Where the Middle Ages Begin
Healthscaping a Medieval City: Lucca’s Curia viarum and the Future of Public Health History G. Geltner (Department of History, University of Amsterdam) Urban History: 40, 3 (2013) Abstract In early fourteenth-century Lucca, one government organ began expanding its activities beyond the maintenance of public works to promoting public hygiene and safety, and in ways that suggest both […]
England is the only European country whose legal system is not based on the Code of Emperor Justinian I
Judging Female Judges: Sir John Fortescue’s Vision of Women as Judges in De Natura Legis Naturae Emma Hawkes Limina, Volume 8, (2002) Abstract The fifteenth-century English legal commentary, De Natura Legis Naturae, is probably the most obscure of Sir John Fortescue’s renowned writings. Fortescue’s text examines female authority more explicitly than his other writings, there has, […]
In the following discussion, I will explore some hitherto unexamined links between the Confessio Amantis and one of these legal texts, the Nova Statuta Angliae or New Statutes of England, which circulated among professional and non-professional readers in the 1380s and 1390s and which Richard II received in a manuscript now in Cambridge: St. John’s College MS A.7.
Legal texts are aimed at maintaining order and defining what is legal in a given society. In the Middle Ages they often take the form of descriptions of situations and cases representing the conditions for the application of various rules.
The Death Penalty and war have long been linked as practices that present special problems for any professedly Christian ethic.
This paper defends trial by battle. It examines trial by battle in England as judges used it to decide property disputes from the Norman Conquest to 1179. I argue that judicial combat was sensible and effective.
No one alive today believes ordeals were a good way to decide defendants’ guilt. But maybe they should.
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain is a tale of the rise of law, suggesting that there can be no Britain without law – indeed, that Britain, like all nation-state constructs, was law or at least a complex network of interrelated processes and procedures that we might call law.
Why were animals put on trial – for murder or for eating crops – in the Middle Ages?
This study examines fifty petitions sent to the Court of Chancery between 1389 and 1515 that relate to abduction.
I will then move to sketch the social profile of female inmates, mainly drawing on the records of Le Stinche, the Florentine municipal prison, during its first century of activity, circa 1300–1400.
This article examines the liberal bent of the early fourteenth century judiciary, in particular the decisions of the great Chief Justice of that era, William Bereford.
Past/Present: Leonardo Bruni’s History of Florence Giuseppe Bisaccia Renaissance and Reformation, Vol. 21, No 1 (1985) Abstract The importance of historical consciousness in the Renaissance is a fact generally recognized by scholars of the period. From Petrarch on, it is possible to discern a growing awareness of the past “men became more and more conscious that […]
The medieval scholastic when faced with a doctrine he did not like or an authority that stood in the way of his own ideas would simply say “sed distinguo” and remove the opposition from his path, whether it was a phrase from St. John, a comment of St. Augustine, or a constitution of Innocent III. Modern lawyers are very much the heirs to this technique,
Is it possible to tell from the information we have if hanging entered the laws due to the influence of the Church and biblical law, or if it existed as a punishment before the rise of the Church’s influence?
The National Library of Wales has digitized and put online the Boston Manuscript of the Laws of King Hywel Dda. The manuscript was purchased last year at auction for £541,250.
I think the question of how the medieval laws dealt with ambivalent bodies deserves some attention in own right. The more general question is: how did medieval societies deal with experiences that challenged accepted views of what was normal?
Seventeen suits concerned with some aspect of marriage litigation have left traces amongst the instance business dealt with between 1347 and 1348.
The First of Century of Magna Carta: Three Crises Ralph Turner (Florida State University, Department of History – Emeritus) Paper given at Presbyterian College, South Carolina (2004) Abstract Magna Carta is one of the key documents of the Anglo-American political tradition, yet it seemed a failure by the summer of 1215, repudiated by King John […]
All legislation of Byzantium from the earliest times also condemned abortions. Consequently, foeticide was considered equal to murder and infanticide and the result was severe punishments for all persons who participated in an abortive technique reliant on drugs or other methods. The punishments could extend to exile, confiscation of property and death.
This paper deals with the legal term ‘medinat ha-yam’ (meaning ‘overseas”) in Jewish law, which, among other things, refers to a husband abandoning his wife, and to debtors who refuse to pay their debts, and commercial partners who took someone else’s property out of their homeland.
Well they were a lot more generous in their beach ownership laws, says Derek McGlashan
The broad street of Cheapside, Vanessa Harding shows, was a central location in the lives and minds of early modern Londoners. In a crowded city it was a significant open space where public events could be staged and important issues communicated to a wide audience. The everyday reality of shop and market trading — where qualities and values were scrutinized and false dealing punished – enhanced its association with truth and patency. Normally dominated by the authorities, it was on occasion captured by oppositional groups, though their activities tended to reinforce Cheapside’s identity as a place of publicity and validation.
In order to understand these issues properly we must first consider our own ideas about ‘crime’, a deeply problematic term for the period before the late twelfth century.
How you can Follow Us!