Art at the service of justice: the old townhall of Kampen

Map of Kampen by Jacob van Deventer (Kampen, around 1500-Cologne, 1575) – from database NRCD/KB, The Hague

Along the river IJssel in the east of the Netherlands a number of towns still have a more or less medieval inner city, with both civil and ecclesiastical buildings. Cities such as Kampen, Zwolle, Deventer and Zutphen are not completely unfamiliar to historians thanks to their place in the history of the fourteenth-century reform movement in the Catholic Church, the Devotio Moderna. They played a subordinate but not neglectable role, too, within the Hanseatic league. The famous series of maps of cities in the Low Countries by Jacob van Deventer, a cartographer from Kampen, came into existence thanks to a request in 1558 by the Spanish king Philipp II. The surviving maps have been digitized in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the Biblioteca Nacional de España in Madrid.

Kampen is the city closest to the end of the IJssel river. Five medieval city gates have survived the centuries. The town-hall from 1350 was hit by a fire in 1543. The courtroom had to be completely refurbished, and this was done in an indeed lavish way. Its rare unharmed survival makes this rather small building more important than you would guess from the outside. Until 2001 it was used by the city, and now it is part of the Stedelijk Museum Kampen. The way justice and city power are represented in the main room at the first floor, which was both court room and council room, is exemplary. A visit to this space amounts to a kind of pilgrimage for legal iconography. Within the space of a short post I can only focus on a few aspects of a building that deserves close inspection and study.

From the outside one can immediately notice the double function of the building. Barred windows give the building an austere image. On one side six sculptures kept a watch. Alas the figures of Charlemagne and Alexander the Great and allegoric personifications of Justice, Charity, Temperance and Fidelity had to be replaced by modern sculptures; the remains of the original sculptures can be seen at the Koornmarktspoort, one of the city gates. Wim van Anrooij, a reknown medievalist and specialist on the history of the Nine Best, doubted the identification of Charlemagne in ‘Beeldvorming in taal en steen ten stadhuize: Alexander en Karel de Grote (of Julius Caesar?) in Kampen’, Kamper Almanak (2002) 50-65.

Inside the town-hall much more is to be seen than I will present here. In a room adjacent to the Main Room you will find a fine exhibition of numerous objects from the history of Kampen as a proud city which could keep its independence until 1795.

The Main Room of Kampen’s town-hall is rather dark, and perhaps thus the white mantelpiece created in 1545 by Colijn de Nole from Cambrai attracts even more attention than it does already on its own. To the left an elaborate wooden structure with a painting of the Last Judgment is almost insignificant. I will point out its beautiful elements later on.

Central to the superb mantelpiece are a number of allegorical figures. In the midst you can see from the left to the right the figures of Spes, Caritas and Fides, hope, charity and fidelity, the three central virtues of faith. The Latin text below the central statue states that kingdoms fall due to luxury, cities prosper because of their virtues, the public interest grows by peace, and perishes by folly. Between the top part and the main part a scroll with another text in Latin focuses on justice, “The violence of Mars cedes before the sword of justice”. Four smaller statues represent Justice, Peace, Prudence and Temperance, four cardinal virtues. The eagle, symbol of the Holy Roman Empire and their Habsburgian rulers, crowns the very top of the mantelpiece in splendid Renaissance style.

The freezes show both scenes from Roman history and from the Bible. The left freeze pictures the Judgment of king Solomon (1 Kings 3,16-28). By now it should be clear that by focusing on the main elements I skip the very details which make this object so stunning. The putti, the two lions with the city blazons, the smaller heads, the use of perspective in the niches, the way persons are dressed, and the smaller reliefs all deserve, nay, need attention if you want to interpret the iconographic program of this showpiece convincingly.

To mention just one element that has to be considered, you cannot understand this mantelpiece properly without acknowledging the fact that specifically in the city of Utrecht late medieval mantelpieces used to be adorned by elaborate freezes. Colijn de Nole had connections with Utrecht. The medieval diocese of Utrecht covered large parts of the Netherlands, including the cities on the IJssel. The recent exhibition Ontsnapt aan de beeldenstorm [Escaped from the Iconoclastic Tempest] at Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht showed a surprising number of mantelpiece freezes, many of them from the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, see the exhibition catalogue Middeleeuwse beeldhouwkunst uit Utrecht 1430-1528 [Medieval sculptural art from Utrecht 1430-1528] (Utrecht: Museum Catharijneconvent; Antwerp 2012). Some of De Nole’s work is charted in Medieval Memoria Online, a new database at Utrecht University on medieval memorial and funeral art in the Netherlands.

A double room

However, apart from an exhaustive inspection of all details, it is necessary to look at the other objects, and to view the mantelpiece as a part of a room with a double function, both court room and council room.

The wooden structure – in fact it is the seat of the judges – with at its top a painting of the Last Judgment by Ernst Maler can boast some fine carpentry by Meester Frederik, but it is not up to the standards set by Colijn de Nole. Its dimensions are really small compared to the mantelpiece. In fact the wooden edifice prevents you to have a good look at the right side of the mantelpiece, where you can only guess that the statue must represent Temperance.

Another detail of the woodwork is also relatively small, a finely detailed relief with an allegory of Justice. I could point out its position below a canopy or the way Renaissance style does influence even a lesser artist, but all these things can speak only when you bring them into a coherent view of all objects in this room. The most recent monograph on Kampen town-hall was published almost 25 years ago, A.J. Gevers and J. ten Hove, Raadhuis van Kampen (Zwolle 1988). At least one art historian has looked recently in close detail at the materials De Nole used for the mantelpiece [Trudy Brink, 'Spiegel voor stadsbestuur nader onderzocht : over de schouw van Colijn de Nole in Kampen', Bulletin KNOB 108 (2009) 183-193, 222-223 (with a summary in English)]. The title of this article states the mantelpiece formed a kind of mirror for the city council. I was not able to find more recent studies on it in the database of the former Dutch center for legal iconography at the Royal Library in The Hague. You can find some eighty images concerning Kampen from this collection at The Memory of The Netherlands, the portal to more than hundred Dutch digital collections.

Let’s turn to the other half of the room. Spectators were allowed to watch the proceedings of a trial from this part of the room. Along the walls you find a mass of spears, a graphic reminder of the city’s power. The door in the center opens to the Tower of the Échevins (Schepentoren), the oldest part of the building.

The wooden screen has large openings for viewing the proceedings in the other half of the room. In a way it is a reminder of the choir screens in medieval churches. Here by lending forms from Classical Antiquity it suggests powerfully that justice is being administered in a classic and therefore just way. The sixteenth-century city council of Kampen was clearly aware that their power had to be framed, to borrow an anachronistic term…

“Looking at legal history”

In 2014 the Dutch legal history journal Pro Memorie, published by the Foundation for the History of Old Dutch Law will publish as a special issue a volume on legal iconography with the title Rechtsgeschiedenis in beeld, “looking at legal history”. In the call for papers legal historians are invited to write contributions on legal iconography from the widest possible perspectives, be it artists’ contracts, the use of colors or forbidden art. Every year Pro Memorie has space for some contributions from the field of legal iconography. I look forward to the volume that will be published in 2014 for the fifteenth anniversary of this journal. No doubt Dutch and Flemish town-halls and their interiors, too, will figure in the new book. Kampen with its rich municipal archive would be a wonderful example to marvel at and to study again.

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.

The telling image: searching for portraits of lawyers

Sometimes a post on this blog is part of a series. Some posts discuss a particular theme from a number of perspectives. Legal iconography is one of these recurring themes. Sometimes I can choose at will from my list of interesting subjects, but this time a post on a well-known blog prompted me to start writing about legal portraits. On my website I deal with legal portraits to some extent on the page for digital image collections. I realized that in order to tackle a question in that recent post concerning the erased name of a lawyer in an engraving, my list of image databases with legal portraits might be helpful indeed to find out whose portrait you are looking at, and in finding legal portraits at all.

A missing name

At In Custodia Legis, the blog of the law librarians of the Library of Congress, Nathan Dorn published on October 19, 2012, a post called The Faces of Renaissance Law. Dorn wrote about the recent acquisition by the Library of Congress Law Library of two rare sixteenth-century Italian books with images of medieval and Renaissance lawyers, Illustrium Virorum Iureconsultor[um] imagines (…), by Marco Mantova Benavides (1489-1582), printed by Bolognino Zaltieri (Venice, 1570), and Imagines quarundam principium, et illustrium virorum (Venice: Bolognino Zaltieri and Niccolo Valegio, 1569). Five of the six lawyers in the pictures from these books shown in Dorn’s post can be identified immediately by the text engraved below in the images, but in the sixth image a part of this text with the name of a lawyer has been erased. The remaining text, “floruit Roberti regis Sicilie temporibus quem patrem legum uocat Ancharanus” says he lived in the times of king Robert of Sicily who Ancharanus called his father of laws. Pietro d’Ancarano (around 1330-1416) seems to be referring to Robert’s support of the University of Naples.

It is one thing to find a portrait of lawyers in the past, but another thing to identify somebody correctly as in this case. On my website I mention a number of portrait databases and websites of museums with a large portrait gallery, but here the question was clearly a bit different. How to find a digital version of this book when the Library of Congress states this book is very rare? This assertion was easily to be proved, with one qualification: one can find other editions of this book, but they contain different images. Mike Widener, curator of rare books at the Lilian Goldman Law Library (Yale University, has created a Flickr gallery of the images in the edition Rome 1566 of this book. He gives Antoine Lafréry as the author of this book, not Benavides, who was the collector of the 26 images in the first edition. Widener discusses these portraits and other portraits in a number of posts for the Rare Books Blog of Yale Law Library. In the edition of 1566 our lawyer has not been portrayed.

Image of Riccardo Malumbra from “Illustrium ivreconsultorum imagines” – copy Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, 37.4 Geom. 2° (28) – from http://www.virtuelles-kupferstichkabinett.de

Instead of plodding along all roads and byways I took to find the missing name I had rather tell you where and how to find a solution for the question about the book at the Library of Congress. One of the portrait databases presented on my website contains indeed all images from later editions. The Virtuelles Kupferstichkabinett (The Virtual Engravings Cabinet), a project of the Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the Herzog-Anton-Ulrich-Museum at Braunschweig and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, gives lots of information on the image in question. The man portrayed is Riccardo Malombra, born in Cremona between 1259 and 1264. He died in 1334. For information on him one can turn to the article written by Andrea Labardi in 2007 for the Dizionario Bibliografico Italiano which can be consulted online, too. The missing text in the book at Washington, D.C. is “Ricardus Malumbra Cremonensis”. The date of the edition at Wolfenbüttel is given as between 1567 and 1570, and when you compare it with the copy at Washington, D.C., you can spot indeed some differences, for example the number of the engraving given here in the corner below right.

Finding legal portraits

With more than 4,000 images the Legal Portraits Online collection of Harvard Law Library certainly is an important and often exclusively mentioned resource, but it is surely possible and useful to look elsewhere, too. To start with Mike Widener, he has also digitized for Flickr 36 portraits from the book by Lodovico Vedriani, Dottori Modonesi (..) (Modena 1665) with professors from the university of Modena, a number of portraits showing Hugo Grotius, and finally a few dozen scattered portraits of lawyers.

A first indication that it is indeed interesting to look not only at the image results of the average online search machine, is the very fact of finding Italian images in a German library. In fact a number of German projects seem to cater for a lot of questions which transcend national borders. The Frankesche Stiftungen at Halle an der Saale, an institution with a rich history in eighteenth-century German pietism, has a fine portrait database where you can find lawyers among the professions indicated (enter “Jurist” in the Berufe field). The Fotoarchiv at Marburg has created a Digitaler Porträtindex where you can search in the same way for portraits in the collections of eight German cultural institutions. The Bildindex der Kunst und Architektur, the main image project at Marburg, too, can be used in this way. When doing my search for the name in this particular image I was surprised to find that the Deutsche Fotothek, a project at Dresden, does not only contain photographs, but also drawings, engravings and paintings. My surprise was even greater, because this database brought me at first to the image of Riccardo Malumbra discussed here. Thus the database of the Deutsche Fotothek leads you to images and data also present at the Virtuelles Kupferstichkabinett. However, at the website of that project you can use also Iconclass, a Dutch systematic classification of subjects in art. Last year the death of Friedrich Carl von Savigny in 1861 was commemorated in particular with the publication of a volume with fifty contemporary portraits of this German legal scholar.

This post started with a question concerning an Italian lawyer. It is always possible to find Italian portraits using the general gateways to art history. Nowadays Art.Historicum.net is one of the most useful portals for art history. Combined with the overview of online database of ArtGuide (Heidelberg and Dresden) and the fine list of links maintained by the RKD (see below) you will surely find many portraits. However, it is really worthwhile to check the 10,000 portraits in the FACIES database of the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio in Bologna. Even when you got to acknowledge the relatively small number of lawyers in it, this database does connect them to other resources as well.

Speaking of Dutch projects, the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) at the Hague has a number of online databases. Among them is RKD Portraits. Here, too, you can search for particular professions. Lawyers can be tracked down by using in the first general search field the Dutch term jurist. Utrecht University has coupled its online database of historic professors with the fine painting gallery in its holdings, and provides links to other databases as well. The image database of the former Dutch Institute for Legal Iconography with some 12,000 images, which used to be accessible only for subscribers at this link of the Dutch Royal Library, has been recently integrated at The Memory of The Netherlands portal. The University of Amsterdam has created a digital portrait gallery with paintings collected for this university and its forerunner since 1743. The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has a digital image collection with some 1,500 images for the history of Protestantism, including many portraits.

For American history, too, one can look beyond Harvard’s Legal Portraits Online. The Smithsonian Institution at Washington, D.C., has an online database for its National Portrait Gallery. Incidentally, for English history one should of course turn to its namesake in London with over 160,000 images. The New York Public Library has created Historic and Public Figures: A General Portrait File to the 1920′s with some 30,000 photographs. Cornell University has an online collection of political Americana which goes even a step further, from an image database to the uses of images in campaigning and publicity. For American women in legal professions the information – including images – at the Women’s Legal History portal of Stanford University is invaluable. Libraries and Archives Canada provide for Canada an image portal with a generous selection from Canadian holdings.

Looking for Dutch lawyers

When you want to find a portrait of Hugo Grotius you will easily find useful results. When preparing this post I realized that the proof of the pudding for the image databases mentioned here is to find a portrait of a less well-known lawyer. For convenience’s sake and for my own interest I started looking for an image of a portrait of Nicolaas Everaerts (latinized Nicolaus Everardi) (around 1462-1532). No contemporary portraits of him exist. Because of the variant spellings of his name (e.g. Everhardi, or his first name as Nicolaes) finding images of this lawyer who became the head of the Great Council at Malines, the highest court of the Habsburgian Low Countries, is not so easy.

Nicolaus Everardi (1462-1532) – from Antonius Miraeus (1573-1640); engraving by Philip Galle, 1604

Nicolaus Everardi – Harvard Law School Library, Legal Portraits Online

Harvard’s Legal Portraits Online comes here into its own with two images. I have never seen the image at the left elsewhere. To be honest, its execution is a bit clumsy, and the older engraving was clearly the model for it, although inverted. Its dimensions are quite small (57 x 43 mm), and the original source is not given. The older image is not as easily found as I suspected it would be. The Europeana portal helped me in getting more details, but some questions remain. In which work did Aubertus Miraeus (1573-1640) use the engraving by Philip Galle (1537-1612)? The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has almost all these details on this engraving. The engraving comes from Miraeus’ Illustrium Galliae Belgicae scriptorum icones et elogia (Antverpiae 1604), a series of 52 portraits of Dutch and Belgian authors. Again, it is from the perspective of art history that you will find here an answer.

When I created my webpage with links concerning digital image collections and legal iconography I often doubted the value of the links belonging to the realm of art history, but I have become convinced that you might need them indeed. A search strategy for legal portraits can be sketched at least in outline: start with the resources dedicated to legal portraits, continue with general portrait galleries and general photo galleries, and switch to resources for art history when the other ways bring no results. On my webpage I point also to digital heritage portals and to other specific resources for images which relate to the vast fields of legal history. National image portals are also often helpful, as are the websites of institutions in the field of women’s history. In my experience it is sound advice to look also at the image collections of major museums – here the Rijksmuseum – and to take the searching order indicated here as a guideline only. By changing the sequence of links to be visited you might in specific cases get quicker and more relevant results. Sometimes results come from unexpected corners: for example, the Château de Versailles has a fine collection of portrait engravings in its image database. I wish you good hunting!

A postscript

Germany takes quite some space here already, but it is possible to add some online German portrait databases. The Tripota – Trierer Porträtdatenbank (Universität Trier) contains more than 8,000 portrait images, mainly from the collections of the Stadtbibliothek Trier. The links section of this website gives an excellent overview of digital portrait collections worldwide. In the Regensburger Porträtgalerie (Universität Regensburg) you will find some 5,000 portraits from the collections of the princes of Thurn und Taxis. The European aristocracy is well represented here.

Utrecht University contributes to the new website Academische Collecties a catalogue with some 1,800 images – paintings, drawings and photographs – of professors. At the same website you will find some 500 portraits from the collections of the Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Writing at a slow pace

This month it seems I will not be able to write four posts. It feels awkward to break my promise for the continuity of my blog. However, yesterday I had the privilege of being guided to a project in Utrecht which proceeds very slowly indeed. It shows the relativity of joining a Weekly Post Competition or a Post a Day Challenge. This post has at face value only a very slim connection with legal history, but perhaps you might detect here a deeper meaning.

The Letters of Utrecht

On June 2, 2012 Aleid Wolfsen, burgomaster of Utrecht, opened the project The Letters of Utrecht (De Letters van Utrecht) by uncovering a line of stones with the words of a poem in the pavement along the medieval canal Oude Gracht. You have to begin somewhere to give the past its place (“Je zult ergens moeten beginnen om het verleden een plaats te geven”) is the first line by Ruben van Gogh of a poem to be written by a collective of poets working in Utrecht.

To create an impressive start the project showed in June immediately a number of lines, but this was only a consequence of using a convenient starting point. For every week since January 2000 a stone with one letter has been put into place. The pace of one letter every week means the poem will become visible at a very slow speed indeed. At present some 650 stones are visible. Every Saturday afternoon a new stone is prepared in situ by a mason and put into its place.

The first stone of the project is a gift from The Long Now Foundation hewn from the Sierra Diablo Mountain Range in Texas where a 10,000 Years Clock is being installed since 1996. Behind the project in Utrecht is the Million Generations Foundation, an organization which invites people to think about the future of the earth, its people and civilization in the very long run. Its founder, Michael Münker, and my guide yesterday, is also on the board of the foundation for The Letters of Utrecht.

Among the immediate offsprings of the Long Now Foundation are The Rosetta Project for a public digital library with texts from all documented languages, and PanLex, a project for a multilingual translation database and interface. At first the name of the PanLex project led me to guess it aims at creating a database of laws worldwide! In fact you might indeed try to use it as a juridical multilingual dictionary.

After spotting in the pavement the word guilty (“schuldigen”) I knew for sure I had a pretext to write here about this project. The word is a part of line in the poem by Ellen Deckwitz where the medieval tower of Utrecht Cathedral points as a finger to heaven to identify the guilty (“…schuldigen aan te wijzen”). My picture of this text is rather vague, but on second thought this can function as a mitigation of the rather strong image provided by the poem.

Yet another line by Ruben van Gogh near the very start of the poem struck me even more: the present matters ever less (“…het heden doet er steeds minder toe”). The words of this poet run directly against the mainstream of contemporary life. However, it is only in the present that we can read his words and reflect on them, but he provokes us to realize that our view of the present is guided by the past. Is it sheer coincidence to reflect on words by someone named Van Gogh in the very weekend the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam closes for a seven month renovation? 75 paintings by Vincent van Gogh will be shown temporarily to the public at the Hermitage Amsterdam. Anyway, the present visibility of the project in Utrecht is not only provided by a website, but also by presence on Facebook and Twitter. It is certainly food for thought to look at a project aiming for the ages which is firmly present in the virtual reality using the media where people often seem to focus on actual situations and activities!

Another aspect of The Letters of Utrecht I would like to mention is the use of a type specially created by the Avant la Lettre foundry. The capitals of this type make me wonder about the form of a basic type yet to be created. I like the fact that a project which invites you to look into the distant future uses a contemporary type. As for the project in Utrecht it is no wonder if you are reminded of laws carved in stone, a subject touched upon here in some posts here, too (The voice of Hammurabi and Carved in stone). Using stones as a material to make texts visible for all times still has the attraction of one of the ways to reach into eternity. The use of stone is a part of the image a text creates, and thus I decided to include this post not only in the Utrecht section of my blog, but also under the heading Legal iconography.

Centers of legal history: Graz

Where to look for a new city for inclusion in the series Centers of legal history? While working on other posts the Austrian city of Graz came into view. Not only the department for legal history of the Universität Graz will be presented here, but some other institutions in Graz as well.

Legal history at Graz

At the Karl-Franzens Universität Graz the law faculty has two institutes for legal history, first the Institut für Österreichische Rechtsgeschichte und Europäische Rechtsentwicklung [Austrian legal history and Development of European Law] and the Institut für Römisches Recht, Antike Rechtsgeschichte und Neuere Privatrechtsgeschichte [Roman Law, Ancient Legal History and History of Modern Private Law]. The websites of both institutes give mostly information about the teaching program, not about the research conducted at Graz. An icon suggests the presence of an English version but this does not show up. However, by checking individual staff members, both now and in the past, you will find information about their research. In fact the overview of activities in 2010 and 2011 is very useful.

At the department for Roman law Evelyn Höbenreich is a member of the LEDA network for gender studies and Roman legal tradition. Johannes Pichler launched in 2005 the website Europa zwischen Unrecht und Recht [Europe between Legal Abuse and Law], with articles and videos on legal developments in a number of periods in European history. Here law is seen as the most unifying element of Europe’s very existence. Markus Steppan is the moderator of the Politik Cafe at the Café Sacher, a monthly series of debates on politics, law and society. This activity is held by the Centre for Society, Knowledge and Communication which is affectionally called “die siebente Fakultät”, the seventh faculty. Martin Polaschek, another legal historian, leads this program, and is also responsible for the series Justiz und Gesellschaft [ The judiciary and society] which brings this year a series of lectures on trials in Poland, Germany and Austria against crimes committed in concentration camps during the Second World War. A number of trials have been held in Graz.

In 1996 the Association of Young Legal Historians held its third meeting at Graz. Not only the younger generation is very active. Perhaps the best-known legal historian at Graz is Gernot Kocher. Apart from his teaching and research on more common themes he is one of the most active scholars in the field of legal iconography. One of his efforts is the Rechtsikonographische Datenbank [Legal Iconography Database], not only the first but still one of the very few databases in this field in open access. in 1992 he published Zeichen und Symbole des Rechts : eine historische Ikonographie (Munich 1992). He is one of the editors of the volume Römisches Rechtsleben im Mittelalter. Miniaturen aus den Handschriften des Corpus iuris civilis (Heidelberg 1988). Together with Dietlinde Munzel-Everling he wrote the commentary (Kommentarband) to the facsimile edition Sachsenspiegel : die Heidelberger Bilderhandschrift Cod.Pal.Germ. 164 (Graz 2010). The publisher of this book is well known for its facsimiles and reprints of scientific monographs and source editions, with due attention to works for legal history. With Heiner Lück and Clausdieter Schott Kocher edits since 2008 the journal Signa Ivris. Beiträge zur Rechtsikonographie, Rechtsarchäologie und rechtlichen Volkskunde, the continuation of the earlier Forschungen zur Rechtsarchäologie und rechtlichen Volkskunde (1978-2007). The addition of legal iconography to the title of this journal is significant.

Kocher published also about the first Austrian professor of criminology Hans Gross (1847-1915). Gross’ collection of objects is the core of the Hans-Gross-Kriminalmuseum of the Universität Graz. It is again Kocher who took the initiative for an exhibition in 2011 at the university museum of Graz on the unification of law by the Habsburg emperors. The committee for university museums and collections of the ICOM lists nine collections at Graz, including a collection on forensic medicine.

Looking for more at Graz

Other institutions at Graz deserve mentioning here. The Universitätsbibliothek Graz was probably the first to launch an online version of its catalog of medieval manuscripts. A number of manuscripts has been digitized in a digital library. It is no surprise, but certainly a useful service to find even an online bibliography of manuscripts in facsimile editions, in which you can search freely but also for locations. Clearly the presence of the firm referred to above has proved to be a stimulus for scholars to study both manuscripts and images. You can also view a presentation of the 42 papyri held at Graz. The university library in Graz participates in the Österreichische Verbundkatalog der Nachlässe, Autographen und Handschriften, the Austrian national catalogue for literary papers, autographs and manuscripts.

Graz is also home to the Steiermärkische Landesbibliothek with for example the Munzinger Archiv with some 27,000 biographies, and digitized catalogues for a number of historic Austrian libraries. The Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv holds many archives from the region. I would like to single out the monastic archives of such famous monasteries as Admont and Vorau. It is helpful to be aware, too, of Kirchenarchive, a consortium for ecclesiastical archives in Austria. No archives held at Graz are represented in the Monasterium project for the online presentation and edition of medieval charters. When you think all this is much too serious you might consider visiting the Österreichisches Kabarettarchiv, the archive for the history of cabaret and satire in Austria. Culture in its widest sense is also present at the host of museums under the aegis of the Universalmuseum Joanneum. Graz seems to have a particular sensibility for visual perception. The Museum der Wahrnehmung is a museum for modern art which is even dedicated to the art of perception.

I will not exhaust any longer those readers waiting for an explanation why Vienna is not mentioned in this post. You could have guessed I would eventually not forget the Austrian capital, because Café Sacher already figured in this post. It is at Vienna that this year’s Annual Forum of the AYLH will be held. It is the Wiener Rechtsgeschichtliche Gesellschaft which gives a fine overview of weblinks on Austrian legal history. The Kommission für Rechtsgeschichte Österreichs of the Austrian Academy of Sciences will guide you on its website to even more. In the near future the Universität Wien will take over this institute. Apart from all scientific institutions, the cultural ambiance of Vienna needs no laurels. Graz does merit attention for its own qualities, and hopefully enough has been shown here to give you a more or less rounded picture of legal history in this city.

Earlier posts in the series Centers of legal history

• Frankfurt am Main: the Max-Planck-Institut for European Legal History
• Munich: the Institute of Medieval Canon Law
• Robbins Collection, Berkeley
• Leiden
• Paris - a tour of several research institutions, libraries and archives
• Edinburgh

Making an impression: more about museums and legal history

Last month’s post about museums and legal history cried out for a sequel, and not only because I launched the post at first in a rather unfinished state. Since that moment I have tightened some loose ends, and even better, I have added some institutions to my list in statu nascendi of museums for legal history. While working on it and by chance also at other moments it became clear that these museums suffer competition from commercial organizations which simply want to attract as much public as possible and to get money out of the appetite for sensational objects. A news item helped to get a better focus for this side of the subject.

Law and sensation

Any quiz master would rule the question “Which kind of law will attract attention most easily?” out of court, because the answer will come too readily. The additional questions “Specify a particular period” and “Can you mention at least one aspect?” go the same way. Criminal law, medieval law and torture are a kind of eternal golden braid. I bumped into this silly wisdom when I wanted to add a number of museums which show instruments of torture. In fact a number of more general museums concerning legal history, in particular old prisons, do show them also, but a select number of museums is devoted solely to these instruments of terror. It dawned upon me all of a sudden my own country does indeed have not four, but five museums for legal history. I had forgotten about the Torture Museum in Amsterdam. While searching for more museums devoted to this subject I ran into the Mittelalterliches Foltermuseum at Rüdesheim am Rhein, but also into the travelling exhibitions of the Museo della Tortura in San Gimignano.

Showing the history of torture is something else than showcasing the most hideous objects, and even presenting a selection of them on tour. In my March post I benefited from the use of the English Wikipedia to find more jail and prison museums, but the people’s online encyclopedia does not stop at that point. To the torture museums listed the English Wikipedia adds references to articles on a number of torture museums which do not rank in the same league. The Dungeons firm is a chain of tourist attractions at Amsterdam, Blackpool, Edinburgh, Hamburg, London and York with historical objects with more or less pertinence to criminal law from several periods, mainly aiming at children and their parents who are willing to have a ghastly experience or even a scary day! History is here a pretext for gloating over the terrors of the past with on the back of your mind the firm conviction that our times know better, and telling the kids it is only a museum with rewards afterwards for their perseverance.

At least one museum seems to bring together the best of two worlds. The Galleries of Justice Museum at Nottingham presents its fair share of tours with actors playing out stories of crime and punishment, but its educational department cooperates also with the National Centre for Citizenship and the Law for more serious forms of education. By all means I do not want to spoil the joy of a family going to a place with more or less grisly aspects, almost poking fun at terrors long tamed, but it is not as innocent as it once could have seemed.

Facing the history of human rights and violence

The very opposite of these attractions, however, too, are not completely museums presenting objects and stories in a detached and objective way. Human rights are the unifying theme at a surprisingly large number of museums. There are at least two worldwide federations of them, the Federation of International Human Rights Museums and the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, and IC MEMO, the ICOM committee for museums and memorials for the victims of public crimes, should be added to them. Political correctness can be a strong force at work in these institutions dedicated to document some of the greatest crimes that have been committed in recent history. How to choose a particular subject avoiding a too general approach? How to avoid choosing a subject which excludes too obviously other subjects that would merit a museum? How to avoid sterile musealisation, the false objectivity and alienation of objects and a story, and showing instead the often confusing realities in which very different people lived? These questions arise around the project for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but they apply of course elsewhere, too.

The sting is indeed in the adjective recent. Violation of the integrity of humans, grave disrespect to the rule of law, indiscriminate acts of violence still happen. Today four French organizations, among them Amnesty France, published a joint press statement expressing their satisfaction about the prohibition of a proposed auction of the collection of torture instruments collected by Fernand Meyssonier, a former executioner who had been active in Algeria between 1957 and 1962. The organizations held a plea to buy this collection for a national museum or similar institution. Meyssonnier executed nearly 200 people. ACAT France, a French Christian movement against torture and the death penalty, states flatly that in every second country of the world torture is used. In 2011 ACAT France published a grim report on torture in 23 countries called Un monde tortionnaire, a world of torture.

Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer published last year their study Soldaten : Protokolle vom Kämpfen, Töten und Sterben [Soldiers. Protocols of fighting, killing and dying] (Frankfurt am Main, 2011], already translated into Spanish, Finnish and Dutch, about the tapes of German soldiers imprisoned in England during the Second World War talking about their war experience and doings. From these materials the authors come to a devastating conclusion: ordinary people can become killing machines. This conclusion goes a long way to rebut answers pointing to other times, other countries and other cultures or solely to those in command. The beast is asleep within us.

Therefore I can resist the temptation to add any image to this post, even if imagination really does not totally capture the reality of an aspect of legal history that is also today’s reality in too many places around the world. The connection of violence with law is perhaps the most compelling argument for lawyers and historians, and in fact for anyone with a mind for real life to see legal history as a vital component of their disciplines, to be neglected only at their own peril. Violence is part of the image of law. Museums and institutions which try to document and to portray the most appalent stories of mankind can help us to face these stories, and not those places which make only attractions out of them.

Legal history and museums: some notes

On my blog I have written about many subjects concerning legal history. Sometimes I have even tried to connect subjects from unexpected angles to it. Buildings and landscapes, archives and libraries have featured here. However, museums have only rarely figured here. A number of museums worldwide is devoted to aspects of legal history. Lately I wondered why I had not already created a list or an overview of them on my website. This week I put the first version of a list of a number of museums in this field online. When preparing it soon a number of problems and hiccups occurred that made me hesitate to complete it. These problems and aspects are well worth discussing here. Even a simple list of museums concerning aspects of legal history is not as easily created as it might seem.

Finding list or full inventory?

How can one assemble a list of museums concerning legal history? Can you find somewhere already lists or overviews of them? At first it seemed that the snowball method, just tracking them down by chance and working from incomplete lists, would not work at all. Last year I noticed the website of the Museo di Antropologia Criminale “Cesare Lombroso” of the University of Turin. This website provided me with only eight links to comparable institutions worldwide. Assuming the Netherlands have only four museums in this field did not push me to make any list at all. Another fact that slowed down my activity was the rather simple design and lack of content of some websites. I will come back to that later in this post.

When I looked again at one of these folder-only websites I decided to have a good look at Wikipedia. The classic encyclopedias do not excel themselves in all kind of lists, but the contributors to Wikipedia have often shown great enthusiasm for them, and they use all kind of tagging, which might help to find museums. This choice was rewarded when I tried to make a list for relevant museums in Germany. The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Polizeigeschichte (German Society for Police History) has created a substantial overview of police museums worldwide. The German museum for the history of taxes led me to the website of the federation of customs museums which features museums in eighteen countries. The English Wikipedia has a list with museums in former prisons and jails, certainly not complete, but it did convince me to proceed with my own list. It made me face some hard questions: is it sensible at all to include all prison and jail museums? Which criteria should one use for inclusion? Should one order museums by country? Would a commented list serve any purpose, or is it wiser to create a separate database for all kind of legal history museums?

How to find museums on any subject, in any region, country or continent? Some international committees of the International Council for Museums have created databases for a particular kind of museum. At the Humboldt Universität Berlin you can check the database of the ICOM committee for university museums and collections (UMAC). It brings you to fifteen collections and museums in the field of forensic medicine. The database includes also eleven detention rooms. This category features mainly historic university prisons in Germany where students were detained after misbehavior and conviction by the rector or university court. The ICOM has a committee for the memorials in remembrance of the victims of public crimes, IC MEMO, but as for now no overview is given of actual museums and memorials.

So far it seems that for a number of museums dealing with specific subjects you can find a large number of them in the lists indicated here above. However, these lists, and even the database of university museums, do not include everything you would expect. Among the criminology museums of universities for example you would expect the Musée Testut-Latarjet de Médecine et d’Anatomie of the Université Lyon-I, because it has a department for médecine légale et anthropologie criminelle, yet it is only listed at UMAC with the museums for the history of medicine and anatomy. No doubt such omissions will always occur. Some of the links in the UMAC database have changed, and I have reluctantly decided to present also the museums without a functioning website. The departments for forensic medicine at Vienna and Berlin do hardly acknowledge the existence of a historical collection, but at least the Institut für Rechtsmedizin of the Charité hospital in Berlin provides a webpage on the history and form of this discipline in Berlin. Anyway, for now UMAC gives only for a few institutions working links, and it is rather painful to create a separate list of museums for forensic medicine. It is only fair to add that a number of these collection are only open to students and staff.

Among all these museums it is rare to find an online catalogue of objects or an online catalogue to the library of an institution. Until now I have only spotted an online catalogue at the website of the Dutch National Police Museum in Apeldoorn. A selected number of museums shows virtual exhibitions. The Virtual Museum and Archive of the History of Financial Regulation, maintained by the Securities Exchange Commission Historical Society, exists only in virtual space. This situation seems to confirm that presenting and viewing objects in person or even at the actual historical spot, a prison or a court, is the major goal of legal history museums.

I stated a number of questions which face you when you are going to create an overview of museums in a specific category, but I do not have quick answers for each question. Including all and sundry can result in an ugly list without much added value. Announcing the completeness of a list can create the false impression that indeed everything has been included, which is very difficult to achieve. With comments at each museum you give additional and hopefully useful information. The experience with the UMAC database teaches it is indeed wise to add several tags or categories to an institution. When you are dealing with a large number of records with a great variety of information it is certainly wise to create sooner or later a database. The example of A Compendium of Digital Collections, a blog of the library at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, shows that a blog with an ordinary content management system can now fulfill a number of the functions of a database.

How to find more relevant museums? Any art history department will bring you to lists of art museums, but here further searching is needed. For a number of countries national museum organisations exists. The American Association of Museums maintains on its website a list of accredited museums. This list does include for legal history the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Missouri, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama, the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, and the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The Old Jail Center at Albany, Texas, is a museum for modern art, with however in the Robert E. Nail Jr. Archives some legal records, and of course the historical location. No American prison or jail museum is at present listed as an accredited museum. The United States National Park Service has created the National Register of Historic Places, another gateway to museums and collections at historic locations. A search for courthouses in this database brings you a substantial number of locations. These examples should suffice to demonstrate the way a register of legal history museums can be completed using similar resources for other countries.

Learning by doing

While writing this post I involuntarily pushed the button to publish it. To me this seemed at first way too early, but on second thought I might as well stick to the description lately launched of scientific blogs as laboratories of science. On March 9, 2012 German scholars in the humanities met in Munich to debate the role of scientific blogs. A scholarly blog post allows you to look over the shoulders of a scholar to work in progress. Some ideas may be just ideas, some thoughts clearly need rethinking and rephrasing, some results are meagre or still doubtful. Sometimes you are painfully aware that you look through the eyes of just one scholar, and here, too, you will sometimes sustain this conclusion! However, science does not step into the world like the goddess Athena at her mythical birth from the head of Zeus, full-grown and armored. I can write as much as I want about my little project for an overview of legal history museums, but in the end I will need reactions from outside, my own reflections and afterthoughts to make this and other things any better.

A postscript

To give an indication of the work to be done I would like to give the example of Dutch museums for legal history: I thought only four museums existed, but I could easily add two more institutions to my list. Today I spotted even the Politiemuseum Tilburg, a private collection for the history of the Dutch police which however focuses strictly on uniforms. In the field of digital collections one can now add the collection of the Taxes and Customs Museum in Rotterdam which you can visit at the Memory of the Netherlands portal.

Savigny at 150 years

Friedrich Carl von Savigny, the founder of the German Historical School, died on October 25, 1861, today exactly 150 years ago. In his birth town Frankfurt am Main the International Max-Planck-Research School for Comparative Legal History organizes a two-day conference to commemorate Savigny. The conference with the title Savigny International? looks in particular at the influence of Savigny outside Germany. Savigny’s works have been translated into many languages. At the Goethe-Haus in Frankfurt Joachim Rückert will present a study with fifty contemporary portraits of Savigny and a new biography. If you want to find quickly some portraits of Savigny you could try using BPKGate, the image portal of a number of museums in Berlin, or look at at the online version of his biography in the Neue Deutsche Biographie. I point to some portrait databases at the end of my webpage concerning digital collections. In this post I will look in particular at the ways one can access Savigny’s legacy in libraries and archives using archive portals and other gateways.

An icon of German law and science

The highlights of Savigny’s life are well-known and need scarcely extensive description. He studied law in Göttingen and Marburg where his interest in legal history was awakened and fostered. From 1800 to 1804 Savigny taught at Marburg. He came in close contact with major figures of the German Romantic movement and even married Kunigunde Brentano, a sister of Clemens Brentano. In 1803 Savigny published a monograph on possession, Das Recht des Besitzes. Not only was this monograph a model of its kind, but it dealt with one of the most discussed and vital subjects of law in the age of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Savigny taught from 1810 onwards at the new university of Berlin. An academic debate with Anton Friedrich Just Thibaut about the role of law in German society and the need for a German code of civil law led Savigny to the publication of Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft [On the call of our time for legislation and jurisprudence] (1814).

In 1815 Savigny founded with Karl Friedrich Eichhorn and Johann Ludwig Göschen the Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft. Already before the start of his opus magnum on the history of Roman law in the Middle Ages, Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter (first edition 6 vol., Heidelberg, 1815-1831) Savigny emerged as the foremost lawyer of his generation. In the field of contemporary law his System des heutigen römischen Rechts (8 vol., Berlin 1840-1849) is his most voluminous publication and certainly one of his most influential works. In the digital library of the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main, you can consult online several of Savigny’s works. The number of editions of Das Recht des Besitzes is just one of the signs indicating the place of Savigny.

Savigny’s influence and his legacy

Savigny was not just influential through his teachings. He was in close contact with many German and foreign scholars. In his own Zeitschrift he announced in 1817 Barthold Niebuhr’s discovery of the palimpsest manuscript at Verona with the text of Gaius’ Institutiones (Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, XV (13)). Niebuhr thought Ulpian was the author of the text he had discovered, but Savigny judged otherwise. In the project Savignyana of the Frankfurt Max-Planck-Institut a series appears since 1993 with both editions of Savigny’s lectures and studies on his work. The discovery, study and editing of the Gaius manuscript is a major theme in Cristina Vano’s Der Gaius der Historischen Rechtsschule. Eine Geschichte der Wissenschaft vom römischen Recht (Frankfurt am Main 2008). The latest volumes in the Savignyana series are a collection of articles by Joachim Rückert, Savigny-Studien (2011) and the volume on portraits of Savigny, Savigny-Portraits, Joachim Rückert, Beate Rizky and Lena Foljanty (eds.) (2011).

Savigny’s material legacy is not to be found at just one German city, because Savigny does not belong to one city, and thus apart from the Staatsbibliothek Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz and the Universitätsbibliothek Marburg it is also in particular at the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Münster in the Nachlass Savigny that papers of and letters to and from Savigny are preserved. The Staatsbibliothek in Berlin got also a number of manuscripts once owned by Savigny which now have the signature Mss. Sav. The Kalliope database for searching papers and autographs in German holding yields a rich harvest for Savigny at several German institutions. Unfortunately today Kalliope could not be reached directly. In fact this makes it even more interesting to look at gateways to archives and libraries, because there is a gateway to Nachlässe, literary papers and letters at the European level which gives you access to the data of Kalliope. MALVINE, “Manuscripts and Letters via Integrated Networks in Europe”, allows you to search in Kalliope, the British Library, the national libraries of Portugal and Austria and three other institutions. Thus you will find a letter by Savigny in the manuscript British Library, Egerton 4207, fol. 140-141, a letter from 1861 to Franz Brentano kept at Graz, but first of all some 1900 entries at Kalliope. Happily a second link to Kalliope does function as it should.

The CERL Portal, too, offers access to Kalliope, but this is the only catalogue it shares with MALVINE. It brings you for example to a student’s transcript from 1830 of Savigny’s lecture “Institutionen des Römischen Rechts” now kept at Schwerin, to comments from 1822 on a book about legal history and an undated engraved portrait in the Wallers Manuscript Collection of Uppsala Universitet.

The digitization of Savigny’s papers at Marburg in the Savigny-Datenbank has made accessible online a number of manuscripts with notes and drafts of articles, his university lectures, letters, personal documents and miscellaneous papers. The scope and range of Savigny’s correspondence is truly imposing. The Savignyana series is not the only series in which letters by Savigny are published. To mention only a few of the most recent editions, Bernd Reifenberg edited letters to Johann Ludwig Göschen kept at Marburg (Mein lieber theurer Freund… (Marburg 2000)), and letters by and to Savigny are part of volume 31 of the Weimarer Arnim Ausgabe with the works of Achim von Arnim (Werke und Briefwechsel, vol. 31, Briefe 1802-1804, Heinz Härtl and Roswitha Burwick (eds.) (Tübingen 2004)).

I hoped to find much more on Savigny at the BAM-Portal for combined searches in the holdings of German museums, libraries and archives, but it is disappointing to find only results from Kalliope, a small number of digitized works – mainly reproducing the list which you get using the Zentrales Verzeichnis Digitalisierter Drucke (ZVDD)- and a few portraits available through the BPKgate. Only for German archives the search at the BAM-Portal gave some twenty results which would not have been easily found separately. The ZVDD does not connect to the digital libraries of the Max-Planck-Institut in Frankfurt am Main, and this diminishes the value of searches in the ZVDD for subjects concerning legal history. It is also frustrating the ZVDD does succeeds bringing you to works by Savigny digitized at Munich for the Digitale Sammlungen, but that you cannot find these books using the Munich interface. Only using the OPACPlus of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek you can find them directly in Munich.

By now you are probably fully aware that the commemoration of Savigny serves here also as an opportunity to conduct research in a number of online portals and gateways, and to comment on their qualities and functions. The Archives Portal Europe is another example of a recently developed gateway to sources. It appears to me as very natural to try using it for purposes touching legal history. A first search for Savigny brings you nine results from France which concern places called Savigny, such as Savigny-le-Vieux and Saint-Jean de Savigny. Of the eighteen search results six are concerned with the Nachlass of Arnold Ruge (1802-1880) at the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz.

A lithographed portrait of Savigny, around 1850; Collectie Protestantse portretten, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

The Europeana Portal is only slightly better in bringing to light texts by Savigny and images at institutions all over Europe, mainly from Germany, 36 printed texts and 21 images in all, mostly letters and some portraits. The European Library brings you mainly to books by and about Savigny which one can find also in ordinary library catalogues. Only on second thought I looked for institutions holding Savigny’s papers in the Nachlassdatenbank of the German Bundesarchiv, which mentions apart from the collections at Marburg and Berlin also the papers left from Savigny’s time as a statesman kept in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv at the Staatsbibliothek Berlin. Between 1842 and 1848 Savigny had a role akin to that of a special advisor on law to the Prussian government with the rank of a minister. Earlier he had already been a Staatsrat and involved in the Prussian administration. A fourth collection is concerned with Hof Trages, the Savigny family estate.

The only Dutch results at this archives portal – still in its beta-version - are notes for an essay on Savigny from 1968 by the late Roeland Duco Kollewijn (1892-1972), professor for international private law at Leiden, found among his papers now kept at the Dutch National Archives. The Dutch portal Archieven.nl is now also available in a German version called Findmittel. It brings only Hof Trages to my attention, an estate in the Hessian village Freigericht-Somborn – near Hanau – still owned by the Savigny family, where around 1800 the Brentano’s, the Von Arnims, the Grimm brothers and the Gunderodes often met. Savigny was first buried at Berlin, but his tomb is since 1875 in the crypt of the family chapel at Hof Trages. More on Hof Trages and Savigny’s agricultural and seigniorial activities can be found in a study by Sebastian Günther, Friedrich Carl von Savigny als Grundherr (Frankfurt am Main, etc., 2000). Let me not forget to notify you that at Thematis, the second Dutch archives portal which connects to thirty archives and a number of image databases, I did not find anything on Savigny.

Incidentally the placename Freigericht is in German also the word for the tribunal in a Freigrafschaft and for the late medieval vehmic courts (Femegerichte), secret courts which offered no possibility for appeal. It strikes me as remarkable that Savigny had so to speak a subject of German legal history very often for his eyes, but that he led his research in another direction, the influence and role of Roman law. Did he perhaps react against the romantic views on German medieval history of his contemporaries, in particular within the circle of Romantic poets with whom he was personally acquainted? Did he leave the study of medieval German law on purpose to his scholar Jacob Grimm? No doubt this question, too, has been dealt with in the very extensive literature on Savigny who had a pivotal position both in the organization of legal Germany and in the German Romantic movement.

Savigny’s library has not been held together after his death. A rather large number of books was sold in the twentieth century to libraries in Japan. In the Savigny-Bibliothek of Toin University in Yokohama some of the books once owned by Savigny have been digitized. Kyushu University Library holds a number of manuscripts with some of Savigny’s lectures and lectures by a number of his contemporaries. Heinz-Peter Weber published a book on Die Bibliothek des Friedrich Carl von Savigny in der Universitätsbibliothek Bonn (Bonn 1971). The collection at Bonn sold to this library by the Savigny family in 1959 is truly remarkable, even if some twenty percent of Savigny’s books is no longer in Germany.

Much more can be said about Savigny, one of the few German lawyers who gave his name to a foundation, the Savigny-Stiftung, responsible for the publication of by all accounts one of the most important legal history journals, the Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte. Savigny opposed vehemently the codification of German law and helped bringing the study of Roman law at new heights. Even now his views sometimes divide German legal historians. Whenever the sparks of such clashes of opinion lead to new questions and renewed research on the developments and impact of law and justice in history this can only be helpful and enriching.

Gouda and the visual power of a town hall

This weekend I visited Gouda. When you are going from Utrecht to Rotterdam or The Hague you have to pass Gouda, but I have only seldom visited this town which belongs to the group of classic Dutch towns in the medieval county Holland. It was difficult to take pictures of the Sint Janskerk in Gouda and its magnificent sixteenth-century stained glass windows. It was a rainy day, the church is enclosed by other buildings, and photographing church windows is an art in itself, and thus I will not present here any picture of this church. After a fire in 1552 the Sint Janskerk was rebuilt very quickly. New stained glass windows were donated by cities like Haarlem and Amsterdam, by collegiate chapters such as the Oudmunster chapter in Utrecht and other institutions. William of Orange founded a window, as did even the Spanish king Philip II. The original drawings for most of the 72 windows have largely been preserved, and they will be put on display at MuseumGouda from November 22, 2011 onwards after restoration of the paper of these life size drawings.

Apart from the Sint Janskerk, one of the largest churches in The Netherlands, the gothic town hall at the market place of Gouda is the town’s chief attraction. It takes pride of place on the websites devoted to the history of Gouda. The archives of Gouda are now kept by the archival consortium Groene Hart Archieven with centers in Gouda and Alphen aan den Rhijn. On its website the building story of the town hall is told in some detail. A fire in 1438 had damaged the old town hall. At last between 1448 and 1450 the work began for a new town hall designed by Steven van Afflighem. Gouda became prosperous because of its central position at the Gouwe river on which in medieval and early modern times freight from all Holland had to pass. The route using the Gouwe was the quickest way for merchants between Amsterdam and cities like Haarlem in the north, and Dordrecht and Rotterdam in the south. Add to this the proverbial Gouda cheese from the rich meadows surrounding this small town, calculate a loss of importance during the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, and thus a medieval town hall can survive.

The new town hall has not survived completely in its late medieval form. The flight of steps in Renaissance style dates from 1603. You might think this post offers you until now only regional history, but at the long side of the town hall you can detect a pillory, a pedestal on which offenders could be mocked and denounced by the people. The town hall served also as a court building. At the back of the building is a scaffold from 1697. It was on this scaffold that in 1860 the death penalty was executed for the last time in The Netherlands.

At the entrance of Gouda Town Hall is written Audite et alteram partem, “Hear also the other side”, a well-known juridical maxim, an indispensable element of fair justice and the concept of due process. I was surprised by the plural Audite instead of the singular Audi. No doubt the gold lettering is rather modern, and the letter forms suggest a date in the seventeenth century, but these words might have been written here earlier on, too.

On my way to the Sint Janskerk I passed inevitably the former Catharina Gasthuis, an old hospital, now the premises of MuseumGouda, the municipal museum, with a beautifully restored Dutch Renaissance gateway, dated 1609. Somehow I was in particular intrigued by the relief above the entrance. Inside the museum you can find a historical collection, instruments of torture from the town hall, paintings from Gouda and temporary exhibitions. A part of the collection is shown in the former chapel of the hospital. Above one of the doors I saw a statue representing Justice as a woman with a sword and a balance. Interestingly her eyes are not blindfolded.

However, the relief at the gateway called plainly stronger for my attention. The story depicted and the use of polychromy are to be blamed! The main scene shows the table of the rich man from the story about Lazarus in the gospel of Luke (16,19-31). The scene illustrates verse 21 (King James Bible):

And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table; moreover the dogs came and licked his sore.

In the scene Lazarus looks up to the rich man, but at the same time Lazarus seems already to see the vision of himself in Abraham’s bosom depicted in the niche above the scene in the dining room. The story of Lazarus and the anonymous rich man is a story of justice and mercy, two elements which cannot be taken from any form of effective law and justice without taking away the very heart of what laws, judicial institutions and the actual working of the rule of law are meant to be. The contemporary clothing of the people in this relief followed the tradition of Dutch art to present biblical stories in present day surroundings. Alas it is very easy to imagine a scene of tremendous richness and appalling poverty side by side in our times, too.

Dirck Coornhert, philosopher and social reformer

Social conditions can form the starting point for a moral appeal. In sixteenth-century Haarlem lived Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert (1522-1590), an independent thinker and prolific writer. For some years Coornhert served as a secretary to the States of Holland. He suffered from persecution, and had even to leave the Netherlands for some ten years. When he returned he went to Delft, only to face again opposition. In 1588 he came to Gouda, where he was buried in the Sint Janskerk. In 1587 Coornhert wrote a proposal for disciplining ruffians, Boeventucht; a modern edition (1985) of this text has been digitized in the Digital Library for Dutch Literature. Coornhert had a view of criminals working during their stay in prison. During the seventeenth century his ideas were adopted by a number of Dutch cities. A large number of old editions of Coornhert’s writings has been digitized by Amsterdam University Library, in particular the opera omnia edition “Werken van D.V. Coornhert” published by Jaspar Tournay in Gouda between 1610 and 1612. The edition of sources for his life edited in 1925 by Bruno Becker has been digitized at the Institute for Dutch History.

For legal historians not only Coornhert’s proposal for a new prison regime is of interest. The Coornhert Liga, a Dutch society for the reform of criminal law, is named after Coornhert. He quarreled with Justus Lipsius about the repression of heretics. Vrijheid van conscientie, freedom of conscience, was the motto devised by Coornhert for the city of Gouda. This motto is also prominent in the glass window in the Sint Janskerk offered to Gouda by the States of Holland. Some of the windows show images that are relevant for legal iconography, too, and therefore they have been included together with other images from Gouda in the database of the former Dutch Center for Legal Iconography and Documentation (NCRD). Earlier this year the Royal Library confirmed the release into the public domain of this subscribers-only database, but until this day this has not yet been realized. In the first post of this month I have said enough about restricted access. I will just add that the former NCRD was an institution financed by all Dutch universities.

Gouda and Dutch legal history

Gouda is proud of its history. It has even developed its own historic canon in the wake of the current Dutch vogue for historic canons. In the Goudse Canon you can read about the town hall, the Sint Janskerk and Coornhert, three of the forty subjects, and also about Erasmus. Gouda has a claim on Erasmus because his mother came from Gouda. Erasmus went to school nearby Gouda. In Latin this Gouda claim has been concisely put: Goudæ conceptus, Roterodami natus, begotten in Gouda, born in Rotterdam. The canon of Gouda’s history does include the Waag, the weigh-house from 1670 at the Markt, the place where the cheese commerce in Gouda cheese took place before industrial production took over from the commerce on and near the market place. Gouda cheese comes from the area surrounding town, not from Gouda. The name Gouda cheese is not protected, and thus production of it is possible anywhere.

The Gouda Canon website shows apart from the well researched topics an excellent choice of illustrations and connects you to the AquaBrowser catalogue for associative searches in the city library’s GoudaNet. The website of the GroeneHart Archieven includes an image database which will help you to get more pictures about Gouda and the surrounding region. It is definitely a city with a history bringing enough assets for legal historians, even when it is of course rather grim to see at one side instruments of torture and the historical pillory and scaffold, and at the other side room for a pioneer of legal reform. It can do no harm to realize that the dark and sunlit sides of history are part of one history with many tales, a history in which justice and law have not always succeeded to reach their original aims.

Is it merely a coincidence to find a reproduction of the Fallen angel by Odilon Redon (1840-1916) next to the entrance of MuseumGouda with the Lazarus relief?

A postscript

The question at the end of this post is indeed not rhetorical. MuseumGouda had in June 2011 the painting The Schoolboys by Marlene Dumas auctioned at Christie’s without prior consultation with other Dutch museums which might have been interested to have this painting in their holdings. MuseumGouda got some € 950,000 from the auction, but ran into severe criticism from the Dutch Museum Society which had advised that MuseumGouda doing thus would act inappropriately and against clear guidelines of this society. The Dutch Museum Society even considered to cast MuseumGouda from the society. By the way, the Fallen angel is a painting in the holdings of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

A holiday round-up

After a rather long time, almost four weeks without any new posting, I am back at my desk to continue writing for this blog. I have been on a holiday with a rich variety of landscapes, weather types and people. It is still summer. A first quick check for new things learned me that even the ever busy Legal History Blog had slowed down its usual pace of new postings. One of the strong features is the weekly Round-Up in which you can find all kind of things which touch upon legal history but somehow had nearly escaped the alertness of the editorial team led by Mary L. Dudziak and Dan Ernst. My post today proposes to salute their weekly efforts in a more leisurely way fitting this summertime, which, however, has by now taken some very serious turns. Events worldwide will no doubt soon influence this blog. I would like to reassure you I will not turn away from these developments, but it will do no good to react here immediately. Anyway, my list with plans for new postings has a nice length and a variety of subjects from many corners.

Looking closely at pictures

In this post I want to present just a few websites and blogs which came to my attention lately. You will notice quickly that they are not solely, in fact often only rather loosely connected with legal history. I cannot help pointing again to Klaus Graf and his Archivalia blog – does he ever take a holiday?! Anyway a week ago he posted a message on the section on photo tampering in history at Four and Six. At this website you will find an impressive collection of both historical photographs and modern advertisements with images which have been tampered with. I suppose contemporary lawyers will be more interested in the latter. On this website some photographs have been explicitly tagged with the label “Law”, but it is worth looking around for more. On close inspection photographs can tell a sometimes very different story than one suspects at first. We all are aware of the telling power of images. They can conjure up a story more quickly and more dramatically than many well-phrased paragraphs. It is easy to forget about the possibility of tampering with photos when craving for images to convey your message.

Comics and the law

As a faithful reader of the Rare Book Room blog of the Lilian Goldman Law School Library at Yale University I was initially surprised by the efforts to collect child books touching upon law and even comics. In 2010 a series of blog postings accompanying the exhibition Superheroes in Court was even devoted to the alleged Yale Law School degree of Batman shown in a particular story! The point of collecting books on seemingly fringe subjects is to do it in a most sensible way, and here Yale surely succeeds.

I was reminded of the collections at the Yale Law School Rare Book Room because the Freshly Pressed section of my provider’s blog featured a post from Bear Lawyer LLC. Thomas E. Körp is the creator of this blog about a bear who makes a living from law. This blog goes with a nice sprinkling of real American law websites and links to other comics blog and websites.

Lately Et Seq., the blog of the Harvard Law School Library, published the image of a drawing in an old legal book. The image in question is a drawing in a copy of a 1615 edition of the Corpus Iuris Canonici, the multivolume collection of canon law sources printed from the early sixteenth century up to the nineteenth century. The “Weekly Special” of Et Seq. is often devoted to rare law books with an intriguing history or story. In the story entitled A Canon and its Cannon its author Lesley Schoenfield very much wonders about the drawing showing a castle with a firing cannon. I myself have my view of the riddle behind it, but in order not to spoil your own investigation of it I will not give away my solution here…

Searching images

From Harvard back to Yale. Apart from the superb digital collections of the Harvard Law School Library Harvard University has a most impressive and very diverse range of digitized collections, fortified by the digital collections at Harvard College Library. It seems very difficult to outdo these efforts but Yale, too, can proudly present its digital collections. Not only the university library at Yale but also several other Yale libraries offer access to digital visual resource collections. Recently the website Yale Digital Commons has been launched where one can search in the image resources of five Yale institutions. Legal historians cannot neglect the Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal when researching this subject, and when you need documents in English translation you will often turn to Yale Law School’s Avalon Project: Documents for Law, History and Diplomacy. The Lewis Walpole Library has started the Yale Indian Papers Project with digitized materials from several Yale institutions. It is hard to say which university is winning this battle of giants in the field of digital collections.

In the field of legal iconography Yale Law School can point to the Documents sections of its website which has been created for the image collection Representing Justice. Harvard Law School Library has digitized over 4,000 images of lawyers in the digital collection Legal Portraits Online.

Earlier this year I wrote a post about online exhibitions concerning legal history. On my website I have a created a new page about virtual exhibitions in which I have put things from this post in a more orderly fashion. By the way, of course not only Harvard and Yale, and not only the other Ivy League universities are most actively involved in the field of digital collections. In my latest post almost four weeks ago the University of California, Santa Barbara came into the spotlights with an impressive number of interesting digital collections, pace Berkeley and Stanford. It can depend on a lot of factors which universities happen to make the largest presence in your perception.

The debt crisis in the United States and Europe, the riots in London and other English cities, the aftermath of the terrifying violence against innocent people in Norway, the spreading fierceness of the political climate in my own country, the fear in many European countries for drastic cuts in the budgets for education, research, culture and social welfare, the ongoing fight for democracy in many countries surrounding the Mediterranean and the violent suppression of legitimate protests in Libya and Syria, the troubles in the Middle East, the droughts and famine in East Africa, the anarchy in countries like Somalia, and much more are these days the background of any serious legal and historical research. This might well determine to some extent its shape and direction, too.