New light on Alfred Dreyfus in a secret dossier

On March 7, 2013 the online edition of the New York Times ran a story on the digitization of the secret dossier on the Dreyfus Affair by the historical department of the French Ministry of Defense. The documents are accompanied by full transcriptions at the website which accompanies the recent book by Pauline Peretz, Pierre Gervais and Pierre Stutin, Le dossier secret de l’affaire Dreyfus (Paris 2012). In their book they publish documents which had until now been neglected or usually presented in versions now proven to be less correct than one had reason to believe.

On the website the three authors discuss not only the trials, but they point for example also to the earliest movie about the Dreyfus affair. The site has even its own discussion forum and amounts to a portal on the Dreyfus case. Only a section with links to other websites seemed at first absent, and in my post I tried to provide information to fill this gap. In fact I mistakenly looked more at the sidebar of the website than at the main menu! A number of virtual exhibitions contain rich visual and written information on a case which for many years divided opinions in France. The Dreyfus affair became soon a focus point of political and social strife. Antisemitism played a large role, but nationalism and militarism, too, fueled the furious exchanges between dreyfusards and their opponents.

Tampering with documents

The 1894 bordereau - image Service Historique de la Défense, Paris

There is scarcely any need to mention here the main facts of the affair around Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), because they occupy a place of its own in European and French history. A central place in the Dreyfus affair has always been given to the bordereau from 1894, the document in which Dreyfus allegedly gave secret military information to the Germans. It was only five years later that this document was definitely unmasked as a falsification. Historians trained as medievalists, in particular professors at the École nationale des Chartes (ENC), were the first to apply a rigorous historical examination to the bordereau. Arthur Giry, Auguste Molinier and Paul Meyer were all ancient students of or professors at this famous grand établissement for the formation of archivists, palaeographers and historians, The auxiliary historical sciences, in particular palaeography, the study of old scripts, and diplomatics, the critical study of documents, are still central to the education given at the ENC.

Among the other falsifications in the dossier secret (SHD/GR 4 J 118, kept at the Centre historique des archives of the Service Historique de la Défense in Vincennes) is the faux Henry (cotes 365-370) from 1896. Its false nature was detected in 1898. When the court in Rennes established this as a truth army officer Henry committed suicide in his prison cell.

The Dreyfus affair and modern memory

Mass communication was one of the factors in giving the Dreyfus affair its enormous scale and impact. Newspapers and magazines covered all developments extensively. In the struggle for new readers cartoonists and photographers were engaged. The cartoon of Dreyfus as the head of Medusa has become an icon of French illustrations in the late nineteenth century. Photographs, cartoons and more sober drawings provide a living image of this cause célèbre. They are also an important element at several websites.

On my website I have created a special page for virtual exhibitions concerning legal history. The Dreyfus affair looms large among virtual exhibitions on French legal history. 1906 Dreyfus réhabilité, “1906: Dreyfus rehabilitated”, is a bilingual website of the French Ministry of Culture which functions as a portal to all kind of media concerning Dreyfus. It offers a great starting point for anyone curious about the Dreyfus affair. Savoir et Enseignement. L’affaire Dreyfus et l’École Normale Supérieure, ”Knowledge and Education: The Dreyfus Affair and the École Normale Supérieur”, is a small online exhibition on the aspects of the case which touched this institute for higher education in Paris. The Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries has created a website for the Lorraine Beitler Collection of the Dreyfus Affair with more than 1,000 documents related to the impact of the affaire on French culture and society. Recently Duke University Libraries launched the virtual exhibition A Mockery of Justice: Caricature and the Dreyfus Affair with a number of cartoons, including the dragon head cartoon from the Musée des Horreurs. In its web exposition on the writer Émile Zola the Bibliothèque nationale de France does of course cover the Dreyfus affair, and the library provides additional information, too. The website Le capitaine Alfred Dreyfus à Rennes, “un reportage oublié de l’été 1899″ shows a number of rare photographs taken in Rennes during the 1899 revision trial. At L’histoire par image 1643-1945, a website with a fine selection of important images on French history, you can find some of the best known images about the affair. The Musée d’art et histoire du judaïsme in Paris has created a website around its Fonds Dreyfus. 

When looking for images it is also useful to consult the website of the Agence photographique des Musées nationaux. A first simple search indicates that you will find scores of images on the Dreyfus affair. The search engine of the French cultural portal Culture is also very helpful in finding all kind of resources. It brings you for example to images in the Joconde database for French museal collections of 23 drawings of the 1906 trial now kept at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Angers. In 1906 Dreyfus got rehabilitated. He received the Légion d’Honneur and served during the First World War. You can search online in the Leonore database of the French national archives to view the card with his honors, first the rank of chevalier in 1906, and in 1919 a promotion to officier. The 20 digitized pages constitute actually a rather complete dossier of his life and career (LH/803/61), including a physical description of Dreyfus.

Two Dutch twists

The end of the Rennes trial approaches – cartoon by V. Geldorp from the Amsterdamse Courant, September 8, 1899 – image from The Memory of the Netherlands, http://www.geheugenvannederland.nl/?/en/homepage

Before I start writing here about two Dutch angles on the Dreyfus affair I am happy to thank Agnes Jonker (University of Amsterdam and Archiefschool, Hogeschool van Amsterdam) for alerting me about the digitization of the dossier secret. By only pointing to the numerous websites with digitized historical newspapers it is already clear that the number of images of Dreyfus and all people who came into the picture during the long years of his trials can be easily expanded. For a Dutch twist I can mention for example a cartoon in the Amsterdamse Courant of Dreyfus’ opponents trying to tear the blindfold from Themis’s eyes. It is really interesting that not as most often Lady Justice but Themis, the muse of law, is portrayed here. Perhaps the presence of the Dutch law journal Themis - now called Rechtsgeleerd Magazijn Themis – helped the cartoonist in his choice.

To end with yet another Dutch twist, a rather large part of the dossier secret is occupied by letters which touch only the margins of the Dreyfus affair. The numbers 159 to 235 of the dossier secret are love letters by Hermance de Weede, the wife of the Dutch ambassador in Paris, to the German military attaché Schwartzkoppen. Hearing about this part of the story readers of Umberto Eco’s novel The Prague cemetery will admit that even the makers of falsifications and all those people fueling nasty sentiments in the media of the late nineteenth century would not have thought of getting these love letters into the case file of the Dreyfus affair, certainly not in view of the Parisian way of life in that age. Other love affairs are indeed present, too, in the fascinating pages of the dossier secret, but around 1900 they constituted the more combustible part of it.

A postscript

Let’s add another Duch angle on the Dreyfus affair, one that I should have mentioned already when writing. The International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam has substantial holdings on this subject, including publications from the late nineteenth century. Cartoons are not mssing among the items to be found. Among the Dutch books are publications by Aaron Adolf de Pinto (1828-1907), a judge of the Hoge Raad, the Dutch Supreme Court, in particular Het proces-Dreyfus getoetst aan wet en recht (2 vol., ‘s-Gravenhage 1899). Alas the digitized copy in the Igitur Archive of Utrecht University is not published in open access.

Rousseau at 300 years: nature and law

Tomorrow the birth 300 years ago of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) will be commemorated, not only in France but in many countries worldwide. In this post I will look briefly at his impact on law, mainly through his views of mankind and nature.

Painting of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Maurice Quentin de la Tour – Saint Quentin, Musée Antoine Lécuyer – image in public domain

Rousseau’s tercentenary

At his blog Jean Stouff published already in January 2012 a webographie, a short guide to websites celebrating the tercentenary of Rousseau. I will take over from this post a number of websites. Stouff points to the Athena website, a database at the Université de Genève with texts in French, where you will find mainly Rousseau’s literary texts. On the Canadian website Les classiques des sciences sociales texts and pamphlets with a more political orientation are presented. For translations into English available online you can go for example to the Online Library of Liberty where you can read some of the most important texts by Rousseau, among them Emile ou l’éducation and Du contrat social. In fact you can choose between many starting points for introductions to his life and writings. I stumbled on the entry for Rousseau at the mirror at Leeds of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Worse choices are certainly possible! The University of Leeds organizes on June 28 and 29 a conference on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Britain. One of the conferences linking Rousseau and law will be held at Chambéry on October 24-25, 2012,  L’émancipation par le droit entre utopie et projet. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, XVIIIe-XXIe siècle, with a focus on emancipation by law. You must forgive me for not giving here an exhaustive list of all conferences on Rousseau that have already been held this year.

Looking directly at Rousseau’s writings is one thing, looking at exhibitions concerning Rousseau offers a kind of contemporary window to look at this immensely influential writer. A special Rousseau 2012 blog helps you to keep track of festivities in France. The links guide you to more Rousseau websites. In particular the Rhône-Alpes region bristles with all kind of activities. To be honest, I suspect Rousseau is used here also for the marketing of this region… One of the largest exhibitions is at the Bibliothèque municipale in Lyon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau entre Rhône et Alpes. At Grenoble the municipal library presents the exhibition Avatars de Rousseau: héritage et postérités. The bilingual website of the international Rousseau Association - maintained at Lyon – brings you to more scientific activities and can bring you to more relevant information.

The Art Museum of University College London had earlier this year an exhibition on Rousseau 300: Nature, Self and State, and a conference with the same title. In Paris the Panthéon, where Rousseau is buried since the French Revolution, is the location for an exhibition on Rousseau et les arts. The Musée Jacquemart-André, too, devotes special space to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially at its location in Chaalis. Harvard’s Houghton Library presented this year an exhibition on Rousseau and human rights. The guest curator of this exhibition took her lead from Rousseau’s use of the very word human rights, droits de l’homme, in Du contrat social (1762). In Germany the Rochow-Museum in Reckhan (Brandenburg) will bring an exhibition on Rousseau as a man of many talents, a visionary and someone often exiled or banned. The university library of the Freie Universität Berlin presents this year its copies of early editions of Rousseau’s works.

For this post I have found only one recent virtual exhibition on Rousseau, Voltaire-Rousseau: l’éternel duel, created by the Centre international d’étude sur le XVIIIe siècle in Ferney-Voltaire. The database of the Smithsonian Institution on virtual exhibitions in museums and libraries worldwide brings just one example, an exhibition at the Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati on Rousseau and his botanical interests.

A Dutch connection to Jean-Jacques Rousseau will be explored to some extent at a two-day conference at Neuchâtel on Jean-Jaques Rousseau/Isabelle de Charrière. Régards croisés (August 22-23, 2012). Isabelle de Charrière née Van Zuylen (1740-1805) was born in Utrecht where she lived until her marriage. She wrote in French. Both authors were also composers, to mention only one connection between them. The university library of the University of Amsterdam will organize in September an exhibition on Rousseau. Last week the Zentral- und Hochschulbibliothek Luzern presented a new German translation of Rousseau’s letters on botany and an accompanying exhibition.

Rousseau, nature and law

The themes presented by Rousseau can rightfully be called familiar spots, old stamping grounds, classic themes for discussion and research. The proverbial imaginary library is well-stocked with works studying these and other subjects from ever-changing angles: the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, education, anthropology, views of nature, the scope and character of laws, to mention at least a few examples. Even if Rousseau is not on his own completely responsible for introducing views of nature and mankind which influence modern thinking already for more than two centuries, he is surely the author most often associated with new perceptions of nature, man and society. Research on for example his influence on the French Revolution, and more particular the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme, amounts to a veritable industry. Even though he did live for some time as a recluse – the original cabane can still be seen near Chaalis – he was certainly not cut off from society. Either directly on indirectly his views became quickly known and often hotly debated by his contemporaries.

Rousseau brings the idea of liberty to the front in an exemplary way, both in his writings and his private life. This is reinforced by his Confessions, an autobiography which redefined the genre. Nevertheless, one should be wary about this source which is in its own way as particularly constructed as the Confessiones of Augustine of Hippo. A short summary of some of Rousseau’s major ideas does scarcely justice to him, nor does it provide a balanced view of the ongoing reception of Rousseau, not just in intellectual history, but in society at large. However, let it suffice here that for Rousseau nature gets a new significance as the untroubled, innocent and promising origin of man, instead of a state of man taken away by the fall of Adam and forever out of reach. He looked at natural surroundings with new eyes, and indeed introduced nature as an object of beauty and contemplation for its own sake. The exploring of continents and landscapes, supposed or real wilderness near city life or far away owes to his enthusiasm, not to mention the search for the bon sauvage, the archetypical wild man living in or close to Paradise. To be sure, the concept of the noble savage is much older, and Rousseau’s actual views here might even have been interpreted incorrectly. His view of mankind as susceptible to benevolent influences has had far-reaching consequences for ideas about education and lawgiving. In a way Rousseau seems to encapsulate the Enlightenment at its most optimistic turn. His longing for liberty is perhaps his most lasting influence, shared all over the world.

Maybe this brief post helps you to choose between many opportunities this summer for interesting exhibitions to visit and books to read of reread. This time I have not included a tour of digitized first editions or translations, but that voyage in the wake of Rousseau will no doubt be rewarding, too.

A postscript

In July 2012 the  new website Rousseau Online presents a digitized version of the Collection complète des oeuvres de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17 vol., Geneva 1780-1788), a project of the Swiss history portal InfoClio. Hat tip to Eric Hennekam!

Nicolas Le Floch, chasing crime in eighteenth-century Paris

Sometimes I write here about historical subjects and their presentation on television. It is much rarer to find an example of the reversed, a television series which becomes the subject of historical debate. French scholars will organize a one-day symposium about the series running since 2008 on France 2 featuring Nicolas Le Floch, a police commissioner in eighteenth-century Paris. The call for papers at Calenda attracted my attention, thanks to the Frühe Neuzeit blog for Early Modern history. Is it typically French that I cannot find here the date of the event which no doubt will take place in Paris, and only the deadline of the call for papers, October 31, 2012? In this post I will inform you about the series, the books behind it, and the aims of the symposium.

The Maigret of the Enlightenment?

Nicolas Le Floch works in Paris during the reign of Louis XV (1715-1774). His first appearance is in 1761, during the Seven Years War (1756-1763) between France and England. Le Floch works for De Sartine, the lieutenant-general of the French royal police force. Not only this war, but also royalists opposing the Jansenists and the Jesuit order form the background of the various stories and events in the series.

The French series is actually based on a number of novels by Jean-François Parot. On the website of France 2 he explains his view about the idea of a series around an imaginary police commissioner. Parot does not want to recreate a faithful picture of Paris in the eighteenth century, but he admits that a number of details help us imagining the surroundings in which Le Floch worked. The website proceeds with a number of maps of Paris, presents a number of dishes and recipes mentioned in the various installments as in the original novels, gives even a glossary of words and terms used in the series, and introduces you also to various prostitutes figuring in the series. The website amounts to a veritable portal around Nicolas Le Floch, including merchandise, a forum and a photo gallery, an overview of all installments and a page on Facebook. The signature tune of the lavishly produced series, a nice pastiche of late eighteenth-century music, is as memorable as that of a Maigret series!

Jean-François Parot has created his own website on Nicolas Le Floch. His novels featuring Le Floch have been translated into English, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Japanese. Inevitably some elements shown on the series website return here, too. Even if you dislike detective series you can enjoy the maps of Paris and the images of buildings which feature in his stories. One of the strengths is the careful list of credits for the images used on the website. This “Sources iconographiques” section is really instructive. Getting the credits for images right is not a task easily accomplished.

Law and fiction

The French scholars preparing the colloquium Fiction policière et série télévisée : Nicolas Le Floch, un “expert” au temps des Lumières do not keep Parot’s novels and the fictionalized crime series at a wide distance, but view it as an opportunity to ask questions about the way the series has been created. The first four installments followed more or less Parot’s novels, the following four are not directly founded on them. The central question helps to look at Le Floch from a wider perspective than just checking the historical correctness of the situations depicted and the details adduced. What was the position and role of police officers like Le Floch? How did one perceive his job? What status did someone charged with his tasks really have? For this series it will lead to looking at his cooperation with inspector Bourdeau, Sanson, the hangman, and his chef, Le Sartine, and more general the way he moves in public society, both in high circles and in the Paris underground. Other themes will be the relation between fictionalization for television and faithfulness to historic facts and surroundings, the freedom (“franchise”) of fictional persons and the freedom in developing a series, the use of language, and the choice of venue and public for the series: is France 2 the only possible channel for this series? The producers of the series have bought the right to create new adventures for Le Floch as they see fit.

Personally I would like for example to discuss the uses of music in this and similar series, stylishly composed for the series or existing period music. Remembering some of the BBC television series recreating novels by Jane Austen the art of getting things also musically right merits attention, too.

Natalie Zemon Davis published in 1987 her study Fiction in the archives. Pardon tellers and their tellers in sixteenth-century France. In order to get a lettre de rémission, a pardon for their crimes, suspected criminals had not only to tell the truth but more importantly a convincing story. The series with Le Floch is a challenge to legal historians to tell the story of crime and persecution in eighteenth-century Paris as imaginatively, vigorously and utterly compelling by the sheer force of truthful historic representation as novelist Parot and the creators of this French historic crime series have thus far succeeded in doing. The call for papers at Calenda points to several new French studies on history and fiction.

Even if you would prefer to label Nicolas Le Floch under the heading of Law and Humanities, it is a reminder that “doing the real thing”, research into criminal history during the Ancien Régime, will ultimately lead to an interpretation, a representation or reconstruction of a particular part of the past. Any paper, article, book or video presents not the past itself, but a view of the past guided by your questions, views and background. Scholarly research, too, creates an image of the past. We had better learn to use images creatively, too, instead of depreciate and deplore such series. Those who have followed Downton Abbey on television will remember how legal historians were asked to scrutinize the representation of the entail featured so prominently in this series. Readers of Austen’s Pride and prejudice have met with the entail, too, and this list can be easily expanded.

Law and protest in the mazarinades

In the history of pamphleteering a particular kind of pamphlets has earned a name which has sometimes almost obscured the very fact that they are pamphlets. The mazarinades are French pamphlets from the mid-seventeenth century aimed against the policies of cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602-1661). Mazarin had succeeded cardinal Richelieu in 1642 as the first minister of king Louis XIV (1638-1715) who at that time was still a child. Mazarin was very intelligent, but also greedy and sly, and on top of that his reputation was hampered by his Italian origin, for he was born as Giulio Mazarino. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 a revolt started against the French government. The revolt of the Fronde was led by the French nobility and very specifically influenced by the high courts of law under the ancien régime, the parlements. These courts claimed the right to stop royal legislation which conflicted in their opinion with French customary law, the coutumes. From 1648 to 1653 the Fronde divided France, and the country came close to civil war.

Cardinal Mazarin, painting by Pierre Mignard; Chantilly, Musée Condé – image in public domain

In 2011 I mentioned the mazarinades once in passing when writing about the Bibliothèquw Mazarine in Paris in a post about research institutions in the French capital. I could have mentioned the mazarinades also in a post on digital pamphlet collections, but I somehow had not considered including these French pamphlets. In this post I would like to make amends for my omission.

The mazarinades

The Bibliothèque Mazarine, the oldest French public library, opened its doors in 1643. Since 1945 it is linked with the Institut de France as one of the grands établissements in Paris. The library is home to various collections which you can access using the online catalogues. The manuscripts kept at the Bibliothèque Mazarine are included in the nationwide Calames catalogue. Images from illuminated manuscripts are shown on the Liber Floridus website.

Among the collections of the Bibliothèque Mazarine are some 5,000 mazarinades in the Fonds de mazarinades with an overall total of more than 12,000 items, including double copies. Cardinal Mazarin started himself collecting the pamphlets, also because some of them actually supported his policies. His first librarian, Gabriel Naudé,was very active in bringing these materials into the Mazarine. Naudé had published in 1627 the Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque, the first manual in French on the creation of libraries; the 1963 facsimile of the first edition has been digitized by the ENSSIB in its series Les classiques de la bibliothéconomie. Many items stem from collections kept elsewhere that found eventually their way to the Mazarine. By choosing Autres catalogues in the library’s online catalogue and selecting the link for the mazarinades you can easily limit your search to the Fonds de mazarinades.

Bibliographers have not been idle with the mazarinades. Célestin de Moreau published a three-volume Bibliographie des Mazarinades (Paris 1850-1851), and his example was followed by others. Many European libraries have collected mazarinades. For the university library of the Radboud University in Nijmegen Th.F. van Koolwijk edited in 1968 a special catalogue of mazarinades. The website of the Mazarine gives a succinct list of major publications about this genre. In the list figure not only Robert O. Lindsay and John Neu (eds.), French political pamphlets 1547-1648: a catalog of major collections in American libraries (London 1969), and their Mazarinades: a checklist of copies in major collections in the United States (Metuchen 1972), but also a recent mémoire de maîtrise, a thesis written by Christelle Kremer at the Université Paris-IV, D’un cardinal à l’autre: le figure de Richelieu dans les mazarinades (Paris 2005). It made me curious to find out whether you might be able to consult this thesis online, and of course I will look here into the online presence of the mazarinades themselves and literature about them. The Bibliothèque Mazarine has only a small digital library, with just one digitized mazarinade.

A first port of call for online research into mazarinades is offered by a team of scholars in Tokyo and Nagoya with the website Recherches internationales sur les Mazarinades. This website offers a search facility for finding specific pamphlets and libels in the successive bibliographical repertories from Moreau onwards until the present. For those registering with the scholarly team you can also get access to the transcriptions of some 2,700 pamphlets kept at Tokyo. The companion blog to this website offers almost more than this site. You will find a very useful selection of relevant links, including to digitized works within the Internet Archive, where Moreau’s bibliography and his supplements are present, and also his Choix des mazarinades (2 vol., Paris 1853). Very interesting is the overview of libraries in France and worldwide with holdings containing mazarinades. Some library catalogues provide even the Moreau numbers. The list gives only a single indication of digitized pamphlets, for the Archives Départementales de Dordogne at Périgord with fifteen pamphlets. Finally among the pièces you will find a small number of digitized marinades, and the book which constitutes the first attempt to a critical overview of the vast number of publications that had appeared since 1648, the Jugement de tout ce qui a esté publié contre le cardinal Mazarin (Paris 1650) by Gabriel Naudé. This page has an embedded link to the digitized copy at Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Gallica yields in a first general search for mazarinades 387 results, including a digital version of Moreau’s bibliography. A query in Europeana brings you to nearly 400 items, and here, too, you will find some digitized bibliographies.

In 2011 the Agence Bibliographique de l’Enseignement Supérieur (ABES) launched Theses.fr, a website for the publication of French theses in open access. The mémoire de maîtrise of Christelle Kremer does not figure at this website. More formal data on it are included in the SUDOC catalogue, another service of ABES. SUDOC lists currently 33 titles concerning mazarinades, among them the second edition of Christian Jouhaud’s Mazarinades: la France des mots (Paris 2009; first edition 1985). At Theses.fr you will theses such as Matthieu Lecoutre, Ivresse et ivrognerie dans la France moderne (XVIème – XVIIIème siècles) (Dijon 2010), with views on drunks and drunkenness, and also proposed theses. Christian Jouhard directs at the EHESS since 2008 the research of Eleanore Serdecny on Des mazarinades aux rëcits de voyage : écriture, littérature et politique dans la France du XVIIe siècle, which focuses on literary dimensions of the mazarinades.

It is possible to conduct a full text search in a number of French scientific journals through the consortium Open Edition which is responsible for Calenda, the French social sciences events calendar, the journal portal Revues and Hypotheses, a portal to French and since a few months also German scientific blogs. Thus a search for mazarinades in connection with law at Open Edition can contain references to articles, largely available in open acces, to blog posts and also to upcoming or past events. In 2009 Sophie Vergnes (Toulouse) gave a lecture about views in mazarinades concerning the equality of men and women, and the notice will lead you to more scholars working on the theme of law and women in Early Modern France. Vergnes’ article ‘De la guerre civile comme vecteur d’émancipation féminine : l’exemple des aristocrates frondeuses (France, 1648-1653)’, Genre & Histoire 6 (Printemps 2010) can be consulted online. A search at Cairn, the journal portal of four major French publishers, yields even more results than at Open Edition, but you cannot not freely access the latest articles, only the somewhat older issues.

Here I will highlight just a few results. The protests in the mazarinades have been placed in the tradition of protest against despotic governments in the article of Mario Turchetti, Droit de Résistance, à quoi ? Démasquer aujourd”hui le despotisme et la tyrannie’, Revue historique 4/2006 (n° 640) 831-878. Turchetti has created a website on the history of protest against tyranny. In an online issue of Les Dossiers du Grihl you will even find a current bibliography created by Jean-Pierre Cavaillé on the history of free thought, anticlerical thinking and atheism, ‘Bibliographie : Libertinage, libre pensée, irréligion, athéisme, anticléricalisme – 3′. Despite his own warning that this does not constitute an exhaustive bibliography it is certainly impressive and illuminating.

Of course more can be found in print and online. Many older articles on French history can be viewed online using the Persée portal. As always the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog can help you very much to find publications concerning French pamphlets and cardinal Mazarin. One of the more recent online resources indicated here is a Canadian mémoire de maîtrise by Josée Poirier, “Contrer les mazarinades”: les préambules des édits royaux pendant la Fronde (1648-1652) d’après le “Recueil des Anciennes Lois Françaises” d’Isambert (Université de Québec, Montréal, 2009). Isambert’s Recueil Général appeared in Paris in 29 volumes between 1821 and 1833 and can be consulted online at the Hathi Trust Digital Library. In my view Poirier has chosen a rewarding search angle by looking at the preambles of French royal ordinances issued to some extent also against the allegations and protests appearing in print in an seemingly endless stream of pamphlets.

If you would like to read more on paper about the mazarinades and legal history you could start for example with the recent article by Damien Salles, ‘Droit royal d’imposer, consentement et mazarinades’, Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 88 (2010) 365-396. The Bibliographie d’Histoire du Droit en langue française, an online service of the Centre Lorrain d’Histoire du Droit, Université Nancy-2, will guide you swiftly to more French publications. When French is not your first option, you can of course find orientation in English studies, too. During the preparation of this post I came across some books which can now also be consulted online at a website of the University of California Press. You will certainly benefit from older studies such as Jeffrey K. Sawyer, Printed poison, pamphlet propaganda, faction politics and the public atmosphere in early seventeenth-century France (1991), Sara E. Melzer, From the royal to the republican body. Incorporating the political in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France (1998) or Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic experience and the origins of modern culture: France 1570-1715 (1993).

Mirroring a cardinal, France and French law

Pamphlets do not necessarily represent the truth. They might misrepresent reality or more positively create their own images of society and law. Mazarinades can offer a kind of distorted mirror of the ancien régime in one of its classic and most pivotal periods, and some pamphlets might present the kind of truths which were at that time difficult to swallow. The mixture of an aristocratic movement with generous use of a very popular medium is in itself already fascinating. No wonder discerning men as Mazarin and Naudé tried to get their hands on them as diligently as possible. This particular kind of pamphlets did surely have a legal sequel.

As for digitized pamphlets from the Fronde period one could certainly hope for more examples of them. One of the few lists with individual digitized mazarinades is provided at the Online Books Page of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, which offers far more than only the sources themselves, however central they remain to the subject of aristocratic views of the French royal government around 1650.

Spotlights on Henri Bohic, a medieval canon lawyer

When I started my blog in December 2009 I intended to give medieval canon law attention as often as possible. Nearly two years later it is clear I have widened the scope of my web initiative. This week I received a notice about a website dedicated to a French medieval canonist, Henri Bohic. Apart from the Domus Gratiani website maintained by Anders Winroth and the website created by Bruce Brasington and Martin Brett for the works of Ivo of Chartres there are subdomains for the forged decretals of Pseudo-Isidor and Benedictus Levita at the website of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich, but it is really rare to find a website dedicated exclusively to a medieval canon lawyer. Eric Knibbs’ blog about Pseudo-Isidore is one of the few sites to mention. Jean-Luc Deuffic enters a more virgin territory of the study of medieval canon law, the fourteenth century, with his website Henri Bohic, un juriste breton au Moyen Âge. The fact that Deuffic writes French should not stop you from looking at his new website.

A lawyer from Brittany

Henri Bohic was probably born around or before 1300 and died in 1357. Sometimes his name is spelled Bouhic or Boich. Deuffic uses on his website information he published in two articles, ‘Au service de l’Université et au conseil du duc. Notes sur le canoniste breton Henri Bohic (+ v. 1357)’, Pecia 4 (2004) 47-101, and ‘Henri Bohic et le receveur Yves de Cleder’, Pecia 9 (2009) 57-62. Deuffic is the editor of the journal Pecia for which he also has created a very interesting blog, Pecia: Le manuscrit médieval – The medieval manuscript. Deuffic adds to the summary biography of Bohic who had studied law at the University of Orléans. He taught in Paris and acted as a councillor to the duke of Orleans and king Philip VI. He owned a house in Paris called the Clos Bruneau. His family stemmed from the Bas-Léon, the most western region of Bretagne (Brittany).

Henricus Bohic, Distinctiones in liber primum Decretalium; Utrecht, University Library, ms. 615, fol. 9r - image by kind permission of Utrecht University Library

Deuffic gives on the new website a very extensive list of the remaining manuscripts of Bohic’s major work, his Distinctiones super quinque libris decretalium, a commentary on the Liber Extra, the collection of decretals edited in 1234 by Raymond of Peñafort on behalf of pope Gregory IX. He adds to this some notes from archival records, a survey of printed editions, starting with an incunable published at Lyons in 1498, and a bibliography of studies which mention Bohic either in passing or in some depth. For both famous and less known medieval canonists Kenneth Pennington (Catholic University of America) provides on his webpages the provisional version of the volume with bibliographies that will eventually be published in the series The History of Medieval Canon Law. It has taken Pennington many years to bring together the massive amount of information in these Bio-Bibliographies of Medieval Lawyers. The project is now being extended to include jurists from the Early Modern period. Pennington gives four references to literature on Bohic, admittedly references to articles and a book paragraph summing up the knowledge at the time these authors were writing. In particular the article by Paul Fournier is important.

Knowing this one can only look in disbelief at the amount of notices and references found by Deuffic. Perhaps the seemingly indispensable search tool with all its accessory devices – yes, the one which name has almost surpassed the verb surfing in daily use – has helped, too, finding some of these references, but the results are stunning. These references are often concerned with the content of Bohic’s Distinctiones. The sheer number of manuscripts of Bohic’s main work, too, is a reason for pausing and looking attentively at Deuffic’s list, for he gives far more than listed by Giovanna Murano on her fine overview of Initia operum iuris canonici medii aevi. The number of manuscripts is flattered by the fact that in many of them only a part of Bohic’s commentary is transmitted. Even the manuscripts Amiens, Bibliothèque Municipale (BM), 365, Arras, BM, 445, and Chartres, BM, 270 with the complete text, consist of two volumes. For many manuscript notices Deuffic has provided links to the online version of the relevant library catalogue. Some of the colophons by the scribes in these manuscripts are very expressive!

In my eyes the number of manuscripts with Bohic’s Distinctiones containing illuminated pages is quite remarkable. Of the main text books of medieval canon law, the Decretum Gratiani and the Liber Extra many illuminated manuscripts are known,¹ but apart from these works hardly any commentary on canon law received this honour. Frank Soetermeer found only a substantial number of illuminated manuscripts for the summa of Henricus de Segusio (Hostiensis) (circa 1200 – 1271), one of the most famous treatises on medieval canon law. ² In my view the illuminated manuscripts of the Distinctiones point to a much higher rank and esteem for Bohic than modern historians of medieval canon law have thus far imagined. The number of manuscripts, too, is surprisingly high. Is it rash to guess that Bohic’s activity as a councillor to the French king has helped creating demand for his commentary? In the face of possible questions about the copyright for the images shown by Deuffic at his site I suggest you look either there or at the Enluminures website for illuminated manuscripts in French municipal libraries.

Medieval manuscripts and the pecia system

In the second part of this post I would like to look more generally at medieval manuscripts and the guidance for the study of this subject offered by Deuffic’s websites. The name of Deuffic’s blog Pecia stems from the medieval Latin word for a quire, a part or piece of a manuscript. In the cities with medieval universities the pecia system refers to the process of text control and multiplication. Quires of the official copy of a medieval text-book were lended by professional scribes to copy for their patrons, medieval students and other people using these texts. In many medieval manuscripts you can find pecia marks, indications of the particular quire and the sequence of peciae used to produce a manuscripts.³ The first volume of the Bohic manuscript Amiens, BM, 365, contains a note on the number of quires and refers to an official copy, an exemplar, held by the Carmelites: “Item sciendum est quod exemplar totius libri constitit in locagio Martino bedello Carmelitarum quinque francos”. This manuscript was produced in Paris. Soetermeer does not mention Bohic in his overview of juridical works available within the pecia system at Bologna and Paris, but it seems worthwhile to check the descriptions of Bohic’s manuscripts for the presence of pecia marks.

On the Pecia blog you will find more articles of interest for legal historians. On the blog appear regular posts in a series on medieval masters from Brittany. Among them figured recently Guillaume Chaloup (died 1370), a canonist at the University of Paris. One of the earlier post in this series is concerned with Guillaume de Rennes (around 1250), a decretist – a law professor teaching on the Decretum Gratiani – and his commentary on a summa by Raymund of Peñafort (circa 1180-1275). The books in the will of Laurent Surreau, a fifteenth-century canon of the cathedral at Tours, are the subject of another post. Surreau owned a substantial library with a lot of law books. Deuffic wrote about a missal from Italy owned by Thomas James, a canon lawyer and bishop of Dol-de-Bretagne around 1500. Recently Deuffic made a very useful list of the digitized volumes of the Gallia Christiana and its sequel Gallia Christiana novissima which offer precious information on the medieval history of French dioceses. The same post indicates also a number of digitized volumes of the Recueil des historiens des France. Deuffic alerted his readers recently to a new French database for researching illuminated manuscripts, Initiale.

This week Deuffic launched a second website, Manuscrits du Moyen Âge. Like the Bohic site Deuffic uses a new blog system. The choice for a grey background on both sites might hamper the visibility and contrast of the texts he publishes. As for now the second site seems to aim at publishing information about medieval manuscripts that will be sold at auctions.

The first time I noticed Henri Bohic was in citations of his work in the book of Nicolaus Everardi on juridical argumentation and in his consilia, extended advisory notes on juridical questions. Thanks to Jean-Luc Deuffic we now know a lot more about Bohic and about the transmission in manuscript and print of his legal commentary. It is really interesting to see how he and other masters from Brittany hold important posts in France, because this is one of the dimensions which show the degree of integration of the Bretons within France. Yves Hélory de Kermartin (around 1250-1303), a lawyer from Tréguier in Brittany, is one of the patron saints of lawyers, together with Raymund of Peñafort. It is good to realize this Breton lawyer stands not alone among the medieval lawyers from Brittany.

A postscript

When I created this post I did intend to point you also to the actions on behalf of the Wissenschaftliche Stadtbibliothek in Mainz. The city of Mainz has plans to either close this municipal library and to disperse its collections or to cut its budget drastically. You can sign the online petition to keep the rich collections at its place. The Stadtbibliothek has four manuscripts with parts of Bohic’s Dinstinctiones: II, 31 (liber V), II,118 (libri III-IV), II,231 (liber V) and I,1500 (liber V).

Notes

1. See Anthony Melnikas, The Corpus of the Miniatures in the Manuscripts of the Decretum Gratiani (3 vol., Rome 1975) and Kathleen Nieuwenhuisen, Het jawoord in beeld. Huwelijksafbeeldingen in middeleeuwse handschriften (1250-1400) van het Liber Extra (Ph.D. thesis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam 2000).
2. Frank Soetermeer, ‘”Summa archiepiscopi” alias “Summa copiosa”: Some remarks on the medieval editions of the “Summa Hostiensis”‘, Ius Commune 26 (1999) 1-25, online at the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt am Main.
3. See for juridical manuscripts Frank Soetermeer, Utrumque ius in peciis. Aspetti della produzione libraria a Bologna fra Due e Trecento (Milan 1997), also translated as Utrumque ius in peciis. Die Produktion juristischer Bücher an italienischen und französischen Universitäten des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main 2002).

Centers of legal history: Paris

Perhaps writing about historical research in Paris is bringing coals to Newcastle. Is there any real need for yet another attempt to bring information together? If you want to study France and French legal history you will be able to read French. If you are convinced French scholars have said all you would like to know, just skip this post, I will not feel offended… The Portail Numérique de l’Histoire du Droit and Paolo Alvazzi del Frate’s blog Storia giuridica francese-Histoire juridique française are two of the safest points of depart for any research into French legal history, but you will soon admit they do not focus in particular on institutions in Paris.

A month ago I could point in a post on French customary law to a useful guide to legal history online created by the Bibliothèque Cujas, and it is certainly wise to use it. For the legal history of medieval France you can start visiting Ménestrel, in particular for the great sections on auxiliary historical sciences, such as diplomatics, palaeography and sigillography which are each models of its kind, as is the section on cartularies. However, the section Histoire du droit contains only a few links, albeit with full commentaries, and a few book reviews. An earlier version of Ménestrel had a section on medieval canon law, but now there is only a paragraph on the ecumenical councils in the section on religious history. The section on France offers a useful overview of institutions, libraries, archives and museums relevant to French medieval history. In this post I will give slightly more attention to medieval history than to other periods. I hope this will not be an obstacle to seeing the core of this post, Paris as a center for doing legal history.

Centers for legal history

Where to start in Paris? In view of the high degree of centralization in France the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) has a claim to take the first place. Its Institut d’Histoire du Droit (IHD) is associated with the Université Panthéon-Assas Paris-II and the Centre Historique des Archives Nationales. This spring the IHD offers a seminar led by Isabelle Brancourt on the history of the French parlements, the regional high courts, and royal justice during the Ancien Régime in an European perspective. Isabelle Brancourt blogs regularly about her research on the Parlement de Paris. At its website the IHD offers access to a large number of databases, starting with the DRoits ANTiques bibliography on ancient law. Most databases are concerned with the French judiciary. The oldest records, registers from the archives of the Parlement de Paris, can be tracked down with the help of the Olim database, an index to the registers of verdicts of the royal court between 1254 and 1319. Similar indices are provided for the fourteenth and fifteenth century, for the parlement during its period at Poitiers (1418-1439) and Tours (1589-1592), and for the parlement criminel between 1311 and 1328. The edition by Auguste-Arthur Beugnot, Les Olim, ou registres des arrêts rendus par le Cour du Roi (…) (4 vol., Paris 1839-1848) can be consulted online at Gallica. At the Hathi Trust Digital Library you can find the volume edited by Edgard Boutaric, Arrêts et enquêtes antérieurs aux Olim, 1180-1254 (Paris 1863). The IHD has microfilms of relevant manuscripts and further materials concerning French royal jurisprudence, including a refined thesaurus for defining the character and subjects of cases, and a bibliography of publications concerning the Parlement de Paris.

A second centre at the Université Panthéon-Assas Paris-II is the Centre Sainte Barbe. This center is host to the Institut de Droit Romain and its famous series of Friday lectures during every winter and spring by scholars from all Europe. Its building house also a library, the Bibliothèque Sainte Barbe. More lectures, seminars and workshops in Paris are announced by the Société d’Histoire du Droit, also seated at the Place du Panthéon. Apart from the Bibliothèque nationale de France Paris can boast a number of important libraries. Legal historians will find much at the Bibliothèque Cujas of the Université Sorbonne Paris-I. This library maintains Jurisguide, a special site with online guides to many fields of law and jurisprudence, including legal history. Some books in its rich holdings have been digitized in its own digital library, with not only French publications but also editions for medieval canon law. The online exhibition on the bicentenary of the Code civil (1804-2004) amounts to a short introduction to French legal history. Among the Parisian centers devoted to the study of modern legal history is also the CERAL, the Centre de Recherche sur l’Action Locale of the Université Paris-XIII. Slavery and its history get attention at a CNRS institute, the Centre International de Recherches Esclavages. Criminocorpus, the platform for the study of the history of justice, crimes and punishments, is another major project in which CNRS, the Centre d’Histoire des Sciences Po, the Ministère de la Justice and the Archives nationales de l’outre-mer cooperate.

Medieval canon law

Medieval canon law is one of the areas of interest at the Centre Droit et Sociétés Religieuses of the Université Paris-XI, Faculté Jean Monnet. This center, too, has its own library. François Jankowiak is responsible for GREGORIUS, an international bibliography for the history of medieval canon law. Even at home you can benefit from their list of works on medieval canon law and medieval religious institutions digitized by Google Books or presented at Gallica. Both for the history of canon law and for modern ecclesiastical law the Institut Catholique de Paris has a special library, the Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Droit Canonique. Here it is appropriate to mention the Deutsches Historisches Institut Paris and the ongoing work for Gallia pontificia, the edition of medieval papal documents in France.

The old libraries and manuscripts

Let’s not forget the old libraries in Paris: the Bibliothèque Mazarine has rich holdings for the Ancien Régime. Among the digitized treasures is one of the mazarinades, the various texts from the turbulent period of the Fronde in which the policies of cardinal Mazarin were often criticized. The illuminated medieval manuscripts of this library and those of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève can be consulted at the Liber Floridus website. The Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève has for the Fonds Général its own digital collection in the Internet Archive. For the Réserve there is a digitization plan for the incunables, and La Nordique, the Scandinavian department, deserves at the very least a mentioning for its 160,000 books. Speaking of manuscripts, the Bibliothèque nationale de France has its own special website for searching manuscripts, which also covers the former Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. Your research for manuscripts in Paris can be reinforced by the search functions of the Catalogue collectif de France. Calames, the collective manuscript catalogue of French institutions for higher education, searches for manuscripts in eighteen (!) other Parisian libraries.

Archival records

The French national archives are busy building a third center at Pierrefitte-sur-Seine. The importance of these archival collections is beyond question. The ARCHIM database of the Archives nationales contains a wealth of digitized archival records. A few examples will have to suffice, such as the records of the 1307 interrogation concerning the Templars (J 413, no. 18) and registers of the French royal chancellary during the thirteenth and fourteenth century, a small set of key documents concerning the French Revolution and constitutions from 1791 to 1958. You will soon see that many of the sources mentioned for example in the online database guide to the history of slavery and its abolition are to be found at the Archives nationales. The municipal archives of Paris are certainly as interesting. It is not possible to make a short list of the many judicial archives of this city, including the records of several prisons. Among their digitized sources are the pre-1860 cadastral plans of Paris and annexated comunes.

Other research institutions

Approaching the great institutes for historical research means again posing the question of priority: with which institute should you begin? Fortunately legal history, and more specifically institutional history and the auxiliary historical sciences have been at the heart of the École nationale de Chartes (ENC) since its start in 1821. The ENC has been the model for institutes of its kind in Europe. The ENC, too, has an important library, with its own small digital library. Almost embarrassing is the series of websites with digitized sources: the ELEC presents such things as eight digitized cartularies from the Île-de-France, accounts of the consuls of Montferrand, a bibliography of studies on French diplomatics, a formulary book for notaries from the fifteenth century, the Edict of Nantes and earlier pacification edicts, and charters of the royal abbey of Saint-Denis. The digitized version of Ducange’s Glossarium infimae et medii latinitatis rightfully has its own website. Through the TELMA website you can gain access to actes royaux, the Cartulaire de Nesle, to CartulR, an online repertory of medieval cartularies, to editions of charters dating before 1121 in French collections, enquêtes of the last Capetian kings, and to ordinances concerning the Hôtel du Roi. In 1839 the ENC founded one of France’s oldest historical journals, the Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes. Old issues of this journal can be consulted online at Persée.

The École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) is home to a large number of équipes of which at least some do touch upon legal history. I would single out GAHOM, the Groupe d’anthropologie historique de l’Occident Médiéval, founded in 1978 by Jacques Le Goff and led by Jean-Claude Schmitt since 1992. Human behavior in historical context is the research subject of this équipe, which has for instance studied medieval exempla for the perspectives these texts offer on exemplary behavior, and more implicitly about do’s and don’ts.

From GAHOM stems GAS, the Groupe d’anthropologie scolastique. A seminar on ecclesiology and politics has just been held, another seminar on concepts of hierarchy runs until April. Two members of this équipe, Charles de Miramon and Maaike van der Lugt edited an essay volume, L’hérédité entre Moyen Âge et Époque moderne. Perspectives historiques (Florence 2008), with contributions on hereditary law and heredity in its widest sense. Building on the pioneer research of Palémon Glorieux this research group has developed a database for searching theological quodlibeta from Paris in the period 1230-1350. After subscribing to Quodlibase you can find not only theological debates, but also some questions about legal problems. Norms and values and their development in time are the central themes of the well known Centre d’études des normes juridiques “Yan Thomas”. This centre regularly invites legal historians. Among the projects for databases and research tools at the Centre des Recherches Historiques of the EHESS one finds a project on the “Ars Mercatoria”, books on commerce and commercial law between 1700 and 1820, and a project on legal books in print from the fifteenth to the eigtheenth century.

Formally part of the École Normale Supérieure, but also a research group of the EHESS is the Atelier Simiand. One of its research themes are law and economic history. In the field of history the ENS cooperates with the ENC, and let’s not forget the libraries of the ENS: the Bibliothèque Jourdan-Sciences humaines et sociales and the Bibliothèque Ulm-Lettres et Sciences Humaines are worth noting. As an historian I have to mention the ENS’s Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine. Among the online services is the bibliography of French history to 1958 and a bibliography of scientific works printed in Rome between 1527 and 1720. One of the projects is concerned with an edition of letters from the Archivo Datini in Prato. Seeing among the online exhibitions of the ENS an exhibition from 2006 on the Dreyfus affair, “Savoir et engagement”, reminds me of another very well documented online exhibition concerning Dreyfus – “1906 Dreyfus réhabilité” – created by Culture.fr which can be consulted in English, too.

Some breathing space…

The cornucopia of Paris has more in stock! Let’s notice halfway that I am very much aware that you can find more information in printed guides to resources for historical research in Paris. A quick check tells me most of them restricted themselves to clearly defined areas and periods, for example David Spear’s article ‘Research facilities in Normandy and Paris: a guide for students of medieval Norman history’, Comitatus 12 (1981) 40-53. If you use the World Guide to Libraries you will find perhaps too much, and on a site like Libdex not enough, at least not for Paris. Steering a middle course on the oceans of knowledge calls to mind a lot of famous quotes, including last words, and I had better wait until the end of this post before unveiling my choice.

…and continuing

With the Liber Floridus and TELMA websites we encountered in fact already the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT). The services for medievalists of this institute in Paris and Orleans are manifold. Manuscript studies are not really feasible without the IRHT. The scholars of the IRHT and their online databases support this field of research. For legal historians the Base Budé for the transmission of ancient and medieval texts, the Pinakes database of texts and manuscripts in Greek, and the JONAS database for texts in medieval French and Occitan deserve highlighting. The JONAS database gives for example information about manuscripts and studies on Philippe de Beaumanoir and his Coutumes de Beuavaisis.

For the French Revolution Paris has a special institute, the Institut d’Histoire de la Révolution Française. Anyone working on this epoch will benefit from the resources of this institute. On the website I would like you to enjoy in particular their excellent list of digital image collections. Approaching modern times it warms me to read that the library of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris was created also with a view to the needs of the GAHOM research group. Even when law and its history is not often the focus of the MSH its research themes do bear upon them, and they offer welcome orientation. The Parisian branches – there is also a MSH Paris Nord – are part of a nation wide network of MSH’s. I was rather surprised by the library of the Cité des Sciences, one of the major late twenthieth century cultural institutions created by presidential order. Among the plethora of collections and activities is Scientifica, an interesting digital library of the Bibliothèque des Sciences et de l’Industrie, with nineteenth century books on themes such as social hygiene, mental health and phrenology, themes which were very much in the minds of lawyers in this period, too.

Au revoir!

Let’s not overdo things and stop the tour of libraries, research institutes and digital collections in Paris. I will not put everything in just one post. No epigraphy or Byzantine law, nothing on Akkadian and Egyptian law, only a few things touching politics and administration, and no museums, I have to face it. Memories of Joyce Pennings’ Wegwijzer middeleeuwse studiën te Rome (Rijswijk 1987), a guide to medieval studies in Rome, came back when writing this nutshell guide on Paris. It is a long way to repeat her achievement. Where to find more? I hope the impromptu set of links collections with which I will end here will function as a kind of preview of more things in Paris to discover and discuss:

• The Album des Sciences Sociales, an initiative of Revues.org, is a no longer maintained guide to over 2,000 French websites
• A number of French digital libraries is presented in a clear way at Bibliopedia
• The website of the Comité d’histoire parlementaire et politique has a useful links collection, focusing on the contemporary period
• The Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France has a fine links page on institutions, libraries, library catalogues and digital libraries, and its own digitized materials
• My predilection for commented links selections is shared at the Signets of the Bibliothèque nationale de France
• The École nationale supérieure des sciences de l’information et des bibliothèques (ENSSIB) has a lot of digital resources, among them are some interesting links
• Liens-Socio is a web portal for the social sciences which can be put to good use for history and law as well; by the way, this site is maintained at Lyon
• Patrimoine numérique is the MICHAEL portal to digitized collections in France

I owe you a few of the quotes that have inspired me during the composition of this post: the first is Attempto, “I try”, the motto of the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, and the second a quote from Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Didascalicon, not by chance to be found at the website of GAHOM: Disce omnia, videbis postea nihil superfluum esse. Coartata scientia iucunda non est, “Learn everything, and you will see later that nothing is superfluous. Restricted knowledge is not agreeable”. Not everything is available in Paris: the Bibliographie d’histoire du droit en langue française is maintained by the Centre Lorrain d’Histoire du Droit. In the middle of the great wealth and variety of libraries which adorn Paris it is good to see the ENS library at the rue d’Ulm partners with the university library at Port-au-Prince in Bibliothèques sans Frontières (Libraries without Frontiers) to rebuild Haitian libraries.

A postscript

A fairly recent and most interesting guide for historical research in Paris can be consulted online: Aude Argouse and Mona Huerta, ‘Guide du chercheur américaniste: l’Amérique latine dans les bibliothèques et centres d’archives de Paris et d’Île-de-France’, Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos 2009. This journal offers every year a number of similar guides in its section Guía del investigador americanista, for example for Madrid, Amsterdam, the Archivo General de Indias, Berlin, London, Oxford and Philadelphia.

A second postscript

In 2012 I devoted an entire post to one of the libraries mentioned here, the Bibliothèque Mazarine. In this post I focused particular on the mazarinades, seventeenth-century pamphlets concerning the policies of cardinal Mazarin.

Centuries of law in Normandy

The classic French legal historiography makes a wonderful neat and crisp distinction between two kinds of law prevailing in a large part of France. Either the droit écrit, written law in the particular sense of learned medieval law, or the droit coutumier, customary law, dominated one or more regions. Within the pays de droit coutumier the customary law of a particular region could influence other regions as well, and this is the case also for commentaries on and collections of the coutumes of a region. Perhaps the best known example are the Coutumes de Beauvaisis by Phillippe de Beaumanoir, edited by Amédée Salmon (2 vol., Paris 1899-1900; reprint Paris 1970). I noticed an announcement for a conference celebrating the eleventh centenary of the law in Normandy at Cerisy-La-Salle from May 25 to 29, 2011, and the bibliographical information provided there stimulated me to look further into Norman and Anglo-Norman law in medieval and modern times.

In Custodia Legis, the blog of the law librarians of the Library of Congress, published on January 18, 2011 a post by Meredith Shedd-Driskel on ‘Coutumes of France in the Law Library of Congress‘. This post has as its central point a beautifully illuminated manuscript of the Grand Coutumier de Normandie. The seven large historiated initials shown in this post make you longing for more. Seeing only one other page and the book’s cover does not make up for the fact that I had expected more, beginning with a complete digital version of this manuscript. Last year for example the Library of Congress published a substantial digital collection of their old books on piracy and documents about piracy trials, which induced me to write a post about pirates. The Library of Congress kindly informed me that they have not planned to digitize this manuscript. On French coutumes this library has published a book by Jean Caswell and Ivan Sipkov, The coutumes of France in the Library of Congress: an annotated bibliography (Washington, D.C., 1977; reprint Clark, N.J., 2006). Used together with André Gouron and Odile Terrin, Bibliographie des coutumes de France. Éditions antérieures à la Révolution (Geneva 1975) one can start further research.

Medieval manuscripts concerning the law of Normandy

In this post I will try to put the fifteenth century manuscript at Washington, D.C., in the context of other manuscripts and editions of the Grand Coutumier de Normandie as far as they can be consulted online. At least one manuscript has been digitized completely. The manuscript at Harvard University (Harvard Law School, Ms. 91) is written about 1300 and is less lavishly illustrated than the manuscript in Washington. The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, has two manuscripts of the Grand Coutumier de Normandie, HM 1343 in Latin from the first half of the fourteenth century with some illuminated pages, and HM 25862 with the French text from the second half of the fourteenth century. Ernest-Joseph Tardif discussed in his work Coutumiers de Normandie: textes critiques (2 vol. in 3 parts, Rouen-Paris 1881-1903; reprint Geneva 1977) the various versions of the text and edited them. His book is available online at Gallica.

Several manuscripts with the Coutumes de Normandie are illuminated. Most manuscripts are held by libraries, but some are kept at archives, such as the manuscript Rouen, Archives Départementales de Seine-Maritime, ms. 10. The Enluminures website brings you to three illuminated manuscripts held in French municipal libraries (Cherbourg, BM, 13 and 17, and Rouen, BM, 877). How to find more manuscripts in a quick way? Do portals bring you as much as you would like them to do? The Europeana portal brought me to just one manuscript, Paris, Musée du Petit Palais, Duteil 95, of which one can admire four illuminated pages at their website. CERL, the Consortium of European Research Libraries, has created a portal for searching manuscripts and early printed books until 1830; the search for printed books is mainly in a number of national bibliographies. It brings me through Calames to the manuscripts Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 1743 and 2995. Checking on the Liberfloridus website for the illuminated manuscripts of both this library and the Bibliothèque Mazarine yielded no results. The Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen has two manuscripts, NKS 688 oktav and Thott 1012 kvart. Searching in the REX database of this library eventually ends with a third manuscript, Thott 303 oktav, with the Latin version.

More manuscripts in French libraries can be found using a more usual website, the Catalogue collectif de France. I will not list all these manuscripts, but only stress the need to use multiple search terms. When you look for coutumier and Normandie you will find here twelve manuscripts, searching with coutume and Normandie gives you fifty results, including later commentaries and collections of ârrets, the verdicts of the Parlement de Rouen. If you are not aware of the Latin version you would miss it completely. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Arsenal 804, called Summa de legibus Normannie (sic), and Rouen, BM, 818, Jura et statuta Normannie, are among the few manuscripts with the Latin version.

I could scarcely have made more clear the importance of not only using online catalogues, but also checking the printed versions and the often very detailed indices of manuscript catalogues. In the field of medieval canon and Roman law Gero Dolezalek has put on the website of the Leipzig law faculty alongside his information on medieval legal manuscripts also an extremely rich, fully commented and updated collection of links to online information about medieval manuscripts. The fine list on online resources by Bob Peckham (University of Tennessee at Martin), the impressive list of manuscript links compiled at the Kungliga biblioteket in Stockholm, and the marvellous gateway to manuscript studies of the Senate House Library, University College London, however useful for its purpose, lack such comments. The very least you should do for the manuscripts in Paris is to check also the online manuscript catalogue of the BnF. It is not wise nor really feasible to present in a simple blog post a complete list of medieval – and later – manuscripts with the different versions of the Coutumier de Normandie, including the rhymed versions and collections of maximes. In the bibliography at the University of Heidelberg created for the online version of the Dictionnaire Étymologique de l’Ancien Français you can find in a nutshell a bibliography of the Coutumier de Normandie and other French coutumes, including manuscripts and main editions of the most important versions.

Printed books and the history of the Coutumier de Normandie

Creating such an overview is not just a question of careful using manuscript catalogues, but of research in the existing literature about this text. Let’s turn to digitized books with the Coutume de Normandie or comments on it. The Jacob Burns Law Library of the George Washington University, Washington, D.C., recently acquired a copy of the first edition, an incunable from 1483. In the Spring 2010 issue of their news bulletin A Legal Miscellanea you can find a short, clear and substantial introduction to this and other early editions, besides a good sketch of the importance and role of Norman customary law. Finding this first edition in the online version of the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (GW) was not easy, because somehow searching for coutumier or coutumes did not work. With the other main search website for incunabula in Germany, the INKA catalogue of the University of Tübingen, it becomes clear this edition is present in the GW with number M43587, where luckily a link is given to a digitized version at Troyes. In the online version of the Gesamtkatalog all editions of municipal and regional statutes, statutes of religious orders and synodal statutes, are filed under the headings Statuta civitatum, Statuta ordinum, Statuta synodalia and Statuta regnorum. Seven incunable editions exist for the Coutumes de Normandie. Legal historians should consult with profit the many digitized versions of incunable editions of medieval statutes indicated in the GW.

Visiting a relatively small number of digital libraries brings you to digitized editions of the Grand Coutumier de Normandie. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich has several editions, to be found using the OPACplus database. Among important editions it is good to remember the first edition of Le grand coutumier de France (Paris 1539) with the gloss of Guillaume Le Rouillé. At the moment of writing the OPACplus is not working completely as it did. In Paris Gallica has for instance digitized Le grand coustumier du pays et duché de Normandie (Rouen 1515), and not only Tardif’s modern edition, but also another edition of the Latin version, Summa de legibus Normanniae in curia laicali ou Coutumier latin de Normandie (Rennes 1896).

The Fontes Historiae Iuris portal at Lille brings together two editions of the Norman customary law, Pierre de Merville’s La coutume de Normandie reduit en maximes (..) (Paris 1707) and L’ancienne coutume de Normandie (Jersey 1881) by William Laurence de Gruchy, recently reprinted and expanded with an English translation  by Judith Ann Everard (Saint Helier 2009). At Lille you find also easily the links to commentaries by Berault (1612), Routier (1748), Le Royer de Tournerie (1778), and also the remarkable Dictionnaire analytique, historique, etymologique, critique et interpretatif de la coutume de Normandie by Daniel Houard (4 vol., Rouen 1780-1782). The Tarlton Law Library of the University of Texas at Austin has a small but remarkable online exhibition on the history of legal dictionaries, featuring also Houard. At the Hathi Trust digital library you can find his Traités sur les coutumes anglo-normandes (4 vol., Rouen 1776). In this digital library you find also the edition by A.J. Marnier of the ârrets present in a number of manuscripts, Établissements et coutumes, assises et arrêts de l’échiquier de Normandie, au treiziéme siècle (1207 à 1245) (Paris 1839). Let’s not forget to put the law of Normandy in the perspective of the droit coutumier at large. The Centre Lorrain d’Histoire du Droit has put the four volumes of Charles Bourdot de Richebourg’s Nouveau Coutumier General (…) de France (Paris 1724) online. The center at Nancy, too, maintains the Bibliographie d’histoire du droit en langue française, no laurels needed.

The legacy of Normandy’s law

The medieval customary law of Normandy is still living law on the Channel Islands, especially on Jersey. Willem Zwalve wrote about the use of the old Norman customary law in a case at Jersey from 2001, ‘Snell vs. Beadle. The Privy Council on Roman law, Norman customary law and the ius commune‘, in: “Viva vox iuris romani”: Essays in honour of Johannes Emil Spruit, L. de Ligt (ed.) (Amsterdam 2002) 379-386, available online at the digital repository of the University of Leiden. For Jersey the study by Charles Sydney Le Gros, Traité du droit coutumier de l’île de Jersey (Jersey 1943; reprint Saint Helier 2007) has a position somewhat akin to that of works stemming from the Romano-Dutch tradition in South-Africa. At Guernsey lawyers do look for time to time to the Coutumes des bailliage, duché et prévôté d’Orléans et ressort d’iceux by Robert Joseph Pothier (Paris 1740 and later editions). The edition Paris 1780 has been digitized at Gallica. His Traité des obligations (1761) and other treatises were destined to influence the creation of the Code civil, and it is remarkable that this earlier work, too, still has its area of influence.

Large parts of the digitized French cultural heritage can be found using the Patrimoine numérique website. I looked at institutions in Normandy. Normannia is Normandy’s digital library. The Patrimoine site mentions it, but the URL of the website is lacking. As for now I could find for the field of legal history just a few things. Using the rather limited search functionality – just lists ordered by date, author and title – I did only find a small book from 1786 called Recherches historiques sur les droits de la province de Normandie and some Caen guild statutes from 1679, both OCR scanned. The Bibliothèque municipale of Caen has digitized books, but these can only be consulted on spot, and I could not reach the website. A list at Bibliopedia offers you a handy selection of French digital libraries. The municipal library of Rouen has a database with selected images, also from manuscripts. For searching literature on Normandy the Catalogue Collectif Normand can help you, as does the earlier Bibliographie Normande in the journal Annales de Normandie. Les Normands, peuples d’Europe is a portal at Caen. Dipouest is a database at the Université Rennes-2  for searching articles on the history of Ouest-France in scientific journals.

Of course I am aware that much more can be said. Just one example: the libraries of Yale and Harvard, too, have rich holdings for the history of French customary law. It has been a tour d’horizon of Normandy. If you really want to look further into French legal history you might as well have a look at the recent guide to histoire du droit en ligne created for the Jurisguide website of the Université Paris-I by Isabelle Fructus of the Bibliothèque Cujas. At the website of this library you can still visit the online exhibit on the bicentenary of the Code civil (1804-2004) which has a generous section on earlier French law, including the various coutumes.

A postscript

In November 2011 Harvard Law School announced the acquisition and digitalization of a newly found medieval manuscript of the Summa de legibus Normannie. Charles Donahue Jr. comments on the manuscript with the sigle HLS MS 220.

A guide to researching coutumes

Only belatedly I noticed the short guide to the official redaction and reform in the sixteenth century of French coutumes provided in 2009 by Isabelle Brancourt, a scholar blogging about her research on the Parlement de Paris in the eigtheenth century. She notes the bibliography by Martine Grinbert on this process of redaction, Ecrire les coutumes. Les droits seigneuriaux en France (Paris 2006).

Bibliographical information and links

Even though this is another late addition, mentioning the website of the journal Tabularia edited at the Université de Caen is useful. You will find not only digitized issues of this journal, but also a yearly bibliographical chronicle and more relevant links for the history of Normandy. The Université de Rouen has started the project Bibliothèque David Hoüard: bilbiothèque numérique de droit normand with digitized works from the sixteenth century onwards on customary law in Normandy.

Changing your search angle

Many posts on this blog and a growing list on my website are concerned with digital libraries with holdings for legal history. At the back of my mind there has been a nagging doubt whether this is the only way to find digitized books. Luckily the answer is negative: there are other ways to find them. Remarks by Robin Vose (St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick) led me again to the medieval inquisition and libraries with holdings concerning this institution, and I am grateful for his encouragements.

In my post Digitizing a medieval inquisitor (January 4, 2011) I had presented a digital version of the manuscript Toulouse, Bibliothèque Municipale, 609. I mentioned also the Historia Inquisitionis, a famous book on the inquisition by the Dutch writer Philippus van Limborch, but at that time I could not offer you information about a digital version of it. Its second part contains an edition of a manuscript now in the British Library (Add. 4697) with records of an inquisition held in the early fourteenth century by Jacques Fournier and Bernard Gui.

Using the BASE search engine at the University of Bielefeld I found a digital version of Van Limborch’s Historia Inquisitionis (Amsterdam 1692) . Both parts of Van Limborch’s book have been digitized: at page 417 the “Liber Sententiarum Inquisitionis Tholosanae” starts. The digital version, published on June 3, 2010, is present in the DSpace of the CEU-Net libraries, Universidad San Pablo CEU, Madrid, at this link. You can find digitized versions of the English translation of Van Limborch’s work in the Hathi Trust Library, but this English translation does not include the second volume with the edition of the inquisitorial records.

BASE, the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, enables you to search with one search action in a very large number of digital libraries and repositories. More than 1700 collections are covered now. A digital repository typically holds the publications of scholars from one scientific institution.

Robin Vose was involved in creating the online exhibition on the materials for the history of the medieval and Spanish inquisition at Notre Dame University. I would like to draw your attention to their online exhibition Familia Praedicatoria on the history of the Dominican order. A number of Dominicans became very soon after the foundation of this mendicant order involved with the medieval inquisition. Vose points to several other American libraries with holdings on this subject, in particular the Henry Charles Lea Library at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Among the digitized manuscripts in Pen in Hand: Selected Manuscripts of UPenn Libraries, too, one finds some items concerning the medieval, the Spanish and the Roman inquisition. The Lilly Library of the Indiana University at Bloomington Libraries has some manuscripts concerning the inquisition in Peru, but none of these is to be found in the digital collections of this library. Chicago’s Newberry Library has fine holdings for literature concerning the various inquisitions. Among their wealth of digital collections presented together with other libraries in Illinois at CARLI no item is connected with the history of the Catholic inquisitions. As a happy reader of the Introduction to Manuscript Studies by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham (Ithaca-London 2007) I am a bit surprised that the Newberry Library which provided many illustrations for this volume does not have many manuscripts bearing on legal history, apart from charters and administrative rolls. Looking at the libraries of the Hebrew Union College did not bring me immediately to materials in their holdings, but I can at least mention the digitized version of the American Jewish Archives Journal. The Witchcraft Collection of Cornell University Library yields only four digitized books focusing on any form of the inquisition.

Perhaps this sunny Friday afternoon does not help me much to dig deeper, but surely it’s time to look briefly at European institutions. Perhaps it is a kind of justice that this afternoon the search function of the MICHAEL website does not seem to work at all, and thus it seems wiser to turn again to the BASE engine. Was finding Van Limborch a case of being just lucky, or can this search engine bring you more? The results might have been relevant only when searching for the Middle Dutch Roman van Limborch or the Limburg brothers… With the basic search term inquisition at least two of the results have directly to do with Jacques Fournier, the article ‘Per modum quem solent tenere heretici in respondendo. Confessione, prova e dissimulazione nel tribunale di Jacques Fournier (1318-1325)’ , Les Dossiers du Grihl, 2009-2 by Irene Bueno, and her article ‘Dal carnalis concubitus all’heretica pravitate. Sesso, matrimonio ed eresia nel tribunale di Jacques Fournier (1318-1325)’, L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques, 4-2009.

It was no chance to find after a first attempt already two incunabula in the Verteilte Inkunabelbibliothek of the Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel and the University Library in Cologne of works mentioning the workings of the inquisition in passing – the Summa theologica of Antoninus of Florence – and more substantially – the Practica nova judicialis by Johannes Petrus de Ferrariis. Doing the same search with the INKA Inkunabelkatalog for incunabula in German scientific libraries yields results with indications of digitized copies of for example Francesco Accolti’s commentary to the decretals of the title De accusationibus, inquisitionibus et denunciationibus (X. 5.1). The Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz also increasingly marks search results with links to digitized copies, for instance a copy at Munich of repetitiones by Azo de Ramenghis, including a repetitio on X. 5.1. Because the new DFG-viewer of the digital collections at Munich is not yet easily reached I will give the permanent link to it.

In the Digi20 project of the Digitale Sammlungen in Munich you can find fairly recent publications on the Roman inquisition from the series Römische Inquisition und Indexkongregation edited by Hubert Wolf. The literature database of the Regesta Imperii, an indispensable tool when searching literature on the Middle Ages, too, has started to mark search results with indications of digital versions. You will find here much more on Bernard Gui and Jacques Fournier. Let’s finish today’s search for digital collections with the Editti e bandi pontifici at the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome, a collection of papal documents from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century mainly concerning censorship of books by the Roman inquisition, but sometimes about the inquisition in its widest sense.

You might argue with some justification that this post only skates the surface of the huge literature on the inquisition in its various incarnations and deviations. What needs underlining for the medieval inquisition is its deep inner paradox of being an institution in which the role of accusing party and judge were united in one person against all indication of what constitutes due process. Medieval canonists did work to create the doctrine of due process while at the same time they factually condoned or ignored the workings of medieval inquisitors. Unravelling the facts surrounding such questions is one of the arguments of placing high value on research concerning medieval canon law, its doctrinal development, jurisprudence and actual practice. The digitization of manuscripts and books pertaining to this history is one of the means to fulfill this aim, and certainly not the only one.

A postscript

I should add two rather obvious additions to works in medieval canon law concerning the inquisitorial procedures of which digitized incunabula exist. The Digitale Sammlungen at Munich contain several incunabula editions of the major reference work on medieval procedure, the Speculum iudiciale by Guillelmus Durandus (or Duranti). In this digital library, and in the Verteilte Inkunabelbibliothek, you can find also the Repertorium aureum iuris canonici ascribed to this author. In this work “inquisitio” is a separate lemma. Sometimes this repertory is also included within the bindings of, or printed alongside the Speculum iudiciale.

A second postscript: the Universidad San Pablo-CEU in Madrid has at its website a PDF with a collection of books from Emil Van der Vekene, the author of the Bibliotheca bibliographica historiae sanctae inquisitionis (3 vol., Vaduz 1982-1992). In Dresden Gerd Schwerhoff has created a fine bibliographical introduction to inquisitional history.

Digitizing a medieval inquisitor

Does being familiar with historical sources, with special collections, old editions, archival records and buildings in their original or restored state, ever satisfy you completely? Writing for a virtual public I more and more realize how special it is to have historic material near at hand. Within half an hour I can walk to monuments from many centuries. On bicycle or by bus and train even more is within easy reach. Yet often you are not in a position to see the originals. Today the web brings many things to your home or even to your portable computer that normally would only visualize before your eyes after a voyage or prolonged research.

Let’s take medieval texts as an example. Often you had to be quite happy when the university library in your town had an edition of particular texts. Virtual libraries make it possible to consult many editions on your screen. On my website for legal history I have created a page on medieval procedure with sections on the officials, the lawyers heading the diocesan tribunals created in the thirteenth century, on Guillaume Durand, the author of the Speculum iudiciale, an encyclopedic treatise on medieval procedure, on the Rota Romana and other tribunals at Rome, and on the medieval inquisition. Even if one is not particularly interested in the subject it simply had to be included. In this section you will find mainly a list with source editions and modern studies on the subject by historians specializing in medieval and legal history.

Pointing to websites with clear and reliable information on the medieval inquisition proved to be rather difficult. The clarity offered by many popular sites runs often completely against reliability. Among the few safe guides are the pages at the University of Notre Dame on their collection concerning the medieval inquisition, and the webpages of Jean Duvernoy with a list of his editions and transcriptions of sources on the inquisition in the Languedoc. For further research I could mention in particular the Henry Charles Lea Library at the University of Pennsylvania.

Duvernoy offers transcriptions of several important manuscripts with inquisitorial sources, mainly from the Doat collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France of seventeenth century transcriptions of medieval sources from Toulouse, many of them no longer existing. Pride of place is taken by the transcriptions of the manuscript Toulouse, Bibliothèque municipale, 609, with the records of the inquisitions held by Bernard de Caux in the Lauragais during 1245 and 1246. I feel quite happy to have Duvernoy’s transcriptions of the manuscript at Toulouse long recognized as a very important source. Scholars like Mark Gregory Pegg in his studies The corruption of angels. The great inquisition of 1245-1246 (Princeton-Oxford 2001) and A Most Holy War. The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Oxford, etc., 2008) have studied the manuscript in situ. You might guess how much surprised I am to find a digitized version of Toulouse 609 at the Bibliothèque numérique of Toulouse’s city library. The Bibliothèque Municipale at Toulouse has digitized a substantial number of medieval manuscripts. Interestingly the library has partnered with the French national library for this digitization project, and thus you can find these manuscripts at Toulouse through the services of Gallica.

Looking at the manuscript on my screen I encountered a few difficulties in getting a detailed view of the written text. The enlargement could have been better. Creating a PDF, one of the services shown at the website’s viewer, did not work with the browser I normally use. After downloading an image of a random page the original photograph turned out to have a rather less sharp resolution than needed for normal decipherment of a medieval manuscript. When your eyes have adjusted to the script reading will certainly go easier, but I had expected a better technical quality. I do not at all like to quibble about these matters, but they do matter. When I first found out about the collection on the medieval inquisition at Notre Dame I hoped they would have digitized their copy of Philipp van Limborch’s Historia Inquisitionis (Amsterdam 1692) who printed as an appendix the famous record on the Montaillou inquisition by Bernard Gui and Jacques Fournier, the future pope Benedict XII, from the manuscript only much later identified with London, British Library, Add. 4697. I have not yet spotted a digitized version of this edition. For now having digital access at home to a manuscript that has been so often studied, a real treasure of medieval legal history, is just most welcome.

A postscript on the Bibliothèque numérique of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Toulouse and the quality of digitization: I have looked here at more images of digitized manuscripts. It seems that the pictures taken of illuminated pages are generally of a better quality than those of text pages. The digitized images of music scores, including autographs such as Gabriel Fauré’s Berceuse for violin and orchestra (Res. Mus. B. 557) and music editions from the sixteenth century (e.g. madrigals by Phillipus de Monte), are really sharp. Among the digitized manuscripts of legal interest are a collection of conciliar canons (Ms. 364) and letters from and to Jean de Boysonné (1505-1559?), a lawyer and poet at Toulouse (Ms. 834). The four thousand photographs taken by Eugène Trutat (1840-1910) are not always presented in their original dimensions, but his images of places like Moissac and for example an Italian fresco with the judgment of Solomon (TRU C 1906) have historic value.

Human nature, human rights: a long history

Looking at my recent postings I became aware of a common theme connecting them: both in my posting on South Africa and apartheid and in the posting about the mirror of society offered by the beast epic Van den vos Reynaerde views of human nature are at stake. From the viewpoint of legal history it might seem a small step to human rights. Just how great the step is for humanity was at the centre of a lecture at Utrecht University on the history of human rights by Lynn Hunt, a historian from UCLA well-known for her books on the French Revolution.

Thursday Lynn Hunt’s starting point was her book Inventing Human Rights (New York 2007). She did not repeat the lecture shown on YouTube and on University of California Television! Instead Hunt presented her conclusions as a set of propositions which she then more or less illustrated. In her perspective the concept of human rights came to the fore very suddenly on a wave of interest which started around 1760. The change in views about human nature, if not partially created, were at least stimulated by the new genre of the epistolary novel which invited readers to sympathize with the characters of the novel. It is not just in the sphere of the law, and more precisely of criminal law and punishments, that we should look for motives for and supporters of legal change, crowned by such documents as the 1776 Declaration of Independence and the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme of 1789. What happened between 1760 and 1789? Hunt looks for the interplay between cultural, social and political developments, and rightly so. The suddenness of the coming of human rights makes the title Inventing Human Rights an echo of The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 1983), the volume of essays edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger.

Utrecht University and UCLA have an exchange program since 2001, founded by Margaret Jacob (UCLA) and Wijnand Mijnhardt (UU). This year the two of them together with Lynn Hunt have edited a volume of essays, Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion (Getty Research Institute, 2010), and The Book that changed Europe. Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Belknap Press, 2010). A website with a full facsimile of the four earliest versions of Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, originally published at Amsterdam between 1723 and 1743, accompanies both books. Jean Frederic Bernard wanted to present the rituals of all known religions and he got the engraver Bernard Picart to illustrate the nine volumes of the first edition.

These books and the splendid website evoke for me at least four remarks. First of all venturing into social history, law, art history and much more shows Lynn Hunt’s scholarly capacity to cross frontiers and to connect different fields of research in a fertile way. Secondly, the growth of religious tolerance is coupled with the establishment of a vision of worldwide mankind, which contributes indeed to a cultural change, and this view of man and mankind influenced the concept of human rights. Thirdly, Bernard’s and Picart’s ventures slightly predates the French eighteenth century vogue for encyclopedic works in the wake of the Encyclopédie of Diderot and Voltaire published between 1751 and 1772, but it surely made some minds already more open. The fourth point is the evident role of illustrations in the success of these works, and this brings me to the subject of legal iconography.

Lately I have been busy searching for digital libraries concerning legal history, which I present on my legal history website. Having collected a fair number of digital libraries it becomes clear that more is needed and possible. Archives presenting digitized documents and institutions with different kinds of material contribute as much to legal history as classic libraries presenting mainly digitized texts. At some universities Law and Humanities has become a regular subject. It would be to the benefit of both legal historians and scholars in the humanities and social sciences to revive legal iconography. Since this is only a posting I will not try to present here a full list of interesting websites, but only mention some of the more classic collections for legal iconography. The University of Graz (Austria) has a database for legal iconography. The University of Munich and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek have digitized the collection on legal iconography of Karl von Amira. The Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte at Frankfurt am Main has put the collection of Karl Frölich on its intranet; you will have to visit Germany to use it. Of the former Dutch Centre for Legal History and Legal Iconography at the Royal Library (KB) in The Hague the iconographic database is accessible for KB card holders. Its bibliographical documentation and its thesaurus, too, survive on the web, the former has been integrated into the Digital Bibliography for Dutch History. In due time I hope to present more on my website.

Let’s return to Lynn Hunt and the history of human rights: of course she had to mention such landmarks as Cesare Beccaria and Voltaire’s comments on the Calas affair. Jean Calas was tried at Toulouse. Tolosana, the digital library of old books at the Université de Toulouse, contains a substantial number of legal works from eighteenth century France, including at least 23 books and documents concerning the cause célèbre of Calas.

No doubt it remains difficult to pinpoint exactly the start of the concept of human rights, but at least it is clear this concept was not invented as recent as 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Awareness of the history of human rights can help to understand the slow progress of human rights. This last miserable fact can be researched using the database at the documentation centre of the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights at Utrecht. And a reminder about iconography: at Utrecht University you can use a copy of the Index of Christian Art, both the card files and the database.

A postscript: a fine history of views on mankind and humanity has been written by Siep Stuurman, De uitvinding van de mensheid. Korte wereldgeschiedenis van het denken over gelijkheid en cultururverschil [The invention of mankind. A short world history of thinking about equality and cultural difference] (Amsterdam 2009).