Cuenca's "Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England"

Esther Liberman Cuenca has published The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England (Oxford University Press):

Drawing on a quantitative analysis of hundreds of printed and archival sources from 77 towns, The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval England is the first cross-regional investigation into the history of urban customs since Mary Bateson's seminal, two-volume work Borough Customs (1904-1906). In contrast to English common law and church law, which both had long institutional and academic traditions devoted to training men in their legal philosophies, customary law constituted local practices that acquired the force of law over time. Urban customary law regulated political officeholding, trade, property holding, and even moral behaviour in English towns.

The Making of Urban Customary Law argues that urban customs, which governed the lives of people in English towns, were crucial to the development of a distinct, bourgeois identity in England-an evolution that this new study tracks from the early twelfth to the late sixteenth centuries. In the years following the Black Death, and especially during the Reformation period, this law became more concerned with defining political authority, maintaining morality, and articulating a consensus about the “common good” for townspeople.

This book makes two principal claims: First, customary law advanced the business interests of an urban oligarchy. These were urban (male) elites who drafted laws and obtained privileges to enhance their wealth and assert their political independence from local lords, and often made claims about the legitimacy of their privileges or laws by rooted them in history or some kind of ancestral past. These lawmakers also made considerable efforts to establish their identities as morally upright and even-handed patriarchs. In so doing, urban customary law played a central role in the development of a distinct bourgeois identity in medieval and Reformation England. Second, this law lent particular meanings to the “common good” in towns, as it helped these lawmakers articulate policies that cohered to their vision of an ideal civic community.

--Dan Ernst

Prévost to Lecture on Renaissance Jurists

The Edinburgh Law School’s Centre for Legal History will host a talk with Xavier Prévost, Professor of Legal History at the University of Bordeaux, on 10 May. Professor Prévost will lecture on "The Encyclopedism of Renaissance Humanist Jurists."  Register here.

The expression “Legal humanism of the Renaissance” refers to the movement that emerged from the full integration of law into humanist knowledge, which began at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries. Starting with a critique of medieval scholasticism for the study of legal texts, this intellectual movement proposed new methods for producing legal ideas based on an encyclopedic approach. Although there were many methodological differences between the legal scholars grouped under the banner of humanism, they shared the conception of a legal science that is not closed in on itself. Thus, they applied to law the humanist idea that knowledge forms a vast body made up of elements that may be intellectually differentiated, but which remain interrelated: the understanding of one of these elements must therefore logically call upon all those related to it. Not only did these scholars master the legal sources (Roman law, canon law, customs, royal legislation, court decisions, etc.), but they constantly referred to history and geography, philosophy and theology, philology and rhetoric, literature and poetry, mathematics and architecture, agronomy and astronomy.

The encyclopedism of Renaissance humanist jurists then caused an upheaval in the understanding of law, while participating massively in the production of knowledge beyond legal ideas. Presenting such an approach can contribute to the current debate which, faced with the extreme compartmentalisation of disciplines and even a growing separation between legal branches, is calling for greater use of interdisciplinarity.

--Dan Ernst.  (H/t: Scottish Legal News.)

CFP: Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity

[We have an announcement of the interdisciplinary workshop, “Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity,” to be held at St John's College, Oxford UK, in April 2024.  We understand that the organizers are “particularly keen to receive some abstracts from early career researchers and scholars working in law as well as in history, and on contexts outside of England.”  DRE]

In a study published just over forty years ago, Richard Kagan outlined a Western-European ‘legal revolution’ taking place between 1500 and 1700. Characterised by growing recourse to formalised courts for civil dispute-resolution, and judicial centralisation around monarchs and rulers, this trend has been identified in various cultures and contexts since: in England, Scotland, France, Germany, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Scandinavia, and in ‘New World’ colonies. Counts of surviving casefiles, plea roll entries, and register folios among legal archives confirms the general course of this trend. Yet simply enumerating lawsuits across a range of jurisdictions cannot, by itself, explain this social and institutional phenomenon.  
Litigation required knowledge about how to find legal counsel, how to write a petition or submit information, and where and when a court was held – and so its rise was driven by some practical, popular knowledge of the law. This phrase encapsulates several semantic challenges, however. What or who is included in the category of ‘popular’, and how do we measure popularity – by number or by status? What constitutes ‘knowledge’ of the law and its processes? How was it gained, who had access to it, and how did they use it? What aspects of the law were open knowledge? There is a tendency to focus on the doctrines and precepts of written law. Yet how widely were the procedures, routines, customs, and documents of courts and their personnel understood?

This one-day, hybrid conference will bring together researchers working on different legal and judicial contexts across early modernity to share the kind of occasional, practical insights which – until we compare and contrast our findings – might feel incidental to individual research agendas. Contributions to this discussion are invited particularly from postgraduate and early-career scholars working with legal archives, and from researchers in history, law, and related disciplines.

Short papers (no longer than 15 minutes) are welcomed on three broad themes:

• The transmission, reception, and collection of knowledge about how to access the law among wider populaces – through literature, performance, and other cultural modes;
  

• The use of judicial and extra-judicial systems – evidence for how people practically approached the law, made complaints, hired counsel, accessed courts, whether as litigants, informants, witnesses, or jurors etc.;

• The application and adaptation of legal ideas within and outside of courtrooms – the exploitation of perceived loopholes in the law; the deployment of formalities like documents and witnesses to extra-judicial events; communal adaptations of law.

Please send short abstracts (150 words) and a brief biography to Laura Flannigan (laura.flannigan@sjc.ox.ac.uk) by 31 August 2023.

2021 Boucher Prize to Wood

Laurie Wood (Florida State University) has won the 2021 Boucher Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society for her book, Archipelago of Justice: Law in France's Early Modern Empire, published by Yale University Press in 2020. 

Here's the citation: 

Laurie M. Wood’s Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire is the winner of the 2020 Mary Alice and Philip Boucher prize. Archipelago of Justice offers a major contribution to an emerging scholarship seeking to integrate the histories of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean empires in order to better understand how the early modern French empire operated as a whole. Wood achieves this remarkable accomplishment through her focus on the conseils. In the early modern French empire, the conseils—regional law courts—bound a far-flung and diverse imperial system together through a network of institutions, people, and practices. In Archipelago of Justice, Wood focuses our attention across the entire system of these crucial legal institutions (the administrative equivalent of the parlements of metropolitan France), along with the people who staffed them and the subjects who petitioned them, to show how they created power, order, and the very nature of French colonialism. Based on astonishing archival tenacity, the book is beautifully written through powerful case studies and stories that bring to life both the powerful and the marginalized in vivid detail. Its most powerful and creative intervention is surely at the level of framing. Approaching the conseil and its agents as a whole, Wood navigates from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, helping us see these frequently separate worlds together, as they were legally bound together in the early modern era through the fascinating history of the conseil.

Professor Wood will be guest blogging at the LHB in the future. In the meantime: many congratulations!

--Mitra Sharafi 

CFP: Law, Theology, and the Moral Regulation of “Economy” in the Early-Modern Atlantic World

[We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Call for Papers: Law, Theology, and the Moral Regulation of “Economy” in the Early-Modern Atlantic World

This is a call for papers in anticipation of a one-day conference to be organized by Brian Owensby (University of Virginia) and Richard Ross (University of Illinois) through the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History  The conference, to be held at the Newberry. Library in Chicago on Friday, April 23, 2021 is entitled, “Law, Theology, and the Moral Regulation of ‘Economy’ in the Early-Modern Atlantic World.”  The time is long past when the Western world’s emergent commercial culture could be understood solely in terms of a Protestant ethos or the division between commerce and social morality occasioned by the Protestant Reformation. Scholarship has shown that “modern” ideas regarding commerce and “economics” had their roots in late-medieval Catholic thought and in neo-scholastic ideas that blended theology, justice, and law. It is clear as well that the rise of commercial thinking was not a linear intellectual development. Protestants and Catholics alike, facing the moral and social implications of novel “economic” relations, undertook deep theological and legal reflections regarding unbridled, competitive, exchange-oriented gain seeking. Many of these concerns were raised in the context of Europe’s westward expansion to the New World. Usury, just price, interest, legal personality, slavery, reciprocity, property, cases of conscience, doubts regarding self-regulating mechanisms, concerns for the poor—all figured in a vibrant legal discourse that simultaneously elaborated and critiqued a set of ideas regarding human economy that became dominant between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. This conference will bring together historians, legal scholars, and social scientists to investigate law’s historical role in enabling and regulating behaviors now recognized as foundational to modern economies.

Interested presenters should submit an abstract of between 200 and 500 words and a c.v. by March 15, 2020.  Please send submissions and inquiries to Richard Ross [rjross@illinois.edu]; 217-244-7890.  No previously published work will be accepted. Applicants will be notified by email shortly after the submission deadline.  Accepted participants will be required to submit a full paper of no more than 10,000 words by the end of February 2021. Papers will be pre-circulated and read by all participants.  The conference will pay for travel and hotel expenses. 

Thank you, Bianca Premo!

We are very fortunate to have had Professor Bianca Premo (Florida International University) as our guest blogger in January 2020. She was joined in several of her posts by Judith Mansilla and John Ermer (both of Florida International University). Here are these posts, all in one place:

• Paperless Law and Extrajudicial Legality
• Law and the Lettered City
• Copies and Originals, Premo
• More Than a Contract Part I, Premo with J. Mansilla
• More Than a Contract II, Premo with J. Mansilla
• Lo Extrajudicial, Premo
• Paperless Citizenship in Cuba, Premo with J. Ermer

Thank you all for sharing your insights on everything from improvised legal deals to modern citizenship cultures across Latin America!

--Mitra Sharafi

Loft on Litigation and the Anglo-Scottish Union

Philip Loft, University of Cambridge has published "Litigation, the Anglo-Scottish Union, and the House of Lords as the High Court, 1660-1875" in The Historical Journal 61:4 (2018), 943-67. The article won the Royal Historical Society's 2019 David Berry Prize for best essay on any aspect of Scottish history. Here's the abstract: 

This article examines the role of the House of Lords as the high court from the Restoration of 1660 to the passage of the Appellate Jurisdiction Act in 1876. Throughout this period, lay peers and bishops judged appeals on civil law from the central courts of England and Wales, Ireland (aside from between 1783 and 1800), and Scotland after the Union of 1707. It has long been known that the revolution of 1688–9 transformed the ability of parliament to pass legislation, but the increased length and predictability of parliamentary sessions was of equal significance to the judicial functions performed by peers. Unlike the English-dominated profile of eighteenth-century legislation, Scots constituted the largest proportion of appellants between 1740 and 1875. The lack of interaction between Westminster and Scotland is often seen as essential to ensuring the longevity of the Union, but through comparing the subject matter of appeals and mapping the distribution of cases within Scotland, this article demonstrates the extent of Scottish engagement. Echoing the tendency of Scottish interests to pursue local, private, and specific legislation in order to insulate Scottish institutions from English intervention, Scottish litigants primarily sought to maintain and challenge local privileges, legal particularisms, and the power of dominant landowners.

Further information is available here. 

--Mitra Sharafi

Smiley on the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law

Will Smiley, Reed College published From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law with Oxford University Press in 2018. From the publisher: 

The Ottoman-Russian wars of the eighteenth century reshaped the map of Eurasia and the Middle East, but they also birthed a novel concept--the prisoner of war. For centuries, hundreds of thousands of captives, civilians and soldiers alike, crossed the legal and social boundaries of these empires, destined for either ransom or enslavement. But in the eighteenth century, the Ottoman state and its Russian rival, through conflict and diplomacy, worked out a new system of regional international law. Ransom was abolished; soldiers became prisoners of war; and some slaves gained new paths to release, while others were left entirely unprotected. These rules delineated sovereignty, redefined individuals' relationships to states, and prioritized political identity over economic value. In the process, the Ottomans marked out a parallel, non-Western path toward elements of modern international law. Yet this was not a story of European imposition or imitation-the Ottomans acted for their own reasons, maintaining their commitment to Islamic law. For a time even European empires played by these rules, until they were subsumed into the codified global law of war in the late nineteenth century. This story offers new perspectives on the histories of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, of slavery, and of international law.

 Praise for the book: 

"This is an extensively detailed history of Ottoman Turkish relations primarily but not entirely with...the Russian Empire, the Hapsburgs, and the West, dealing with the numerous wars in which it was involved between 1700 and 1876...Recommended" -- CHOICE

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi

Weekend Roundup

• Our friends at the Federal Judicial Center have posted the legislation that for the first time increased the size of the US Supreme Court and established a new federal circuit. 

• We're getting caught up on Legal History Miscellany posts since the new year--here's Krista J. Kesselring (Dalhousie University) on Star Chamber records and early modern fugitives, Sara M. Butler (The Ohio State University) on femme sole status, and Cassie Watson (Oxford Brookes University) on illustrated Victorian crime reports.

• Over at Nursing Clio: Cara Delay (College of Charleston) on the trial of abortionist Mamie Cadden in 1950s Ireland.

• An advance alert from Oxford University Press tells us of the online publication of two articles in the American Journal of Legal History.  We've previously noted Zachary Newkirk’s "Full Justice May Be Done Them": The Case of Bill, Charles, Jupiter, Randolph, et al. v. William A. Carr in a Florida Freedmen's Bureau Court.  New to us is John Harrington and Ambreena Manji’s “Africa Needs Many Lawyers Trained for the Need of their Peoples”: Struggles over Legal Education in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana.

• Calling all junior scholars of Asian socio-legal studies (including those doing archival research): read up on the Training Initiative for Asian Law & Society Scholars (TRIALS) here. The deadline is June 20, 2019.

• ICYMI: An ABA Journal Gallery: 12 Supreme Court milestones that helped define First Amendment rights.  A report on the presentation “Idaho Women Win the Right to Vote” by the professors Katherine Aiken and Rebecca Scofield at the University of Idaho.

• Update:  When we think of legal-historian spouses of presidential candidates, we of course think of Bruce Mann, a past-president of the ASLH.  The Hill reminds us we should also think of Amy Klobuchar's spouse, John Bessler. Legal historians: they're quite the catch!

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

A Cultural History of Law

Out now with Bloomsbury is A Cultural History of Law, a six-volume collection examining law in western societies from antiquity to the modern age. From the press: 

How have legal ideas and institutions affected Western culture? And how has the law itself been shaped by its cultural context? 

In a work spanning 4,500 years, these questions are addressed by 57 experts, each contributing an authoritative study of a theme applied to a period in history. Supported by detailed case material and over 230 illustrations, the volumes examine trends and nuances of the culture of law in Western societies from antiquity to the present. 

Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six. 

The six volumes cover: 1 - Antiquity (2500 BCE-500 CE); 2 - Middle Ages (500-1500); 3 - Early Modern Age (1500-1680); 4 - Age of Enlightenment (1680-1820); 5 - Age of Reform (1820-1920); 6 - Modern Age (1920-present). 

Themes (and chapter titles) are: Justice; Constitution; Codes; Agreements; Arguments; Property and Possession; Wrongs; and the Legal Profession. 

A Cultural History of Law is part of the Cultural Histories Series. 

More on each volume after the jump:

Larson on widows in Durham

Peter L. Larson, University of Central Florida, has published "Widow-right in Durham, England (1349-1660)" in Continuity and Change 33:2 (August 2018), 173-201. Here's the abstract: 

A customary tenant's widow in County Durham had a right to his holdings for her life, and did not forfeit the lands for remarriage or fornication in contrast to customs found elsewhere in England. In this case study of three neighbouring villages, more than 80 per cent of widows with the option exercised this right, and did so consistently over three centuries. The persistence of this pattern indicates that widows as tenants were common and capable of cultivating or managing holdings. It suggests complex interconnections of gender with local social and economic structures, which include marriage, migration, and household formation.

Further information is available here. 

Mansell on female servants in early modern England

Charmian Mansell, University of Exeter, has published "The variety of women's experiences as servants in England (1548-1649): evidence from church court depositions" in Continuity and Change 33:3 (Dec.2018), 315-38. Here is the abstract: 

This article demonstrates, using evidence from church court depositions, that women's experience of service in early modern England was more varied than scholarship suggests. Moving beyond its conception as a life-cycle annual occupation, the article situates service within individual life-stories. It argues firstly, that service extended across the whole of women's working lives and secondly, that employment arrangements took a wide range of forms. Service for women is shown to have been flexible, varied and contingent, employing a diversity of individuals under a variety of different employment agreements.

Further information is available here. 

Abreu-Ferreira on women and law in early modern Portugal

Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, University of Winnipeg, published "Women, law and legal intervention in early modern Portugal" in the journal, Continuity and Change 33:3 (Dec.2018), 293-313. Here is the abstract: 

Early modern Portuguese women had the legal right to engage in a number of official transactions, including granting and receiving sureties and powers of attorney. This was not the case for women in many other parts of western Europe, making the Portuguese example worthy of scrutiny for comparative purposes. This article looks at the unique position of women in early modern Portugal, and shows that upon close examination of the archival sources, the evidence points to a significant gap between women's legal rights and the cultural limitations that were imposed on women.

Further information is available here. 

On the Indigenous Experience in the Americas

One of the issues that habitually frustrates me is the disconnect between historians who work on the colonial period and those who specialize in the indigenous world. Theoretically, both engage with the same period and depend on similar or even (on occasions) identical sources, but their aims and their readings are often diverse, the bibliography they consult is habitually distinct, and they frequently belong to different fields and professional associations. The result is that they are seldom in conversation with one another. Having participated recently in a search for a historian of Indigenous North America made this clear to me, but so have many years working as a scholar of Spanish America.

How could one place colonial and indigenous history in dialogue? To answer this question, I authored two pieces. The first piece was concerned with Indigenous right to land, the other focused on campaigns to resettle natives in new, Spanish-style communities.[i]

Attempting to understand why some historians insisted on Spanish respect to native land rights (mostly historians of the Spanish colonial state) while others criticized Spain for the massive dispossession of natives (mainly historians interested in the native experience of empire), I observed how respect to native rights operated in the colonial period.  I argued that respect did not guarantee continuity. On the contrary, it (often) introduced change. This could happen because Spanish judges, although willing to recognize indigenous right to land, understood land rights not according to Indigenous law but according to European juridical traditions. These judges tied land rights to occupation and described occupation in ways that resonated with the European experience. The result was both the suppression of ancient rights as well as the invention of new entitlements. In other words, examination of how European norms were applied vis-à-vis natives enabled to affirm that respect to native rights and native dispossession could operate simultaneously.

With regards to native resettlement, historians of native Spanish America usually denounced resettlement campaigns as a colonial measure aimed at controlling, converting, and exploiting the native population. Yet, as a historian of Spain in both Europe and the Americas I knew that resettlement did not only target natives but also Spaniards and that it operated in both the Old and the New World. Justifying it were contemporary convictions that only people who resided in proper communities (and indigenous communities were not considered “proper”) could be tied to the polity religiously and civically. The question when resettlement was required, against whom, and for which end, thus demanded a larger and a longer vision. As happened in the case of native land rights, just looking at natives, just looking to the Americas, was insufficient.

These remarks are not meant to diminish the plight of native Americans. European colonialism turned the native world upside down. It was a human-made hurricane that touched and upset almost everything. But, regardless of how terrible it had been, if we wish to understand how it operated, we should not separate the study of the native world from the study of the colonial (and by extension European) world, with which it was closely entangled.

---

[i]  Tamar Herzog. “Colonial law and ‘Native Customs’: Indigenous Land Rights in Colonial Spanish America.” The Americas 63(3) (2013): 303-321 and Tamar Herzog. “Indigenous Reducciones and Spanish Resettlement: Placing Colonial and European History in Dialogue.” Ler História 72 (2018): 9-30 (an earlier version of this work was published under the title “Terres et déserts, société et sauvagerie. De la communauté en Amérique et en Castille à l’époque moderne.” Annales HSS 62 (3) (2007): 507-538)).

Ferguson on Ottoman administrative discourses

Heather L. Ferguson, Claremont McKenna College, has published The Proper Order of Things: Language, Power, and Law in Ottoman Administrative Discourses with Stanford University Press. From the publisher: 

The "natural order of the state" was an early modern mania for the Ottoman Empire. In a time of profound and pervasive imperial transformation, the ideals of stability, proper order, and social harmony were integral to the legitimization of Ottoman power. And as Ottoman territory grew, so too did its network of written texts: a web of sultanic edicts, aimed at defining and supplementing imperial authority in the empire's disparate provinces. With this book, Heather L. Ferguson studies how this textual empire created a unique vision of Ottoman legal and social order, and how the Ottoman ruling elite, via sword and pen, articulated a claim to universal sovereignty that subverted internal challengers and external rivals. 

The Proper Order of Things offers the story of an empire, at once familiar and strange, told through the shifting written vocabularies of power deployed by the Ottomans in their quest to thrive within a competitive early modern environment. Ferguson transcends the question of what these documents said, revealing instead how their formulation of the "proper order of things" configured the state itself. Through this textual authority, she argues, Ottoman writers ensured the durability of their empire, creating the principles of organization on which Ottoman statecraft and authority came to rest.

Praise for the book: 

 "The Proper Order of Things invites us to rethink Ottoman empire-building with its capacity to codify, categorize, and monopolize symbolic violence. A brilliant book." —Ali Yaycioglu

"The Proper Order of Things offers an ambitious treatment of Ottoman bureaucratic textual production. Heather Ferguson's intelligent discursive analysis of the different bureaucratic genres as both texts and spatial practices allows for a new understanding of the nature of Ottoman governance and the longevity of the empire." —Dana Sajdi

Further information is available here.

Special Issue: Property in South Asian history

The Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient has published a special issue: "Repossessing Property in South Asia: Land, Rights, and Law across the Early Modern/Modern Divide." Here is the Table of Contents from vol.61 (2018):

• Repossessing Property in South Asia: Land, Rights, and Law across the Early Modern/Modern Divide-Introduction. by Faisal Chaudhry
• The Theory and Practice of Property in Premodern South Asia: Disparities and Convergences. by Timothy Lubin
• Property and Social Relations in Mughal India: Litigations and Disputes at the Qazi’s Court in Urban Localities, 17th-18th Centuries. by Farhat Hasan
• Revenue Farming Reconsidered: Tenurial Rights and Tenurial Duties in Early Modern India, ca. 1556-1818. by Sudev Sheth
• Property and Its Rule (in Late Indo-Islamicate and Early Colonial) South Asia: What’s in a Name? by Faisal Chaudhry
• Sovereignty, Property and Land Development: The East India Company in Madras. by Bhavani Raman
• The Problem of Property: Local Histories and Political-Economic Categories in British India. by Upal Chakrabarti
• Fluid Histories: Swamps, Law and the Company-State in Colonial Bengal. by Debjani Bhattacharyya

Further information is available here.

Pihlajamäki and friends on the history of commercial law

Heikki Pihlajamäki (University of Helsinki), Albrecht Cordes (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main),Serge Dauchy (CNRS Lille-France, University of Saint-Louis in Brussels), and Dave De ruysscher (Tilburg University, Vrije Universiteit Brussels) have co-edited Understanding the Sources of Early Modern and Modern Commercial Law published by Brill. From the press:

The contributions of Understanding the Sources of Early Modern and Modern Commercial Law: Courts, Statutes, Contracts, and Legal Scholarship show the wealth of sources which historians of commercial law use to approach their subject. Depending on the subject, historical research on mercantile law must be ready to open up to different approaches and sources in a truly imaginative and interdisciplinary way. This, more than many other branches of law, has always been largely non-state law. Normative, "official," sources are important in commercial law as well, but other sources are often needed to complement them. The articles of the volume present an excellent assemblage of those sources. 

 Contents after the break:

1 Introduction

  Heikki Pihlajamäki, Albrecht Cordes, Serge Dauchy and Dave De ruysscher

2 Mercantile Conflict Resolution in Practice: Connecting Legal and Diplomatic Sources from Danzig c. 1460–1580

  Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz

3 Justitia in Commerciis: Public Governance and Commercial Litigation before the Great Council of Mechlin in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Century

  Alain Wijffels

4 Honore et utile: The Approaches and Practice of Sixteenth-century Genoese Merchant Custom

  Ricardo Galliano Court

5 The Abandonment to the Insurers in Sixteenth-century Insurance Practice: Comparative Remarks and (A Few) Methodological Notes

  Guido Rossi

6 Historiographical Opportunities of Notarized Partnership Agreements Recorded in the Early Modern Low Countries

  Bram Van Hofstraeten

7 How Normative were Merchant Guidebooks? Of Customs, Practices, and … Good Advice (Antwerp, Sixteenth Century)

  Dave De ruysscher

8 Sources of Commercial Law in the Dutch Republic and Kingdom

  Boudewijn Sirks

9 The Files and Exhibits of the Imperial Chamber Court and Aulic Council as Sources of Commercial Law

  Anja Amend-Traut

10 Legal, Moral-Theological, and Genuinely Economic Opinions on Questions of Trade and Economy in Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-century Germany

  Eberhard Isenmann

11 The Birth of Commercial Law in Early Modern Sweden: Sources and Historiography

  Heikki Pihlajamäki

12 Svea Court of Appeal Records as a Source of Commercial Law: The Founding Year of 1614

  Mia Korpiola

13 Tracing the Speculation Bubble of 1799 in Newspapers, Court Records, and Other Sources

  Margrit Schulte Beerbühl

14 The Rise of Usages in French Commercial Law and Jurisprudence (Seventeenth-Nineteenth Centuries): Some Examples

  Edouard Richard

15 On the Origins of the French Commercial Code: Vicissitudes of the Gorneau Draft

  Olivier Descamps

16 Court Records as Sources for the History of Commercial Law: The Oberappellationsgericht Lübeck as a Commercial Court (1820–1879)

  Peter Oestmann

Further information is available here.

Berkel and friends on legal sources and Muslim societies

Maaike van Berkel, Radboud University, Léon Buskens, Leiden University, and Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Leiden University have edited the collection, Legal Documents as Sources for the History of Muslim Societies with Brill. From the publisher:

This volume is a tribute to the work of legal and social historian and Arabist Rudolph Peters (University of Amsterdam). Presenting case studies from different periods and areas of the Muslim world, the book examines the use of legal documents for the study of the history of Muslim societies. From examinations of the conceptual status of legal documents to comparative studies of the development of legal formulae and the socio-economic or political historical information documents contain, the aim is to approach legal documents as specialised texts belonging to a specific social domain, while simultaneously connecting them to other historical sources. It discusses the daily functioning of legal institutions, the reflections of regime changes on legal documentation, daily life, and the materiality of legal documents. 

Contributors are Maaike van Berkel, Maurits H. van den Boogert, Léon Buskens, Khaled Fahmy, Aharon Layish, Sergio Carro Martín, Brinkley Messick, Toru Miura, Christian Müller, Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Mathieu Tillier, and Amalia Zomeño.

Contents after the break:

Pohl-Zucker on manslaughter in Württemberg and Zurich

Susanne Pohl-Zucker, independent researcher has published Making Manslaughter: Process, Punishment and Restitution in Württemberg and Zurich, 1376-1700 with Brill. From the press: 

In Making Manslaughter, Susanne Pohl-Zucker offers parallel studies that trace the legal settlement of homicide in the duchy of Württemberg and the imperial city of Zurich between 1376 and 1700. Killings committed by men during disputes were frequently resolved by extrajudicial agreements during the late Middle Ages. Around 1500, customary strategies of dispute settlement were integrated and modified within contexts of increasing legal centralization and, in Württemberg, negotiated with the growing influence of the ius commune. Legal practice was characterized by indeterminacy and openness: categories and procedures proved flexible, and judicial outcomes were produced by governmental policies aimed at the re-establishment of peace as well as by the strategies and goals of all disputants involved in a homicide case.

Table of Contents after the jump:

• Introduction
• 1. Restitution: Strategies of Compensation and Resolution in Early Modern Württemberg
• 2. Prosecution: Manslaughter and the superfacto procedure
• 3. Legitimation: Legal Parameters and Expert Knowledge in Württemberg Homicide Trials
• 4. Accusations and Mediations: The Prosecution of Manslaughter in Zurich
• 5. Justification: Defensive Strategies in Zurich

Further information is available here.

McSheffrey on Sanctuary in England

Shannon McSheffrey, Concordia University, published Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400-1550 with Oxford University Press in 2017. From the publisher:

Seeking Sanctuary explores a curious aspect of premodern English law: the right of felons to shelter in a church or ecclesiastical precinct, remaining safe from arrest and trial in the king's courts. This is the first volume in more than a century to examine sanctuary in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Looking anew at this subject challenges the prevailing assumptions in the scholarship that this 'medieval' practice had become outmoded and little-used by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although for decades after 1400 sanctuary-seeking was indeed fairly rare, the evidence in the legal records shows the numbers of felons seeing refuge in churches began to climb again in the late fifteenth century and reached its peak in the period between 1525 and 1535. Sanctuary was not so much a medieval practice accidentally surviving into the early modern era, as it was an organism that had continued to evolve and adapt to new environments and indeed flourished in its adapted state. Sanctuary suited the early Tudor regime: it intersected with rapidly developing ideas about jurisdiction and provided a means of mitigating the harsh capital penalties of the English law of felony that was useful not only to felons but also to the crown and the political elite. Sanctuary's resurgence after 1480 means we need to rethink how sanctuary worked, and to reconsider more broadly the intersections of culture, law, politics, and religion in the years between 1400 and 1550.

Here is the Table of Contents:

1. INTRODUCTION: RICHARD SOUTHWELL FLEES TO SANCTUARY

Seeking Sanctuary in Late Medieval and Tudor England

Explaining the Tudor Resurgence of Sanctuary

Sanctuary and the Partiality of the Archives

2. TAVERN BRAWLS, CIVIL WARS, AND REMEDIES FOR TYRANNY: THE EVOLUTION OF SANCTUARY IN ENGLAND, C. 1380-1500

Herman Stokfyssh and his Flight to Westminster: The Development of Chartered Sanctuary c. 1400

Sanctuary-Seeking 1400-1550: The Numbers

Sanctuary and the Wars of the Roses

Sanctuary, Mercy, and Redemption

Ecclesiastical Liberties as a Weapon Against Tyranny: St. Edmund and Sheriff Leoffstan

3. DEAN CAUDRAY AND THE CITY OF LONDON: THE POLITICS OF SANCTUARY IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

The Escape of John Knight

St. Martin le Grand and the City of London: Liberties, Franchises, and Jurisdictions

Dean Caudray and the Events of September 1440

Marshalling Cases

The End of Dean Caudray's Days

4. THE HOSPITALLER'S CLOAK: MERCY, JUSTICE, JURISDICTION

Richard Pulham, Ralph Toker, and the Hospitaller's Cloak

The Hospitaller Order, English Criminal Justice, and Christian Mercy in Action

Sanctuary Claims at Hospitaller Properties, 1400-1485

Sanctuary Claims at Hospitaller Properties, 1485-1520

Sanctuary Claims at Hospitaller properties, 1520-1539

5. FRANCIS WOODLEKE'S WINDOW: STRANGER SHOEMAKERS, BOUNDARIES, AND SANCTUARY IN LONDON IN THE 1530S

Living in the Precinct of St. Martin Le Grand

Governing St. Martin's Precinct in the Reign of Henry VIII

Stranger Artisans, Sanctuary Men, and the City

The Boundaries of St. Martin's

The Dissolution of St. Martin le Grand and Beyond

6. THE SANCTUARY TOWN OF KNOWLE: CRIME, LOCAL AUTHORITIES, AND THE STATE IN 1530S ENGLAND

The Goat Inn Robber and Sanctuary at Knowle

Robbery, Flight, Sanctuary

Sanctuary at Knowle and the Administration of Law and Justice in the 1530s

The Knowle Sanctuary and Tudor State Formation

7. CHESHIRE FEUDS: ARISTOCRATIC VIOLENCE AND THE USES OF SANCTUARY IN THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII

Affrays in St. Paul's Churchyard

Breaching Sanctuary

Sanctuary and Aristocratic Violence in the Reign of Henry VIII

8. CONCLUSIONS: SANCTUARY, LAW, AND POLITICS

The Statute of 1540 and Sanctuary's Precipitous Decline

Sanctuary, Law, and Politics in England, 1400-1550

Further information is available here.