Law Archive
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Sovereignty and Territoriality: An Essay in Medieval Political Theory
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsTo advance this task of conceptual clarification, my essay offers an excursus into medieval political theory. It argues that sovereignty, as the idea is used at present, has its genesis in a theological concept—it the notion of highest authority the archetype for which is God. But why invoke the medieval tradition to talk about all this? -
Property Rights in Celtic Irish Law
Posted on December 16, 2012 | No CommentsUnfortunately, many historians not specializing in the study of the ancient Irish law tracts have been unaware of the textual inaccuracies of the O'Curry - O'Donovan translations and have continued to incorporate their older unscientific work, and that of their editors, into their own work. -
Spectacularizing Justice in Late Medieval England
Posted on November 28, 2012 | No CommentsI use the word ritual because in cases of treachery use of a general ‘script’ as ordered by these two accounts emerges with surprising frequency in England in the late 13th and early 14th century. -
The Church in Fourteenth-Century Iceland: Ecclesiastical Administration, Literacy, and the Formation of an Elite Clerical Identity
Posted on November 28, 2012 | No CommentsIn what follows, therefore, I provide a detailed study of Icelandic clergy and the institutions of the Icelandic Church in the period from 1300 to 1404. -
Women on the Rack: Torture and Gender in the Ius commune
Posted on November 19, 2012 | No CommentsThe story that I will tell in this essay is of four women. Queen Sibílla Fortià of Aragon, an unknown woman named Mita, Beatrice Cenci of Rome, and Artemisia Gentileschi, also of Rome. What unites these four women is torture. All four were summoned to court, and all four were tortured. -
The Law’s Violence against Medieval and Early Modern Jews
Posted on November 19, 2012 | No CommentsKen Pennington examines the issue of forced baptism of Jewish children in the legal literature from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. -
Comital Authority, Accountability and the Personnel of Comital Administration in Greater Anjou, 1129-51
Posted on November 19, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper was part of SESSION VIII:Power & Politics in the Long Twelfth Century. It examined the charters of Geoffrey of -
An 11th-Century Scandal
Posted on November 18, 2012 | No CommentsComplaints from Damian about the church’s unwillingness to confront the sexual behavior of the clergy, however, met with inaction. In 1049 Damian wrote to Pope Leo IX (1048-54) about the cancer of sexual abuse that was spreading through the church: boys and adolescents were being forced and seduced into performing acts of sodomy by priests and bishops; there were problems with sexual harassment among higher clergy; and many members of the clergy were keeping concubines. -
Salutare Animas Nostras: The Ideologies Behind the Foundation of the Templars
Posted on November 18, 2012 | No CommentsThe meteoric rise of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon (more commonly known as the Knights Templar) and their equally swift fall has fueled fanciful tales and scholarly research. The order promoted their mythological origins and the extreme charges leveled against them by Philip IV of France (1285-1314) created an atmosphere of speculation. -
Noble and Urban Family-Structures in the Late Middle Ages in the Hungarian Kingdom
Posted on November 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe everyday life of the clan people was filled with disputes over small plots, since it was the main duty of each generation to preserve and enlarge the lands of the clan. It was also the basic interest of the members of the clans to secure the survival of the clan by marriages that were fertile in every sense. It was a sign of the strength of the clan that the members had to consult before taking decisions in questions of marriage, inheritance. -
Medieval Book History Week Lecture: “Practical Latin and Formal English in the 14th-15th Centuries”
Posted on November 13, 2012 | No CommentsThis lecture is part of Medieval Book History Week. Renown Professor Jeremy Catto spoke about literacy and language in England during the later Middle Ages at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto. -
Shifting Experiences: The Changing Roles of Women in the Italian, Lowland, and German Regions of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period
Posted on November 12, 2012 | No CommentsSpecifically, the thesis compares and analyzes the changing roles that women could employ economically, politically, socially, and religiously. -
Customs and Lordship in Greater-Anjou
Posted on November 8, 2012 | No CommentsThis is another Haskins conference paper from SESSION VI: Lordship. This paper focused on monasteries, changes in lordship and expectations between the lord and the monastery. -
Of Kings and Popes and Law
Posted on November 8, 2012 | No CommentsIn England, the period which most legal historians consider to be the key formative years of the common law was the reign of King Henry II. -
“How Could You Recognise a Member of the Merchant Guild in Saint-Omer around 1100?”
Posted on November 5, 2012 | No CommentsThis is another summary of a Haskins conference paper given in the session entitled: SESSION II: Who Do They Think They Are?. It deals with the customs of the guild of Saint-Omer -
The Coleridge Hundred and its Medieval Court
Posted on October 28, 2012 | No CommentsWhere possible, I have given examples of the earliest type of court documented, with examples of the type of case heard, and by whom they were heard, concentrating on the Manorial and Mayor's Courts, which are the best documented, and whose Rolls nave been translated by the authors of my chief sources of reference. -
Anglo-Saxon law and numismatics: A reassessment in the light of Patrick Wormald’s the Making of English Law
Posted on October 22, 2012 | No CommentsIn this article, I wish to return to the references to coinage in the Anglo-Saxon laws in the light of Patrick Wormald's important research on the laws, especially his The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, which has made this difficult evidence much more penetrable to the non-specialist. -
The status of women in Roman and Frankish law
Posted on October 10, 2012 | No CommentsUnder both Roman and Frankish laws, women, although they did not have judicial equality with men, did have many legal rights and freedoms. -
Tolerance of Usury
Posted on October 8, 2012 | No CommentsIn the Middle Ages, could usury be tolerated in the law? -
The Librarius and Libraire as Witnesses to the Evolving Book Trade in Ducal Brittany
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsIn monasteries and cathedrals of the medieval West, the « custos librariae » functioned primarily as a custodian or keeper of bound codices, and we see a similar role emerge from extant medieval registers from Breton cathedral chapters. -
The fabric of society: The organization of textile manufacturing in the Middle East and Europe, c. 700 – c. 1500
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsIn recent years several attempts have been made to use institutional theory to explain this divergence between the Middle East and Europe. Most of these attempts focus on the organization of international trade. -
Hafa nu ond geheald husa selest: Jurisdiction and justice in “Beowulf”
Posted on October 4, 2012 | No CommentsThis coincidence of literary image with legal significance, is as I shall attempt to show in this study, by no means unique in Beowulf. -
Why Grateley? Reflections on Anglo-Saxon Kingship in a Hampshire Landscape
Posted on September 18, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper focuses on the context of the promulgation of the first ‘national’ lawcode of King Athelstan at Grateley. -
Treason and Related Offenses in the Anglo-Saxons Dooms
Posted on September 11, 2012 | No CommentsThe Anglo-Saxon Dooms represent a unique development in Germanic legal history and are unlike the continental folklaws in many important respects. -
Origins and Development of the Notariate at Ravenna (Sixth through Thirteenth Centuries)
Posted on September 9, 2012 | No CommentsExcluding the profession of the sword, that of the notary was among the earliest, the most self-conscious and certainly the largest in the medieval world.
