Diego Pirillo:

The history of peacemaking has traditionally been reduced to isolated case studies and seen as the prelude to the presumed 'universal' and 'modern' international order. Countering this one-dimensional and Eurocentric narrative, this multi-authored volume reconceptualizes peace treaties as a range of successful and failed agreements, settlements, truces, leagues, and other forms of conflict resolution, thus recovering their multilayered history throughout the medieval and early modern period. Rather than a series of 'great' treaties, peacemaking is reframed as a flexible phenomenon; a 'political grammar', whose complexity is reflected in its variety of forms and sources. Drawing on both diplomatic history and international relations studies, this volume traces the central role that peacemaking has played in the political history of the Western World.

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump.

CFP: The Medieval Academy's Centenary

[We have the following Call for Papers.  DRE]

The Medieval Academy at 100: The 2025 Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America.  Harvard University, Cambridge MA,  20-22 March 2025.

The Centennial Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted by Harvard University, Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis University, Fitchburg State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stonehill College, Tufts University, and Wellesley College. While the conference will take place in person, the plenary lectures and some other events also will be live streamed. Plenary addresses will be delivered by Kristina Richardson (Professor of History and Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Virginia), Sara Lipton (Incoming President of the Medieval Academy of America and Professor of History, Stony Brook University), and Wendy Belcher (Professor of Comparative Literature and African American Studies, Princeton University). The Annual Meeting will be followed by the Sunday annual meeting of the Medieval Academy's Committee on Centers and Regional Associations (CARA). [More.]

Weekend Roundup

• Slate's Amicus podcast (hosted by Dahlia Lithwick) is doing a series on originalism. The first episode in the series is here ("How Originalism Ate the Law: The Trick"). 

• The Death Panel podcast has released a conversation with Karen Tani (University of Pennsylvania) and Katie Eyer (Rutgers Law) on their article "Disability and the Ongoing Federalism Revolution," Yale Law Journal (2024). The episode is currently available to patrons only, but will eventually be "unlocked."

• Welcome to the blogosphere to Legal History Insights, moderated by Thomas Duve, on th doings of the department on Historical Regimes of Normativity at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory!
  

• Boston College Law School has launched the website Black History at BC Law “to honor, document, and celebrate the rich history of contributions from Black BC Law community members as student leaders, educators, academics, judges, activists, litigators, transactional attorneys, and visionaries."  More.

• Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies has announced its 2024-2025 Fellows.  They include Myisha S. Eatmon for “to complete a book on black Americans’ use of tort law to seek justice during the Jim Crow era, and to begin a second project on the legal relationship between black Americans and American Jews during Jim Crow and the Holocaust"; Daphna Renan and Nikolas Bowie, for a book “that contests judicial supremacy ...  and recovers a tradition rooted in abolitionism that allows the American people to define the Constitution democratically”; and Laura Weinrib, for “a book on labor unions, corporations, and money’s role in politics in the United States.”
  

• Claire Potter interviews Paul Sabin, Yale University, about his book, Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (Political Junkie).
  

• "More than 200 people attended a special community celebration on Saturday, April 27, commemorating the sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary of the construction of Aliʻiōlani Hale, home of the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court." More. H/t Michael Banerjee 
  

• 
  The U.S. Capitol Historical Society will host a Native American Suffrage Symposium on Thursday, May 23, "to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.”
  

• Legal historians were among the political historians and political scientists at the conference, How the New Deal Was Run, held last weekend at Vanderbilt University.  Kevin Kruse's brief notice of the conference is here. 
  

• New online in the AJLH:  Letter Writing and Legal Consciousness during World War I, by Elizabeth A. Hoffmann.  It "explores how ordinary Americans thought about law during World War I by examining 119 letters to Congress regarding charges under the Espionage Act.”

• New journal alert: "Early Medieval England and its Neighbours is an open access, interdisciplinary journal dedicated to new research on England, its closest geographic and intellectual neighbours, and their wider cultural contacts from the 5th to the 11th century." 
  

• Lawbook Exchange’s May 2024 catalogue.

• ICYMI: Yesterday the Supreme Court of Tasmania turned 200.  Ralph Richard Banks, Standford Law, asks, Brown v. Board: Success or Failure?  Should tikanga Māori be taught in New Zealand's law schools? (Re:). Patrick O'Donnell on Law and Psychoanalysis.
  

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

When Law Left the Lawbooks in Medieval Europe

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

When Law Leaves the Lawbooks: Legal Diffusion and Normative Instability in Medieval Europe.  Rowan Dorin, Stanford University, April 23, 2024, 06:00 PM (Local Time Germany).  Contact: Benedetta Albani, albani@lhlt.mpg.de

Like medieval jurists, modern scholars frequently rely on the authoritative, codified versions of legal norms when considering the relationship between legal developments and social change in the European Middle Ages. Too rarely have medievalists followed the lead of early modernists in emphasizing the multi-sited production and translation of legal knowledge. Yet just as in the early modern era, medieval law did not circulate only in its codified forms; knowledge of its language and provisions could also be transmitted and transformed through other written genres, to say nothing of oral renderings and visual representations. Using a thirteenth-century conciliar decree as a starting point (and building on a newly available online database of medieval ecclesiastical legislation), this talk will accordingly explore the paths by which legal innovations moved from medieval council chambers and university classrooms into local contexts, undergoing significant textual and interpretative transformations along the way.

Rowan Dorin (AB & PhD Harvard; MPhil Cambridge) is Associate Professor of History at Stanford University. In addition to his recent book, No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe (Princeton UP, 2023), he has published articles on medieval canon law, Jewish-Christian relations, digital humanities, and the circulation of people, goods, and manuscripts in the premodern world.

We kindly ask those interested in participating in person or online to register here.

Kuskowski, "The Time of Custom and the Medieval Myth of Ancient Customary Law"

The latest issue of Speculum (the journal of the Medieval Academy of America) includes an article of interest: "The Time of Custom and the Medieval Myth of Ancient Customary Law," by Ada Kuskowski (University of Pennsylvania). Here is the abstract:

Medieval custom has been variously described as old, long, repeated, remembered, or immemorial. These notions of the time of customary law can be traced to Fritz Kern’s “good old law.” While scholars have finessed or critiqued Kern’s conception, the assumption that custom had to be viewed as old or ancient law remains. This article examines the temporal framework of custom in lawbooks from late antiquity to the fourteenth century, as well as in modern history and historiography, to trace how and when the language of age and antiquity came to frame custom. When and how, in other words, did a medieval myth of an old, ancient, and even immemorial customary law form? Jurists who tried to define the term, first in late antiquity and then in the high Middle Ages, deployed various notions of time to separate a legal custom that worked like law from habitual practice. The lawbooks that described custom, on the other hand, tended to see it as current or presentist, and it was only around the turn of the fourteenth century that learned definitions worked their way into customary lawbooks. The medieval myth that customary law necessarily had to be old law turns out not to be medieval but modern.

The full article is available here (but behind a paywall).

-- Karen Tani

Benham, "International law in Europe, 700-1200"

Via New Books Network, we have word of a 2022 publication that we missed: International law in Europe, 700-1200 (Manchester University Press), by Jenny Benham (Cardiff University). A description from the Press:

Was there international law in the Middle Ages? Using treaties as its main source, this book examines the extent to which such a system of rules was known and followed in the period 700 to 1200. It considers how consistently international legal rules were obeyed, whether there was a reliance on justification of action and whether the system had the capacity to resolve disputed questions of fact and law. The book further sheds light on issues such as compliance, enforcement, deterrence, authority and jurisdiction, challenging traditional ideas over their role and function in the history of international law.

International law in Europe, 700-1200 will appeal to students and scholars of medieval Europe, international law and its history, as well as those with a more general interest in warfare, diplomacy and international relations.

More information is available here.

-- Karen Tani

CFP: Objects of Law in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.  H/t: MW.]

Objects of Law in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds.  Universität Bern, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Aug 29–30, 2024.  Deadline: Nov 1, 2023.  Corinne Mühlemann und Fatima Quraishi

Materials and texts function in a variety of ways in legal contexts, they forge diplomatic ties, grant gifts of land, levy taxes, regulate markets, etc. In the medieval and early modern worlds, these objects took on many different guises. Some were highly ornate objects, such as Fatimid marriage contracts where text was embroidered on woven silk, or tablets of authority produced in gold, silver or wood which allowed travelers to cross the Mongol Empire without difficulty, or wax seals imprinted with imperial images protected in textile bags. Other objects facilitated the execution of law in everyday life; glass weights, stamps for marking loaves of bread, length standards embedded in architecture, volume standards. The connection between the materiality of these artefacts and the law are multiple, their very nature conveyed information, performed authority, and communicated authenticity.

Although legal objects fall between disciplinary categories, their texts have been the main subject of scholarship. The conference, Objects of Law, proposes thinking more deeply about the artistic practices that shaped the materiality, iconography, and texts of legal objects in the medieval and early modern period. What forms did these objects take? How did their form confer authenticity and legal authority? What training or knowledge are evident in the objects? Objects of Law seeks dialogue between scholars working in art history, history, archaeology, legal history, and related disciplines that deal with legal objects. We welcome contributions from all geographical regions that relate to the medieval and early modern period. We invite contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

- The role of objects in legal practices
- The aesthetics of objects of law
- The artistic practices of crafting legal objects

Proposals should consist of an abstract in English for 30-minute papers (max 2000 characters incl. spaces) and a brief biography (max 1500 characters incl. spaces) in a single document (pdf or word). They should be submitted to: Corinne Mühlemann (corinne.muehlemann@unibe.ch) and Fatima Quraishi (fatimaq@ucr.edu) by November 1, 2023. Graduate students are highly encouraged to apply. Conference participants will be provided with accommodation in Bern for 3 nights and some travel expenses will be covered.

Kuehn, "Patrimony and Law in Renaissance Italy"

Cambridge University Press has published Patrimony and Law in Renaissance Italy (2022), by Thomas Kuehn (Clemson University). A description from the Press:

Family was a central feature of social life in Italian cities. In the Renaissance, jurists, humanists, and moralists began to theorize on the relations between people and property that formed the 'substance' of the family and what held it together over the years. Family property was a bundle of shared rights. This was most evident when brothers shared a household and enterprise, but it also faced overlapping claims from children and wives which the paterfamilias had to recognize. Thomas Kuehn explores patrimony in legal thought, and how property was inherited, managed and shared in Renaissance Italy. Managing a patrimony was not a simple task. This led to a complex and active conceptualization of shared rights, and a conscious application of devices in the law that could override liabilities and preserve the group, or carve out distinct shares for each member. This wide-ranging volume charts the ever-present conflicts that arose and were a constant feature of family life.

Praise from reviewers:

'Patrimony and Law in Renaissance Italy analyzes the family as part of the sharing economy at the intersection of law, property, and households in Renaissance Italy. It is an essential work for scholars seeking to understand the entangled development of individual legal rights amidst the increasing codification of family law and the evolving familial economy of medieval and Renaissance Italy.' -- Caroline Castiglione

'This important study features the creative tension between a legal environment oriented toward individuals and a social world that prized families and patrimonies. The writings of jurists who wrestled with this tension reveal a 'sharing economy,' a form of economic behavior whose existence upends our simple teleologies of gift and market.' -- Daniel Lord Smail

More information is available here. An interview with Professor Kuehn is available here, at New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani

Stella's "Libri Feudorum"

The Libri Feudorum (the ‘Books of Fiefs’): An Annotated English Translation of the Vulgata recension with Latin Text, by Attilio Stella, has been published, open access, with Brill:

The I (the ‘books of fiefs’) are the earliest written body of feudal customs in Europe, codified in northern Italy c.1100-1250, which gave rise to feudal law as a branch of civil law. Their role in shaping modern ideas of feudalism has aroused an intense debate among medievalists, leading to deep re-thinking of the ‘feudal’ vocabulary and categories.  This book offers an up-to-date English translation with a working Latin text introduced by a historical and historiographical overview of the Libri, thereby providing a valuable tool to understanding the long-standing importance of this collection over nine centuries of European history.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Over at the Blog of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, Jordan T. Watkins has posted on Mormons and the Making of Constitutions on the Margins.

•  The University of Vermont has posted a notice of Felicia Kornbluh's A Woman’s Life is a Human Life (2023).
  

•  If you missed Northwestern University's Kate Masur at the Supreme Court Historical Society on Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, the YouTube video is here.
  

• On January 20, Ada Kuskowski, University of Pennsylvania, will speak on her book, Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France, at the Stanford Center for Law and History.  Register here.
  

• Karen Tani (University of Pennsylvania) appeared on the Death Panel podcast to discuss the legal historical backdrop to Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski and the potential ramifications of the pending Supreme Court decision.  
  

• For their project, "Anti-CRT Bills Come to Campus: New Threats to Free Expression & Academic Freedom from State Legislatures,” Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Snyder, Carlton College, “are eager to interview faculty, historians in particular, who have been affected by these laws.”
  

• ICYMI: Farrell Evans on How Neighborhoods Used Restrictive Housing Covenants to Block Nonwhite Families Communities across the U.S. (History).  Stephen Halbrook, Should Courts Appoint Historians as Experts in Second Amendment Cases? (Volokh Conspiracy).  Nate Raymond, Judge doesn't need historian to review gun law, say prosecutors, defense counsel (Reuters).  Debra Cassens Weiss, Justice Jackson uses originalism to undercut "conservative juristocracy" (ABAJ).
  

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Cambridge History of Medieval Canon Law

The Cambridge History of Medieval Canon Law, edited by Anders Winroth, Universitetet i Oslo, and John C. Wei, has been published.

Canon law touched nearly every aspect of medieval society, including many issues we now think of as purely secular. It regulated marriages, oaths, usury, sorcery, heresy, university life, penance, just war, court procedure, and Christian relations with religious minorities. Canon law also regulated the clergy and the Church, one of the most important institutions in the Middle Ages. This Cambridge History offers a comprehensive survey of canon law, both chronologically and thematically. Written by an international team of scholars, it explores, in non-technical language, how it operated in the daily life of people and in the great political events of the time. The volume demonstrates that medieval canon law holds a unique position in the legal history of Europe. Indeed, the influence of medieval canon law, which was at the forefront of introducing and defining concepts such as “equity,” “rationality," "office,” and “positive law,” has been enormous, long-lasting, and remarkably diverse.

In addition to the editors, the other contributors are Caroline Humfress, Abigail Firey, Greta Austin, Christof Rolker, Wolfgang P. Mueller, Martin Bertram, Andreas Meyer, Péter Erdo, Norman Tanner, Gisela Drossbach, Gero Dolezalek, Anthony Perron, Susan L'Engle, Charles de Miramon, Elizabeth Makowski, M. Izbicki, Rob Meens, Thomas Wetzstein, Sara McDougall, Franck Roumy, Lotte Kéry, Edward Peters, Frederick Russell, Ryan Greenwood, Peter G. Clarke, Peter Landau, and Thomas Izbicki.  The TOC is here.

--Dan Ernst

A Transnational Legal History Workshop

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The current pandemic has encouraged many to experiment with new formats for research and teaching. In our own contribution to the trend, the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and the Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University, in cooperation with the Faculty of Law at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, will be hosting an online Transnational Legal History Workshop this coming semester.

Participants will discuss pre-circulated legal history papers that go beyond national framings, with authors hailing from institutions around the world. A sample of authors and topics:

• James Whitman, "From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: Imagining Ownership in the Western World"
  

• Doreen Lustig, "Towards a Grassroots History of International Law"
  

• Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg, "Rabbinic Responsa and Legal Communication"
  

• Paul du Plessis, "The Limits of Legal History"
  

• Elisabetta Fiocchi, "Transnational Entanglements in Land Law and Land Registration in the 19th Century"
  

• Heikki Pihlajamäki, "Transnational Elements in Colonial Laws: Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands"
  

The workshop will meet online Tuesdays at 7 pm Frankfurt time from mid-October to mid-January (with a break for Christmas/New Years).

Participation in the workshop is open to all interested scholars, junior and senior alike. Students may be able to receive academic credit through Tel Aviv University.

For more information and to register participation, please contact mpitauwkshp@gmail.com.

Thomas Duve (MPI & Goethe)
David Schorr (TAU)
Stefan Vogenauer (MPI & Goethe)

CFP: International Congress on Medieval Studies

 [We have the following CFP.  H/t: Liz Papp Kamali.  DRE]

International Congress on Medieval Studies

This call for papers includes all sponsored and special sessions approved by the Program Committee for the 57th International Congress on Medieval Studies (live on the internet Monday through Saturday, May 9-14, 2022), hosted by Western Michigan University's Medieval Institute.

The sponsored sessions are listed alphabetically by the name of the principal or sole sponsoring organization, and the special sessions follow alphabetically by session title. Email addresses are obfuscated in the page source to reduce the chances of being harvested by spammers.

You are invited to make one paper proposal to one session of papers: that might be to one of the Sponsored or Special Sessions listed here as a session of papers, which are organized by colleagues around the world, OR to General Sessions, which are organized by the Program Committee in Kalamazoo.

You may propose an unlimited number of contributions to roundtables and panel discussions, but you will not be scheduled to actively participate in more than three sessions (including sessions in all formats).

All those hoping or invited to make contributions to sessions or papers, roundtables, and panel discussions at the Congress need to make proposals in the Confex system by the deadline of Wednesday, Sept. 15. Contributions to demonstrations, performances, and workshops are not solicited through our proposal system. Interested individuals should approach the contact person directly.

All proposals for sessions of papers (including general sessions), roundtables, and panel discussions are made through the Confex system, where the sessions are grouped by format and most sessions seeking proposals are described more fully.

Virtual Workshop: Law in Transmission, c. 400-1500

[We share the following announcement.]

The Comparative Law Workshop 2021 will take place as a Zoom webinar on 5-7 May 2021. Please register here for "Law in Transmission: The Movement of Practices, Texts and Concepts across Time and Space, c.400-1500." 

All times are given in British Summer Time.

Weekend Roundup

• 
  Amanda Frost, Bronfman Professor of Law & Government, American University Washington College of Law, will be speaking on her book You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers online at Politics & Prose on January 28.  More. 
  

• Linda Kerber and Lisa Moses Leff will comment at the first Washington History Seminar of 2021 on at 4 PM ET Monday when David Nasaw discusses his new book, The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War.  Register here; watch here.

• Applications for the J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History are due on January 15.  This two-week program of the American Society for Legal History for early career scholars will take place June 13-26, 2021.  Information here.

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Gregory P. Downs (UC Davis) and Kate Masur (Northwestern University), "Yes, Wednesday’s attempted insurrection is who we are."
  

• If you're working on death, this Call for a Royal Holloway virtual conference (15-16 April 2021) may be of interest. Proposals for Until Death Do Us Part: Historical Perspectives on Death and Those Left Behind, 1300-1900 are due Jan.29, 2021.

• And here's another Call for a virtual conference, from the University of Reading (27 April 2021): Medieval Government Finance: Innovation and Experimentation. Proposals due by 19 Feb. 2021.

• “When the Covid-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of conferences and public talks, the editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era organized a series of webinars with historians to discuss new books and research in Civil War era scholarship. The webinars are free, registration required, and the recordings are posted on the JCWE’s YouTube channel.”  The lineup for the first five months of 2021 lineup is here. 

• New from the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore: a brief introduction to the Preamble of the Indian Constitution.

• ICYMI:  Holly Brewer explains that Thomas Jefferson did not rig the 1800 election (Washington Monthly).  George F. Will doesn’t care for the Slaughterhouse Cases (WaPo).
  

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

Duggan's Essays on Medieval Canon Law

We’ve recently learned of the publication of A. J. Duggan, Popes, Bishops, and the Progress of Canon Law, c.1120–1234, ed. T.R. Baker (Brepols, 2020).   Anne J. Duggan is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History and Fellow of King’s College London; Travis R. Baker (D.Phil, Oxford, 2017) is a private scholar living in the Diocese of Orange:

This book considers the role of popes and bishops in the development of the law of the Church between 1120 and 1234. Although historians have traditionally seen the popes as the driving force behind the legal transformation of the Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the primary argument of this book is that the functioning of the process of consultation and appeal reveals a different picture: not of a relentless papal machine but of a constant dialogue between diocesan bishops and the papal Curia.

Bishops have always played a central role in the making and enforcement of the law of the Church, and none more so than the bishop of Rome. From convening and presiding over church councils to applying canon law in church courts, popes and bishops have exercised a decisive influence on the history of that law.

This book, a selection of Anne J. Duggan’s most significant studies on the history of canon law, highlights the interactive role of popes and bishops, and other prelates, in the development of ecclesiastical law and practice between 1120 and 1234. This emphasis directly challenges the pervasive influence of the concept of ‘papal monarchy’, in which popes, and not diocesan bishops and their legal advisers, have been seen as the driving force behind the legal transformation of the Latin Church in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Contrary to the argument that the emergence of the papacy as the primary judicial and legislative authority in the Latin Church was the result of a deliberate programme of papal aggrandizement, the principal argument of this book is that the processes of consultation and appeal reveal a different picture: not of a relentless papal machine but of a constant dialogue between diocesan bishops and the papal Curia, in which the ‘papal machine’ evolved to meet the demand.

–Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump.

Dowling, Keyser and friends on conservation in pre-industrial Europe

 Abigail Dowling (Mercer University) and Richard Keyser (University of Wisconsin-Madison) have co-edited Conservation's Roots: Managing for Sustainability in Preindustrial Europe, 1100-1800, now out with Bergahn Books. From the press: 

The ideas and practices that comprise “conservation” are often assumed to have arisen within the last two centuries. However, while conservation today has been undeniably entwined with processes of modernity, its historical roots run much deeper. Considering a variety of preindustrial European settings, this book assembles case studies from the medieval and early modern eras to demonstrate that practices like those advocated by modern conservationists were far more widespread and intentional than is widely acknowledged. As the first book-length treatment of the subject, Conservation’s Roots provides broad social, historical, and environmental context for the emergence of the nineteenth-century conservation movement.

There are legal themes and sources throughout this book's chapters. Table of Contents after the jump: 

Thank You, Tom McSweeney!

We want to thank Thomas McSweeney of William & Mary Law for his series of posts prompted by his recently published book Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law’s First Professionals:

The Overly Familiar Treatise
Putting the People into Legal History
Who are the "We"?
Legal Genres
Were Justices Lawyers?

Thanks, Tom!