Amsterdam University Press has published Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Europe: Legal Practice and Communication in the Law Courts of Utrecht, York and Paris, by Frans Camphuijsen. A description from the Press:
Late medieval societies witnessed the emergence of a particular form of
socio-legal practice and logic, focused on the law court and its legal
process. In a context of legal pluralism, courts tried to carve out
their own position by influencing people’s conception of what justice
was and how one was supposed to achieve it. These “scripts of justice”
took shape through a range of media, including texts, speech, embodied
activities and the spaces used to perform all these. Looking beyond
traditional historiographical narratives of state building or the
professionalization of law, this book argues that the development of law
courts was grounded in changing forms of multimedial interaction
between those who sought justice and those who claimed to provide it.
Through a comparative study of three markedly different types of courts,
it involves both local contexts and broader developments in tracing the
communication strategies of these late medieval claimants to
socio-legal authority.
More information is available here. An interview with the author is available here, at New Books Network.
-- Karen Tani
