A new guide to (digital) legal history

In 2011 I presented an attempt at a comparison of portals for legal history. Last week I spotted a new online guide to legal history at CLIO Online which definitely does not offer a portal, but instead it has so many qualities that I am very happy to present it here. CLIO online is a German history portal with several subdomains. This portal is partially available in German and English, and it is also connected to websites such as H-Soz-Kult and arthist.net. The current guide, created by Andreas Wagner, is in German, but the bibliography and the additional commented web directory can certainly be most helpful. In this post I will introduce you to the main sections and highlight a number of its qualities. In my view this guide wets the appetite for more, starting with a version in English.

From legal history to digital legal history

Let’s first introduce here Andreas Wagner, the author of the new Clio-Guide Rechtsgechichte. Wagner studied philosophy, sociology and information science. He became a specialist in the field of the history of Early Modern international law. Since 2013 he works at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und Kunste in Mainz with a focus on the research project for the School of Salamanca. Legal historians will know him also for his work in the field of digital humanities at the Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie in Frankfurt am Main since 2017. With colleagues at Frankfurt am Main he organized in 2021 an international online conference on digital legal history with the nicjname DLH 2021, reported also here.

On May 2, 2024, the institute in Frankfurt alerted at X/Twitter to the new online Clio guide. These guides rightly deserve their own subdomain at the CLIO portal. The guides are divided into five main groups. Apart from themes with particular historical genres thers are sections for epochs, regions and countries, collection genres, and a section for Arbeitsformen und -techniken, to be understood as digital methods and techniques. The range and coverage of this fleet of guides is impressive, as is the number of new guides in preparation. Interestingly, the first general guide for history of the CLIO portal (2016) is still available. Its presence shows the long road taken in a few years.

The new guide scores immediately with its clear division into sections, the presence of a PDF version (41 pages) and a separate commented web directory (Linkliste). The first section is a real tour de force, a combination of an introduction into the current state of (digital) legal history, the use of digital methods and techniques for legal history, and its relation to related disciplines. The second and largest section focuses on the contributions of scholars and projects divided into six sections. Institutions and publications each get their own paragraph. A chronological select bibliography (pp. 28-41) on the use of computers and the role of digitization in legal history since the 1970’s follows; there are five sections: before 1990, 1990-2000, 2000-2010, 2011-2015, and from 2016 onwards. The endnotes of the web version appear as footnotes in the PDF.

A rich guide

Wagner starts his guide sketching skillfully some developments leading to the current position of legal history and the role of digital humanities. Legal history does not exist in vitro. In many countries legal history is closely connected with contemporary law. Sometimes this leads to a position for legal history as a mere handmaiden for the study and practice of contemporary law. In particular other disciplines, such as the social sciences, economics, history and philology influence the use of computers and the impact of digital methods. Wagner notes a number of matters implying legal history cannot indiscriminately take over methods, approaches and tools from other disciplines. My brief summary cannot do justice to this thought provoking conicse introduction

The core of Wagner’s guide is the discussion of initiatives divided into six sections, dealing with court records, law collections, linguistic resources, methods and digital collections, commercial databases and in the last section supporting resources created and maintained by a number of scholars. In particular the first section brings you not just to a number of research projects dealing with the history of some important supreme courts in various European countries, it shows you the early preponderancy of large teams using computers to assist their projects and to bring data eventually online. This part of early digital legal history deserves attention.

The subsection on law collections focuses on the history of the work done in Linz to create a searchable database with all sources for classical Roman law. The project history with various forms and conversions is heroic. Wagner is right in noticing the version now available in open access offered by Amanuensis excludes the footnotes and introductions of the full printed editions, but nevertheless it is in my view most helpful for quick orientation. The app version is not mentioned. I discussed Amanuensis and other online collections for Roman law in an earlier post (2015). In my view the addition of another example would strengthen this section.

The third and rather brief subsection deals with linguistic resources developed around sources for legal history. The Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch gets most attention, but Wagner also points to linguistic databases for the records of the Old Bailey, medieval Scandinavian laws and a text corpus for contemporary German law. Some linguistic resources focusing on selected periods exist also for Flemish and Dutch legal history.

The move from digital collections on CD-ROMs to online collections as we know them today is the main thread in the fourth subsection on digital methods and digital collections. Examples from Germany and Switzerland illustrate this section. In the fifth paragraph Wagner looks at commercial legal databases. Each country has a number of online databases offered by major publishing companies. Wagner points at some of the initiatives to create similar databases in open access. Some commercial firms offer also historical collections in open access.

I was a bit surprised to find my name in the final subsection about supporting resources for legal history, and this in the company of Mary Dudziak and Andreas Thier. Mary Dudziak’s name is associated with the Legal History Blog which truly deserves its name and fame, and also with the yearly digital history prize of the American Society for Legal History. My legal history website and blog offer indeed some support. I suppose I am just too much aware of the subjects and themes not or seldom mentioned or treated from just one perspective. However, I am happy to bring some online assistance, in particular alerting to relevant (new) online resources, and presenting my impressions of them.

In the third main section of the guide Wagner looks at a number of German and American institutions and societies for legal history. He mentions a number of research centers, not forgetting his own Max-Planck-Institut or the Stephan-Kuttner-institute for Medieval Canon Law. The fourth section focuses on publications in the field of (digital) legal history. Wagner restricts himself to a small number of journals. Some journals for legal history devoted specials to digital legal history. In 2022 the Journal for Digital Legal History was launched at Ghent University. He reminds us also of the online conference on digital legal history held in 2021.

Bibiiographies and links

At some points in this post I felt an itch to add information that seemed to be missing in the various sections of Wagner’s guide. However, the information presented in the footnotes is already rich with references to scholarly literature and online projects. The possible importance and uefulness of adding here some information is also diminished by the presence of a very substantial web directory. Online bibliographies stand at its start, and this is very much a key element for its value. At Zotero Andreas Wagner has created with other scholars an online bibliography on various aspects of doing digital legal history and the use of digital humanities. If you think something is missing in it, the best thing to do is to consider becoming a contributor to it yourself.

Creating a sensible division for any list is often a challenge. This web directory has eight sections, featuring for instance a fair number of online journals for legal history. You might quibble about the position of a particular resource or even about the order of presentation of resources, but you will be helped very much by the concise descriptions of the resources. More often you will readily admit you encounter soemthing new and relevant for your own interests. Omissions are not be frowned upon or deplored. You had better bring your suggestions simply to the attention of Andreas Wagner and the CLIO team. In the end this guide is not a portal promising you eveything possible. I can assure you I encountered here enough unfamiliar projects and links, although Germany and the United States figure indeed large.

Food for thought and reflection

In his final remarks Wagner notes a clear difference between the appearance of digital legal history in publications on one hand, and the daily use of digital collections, pnline databases, online preprints and digital versions ofmscholarly literature. He signals also that legal history will probably turn more to philology and linguistics than to the spocial sciences when applying digital methods. Wagner stresses the need for a careful use of text mining in order to prevent hasty and sloppy conclusions from legal materials that cannot be approached as an ordinary linguistic corpora. Those who doubt this statement should perhaps look at my latest post about the various possible interpretations of the supposed proverb about the judge who does or does not calculate.

To me the warnings about the difficulties of text mining for legal history sound familiar. Surprisingly Wagner does not mention Jo Guldi and her recent book The dangerous art of text mining. A methodology for digital history (Cambridge, etc., 2023). Guldi clearly inspired Wagner to give space in his guide to institutional foundations for (digital) legal history, a matter she advocated powerfully at the 2021 online DLH conference. By the way, Jo Guldi recently told Anaclet Pons in an illuminating interview on historical methods and digital research at Politika about her road to digital history after a start as a scholar of classical languages and about the challenges she met and meets in doing the digital research she deems important.

I am not advocating a kind of Methodenfreudigkeit, a kind of wallowing in thinking and talking about methods, but there is a clear need to be aware digital legal history forms a new threefold discipline. Each of the three terms in this compound word, digital legal history, calls for reflection. Recently I made some critical remarks about a project in spatial history, not because it was spatial history, but due to some shortcomings in proper historical research.

In 2016 I looked at Lara Putnam’s by now classic article in the American Historical Review on the digital turn in (global) history. She, too, stressed the need for reflection about the use of digital tools and methods. Without sufficient appreciation of their impact you will not notice how the kind of history you do and preach, your own way with the digital turn, actually changes or will change. Putnam pointed out the pioneers of digital history were very critical about their own approach, methods and tools. We should not be tempted to think you can now apply any branch of digital humanities in blissfull ignorance of possible and actual biases, pitfalls or failures.

Let one example of sensible use of a well-known digital tool suffice: In Zotero you can substantially enhance bibliographies and other lists by adding judiciously tags to items. If you help to strengthen the Zotero bibliography for digital legal history by joining the support group, or when you enrich the commented links list for this discipline now online at the CLIO portal with better tags or descriptions, users can get better search results for the things they want to study or use.

Andreas Wagner is to be applauded for his sustained efforts for not just doing digital legal history, but more particular for his continued support for building and shaping its infrastructure and helping shcolars to reflect about the way legal historians can use and adapt digital humanities in sensible and reliable ways. His guide is a milestone on the roads of digital legal history, not in the least for showing also key developments in thid discipline. May it inspire you to find the courage to admit wrong turns, dead ends and partial auccess in your digital research for legal history! In my view this guide can certainly help you to sharpen your senses for balancing the needs of critical research, legal thinking and practice, and sound historical research. Tn my view digital legal history in its most valouable form can offer not only answers but will also bring new questions and perspectives on law and justice in past and the present. Doing digital legal history is not a matter of easy linear progress and success. Wagner invites us to take enough time for reflection on the theories and views that influence our perspectives and practice as legal historians.

Calculating the verdict or not?

A Roman abacus – Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Trésor – image source: Wikimedia Commons

Teachers surely encounter calculating students in secondary schools, maybe even university students or exceptionally in primary education. Today I saw the announcement of a serious question about a lawyer who is not supposed to calculate. The adagium iudex non calculat, a judge does not calculate, sounds familiar, but what is its earliest source? Is it indeed already known in classical Roman law? Hanjo Hamann of the Law School of the European Business School (EBS) in Wiesbaden challenges you to find the earliest possible reference to this proverb. The Centre for Legal History at Edinburgh alerted on X/Twitter (@CentreLegalHist) to this interesting question,

Even if the proverb sounds familiar, I did not encounter the EBS until now. Their Research Competition 2024 in History of Language and Law might be also a kind of publicity event, but the connection sought with Roman law is a serious matter. The question takes its lead from an assertion made in 1949 by Curt Gruneberg. As the announcement – given in a poster version below my text – does not contain the title of his publication I did look a bit into this matter. In August 2023 Hamann uploaded a paper to SSRN, ‘”iudex non calculat”: A Scavenger Hunt in Legal History’ with in the second footnote the reference “Curt Gruneberg, Book Review, 18 U. KAN. CITY L. REV. 96 (1949)”. The 2023 article is the fruit of a workshop at Harvard University on calculation in law. Hamann gives you statistics for modern legal citations of the proverb, and he discussed its use in modern German law, the views of legal historians such as Detlev Liebs, Theo Mayer-Maly and Uwe Wesel, and he traced references in German scholarly literature to it as early as 1851. The competition challenges you to find earlier references to this proverb published in or before 1850. Hamann writes in particular also about the meaning given to this maxim, and this gives you certainly food for thought.

Tracing the original article of Gruneberg in an open access digital repository is perhaps another question. Gruneberg taught economics in Kansas City. His death aged 54 on January 14, 1950 is mentioned in the Kansas City Star of January 16, 1950. I will give full credits to you if you can procure his article from a non-licensed digital resource!

I distinctly remember a matter in legal history which came into view a few years ago with a similar quest for the earliest possible printed reference. In fact while preparing this brief post I was tempted to check at least one large digital library in my country for the new challenge set by Hamann, as for now without any valid result. I had best give you here his mail address, hanjo.hamann@ebs.edu, and the deadline of the competition, June 30, 2024. The three best submissions will receive a book prize. Hopefully both students of legal history and other legal historians will contribute to this quest!

The EBS announcement

Letters, postal services and law in Early Modern Europe

Several scholarly projects have created online access, in repertories or digital versions, to Early Modern letters, in particular for a number of famous writers and scholars. Less attention seems to go to mail delivery in Early Modern Europe. Lately I encountered the research blog of Eric Vanzieleghem (Brussels) who charts French legislation on postal services from the fourteenth century onwards, focusing in particular on postal services during the Enlightenment. By chance I also spotted the website of a research project about Early Modern itineraries and travel guide books aiming at gaining more insight into networks connecting European towns and people. In my view it is fruitful to look at both projects together in a single contribution. A book with images and transcriptions of Dutch letters from many centuries gave me the final push to start this post.

You’ve got mail

Choosing correspondences as a subject goes clearly against the trend of the hyperquick social media and the continuous instant arrival of bits of information at our computers and mobile phones. Letters with their sheer length, the impatience of waiting for the postman to arrive, and the sense of expectation when opening a closed envelope have become rare. To be honest, I like to delve into Early Modern letters, but as a legal historian I hesitated to express this interest! Physical post might be less important now, but we all want to be kept posted on developments, and bloggers keep posting their contributions.

A look at the blog directory of the Hypotheses blog network earlier this year brought me to the blog Histoire du courrier dans l’Europe des Lumières created by Eric Vanzieleghem. Research concerning the letters of Condorcet led him in 2022 to start investigating legislation about postal services in Early Modern France. Vanzieleghem rightly started with defining the main concepts concerning post and postal services, and before I knew it he had me hooked in. The French word courrier was first used to refer to the actual carrier of letters, while nowadays it means the entirety of packages, written and printed matters send by post. The word poste literally stems from the stations where one could change horses. It referred to the distance between them and the network of these posts. Only since the nineteenth century its meaning changed into the desigination of state or private postal services. Vanzieleghem promises us an arricle about the eighteenth-century ferme générale des postes, and this office brings us close to the French government and administration during the Ancien Régime.

Until now Eric Vanzieleghem has published only six posts. One of them gives you the text of a royal ordinance from 1673 which adjusted postal regulations after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668) and the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1673). I found in particular the tariff for postal service in force between 1703 and 1759 very interesting. It deals both with French regions and with a number of European postal routes. The payments due for a trajectory changed markedly when passing through particular towns. Part of the reasons behind these differences stem clearly form the very itinerary you letter had to go. In the second section of this post itineraries and travel guides will come into view.

Vanzieleghem gives us a list of the eighteenth-century correspondences used for his research. Both online versions of well-known corresponces fiugure here, buyt alo some very recently edited letters of more unfamiliar persons. He alerts to the recent discovery at the National Archives, Kew, of 75 letters written in 1757 and 1758 captured from the French navy.

His page on legislation is of course a key element for my posts. Van Zieleghem righly looks far and wide to find royal ordinances from 1315 onwards and revolutionary legislation upto 1801. The famous Receuil général des anciennes lois françaises (…) edited by François-André Isambert and others (29 vol., Paris, 1821-1833) does not contain every relevant ordinance until 1789. The Receuil d’Isambert is available online among the digitized legislative resources in the section Essentiels du droit of Gallica. The chronological list does not (yet) contain references for every ordinance in it, let alone links to digitized editions, but there is a brief overview of the main resources used sofar. It seems Vanzieleghem has found a lot of revolutionary decrees and laws, but he does not refer to the online Décrets et Lois 1789-1795: Collection Baudouin and La loi de la Révolution Française 1789-1799 on which you find information here in a post I wrote in 2022.

At the page Références of his blog Vanzieleghem offers a bibliography with several sections. Apart from scholarly literature for France he mentions a few titles for Italy and Switzerland. He also includes a list with a number of Early Modern books about letters and postal services, some of them with links to digitized versions. Vanzieleghem has either made a very strict selection of works or he has not (yet) used the online Bibliographie d’histoire du droit en langue française (Université de Lorraine, Nacy-Metz), searchable in French and English. For the maritime postal services he has found more titles than currently present in this online bibliography.

Early Modern itineraries and digital humanities

The research project Early Modern Digital Itineraries (EmDigit) is led by Rachel Midura (Virginia Tech). Her project team aims at mapping itineraries in Early Modern travel guide books on maps, using these data to build a project in the field of spatial history. Midura explains the aim of EmDigit using as an example a rare early Italian edition, Poste diverse d’Italia, Alemagna, Spagna, e Francia (Milan, [1550]). This edition is not recorded in EDIT16 and the Universal Short Title Catalogue; the union catalogue of the Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale does not mention any copy of it in Italy. The only known copy has been digitized in full color by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, however, with currently as inferred date of publication around 1620. This change of seventy years came possibly after comparison with a copy of the edition Milan 1647 held at the library of Munich University, but more probably in view of the activity in and around 1622 of the Milanese printer Nava as shown in the Heritage of the Printed Book Database. The HPB database currently repeats the date around 1550 for the book Midura presents at EmDigit. I will look here at other elements and arguments for datation of this rare book.

Title page of the Poste diverse d’Italia – copy Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Rar. 1075 – image source: BSB

The book gives the distances between cities, adverts you about the differences in length of the mile in countries, and contains detailed information about the dates of European year markets, a concise pilgrim’s guide for the Holy Land, and the dates of the weekly departure and delivery of mail for particular itineraries. Midura plotted the resulting data on a map of Europe. As for internal evidence for the date of production of this work, on pages 15 and 26 it is stated Vienna is the current residence of the imperial court, which suggests 1529 as a terminus post quem or the period after 1620. Maybe Midura has been misled by the black-and-white version available online in Google Books with the old datation 1550 given in 2014. It seems she simply did not check the bibliographical information at its ultimate source. Luckily Midura provides at GitHub a PDF with a very substantial list of printed itinerary books between 1545 and 1747. This list provides you with a basis to add further works, for example more translations of some of the works mentioned. Midura points to two editions of a Dutch translation of Georg Kranitz’ Delitiae Italiae. Works in Dutch can be traced using the Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN), now online at the CERL platform.

Midura noted on January 1, 2024 in the ReadMe document and the GitHub startpage of EmDigit the problem with the datation of the Poste diverse edition; she opts for a datation around 1700. She does not mention the new date around 1620 proposed by the librarians in Munich, and she points to just a single other digitized itinerary held at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. An online search in the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog – with a search interface in German and English – will quickly bring you to more relevant digitized works held at this library and elsewhere.

The bibliography by Madura shows very clearly some titles took over advertising claims from other books, and perhaps even more for their contents. The GitHub page of Midura for EmDigit gives you access to the various digital components of the map with the postal routes. The spatial dimensions of the post routes in Early Modern Europe are certainly clear, but their presence in any particular short period needs further elaboration and some basic work, starting with using more printed itineraries and widening also the list of secondary scholarly literature. Midura tells you more about her project in the article ‘Itinerating Europe: Early Modern Spatial Networks in Printed Itineraries, 1545–1700’, Journal of Social History 54/4 (2021) 1023–1063. Midura was also involved in developing a transcribing model for Transkribus, Italian administrative hands 1550-1770. In a period of 150 years Europe changed drastically, if only becaure of long wars, and thus it is vital to locate information both in space and time. Midura uses some eighty itineraries for her project.

The EmDigit team organizes in 2024 several workshops. Midura announces on X (Twitter) she is going to publish her study The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe in open access. I was particular happy to see her announcement, because it can form a bridge to the third and last section of this post around a book on letters from the Netherlands.

Post Scriptum

Letter writing comes in various forms and genres. Recently I was delighted to pick up a copy of a book by Jet Steinz, P.S. Van liefdespost tot hatemail. De 150 opmerkelijkste Nederlandse brieven [P.S. From love letters to hate mail. The 150 most remarkable Dutch letters] (Amsterdam 2019). Steinz found a great way to organize her book and to give it more impact. She organized the letters by genre in chronological order, and she presents each letter with images of the original in full color and a transcription. For older letters she sometimes rephrased the wording for smooth reading in modern Dutch. Letters in foreign languages have been translated. Only the relatively small format (18 by 23 cm) prevents it from truly becoming a kind of palaeographical atlas for late medieval to modern scripts. Apart from letters from famous Dutch people, be they Erasmus, Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek, Rembrandt van Rijn, the brothers Vincent and Theo van Gogh, Anne Frank or Johan Cruyff, numerous letters stem from ordinary people. Letters by famous Dutch writers, often written when they were not yet famous, appear in many genres, even in the section for children’s letters.

With 34 genres Steinz created a wonderful array of moods and aims in letters, bringing emotions from love to hate, anger to happiness, obedience and protest into relief. Sea post, not unfamiliar here from the posts I wrote here about the letters among the Prize Papers in the collection of the High Court of Admiralty held at the National Archives, Kew, figures as the first genre. Letters by prisoneers and letters with threats, letters applying for a job and rejections by firms, letters from scholars and simple notes about household chores show many sides of human life. Steinz brings together letters from many Dutch cultural institutions. She dispensed with exact references to archival collections, thus making it into a nice exercise to trace these meta-data. Steinz redeems this omission with a substantial bibliography of relevant literature about Dutch letters.

Apart from letters captured by enemy navies Steinz used another curious collection of letters which never reached their destiny. Simon de Brienne, a seventeenth-century Dutch postmaster, retained some 2600 undeliverable letters in a chest. After nearly a century in the former Communication Museum, The Hague, these letters and the entire museum collection will move in September 2024 to the main location of Beeld en Geluid [Sound and Vision] in Hilversum, the Dutch national audiovisual museum. The chest and letters were the subject of the independent Brienne research project, now itself part of the international Letterlocking project for creating a typology of ways of sealing letters, and for tracing and reading unopened letters using new technologies. At Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) you can find the catalogue of the letters within the Brienne collection and references to the research about them. It is touching to see in Steinz’ book letters of prisoners among these undelivered letters. Yet another lifeline had been locked for them.

In her foreword Steinz gave a place of honor to Francisco de Tassis (1459-1517), the founder of the first European postal service. I could not help remembering only the Thurn und Taxis family in Regensburg, but they are indeed connected with this man. I readily admit that when looking at Vanzieleghem’s blog I was surprised to read in an old French manual for legal history about the postal service of the university of Paris. Its monopoly ended in 1719. Vanzieleghem could not yet find the first royal ordinance issued in 1383 about the postal role of this university which from then on should serve each French diocese.

To me it seems definitely fitting the themes in this post are connected with each other in some way. It will do no harm to compare postal tariffs with printed itineraries. It is also clear spatial history needs a sure foundation on historical research. Letters and postal services vitally connected and connect people just as much as the internet does since a few decades. In Italian legge (laws) and leghe (miles) might look rather similar, and indeed they are not miles apart from each other. Legislation concerning letters and post deserves due attention from legal historians.

An addendum

A good starting point for researching Early Modern postal services is the chapter by Nikolaus Schobesberger et alii, ‘European postal networks’, in: News networks in early Modern Europe, Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds.) (Leiden-Boston, 2016; online in open access) 19-63. This chapter suggests for example the inclusion of key postal stations in the Holy Roman Empire at certain moments can help to date the moment of creation of the contents in printed itineraries. It is good to see both this article and Midura point to Ottavio Codogno’s Nuouo itinerario delle poste per tutto il mondo (Milan 1608) as a very important source.

In the PDF version of the Munich copy of the Poste diverse the date of publication is still indicated as 1550. At p.15 it is also stated the emperor lived sometimes in Prague, altre volte vi abitava la Maestà Cesarea, referring either to the period in the fourteenth century or to the period between 1583 and 1620.

Maps for legal history, a German example

When creating an article or even a blog post creating a mind map can be most helpful. Using maps to represent information about legal history or historic events and developments with a legal dimension can help you to see legal history in a wider perspective. This month Klaus Graf kindly alerted me at Archivalia to a German project with legal maps, Rechtskarten, the fruit of a cooperation between nine legal historians at a number of German universities. They aim at presenting an atlas touching on both legal and cultural history. Its current dimensions are still modest, but in my view thsi project can inspire other scholars to use or create maps for legal history, too. Somehow this project escaped my attention earlier on…

A variety of maps

The navigation of Rechtskarten is fairly simple. You can use the tabs for maps, authors, keywords (Stichwortregister) and timelines (Zeittafeln). Currently only sixteen subjects are presented, but their numbering shows at least one hundred subjects are in preparation. Thus it seems you should not worry too much about the fact four out of sixteen themes deal with the twentieth century. The earliest item concerns the Kaufunger Wald, a royal wood since the eight century until the late eleventh centuy. In this item created by Wilhelm A. Eckhardt the maps shown are both modern and old. The section Orte (locations) brings you to an interactive map guiding you to its exact location in the north of the modern Bundesland Hessen, to the north east of Kassel.

Wilhelm A. Eckhardt looks at legal iconography and legal ethnology in another contribution on village court locations in Hessen. Among the images is a photograph from the legal icongraphic collection of Karl Frölich held at and digitized by the Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie in Frankfurt am Main. I discussed the background and possible use of this collection in an earlier post (2015). In that post I mentioned already the LAGIS portal for the regional history of Hessen with a section on these Gerichtstätten. Eckhardt righly mentions this in the bibliography to his article, with the latest item in it dating from 2013. The original land registry maps for Hessen (Urkataster) can be searched online at the LAGIS portal, too.

Land registry map (Katasterkarte) of Reichensachsen in Hessen with a linden tree indicating the location of the village court, 1788 – image source Staatsarchiv Marburg, Karte B 234, photo by B. Krippner

Among the items for the twentieth century i was a bit disappointed when I saw the media for the German Democratic Republic (1949-1990). I had expected some maps of the former DDR, but Hans Hattenhauer only added three diagrams touching the organization of this state, in itself surely enlightening and useful, but not the kind of map you would expect. In his contribution Hattenhauer concisely shows the low position of law and lawyers with the DDR. This item is in a way rather close to using a mind map. The visualisation of in this case state organization can be very telling.

Mapping some subjects has progressed clearly since the start of this project, somewhere between 2000 and 2015; information about the background and start of Rechtskarten is lacking, but Jörn Eckert died in 2006. The articles on the foundation of universities in the Holy Roman Empire (Armin Wolf) and the coming of printing to Europe (Jörg Wolff) share the same map, and it is instructive to compare the presence of universities with the advance of printing presses. The Atlas of Early Printing (University of Iowa) does a better job in many respects. You can easily add a layer showing university towns to the interactive map. The question about universities and early printing remains certainly valuable.

It is rather strange that the interesting article on maps of the Holy Roman Empire and the perception of minor states by Armin Wolf lacks any image of the maps under discussion. Is German copyright here the problem or have the Rechtskarten simply been abandonded at some point? Anyway, updating articles is in some cases clearly needed. The bibliography for the article by Jörg Wolff concerning the Tractatus de fluminibus seu Tyberiadis of Bartolus de Saxoferrato (1313/1314-1357) mentions only literature in German until 1999. By the way, this is one of the three subjects within this project not exclusively connected with German legal history. Armin Wolf’s contribution on the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century as to some extent dynastic partitions lacks any map, image or location. The word Theatrum in the title of the work he discussed helped me to remember the project Welt und Wiissen auf der Bühne. Theatrum-Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit of the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel presented here in 2015.

Some musings

Sometimes things go differently than originally planned. Not every project succeeds, and though we all preach that you should learn from your faults and failures more often we hide them or try to forget about them. The Rechtskarten are in my view clearly an unfinished project, and not a failure. It is easy to point at shortcomings and omissions in this interesting pilot for a project with maps for legal history. I think the Rechtskarten can be revitalized. In fact it is a good exercise to come up with proposals for additions, corrections and updates. Some maps are now even only handwork. Only the articles on early printing and the foundation of universities belong to the field of cultural history. Many items lack a timetable, but the use of diagrams is an asset. The inclusion of some interactive maps is a sign this project certainly aimed – when feasible – at using modern tools. It would be great to have similar websites concerning subjects for other countries or regions, and I am sure you know some examples.

I had planned to open this year with other posts, but these I not have yet completed. Looking at an unfinished project with the potential to inspire others to create similar maps for their own field of interest seemed a wise thing to do!

Creating a repertory for the ius commune in manuscript and print

Finding and describing sources can be a hard task. The efforts of scholars who start creating any kind of repertory face many challenges. For tracing manuscripts concerning the medieval ius commune some online repertories already exist. In IVS Commune online, a new project at the Università di Torino, not just manuscripts will be presented, but also early printed editions of the works of late medieval lawyers and other legal texts. The project will cover the period 1350-1650. In 2021 the start of work on this project was announced, and now the first results can be searched online. What are the core aims and distinctive qualities of the repertory? What does it bring for scholars, and what wishes can be expresses to strengthen it? In this post I would like to present some impressions of my first forays into this interesting repertory.

Legal texts in print and manuscripts

Two years ago, during the first online conference of Ius Illuminatum in September 2021, concisely reported upon here, Maria Alessandra Panzanelli Fratoni presented not only IVS Commune Online, but also a closely related project at the Italian MANUS manuscript portal called MANUS Iuridica. In fact visiting MANUS this month reminded me about the project in Turin, and it is by all means wise to devote here some space to it. I revisited the MANUS portal in a search for medieval manuscipts in Italy. Somehow I did not immediately think about the recent integration of the CODEX project for medieval manuscripts in Tuscany into the multiple catalogue search function at the Mirabile portal. The portal Nuova Bibliotheca Manoscritta for medieval manuscripts in Lombardy and the Veneto brings you not only a regional catalogue, but also a digital library. Manoscritti Datati d’Italia is another research tool fit for inclusion here.

The MANUS project explicitly builds on the pioneering overview by Gero Dolezalek and Hans van de Wouw, the Verzeichnis der Handschriften zum römischen Recht bis 1600 (4 vol., Frankfurt am Main 1974), now available online as the database Manuscripta juridica at a server of the Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie. In 1970 Dolezalek and Van de Wouw had to warn their readers that the descriptions given in the repertory in most cases did not stem from personal inspection. Fifty years ago a world with a plethora of online library catalogues, let alone digital access to medieval and Early Modern manuscripts, was still far away. Dolezalek promised an update with descriptions of canon law manuscripts, but alas no update of Manuscripta Iuridica has been performed since 2017.

The clear difference at IVS Commune online from the outset is the wish to add also printed editions of medieval legal texts. Panzarelli and her colleagues use data from incunable editions stored in the Text-Inc project of the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. Among other online resources that will be used to prepare the bibliographical data for authors, texts and editions is the European meta-catalogiue for Early Modern printed works, the Heritage of the Printed Book database (HPB).

Using IVS Commune online

The portal of IVS Commune online comes with three search interfaces, respectively for texts, names, and works. The first interface for texts contains in fact also search fields for names and works. semantic indexing, bibliographical data, and information concerning copies and references. The search interface for names shows you at the start an overview of names with cross-references to standardized versions of names. I could not help seeing immediately a nice example of two lawyers wrongly assigned under one name, Accursius (ca. 1182-1260) and his son Franciscus (1225-1293) are not identical. Luckily this seems to be an isolated mistake. For each author a core selection of data is given. In my opinion adding references to authority files for persons would be truly helpful, but building first a foundation is surely right, and entries in both Text-Inc and the HPB database are used as a base fo the earliest editions.

The interface for works presents the titles of texts as found in existing manuscripts and printed editions, and here, too, you see at the start an alphabetical overview combined with a search field. This means some titles will not be given in Latin, but in Italian, Spanish or other languages. An entry starting an alternative title with “Also known as” has escaped attention, but it helps you to be aware of alternative titles.

The section with guidelines is still empty. The news section alerts you to a recent workshop of the international Héloïse network for the history of universities, held at Turin on October 25 to 27, 2023 on digital approaches to the cultural heritage of universities.

In my view it is still a bit early to state already much about the qualities of IVS Commune online. Despite the presence of many names and titles the database seems yet rather empty when you know about the variety of works preserved in manuscripts. However, in its current phase you can see quite distinctly its qualities for the data concerning printed works. It looks very much like only the information from the Text-Inc project in Oxford has been entered into the database. Anyway focusing on printed books transmitting legal texts is a welcome addition to the more traditional focus on manuscripts with these texts.

Repertories, catalogues and standards in context

The alphabetical list of names reminded me of something else, too. The list starts with a number of Arabic authors. When studying Arabic texts and translations it is necessary to be very clear what exactly you are studying in order to prevent confusion. Already the fact Arabic translations and adaptations of texts exist, sometimes even in several versions, should serve as a reminder it pays off in the end to provide a lot of bibliographical information. The threefold entrance of IVS Commune online for texts, works and names looks to some extent akin to the multi-layered description in the Library Reference Model (LRM) proposed by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA).

My knowledge of this model stems from a library catalogue pioneering the implementation of LRM and related standards, for example RDA (Resource Description and Access). The Alkindi catalogue of the Institut Dominicain d’Études Orientales (IDEO) in Cairo has as one of its aims the provision of data in order to serve as a virtual reference tool for Arabic studies, close to becoming even an union catalogue. The Alkindi catalogue with a multilingual interface presents information about copies as a term for actual objects containing information, manifestations being specific publications, expressions being specific editions and works, the intellectual product. Persons, too, can be identified in their specifc roles and connectied to each other, in other words, matters concerning authority files are present, too.

Faceted research becomes feasible when using such standards. The standards combined here surpass the levels or ordinary alphabetical and systematical description for which international standards exist. At the library portal of the Diamond platform the Alkindi catalogue itself is part of a consortium with eleven libraries, including the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and several libraries in Cairo, Paris and even in Erbil, Irak. In my view IVS Commune online is moving on a similar road, and of course this means facing huge challenges to implement all facets succesfully. The team of IVS Commune online (ICo) indeed expresses its aim to offer both data for content analysus and bibliographical description, and – most importantly – information for text identification. The ICo team has addressed this subject in a number of publications. I had expected to find a reference to the use of a particular standard for the description of (medieval) manuscripts, too.

Thanks to the Hazine blog for Arabic studies I encountered the Alkindi catalogue some years ago. The online magazine The Digital Orientalist can serve as a fine starting point for gaining insight into the role of digital humanities for Arabic and Islamic studies.

Whatever you think of the aims behind projects such as ICo, MANUS Iuridica and Manuscripta juridica, and also about new bibliographical standards, in this case they do at least deal with a very particular situation for the study of medieval legal systems, be they the ius commune, the common law, customary law or regional law. They express a conciousness that only for a limited number of medieval legal texts modern critical editions are available. Scholars delving into medieval law have to become really close to their sources. Luckily repertories exist for many disciplines dealing with medieval sources. The SIEPM society for the study of medieval philosophy has created a most useful and wide overview of (online) repertories for medieval manuscripts and texts, mentioning also national portals for medieval manuscripts.

However, for medieval law only a number of periods and subjects are covered in repertories. For medieval canon law only the period until 1234 is covered in the manuscript repertories created by Stephan Kuttner, and by Lotte Kéry for the period 400 to 1100. The repertory of medieval legal manuscripts in the Vatican Library has not been completed; only two volumes have been published. To redress the balance, manuscripts concerning the medieval and Early Modern common law can be traced thanks to the repertories and catalogues edited by Sir John H. Baker. Ulrich-Dieter Oppitz included even images of manuscript fragments in his repertory of manuscripts for German regional law (Rechtsbücher).

Efforts to bridge such gaps are most welcome. I admire the courage and stamina of scholars who start or continue such projects, and my remarks do not matter that much in view of the tasks they have set themselves to serve the scholarly community. The ICo project is clearly in an early phase. It deserves attention and support helping the team to achieve its aims. Any repertory worthy of its name has its qualities and limits, be it print or online. This short post will serve its purpose when it inspires anyone to support work on modern repertories for the manuscript and print tradition of medieval law in its many forms.

A postscript

At Archivalia Klaus Graf wondered very much on November 27, 2023 about the inclusion by ICo of a work concerning the election for the German emperor Maximilian in 1486. I agree some pruning of works included at ICo is necessary. He also criticised my reference to the list of online manuscript repertories created by the SIEPM, in his view simply outdated, however, without pointing to a better list of such repertories. Graf’s own list of relevant repertories was last updated in 2018. Among the repertories which will disappear quite soon is the German portal Manuscripta Mediaevalia, to be taken down from December 11, 2023 onwards. As a successor the Handschriftenportal is indicated.

Meanwhile I will consider the feasability of creating an overview of repertories for distinct manuscript genres, perhaps combined with a handlist of national repertories for (medieval) manuscripts. It can do no harm to look at the splendid overview of manuscript catalogues and its section Special Interests created and maintained at the Universität Kassel, most probably the resource Klaus Graf would recommend. At my website I created in December 2023 a fairly concise overview of manuscript repertories, with due caution about its limits and with gratitude for other existing overviews. The CERL consortium, too, offers a fine overview of repertories and related websites for manuscript research (PDF).

In 2022 Gero Dolezalek gave an overview of the projected update for Manuscripta juridica in 2023, and he offered a similar overview of the 2017 update. Sometimes non-juridical works are bound with legal works.

Retracing Suriname’s colonial history and remembering Natalie Zemon Davis

This year I somehow evaded or skipped the remembrance activities and publications around the end of slavery in the former Dutch Suriname in 1863. Frankly, I even thought we had already had manifestations about the act of emancipation a few years ago, in 2013! To me it seemed not entirely just to neglect the continuation of slavery in other parts of the Dutch colonial empire after 1863. The death of Natalie Zemon Davis on October 21, 2023 helped me to remember she did research, too, on the history of colonization and slavery in Suriname. In this post I would like to bring some strands of thought together, both to make some amendments for my omission earlier this year and to salute the work of a historian who inspired fellow-historians worldwide.

Remembering Natalie Zemon Davis

Natalie Zemon Davis receiving the Holberg Prize in 2010 – photo by Holbergprisen – Flickr: davis stromgren8, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74162412en, tv. Erling S. Sandmo. Foto: Marit Hommedal/SCANPIX

French history was a key focus in the work of the late Natalie Zemon Davis (1928-2023). Much has been said the past weeks to honour her achievements, to remember with gladness her generosity and curiosity, and to put her scholarly work into various perspectives. She was a most inspiring example of a woman succeeding to enter into academia and reach the highest posts, thus opening doors for many other female historians. Social history gained its current position for Early Modern historians also to a substantial extent thanks to her pioneering research. I will not repeat here the fine tributes paid to her, such as those written by the faculty of history in Oxford, the Society of Renaissance Studies and the Central European University in Budapest. Some interviews with Natalie Zemon Davis remain very telling testimonies to her life, approaches and influence, for instance the one in Itinerario 39/1 (2015) 3-15, the 2008 interview for Medievalists, and for her connection to Suriname’s history the interview (in Dutch) originally published in the history journal Skript.

Three articles by Natalie Zemon Davis about Suriname attracted already years ago my attention at the blog Buku – Bibliotheca Surinamica of Carl Haarnack. He created digital versions – including PDF’s – of Davis’ articles on David Nassy (2010), colonial justice in Suriname (2011), and on Creole languages in Suriname (2009), originally published in Historical Research 82, issue 216 (2009) 268-284. Looking at the footnotes of these articles I smiled when read the old abbreviation A.R.A. for the Algemeen Rijksarchief in The Hague, now called the Nationaal Archief. Davis was about to finish a study on eighteenth-century Suriname, and hopefully this work can be published soon.

Approaching the history of Suriname

On several occasions I wrote here posts about Suriname’s history, for example ina post about slavery (2013), a post on archival resources for Suriname’s legal history (2017), the slave registers of Suriname (2018) and similar registers for the island Curaçao (2020), and last but not least a post concerning the city Middelburg in the province Zeeland and the role of its commercial company in the eighteenth-century Dutch slave trade (2021). These posts seem to me still interesting. The only snag with the oldest contributions are the changes in the way the Dutch national archives present their information online. The Nationaal Archief had good reasons to follow the example of the British National Archives to maintain two websites or at least separated subdomains for searching information about their holdings on one side, and on the other information about its organisation. Thus a number of links in my posts is now broken, because no action was taken to create redirects, in itself surely a major task, but not wholly strange to helping the general public, scholars and anyone interested and thus also providing stable services.

I had preferred not to add anything about the lack of true multilingual presentation and search interfaces on the current website of the Nationaal Archief. The current English version of the overview of indexes at the Nationaal Archief to many record series, including series on Aruba, Curaçao, Indonesia, Suriname and the two major trading companies for the Dutch East and West Indies, are shown with untranslated titles, referring you to the translation function of your browser which might not work as historically sound as proper translations would be. However, the new language button does now offer eight languages. Only for English a condensed standard version of the website exists. It is a pity you can navigate only in Dutch directly to the important zoekhulpen (research guides) on Suriname, Curaçao, Indonesia, colonial history and slavery. On the other hand, the website of the Nationaal Archief Suriname in Paramaribo seems to be entirely written in Dutch.

You might want me to end this lament and look at things differently! The really remarkable and even worrying thing to note is the lack of attention to the use and existence of exclusive language in finding aids and research guides, apart from notices in the guides for Suriname and Indonesia. The volume Staat & slavernij. Het Nederlandse koloniale slavernijverleden en zijn doorwerkingen [State and slavery. The Dutch colonial slavery past and its consequences], Rose Mary Allen et alii (eds.) (Amsterdam 2023), a major commemorative publication of historical essays accompanied by a website, pinpoints as one of the problematic things about doing research about the place of slavery in Dutch history the very use of language with its implications, explicit or hidden bias, political agendas or worse. The thirty authors in this volume wrote essays of generally ten pages, interspersed with short contributions on research methods and some sources, and some interviews. They cover subjects both about the past and the current Netherlands to highlight the fact vIews do not stem from a viewpoint above space and time. On purpose the articles on the oldest periods have been placed last, yet another way to break through commonly held assumptions, even if this reversal of chronological order and sequences has its setbacks, too. The great strength of this volume is the use of multiple perspectives and the wide coverage of themes and periods.

Finding digitized books on Suriname’s history

Reading Davis’ articles on the history of Suriname and visiting the Buku blog of Carl Haarnack rekindled my interest in finding online digitized materials for this subject. My own list of digital libraries concerning Suriname on my webpage for digital libraries was rather short, and thus I started to check the existing links and to search for other relevant collections.

Let’s start at Amsterdam. The old subdomain for digitized cultural heritage held by the Universiteit van Amsterdam responded with an error message. The combined special collections of the university library and museum Allard Pierson brings you quickly to its search portal with at the bottom of the landing page an overview of the main collections, including the Surinamica collection. The page for this collection does currently not point to the availability of digitized items. As in the old configuration books and prints have been digitized within the image database where an overview of digitized heritage collections is now very much absent. There is only a free text search, not an advanced search mode, but you can apply several filters for your search results. To the best of my knowledge it seems at first hardly any item has been newly digitized during the last five years or added to the hundred items. Even the major Suriname exhibition at Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk in 2020 clearly did not work as a spur to digitize more items of this rich collection. However nice the new layout looks, navigating to the things you look for could considerably be enhanced. In my humble opinion a fresh look with a decolonizing view to the state of things at this website can help to make things truly accesible for anyone.

Leiden University Library manages also the collection of the KITLV, the Royal Dutch Institute for Caribbean history. Within the digital collections presented by the university library in Leiden there is no separate collection for Suriname. The number of results in a free search for Suriname is large, but a substantial number of items can only be viewed with restrictions. The catalogue of the exhibition Suriname in beweging (2015 is available online.

Natalie Zemon Davis was impressed by the Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam (…) (Paramaribo 1788), written by a group of learned Jewish men with Portuguese ancestors. It was only natural for me to start searching for a digital version of this work, but it took a while to realize I searched for it with the name of just one author, David de Isaac Cohen Nassy, actually using only Nassy… In this book the names of the authors appear only in abbreviated forms. A number of libraries catalogued this work under the name of one of the other authors, Moses Pa. de Leon, the first name mentioned in the dedicatory letter. Several copies have been digitized by Google. At Leiden a copy of the KITLV has been digitized within the digital collections. The Hathi Trust Digital Library provides both the original edition and a digital version of a reprint (Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1968).

At his blog Carl Haarnack pointed in 2013 at the Dutch version of this work, Geschiedenis der kolonie Suriname (…) (Amsterdam-Harlingen 1791). A copy of this work has been digitized for the Delpher platform. The Allard Pierson does itself no service by simply forgetting to mention at its website the earlier very substantial digital contributions to Delpher from 2013 onwards. Hiding an obvious and important thing is a neutral description of this situation. Luckily, the main library catalogue of the Universiteit van Amsterdam, CataloguePlus, does bring you safely and smoothly to items digitized at Delpher, even to its own digitized copy of the Essai historique. Delpher and other digital portals are mentioned on the help page for finding rare and old works. To be fair, it would be interesting to check the websites of other contributing institutions for any clear mentioning of their partnership with Delpher.

I would have dearly liked to sketch a more positive image of the current state of affairs concerning the digital presence of cultural heritage about and from Suriname at the two institutions presented here above, but it seemed helpful to give here more details and impressions about them. At my webpages on Old Dutch law and digital libraries in Europe you can find more Dutch digital libraries.

At Buku Carl Haarnack pointed in 2015 to the Suriname collection of the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) in Wolfenbüttel. He writes about a number of rare works touching Suriname. I checked for them in the general catalogue of the HAB. Soon I noticed not every work about Suriname has received this keyword as a major element in its catalogue record. You will notice with me the presence in this catalogue of digitized items held elsewhere. The webpage on the Digitale Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel does offer much information, but it does not clearly state that the core digital collection of the Wolfenbütteler Digitale Bibliothek does bring you only to digitized manuscipts, worse from its main page you cannot even reach the search interface for its digitized manuscripts. Some stress on the fact digitized copies of Early Modern German printed works held at the HAB can be found quickly using the bibliographies VD16 and VD 17 would be useful, too. In my view here, too, the viewpoint from outside can help to fill such lacunae which hinder in particular new visitors. My deep admiration for the rich holdings at Wolfenbüttel and the fine fleet of digital initiatives of the HAB made me curious about this part of their collections, and I simply had not expected the present state of guidance.

The powers of history

Doing colonial history and invoking the help of digital libraries or archives is not yet as straightforward as you would like it to be. Historians past and present have to tackle hindrances and perhaps above all to recognize their own blind spots, the limits of their discipline and also the working of library catalogues, bibliographies and finding aids, be they in print or online. It can be fun to find out the tricks of the trade, but at the same time you realize how difficult it can be for outsiders to enter this world.

Natalie Zemon Davies shows for me her greatness again in tackling the difficulties of combining colonial and Jewish history with resources often but not only written in Dutch. It is now decades back I first read her books The return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA-London, 1983) and Fiction in the archives. Pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century France (Cambridge-Stanford, CA, 1987), publications I mentioned here in a post on the legal document genre of factums (2016). Natalie Zemon Davis loved telling stories which stand for much more than only their factual content. Fictionized tales and the very bias they show helped her to gain insights you might easily overlook. Her narrative approach was in a way also a quiet protest against too strong reliance on large datasets and statistical treatment of data. Musing about the impact of historians I was truly touched by the closing words of Natalie Zemon Davis’ contribution to the online series Why Become a Historian? of the American Historical Association. She expressed her enduring love for history, and wanted to see history as “a source of sober realism, but also a source of hope”.

A postscript

After correcting a number of typos, some of them rather silly, I realized something else, too, the omission of an important step by the Allard Pierson, the recent appointment of a staff member to investigate ways for decolonizing its heritage collections. Inadvertently I had also left a confusing sentence about its copy of the Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam. The Allard Pierson’s copy has been digitized and is available at Delpher.

Notarial records and Jewish history in Early Modern Venice, Bordeaux and Amsterdam

In December 2022 I first spotted SION-Digit, a research project aiming at using notarial acts from Venice, Bordeaux and Amsterdam to gain new insights into Early Modern Jewish history. Project leader Evelien Chayes received in 2022 media attention for her discovery during this project of a rare letter by Michel de Montaigne amidst records from a notary’s archive held at Bordeaux. Even with only a project blog I think SION-Digit deserves attention here for its goal of using legal records as a historical source showing much hidden things about the history of Jews in Early Modern Europe. One of the things to investigate is the role of digitized records for this project.

Notarial records, a rich resource

Three archival institutions have a pivotal role for the SION-Digit project, the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, the Archives départementales de la Gironde in Bordeaux and the Stadsarchief Amsterdam. The first section of this post will help to come quickly closer to some of the advantages or hindrances to study notarial acts at the three institutions.

The Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV) recently launched a nicely designed search engine, moreveneto for searching the many fondi. At first I was slightly disoriented, seeing on one side two collections for notai but also more than 1400 other collections. Using the term notarili brought me to twelve fondi in the 3500 Notarile record group. Fondo 3520 contains indici per parti contraenti per notai, without an indication about the period and only a general statement these indices being incomplete, and fondo 3550 with general chronological indices, however, only for the period 1801-1829. Another attempt at using the general search interface led me to fondo 003, Notarile. Testamenti. Indici with indices for wills from the period 1300-1802, with four subseries. Of course it will take you some time and effort to get used to any guide. Apart from the concise guidance in the section Patrimonio of moreveneto you can used the section Galleria, where I got 13 results for notarile and 8 results for notai, bringing you mostly digitized repertories, but also some notarial records.

At the website of the state archive in Venice you will note with me at Risorse in rete that two earlier online resources, including the digitization platform Progetto Divenire and an earlier online guide, are now part of moreveneto. However, it is not mentioned the ASV contributed also digitized materials to the platform Judaica Europeana, now maintained by the Jewish Heritage Network. The Brandeis University helped creating digital access to eighteenth-century pinkasim, community ledgers held at the ASV.

The website of the departmental archives for the Gironde region in Bordeaux brings you quickly – starting with Recherche and choosing Thèmes – to information about notarial records in their holdings. There is an online search form for the minutier des notaires, where you can search for names, places, and periods, and filter for some specific document genres or limit your search to either minutes or repertories. The AD Gironde holds now some 7 kilometer of notarial records. You will find also a digitized biographical register of notaries created by a group of volunteers between 1987 and 1998. The État général des fonds, too, leads you to this repertory for notaries.

Notarial acts from the Stadsarchief Amsterdam have been presented here already in a number of posts, for example in a post about Rembrandt’s life. In fact this resource genre received much attention from this institution recently. This has resulted in the creation of indices for a great number of acts, now integrated into the general search platform. You can limit your search to particular document genres. At the transcription platform Vele Handen [Many hands] two projects deal with notarial records from Amsterdam, Alle Amsterdamse Akten for creating indices, and Crowd leert computer lezen [Crowd helps computer learning to read] for creating a Transkribus base ground which led to two online public models for computerized transcription, the first for seventeenth-century notarial acts and the second one for the eighteenth century.

In a third project at Vele Handen together with other institutions the Stadsarchief Amsterdam let volunteers add tags to a number of transcribed notarial acts. The results can be found at the Transkribus subdomain Amsterdam City Archives. Interestingly, you can adjust the search mode for fuzzy results. By the way, at the portal Zoek in transcripties [Search in transcriptions] with the other tagged acts from the third project at Vele Handen you will find apart form VOC records as its core a nice selection of notarial records from Dutch provincial and regional archives.

The city archives of Amsterdam offer a concise online introduction to the indices for notarial records, and you can download the repertory of Early Modern notaries created by A.I. Bosma, Repertorium van notarissen residerende in Amsterdam Amstelland, ambachtsheerlijkheden en geannexeerde gemeenten 1524 – 1810 (1998) as a PDF.

Objects, texts and networks

The SION-Digit project has objects, texts and networks as its main focuses. By choosing three towns with a busy harbour the network side of things has surely a good foundation. The transport of people, objects, letters and ideas was very much helped from these towns. A principal aim of this project is to use the wealth of information in notarial acts for delving deeper into Early Modern Jewish history. The core of the project is using and creating digitized access to notarial deeds. At the project blog it is asserted until now state and town archives have not been used as much as the records held at specialised institutions for Jewish history.

The flat statement on the SION-Digit blog notarial acts in these three towns are hard to find or difficult to access is in dire need of some qualification. Luckily the French version of the project aims does not contain this lapidary statement. In view of the repertories for notarial registers at all three archives discussed here above it is simply not true one cannot find these registers or that there are severe blockades for finding them. At Venice there are indices for acts contained in notarial registers. In Bordeaux you can use the online search for the minutier and even find biographical information about individual notaries. The city archives of Amsterdam offer an online repertory of notaries, you can search directly for notarial registers in finding aid 5075, and there are online indices and digitized registers. For a fair number of registers you can even benefit from computerized transcriptions.

The problem for researching these Early Modern notarial acts is the degree of accessibility of individual acts. I guess the project description at the SION-Digit blog stems probably directly from a project proposal for funding, with alas a not uncommon exaggerated picture of gaps to be filled, hidden materials and great vistas awaiting at the completion. More to the point is the wish to combine materials from notarial records with existing projects for pinkasim, Early Modern Jewish community registers. In particular the Pinkasim project of the National Library of Israel is important in this respect. It offers an online repertory of this document genre and digitization of a number of registers stemming from several European Jewish communities. There is also a very extensive bibliography.

Instead of looking here somewhat closer at pinkasim I thought it would be more useful to look at notarial records about Jewish communities in Early Modern Europe. Gaining an overview of such records is helped by the existence of the European Jewish Archives Portal, created by the Yerusha network and the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe. The portal does list archival collections held at European archives, libraries, museums and documentation centers. There is both a simple search and an advanced search mode, and also an interactive map for finding locations. Very useful are the possibilities to use other spellings, translations and transliterationd of names and locations.

As with all portals and search machines aiming to give complete coverage of any particular subject the search results at Yerusha are subject to the primordial factor of relevant data being available and entered into them. A quick simple search at Yerusha for notaries and notarial records does bring you to descriptions at collection level of archival collections in many European countries, but currently not from France and the Netherlands. For Italy only notarial records at Mantua and Milan are presented. It will do no harm to note the current absence in the Yerusha portal of any information from French and Dutch institutions. The interactive map for holding institutions helps you to detect such gaps.

I will not try to fill in this post all such real or supposed gaps. Within the Italia Judaica portal of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspore Research Center, Tel Aviv University, there is a fine introduction for Venice (in Italian) with a bibliography and footnotes, but alas without any direct reference to notarial records. By the way, the city Venice offers a concise guide to comunal and other archives in Venice. The SIAR is a portal to archives in Venice and the Veneto region. I looked briefly at the website of the Commision Française des Archives Juives (CFAJ). Among the links the CFAJ mentions are the city archives of Bordeaux, and I might as well put here the current link to the Archives Bordeaux Métropole.

Any temptation to go further here with listing my own selection of either randomly or specifically found resources was checked to some extent by visiting the portal site Jewish Heritage Network, another initiative of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, with due attention to archival collections held by institutions for Jewish cultural heritage in Europe. However, it seems not amiss to start looking for notarial records at another central point, the Archives Portal Europe, and to benefit from the search facilities for Dutch notarial acts at the Archieven portal, because many Dutch archives have created indexes for this document genre. If you want to look further for Jewish archival collections, some of them even digitized, I can refer you to my own web page for digital archives with relevant links for a number of countries and periods.

As for notarial records in France it is good to note here the Minutier central des notaires de Paris. The Université de Tours has created the platform Renumar for searching late medieval and sixteenth-century notarial acts from Tours, Amboise, Bourges, Chartres and Chinon. With this project associated is LECTAUREP, an initiative for computerized use of notarial records. In Italy and Spain are several projects which focus on medieval notaries. You can quickly perform yourself a search for minutes notariales and related resources at the French portal FranceArchives to check where you can find them and to see where such records have been digitized.

SION-Digit in action

On October 25, 2023 SION-Digit organizes a symposium ‘Au-delà de l’assignation géographique: Portraits des juifs dans l’Europe prérevolutionnaire’, to be held at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris. Earlier on, in September 2022, the project team organized in Bordeaux a round table on Jewish testimonies in Early Modern France. This year SION-Digit received support from the Biblissima platform. On the central website of the Institut de Recherche d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT) there is no additional information about the contents of SION-Digit, sometimes also referred to as SION-Digit Sfarim.

The project blog brings you to more information about the newly found letter by Montaigne, for example an article in Dutch from the newspaper NRC Handelsblad on August 10, 2023 (PDF). Chayes wrote with Alain Legros, ‘Un brouillon inédit de Montaigne parmi des actes notariés’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 85/1 (2023) pp. 87-95. At the 2022 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America Evelien Chayes spoke about Letizia Nahmias, a remarkable woman in the seventeenth-century Venetian ghetto. It led to an interview by Esther Voet for the Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad 39 (July 8, 2022) pp. 24-25, ‘Een onafhankelijke vrouw in het ghetto’. Finding Letizia’s will was a key moment in understanding her life and actions which were for a long time overshadowed by her husband -also her nephew – who converted to Catholicism.

With SION-Digit we meet an international project on a vast scale developed and for some part to be executed single-handed by a scholar who is at home in the study of Early Modern literature, book history and library history. Her goal of bringing scarcely known aspects of Jewish lives and history into the limelight by using notarial acts should command respect. SION-Digit should invite and deserves support from those scholars better acquainted with notarial records in Italy, France and the Netherlands. The fact Evelien Chayes pinpoints women’s history as a key to detect networks is another stimulating aspect of this project. I wrote here at some length about SION-Digiti Sfarim exactly because Chayes wants to use sources too easily labelled as a territory of legal historians, local historians and genealogists. It is to the benefit of anyone who becomes fascinated by a particular source genre to meet others with their questions, approaches and tools, and to receive mutual support. Connecting scholarly research in various disciplines to gain insight into peoples and networks that tend to be overlooked is in my view a most valuable effort. Mazzeltov, good luck!

A postcript

For finding digital projects concerning Jewish history you can benefit from another international portal, #DHJewish: Jewish History and Digital Humanities, supported again by the Rothschild Foundation and maintained by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (“C²DH”). #DHJewish offers also an online bibliography at Zotero.

Tracing medieval women in documents and manuscripts

Manuscript with the trial of Jeanne d’Arc, 1431; written 15D/16A century – London, British Library, Egerton 984, f. 3r – image British Library

Some subjects deserve highlighting in general within historical research. On several occasions I therefore present here contributions on major themes in legal history such as justice and injustice, slavery and discrimination. Women’s history, too, should figure here more often. It took me some time to look carefully at the results of a special digitization project finished earlier this year by the British Library. In March 2023 an overview of some ninety manuscripts was presented in a PDF, and in May a further overview was added for more than 200 newly digitized charters and 25 rolls. Adding these archival records greatly strenghtens this project by bringing even more depth and width. Charters and rolls appear here almost every year. In fact I had to restrict myself severely and to choose only some subjects and items touching upon legal history to make this post worth some of your reading time, and wet your appetite for more. Earlier on in fact I wrote here about digitized legal manuscripts of the British Library, and about the project with the Bibliothèque nationale de France for digitizing manuscripts created in England and France from the period 800 to 1200.

Making women visible

The first thing to note about the two sections of this digitisation project is that the British Library (BL) included also manuscripts and documents from the Renaissance, enlarging the period covered to the year 1600. On three occasions the BL’s Medieval Manuscripts blog alerted to the completion of the two series. On March 25, 2023 the overview for the manuscrips was presented, with a notice work on charters and rolls was nearly finished. The second post (May 11, 2023) announced the completion of the work on the rolls and charters. In the third post (May 21, 2023) not only links to the two PDF’s are given, but also to versions in Excel. It goes without saying these posts contain marvellous images for the digitized manuscripts, charters and rolls. For some women figuring in this project the BL created separate pages presenting their lives and the newly digitized materials concerning them.

Let me start with admitting that although I found it really difficult and even unfair to select here just some examples showing the wealth of materials newly digitised within this project I could not help delving deeper into the background of two manuscripts about a rather famous woman from the fifteenth century. As a matter of fact I concluded one manuscript really deserves mentioning, because it is not mentioned at one of the main websites about her.

However, I would like to start to look here first more in general at the digitized manuscripts stemming from and concerning medieval women. Most interestingly, you will find in the manuscript section also manuscripts which are actually archival records. This fact makes it more natural for the BL to add charters and rolls as a second section to this project. In order not to focus only on individual women I will look here first at some documentary genres. For this project the BL has digitized in this section four cartularies, three of them of monastic institutions, from Stixwould Priory (Add. 46701), Wilton Abbey (Harley 436), and Coldstream Priory in Scotland (Harley 6670), The fourth cartulary stems from John de Vaux and his daughter and co-heiress Petronilla de Narford (Stowe 776). There is a manuscript containing a census from St Mary Magdalene’s Abbey in Cologne (Add. 21072), and from this institution comes also a manuscript with revenues and expenses (Add. 21177).

Very much in a royal lineage are two wardrobe accounts, the first for Eleanor of Castile for the years1289 and 1290 (Add. 35294), including expenses for her funeral, and for Thomas of Brotherton and Edmund of Woodstock, sons of Edward I and Margaret of France (Add. 37656), although the last manuscript is clearly concerned with two men expending sometimes money for women at court. The manuscript with patents granted by king Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn stems from her period as marquess of Pembroke (1532-1533) (Harley 303). Another manuscript contains the receipts and expenses for the expedition bringing queen Margaret of Anjou to England in 1444 and 1445 (Add. 23938). The manuscript Royal 17 B XXVIII, compiled between 1536 and 1581, is a book of expenses of Princess Mary, containing also an inventory of her jewels, and a catalogue of printed books in the Royal Library. A bit more personal perhaps is a letter written on a single leaf by Mary, Queen of Scots, to Jacques Bochetel de la Forest, the French ambassador to queen Elizabeth I from 1568 (Add. 89480), preserved with an engraving showing Mary. To end this royal section I would like to mention the manuscript Stowe 784 with a Complainte sur la mort d’Anne de Bretagne followed by a discours on the mariage of Anne de Foix with king Ladislas of Hungary in 1514.

We arrive straight into legal history with the last two manuscripts I want to mention here. With my selection of fifteen items with a content more or less relevant for legal historians from a total of ninety digitized manuscripts the British Library certainly serves legal historians. Actually these two last manuscripts are quite famous examples of records of trials dominated by the use of medieval canon law. It is fair to say these manuscripts play a major royal in our knowledge about and perception of an iconic trial.

Last page of the nullification trial with the notarial confirmation of the first notary; written 1455-1456- London, BL, Stowe 84, fol. 182r (detail) – image British Library

Those readers which read the caption under the first manuscript image in this post saw already the name Joan of Arc. The British Library digitized two manuscripts, Egerton 984, with the proceedings of the trial held in Rouen in 1431, written in the last quarter of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, and Stowe 84, an official copy of the proceedings of the rehabilitation trial in 1455-1456. At the portal Jeanne d’Arc the section on the trials tells you a lot about the manuscripts sources, editions and modern translations, but one of the manuscripts at the British Library, Egerton 984, once owned by Pierre Pithou, is somehow forgotten. It is tempting to provide you here with an overview of the manuscript tradition and modern editions, but this takes more space than I had expected. It is far more important to note the absence of any primary source for the interrogation held in Poitiers, the distance in time to the events of the manuscripts concerning the trial in 1431, and the closeness and official nature of the manuscripts concerning the second trial in 1455-1456, often called the rehabilitation or nullification trial. I created a PDF with an overview of the manuscripts and their digitized versions, and information about the most important editions.

Rolls and charters

The second section with digitized rolls and charters does bring you anyway a lot of legal documents featuring women in many capacities. The sheer number of some document genres prohibits their full selection here. There are for example 23 wills, 15 quitclaims (renunciations of right(s)), and nearly 90 grants. Eight rolls tell you about households, and nine chirographs have been digitized. Eight documents tell us about expenses for households. Seventeen documents concern medieval and sixteenth-century queens, and 27 documents mention a countess. It is definitively a challenge to show here women not only doing things they very obviously regularly could do and did, but also showing more exceptional cases, not forgetting to give a balanced view of social status and the origin of these archival records. With 200 charters and 25 rolls you are sure to find something touching your own personal or professional interests.

Sale of an enslaved woman, 1450 – BL, Add. Ch 15340 (upper half) – image British Library

Many documents concern land transactions, but another attraction caught my attention. Add, Ch. 15340 is a notarial act recording the sale in 1450 by two Venetian men of an enslaved Russian woman named Marta to Angelo Gadi from Florence. Alas the act contains few details in the lines 7 to 9 about this sclava, who was 22 years old and healthy of body and mind.

There is a huge difference between this woman treated as an object for sale, a victim of slavery, and women founding institutions. Between 1237 and 1241 Ela, countess of Salisbury, founded Lacock Abbey (Add, Ch. 75578). Empress Matilda founded Bordesley Abbey between 1141-1142, overruling the original founder Waleran, count of Meulan who acted as a witness in this charter (Add. Ch. 75724). In a further charter from 1141 she confirmed a grant of lamds to this abbey (Add. Ch. 20420). Matilda was also a benefactor of Reading Abbey (Add. Ch. 19576, 19577, 19578 and 17579). Margery de Crek founded Flixton Priory in Suffolk in the years 1258-1259 (Stowe Ch. 291). Confirmations of her foundation followed quickly (Stowe Ch. 292, 293 and 294; LFC Ch. V 15) as did even a royal gift of land (Stowe Ch. 296), interestingly for having a warren, a terrain with rabbits. The more remarkable charter about Flixton Priory is the confirmation by a widow of receiving lands in 1263 for her dowry from the prioress of this institution (Stowe 305). Among the Stowe documents are eleven records with transactions concerning three monasteries in Brescia. Not as a founder, but as protector to a university acted queen Juana de Castile who put her seal to a charter establishing her in this role in 1510 for the university of Alcalà de Henares (Egerton Ch. 127).

Even when I will not unduly focus here on queens and countesses you can find glimpses from their surroundings as well. There is a successful petition by a nurse serving king Henry VI to double her yearly salary in 1424 from £ 20 to £ 40 (Stowe Ch. 643). A very different petition was sent to pope Calixtus III (1455-1458) by Vaggia, widow of Bernardo de Bardi from Florence, to gain permission for herself and her two daughters to have their confessor celebrate mass with a portable altar during an interdict and similar ecclesiastical measures (Add. Ch. 67089). By the way, the description in the overview of this document mentions pope Celestine III, but the description in the online catalogue notes the right pope. A third petition in 1455 comes from queen Margaret of Anjou to her husband, king Henry VI, about sums to be given to her through the Exchequer (Cotton Ch. XVI 72). Another document shows Margaret of Anjou in another role. She was taken prisoner in 1471 and delivered safely to king Louis XI of France in 1476 after he had paid a ransom of 50,000 crowns (Add, Ch. 13932). Margaret had been kept in custody by Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk, formerly her lady-in-waiting. This is of course also an example of a woman figuring in both series of specially digitized documents.

One particular category of documents deserves here a bit more attention, even if it leads to inevitably arbitrary choices. I myself frowned when realizing the fifteen quitclaims contain renunciations of a right or rights. In what cases did women cede rights, and to whom did they renounce a particular right or some rights? The overview mentions almost always cases concerning rights to land ceded to either men or religious institutions. The term quitclaim is indeed reserved to cases concerning rights on lands or rents. One case involves a renunciation by Gonorra in the mid-thirteenth century of half a rent owned on lands given to a hospital in Southwark by her late husband William Bannastre (Add. Ch 23674). To this charter her seal is affixed, a reminder to look for seals of women and the way women are depicted on seals. Seven documents mention a rent or rents.

Let’s end an admittedly restricted choice of items in the second series with some documents which are in my view truly exceptional in the selection made by the British Library. Stowe Ch. XXXII 13 is a chirograph from 1355 with an arbitration by Thomas of Hampstead between Lady Katherine and her son John Latimer about her right to access the chapel at Braybrooke Castle. Another arbitration is found in Add. Ch. 28654. In 1352 an agreement was made about the access for the canons of Sankt Maria im Kapitol, Cologne, to the monastery led by abbess Elizabeth von Katzenellnbogen at this institution when they had to visit the chapter house. The arbiters confirmed in Latin an earlier verdict given in German included in this charter. Add. Ch. 27703 contains a covenant from 1380 between Joan, dowager of Wales, widow of Edward known as the Black Prince, and the community of Beverley in Yorkshire to pay to her an annual rent granted earlier to a kinswoman.

Finally it is sensible to note the only lawsuit among the newly digitized documents, a roll from the last decade of the fourteenth century with documents from of a case heard at Salisbury Cathedral between the abbess and convent of Canonsleigh Priory and parishioners of Morden, Dorset (Add. Ms. 52913). In 1392 the vicar-general of Salisbury judged in favor of the parishioners who had claimed the convent had failed to do an annual payment to the poor, forbidden them to cut woods in the cemetery, and the convent had diverted fruits from the parish church contrary to canon law to a layman.

Women in many roles

I did not write here about the four documents in the second series touching in some way on Flanders, and I have also skipped the manuscripts with rules and statutes. I did spot manuscripts from the Northern Netherlands, but these do not have a legal content. I could have delved into the many wills and grants, and looked in detail for the various motives formulated in these documents. I am afraid no one can present in a single blog post everything that makes this project so interesting! The British Library has made a fine selection of manuscripts and documents enriching our knowledge and helping us to ask questions about medieval women and their lives. Connecting some of the manuscripts with archival records and vice versa is just one of the possible routes to follow. Some archival records could equally be prized possessions of the National Archives, Kew or other record offices in the United Kingdom and even abroad.

It is only logical I could not open every window offered here, but I urge anyone to look at length and with lots of questions to the two overviews and the special web pages for some women to gain new insights into medieval lives and afterlife, not in the least to the legal sides of women’s lives to be found in these manuscripts and archival records. Any selection has its limits, but I think this project of the British Library is truly a gem.

Chasing early copies of Grotius’ De iure belli ac pacis

Today I received a questionnaire from Pablo Nicolas Dufour, a member of the team of scholars at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany, and I would like to share it here. The team is researching a census of the first nine editions of Grotius’ De iure belli ac pacis (1625-1650) and hoping to publish the results in 2025, the 400th anniversary of the book’s first appearance. The project team of the Grotius Census Bibliography calls itself on Twitter Where is Grotius? (@whereisgrotius).

By now, the team has examined and located hundreds of copies to date, but the team memners would like to locate more copies, in particular copies hold privately. Here below are the links to the online questionnaires and to online versions of the reports on these editions published so far.

Questionnaire 1625 IBP: 
https://survey.academiccloud.de/index.php/681736?lang=en

Questionnaire 1626 IBP: https://survey.academiccloud.de/index.php/889362?lang=en

Questionnaire 1631 IBP: https://survey.academiccloud.de/index.php/575734?lang=en

Questionnaire 1632 Janssonius IBP: https://survey.academiccloud.de/index.php/353911?lang=de

Questionnaire 1632 Blaeu IBP: https://survey.academiccloud.de/index.php/115821?lang=de

Questionnaire 1642 IBP: https://survey.academiccloud.de/index.php/955414?lang=en

Questionnaire 1646 IBP: https://survey.academiccloud.de/index.php/124888?lang=de

Questionnaire 1647 IBP: https://survey.academiccloud.de/index.php/776362?lang=de

Questionnaire 1650 IBP: https://survey.academiccloud.de/index.php/318594?lang=de

We have published multiple research notes on the editions, also listing the copies we have found so far:

– 1625: https://brill.com/view/journals/grot/43/1/article-p208_010.xml?rskey=4XDhcA&result=57

– 1626: https://brill.com/view/journals/grot/43/1/article-p236_011.xml?rskey=4XDhcA&result=58

– 1631: https://brill.com/view/journals/grot/43/1/article-p246_012.xml?rskey=4XDhcA&result=59

– 1632 Janssonius: https://brill.com/view/journals/grot/43/2/article-p395_002.xml?rskey=EezetD&result=32

– 1632 Blaeu: https://brill.com/view/journals/grot/43/2/article-p412_003.xml?rskey=EezetD&result=31

– 1642: https://brill.com/view/journals/grot/43/2/article-p437_004.xml?rskey=EezetD&result=33

– 1646: https://brill.com/view/journals/grot/44/1/article-p154_008.xml?rskey=EezetD&result=11

– 1647: https://brill.com/view/journals/grot/44/1/article-p181_009.xml?rskey=EezetD&result=15

– 1650: https://brill.com/view/journals/grot/44/1/article-p197_010.xml?rskey=EezetD&result=4

Should you have any questions about the project or the questionnaire, please do not hesitate to contact Pablo Nicolas Dufour at whereisgrotius@gmail.com. 

The URL’s of the reports bring you to articles in issues of the journal Grotiana. Hopefully the team at Heidelberg can indeed with your help find unknown copies of early editions of Grotius’ famous work!

Since October 2023 the Heisenberg Project Grotius Census Bibliography is also present online with its own blog.

Medieval Frisian law in translation

Approaching a subject in legal history can often start from very different points of departure. You might look at Frisian law as a typical branch of Dutch legal history, but it is equally possible to consider it a part of Scandinavian law. A new edition and English translation of an important text for Frisian medieval law, the Freeska Landriucht has recently been edited by Han Nijdam, Jan Hallebeek,and Hylkje de Jong [Frisian land law: A critical edition and translation of the Freeska Landriucht (Leiden-Boston, 2023]. This book in the series Medieval law and its practice (volume 33) is even available online in open access. In this contribution I will look at the text edition, the translation and also in particular at the important introduction offered by the editors. I will also look briefly at a new website presenting a number of manuscripts with Frisian legal texts.

Introducing Frisian law

The introduction by Han Nijdam, staff member at the Fryske Akademy in Leeuwarden, very soon points out the fact the Freeske Landriucht is a compilation of legal texts in Old Frisian. Therefore this edition and translation gain in importance. Nijdam succeeds in writing a very rich band relatively compact chapter, and I can hardly do full justice to it here. I can understand the clear wish for lucid presentation of the corpus of texts at this point, but somehow using only English titles might feel a bit strange. However, i conceed immediately my view is influenced by the volume Asega, is het dingtijd? De hoogtepunten van de Oudfriese tekstoverlevering [Asega, is it law time? The highlights of the Old Frisian text tradition], Oebele Vries and Dieneke Hempenius-van Dijk (eds.) (Leeuwarden-Utrecht, 2007) who presented a number of texts with apart from the Old Frisian original also translations into modern Frisian and Dutch. Anyway the prologue of the Freeske Landriucht gives the Frisian titles of the texts in this compilation (p. 88) .

Nijdam, a specialist of early medieval Frisian law, explains why a number of important terms such as asega, gretman and scelta defy attempts at unequivocal translation; these untranslated terms are listed in a glossary (p. 443) with clear indication of their mulitple connotations. Apart from a succinct discussion of each text he explains also the legal subjects touched by the various texts, and he looks at the influence of the church in Frisian law, too. Roman law and canon law, too, come into view. Editing and translating the text is complicated by a number of factors. Although the origin of the texts can be retraced to the thirteenth century the material sources used are much younger. For a number of texts there is a learned gloss in Latin. A preliminary collation of them by the late Hans Ankum and Klaas Fokkema proved to be invaluable, but even their ground work had to be checked and corrected at some points.

First page of the Freeske Landriucht – copy The Hague, Royal Library, 150 C 36 – image source: Internet Archive

Translating the Latin of these glosses was yet another challenge for jan Hallebeek and Hylkje de Jong. Han Nijdam edited the main text. One of the most important sources for the Freeska Landriucht is an incunable edition, Dat aelde Freeska landriucht, dated in the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke around 1484 (GW M16942; nine copies extant,see also ISTC no. il00045500). The printer, location and date are not mentioned in this incunable. A veritable flood of publications over the centuries has brought many speculations and few solidly confirmed facts about its origin. The watermarks of the paper used for this work and five connected publications printed by the so-called Printer of the Freesk Landriucht have been dated in the period 1483 to 1486. The Pastei research group for Frisian book history recently conducted its own research on this subject, and I will come back to them in the section on Frisian legal manuscripts. In view of the variety of material sources, the influence of Early Modern Frisian historiography on scholarly study of Old Frisian law, and the nationalist bias of a number of scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Nijdam is to be applauded for steering a safe course and giving us a reliable overview of many matters.

Facing the variety of manuscripts and copies of the incunable edition that could be used the editors decided to take some resolute decisions. For the incunable they choose the copy of the Fries Genootschap, held at Tresoar in Leeuwarden, as their main source. Jan Hallebeek, formerly at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and his successor Hylkje de Jong, too, use the same copy for their edition of the glosses. They provide a concise presentation of the sources referred to in the 188 glosses. They conclude the glosses were compiled in the fourteenth century, the same period in which the compilation itself was probably created. Notwithstanding the fact Frisian legal manuscripts figure only around the text edition the editors do mention most of the important manuscripts. The bibliography (pp. 78-86) does lead you to modern editions of single legal texts using these manuscripts, and it provides you also with a good overview of relevant scholarly literature. For those wanting to focus on the glosses to a single Frisian legal text I can do scarcely better than point you to the online version of an article by Jan Hallebeek, ‘The Gloss to the Saunteen Kesta (Seventeen Statutes) of the Frisian Land Law’, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 87 (2019) 30-64. The importance and influence of Roman and canon law, especially for legal procedure, comes here into view, and he shows how the glosses help also to date the version of the main text more precisely.

In my view the introduction can serve as a very helpful nutshell guide to medieval Frisian law. Anyway, it helped me to get a much clearer picture of Frisian legislation. The sources in the Freeska Landriucht stem from central Frisia, roughly the modern Dutch provinces Friesland and Groningen, and they belong to an older period. From 1400 onwards the Excerpta legum / Jurisprudentia Frisica came into vigour, only to be abolished in 1498 when duke Albrecht of Saxonia came to rule central Frisia, making it a part of the Holy Roman Empire. This change in political power certainly influenced the later historiography about a legendary Frisian freedom. Nijdam stresses the fact the Old Frisian has been updated, and De Jong and Hallebeek noticed the glosses seem almost unchanged. With due attention to such matters and clear explications about them you may conclude that the edition has a sound foundation. The Frisian text is presented with the glosses immediately after the relevant section with the translation on the facing page.

Frankly I can say few things about the quality of the translations, but to me they seem reliable. The edition presents itself with a few footnotes. The integration of the glosses and their translation, with clear rendering of juridical allegations which can be traced in a separate index, are perhaps the most innovative feature, and no doubt also the source of more headaches to get things right. Both the introduction to the main text and the introduction to the glosses have been prepared with great care. In my view these introductions are a must-read for anyone wanting to explore the fields of medieval Frisian law. With this many-sided book Hylkje de Jong, Jan Hallebeek and Han Nijdam perform a tremendous service to legal historians and to all scholars interested in medieval Frisian history.

Frisian law in context: The manuscripts

The texts in the edition of the Frisian Land Law are not all on the same level. The twenty-one texts start with a prologue indicating the contents, and the very last text, atreatise on the Seven Sealands (pp. 438-441), is a short treatise on Frisian political geography. Frisian regions were found between the river Schelde and the Weser in Germany. The four maps help you to pinpoint the regions mostly dealt with in the various texts. One of the strengths of the introduction by Nijdam is the fact it covers the entire medieval period, and it can serve indeed to guide your steps in dealing with the oldest legal texts and manuscripts from Frisia.

By the way, the Lex Frisionum, a legal text in Latin created around 800, is much older than those texts in Old Frisian. I am happy to refer you to the overview for the Lex Frisionum at the website of the Bibliotheca legum project led by Karl Ubl in Cologne. For the Lex Frisionum a printed edition from 1557 is the first surviving textual witness.

By a lucky coincidence two new online platforms recently appeared with a prominent place for Frisian law. It is only logical to look at them here, too. Tresoar, the combined provincial archive and library of Friesland in Leeuwarden, holds a number of Frisian legal manuscripts. After a long period of preparation the digitized versions of these manuscripts finally became available online on a new subdomain for its digital collections, however not as prominent as these manuscripts deserve, just as items of the small general digital library.

Therefore Tresoar decided to presenr the ten (!) manuscripts on a special website, called the Richthofenkolleksje. The website is accessible in Dutch and Frisian. The ten manuscripts originated between 1400 and 1600. Several scholars once owned one or more of them, but finally all manuscripts – and a copy of the incunable edition – were bought by Petrus Wierdsma (1729-1811), who published with Pieter Brantsma two volumes of Oude Friesche Wetten (Kampen-Leeuwarden, [1783-1788]; online, Google / Utrecht University Library) with a Dutch translation. After much trouble with the Frisian scholar Montanus Hettema Karl von Richthofen (1811-1888) succeeded in 1858 in buying them from Wierdsma’s family. In 1922 the manuscripts returned from Breslau (now Wroclaw) to Leeuwarden. Von Richthofen had studied with Karl Friedrich Eichhorn and Jacob Grimm. Directly after his main work on Friesische Rechtsquellen (Berlin, 1840; online, Internet Archive) Richthofen published also an Altfriesisches Wörterbuch (Göttingen, 1840; online, Internet Archive). The Richthofen website offers a brief overview of the manuscripts, a timeline of research and the whereabouts of the manuscripts, and it presents educational programs on Frisian (legal) history for children in primary and secondary schools. Surely the recognition of the importance of these manuscripts and the homecoming a century ago was crowned by admission in 2022 to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register by its Dutch committee.

New research on these manuscripts at Leeuwarden has recently been done by Riemer Janssen, Anne Tjerk Popkema and Herre de Vries, directors and members of the Pastei research group for Frisian book history. The three researchers studied both the manuscripts and the incunable with the Freeske Landriucht and the riddle of the unknown printer and his publications. In the publication corner of the Pastei website, the Bibliotheca Pasteiensis, you can find the report on the ten manuscripts in the Richthofen collection (in Dutch). Their new descriptions of the ten manuscripts is also present at the Richthofen website, as is a report on their material condition. What Nijdam writes about Frisian legal manuscripts is important as a fair status quaestionis (pp. 14-17). Nijdam’s overview of texts place them in groups in chronological order which differs considerably from the order in the Freeska Landriucht.

Interestingly medieval manuscripts held at Tresoar in Leeuwarden, figure promintnely at the beta version of the new portal e-CodicesNL for medieval manuscripts in Dutch collections. This project will become the successor to Medieval Manuscripts in Dutch Collections (MMDC). At the new platform created by the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam and launched in March 2023 you will find currently digitized manuscripts from Tresoar, the Athenaeumbibliotheek, Deventer, and the Huis van het Boek (formerly Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum), The Hague.

The proof of the pudding is of course comparing the current descriptions at eCodicesNL, the MMDC portal, at the two websites created by Tresoar and the new descriptions offered by the Pastei research workgroup. For this purpose I choose at will the very first Richthofen manuscript (Leeuwarden, Tresoar, PBF, Hs R1) with the Emsinger Landrecht. The description at eCodicesNL gives the full provenance since Ernst Friedrich von Wicht in the sixteenth century. You can choose between a succinct overview and a full description with information about the incipit, layout and decoration, provenance and acquisition. The field for bibliography is still empty. The manuscript with the Emsinger Landrecht, an East Frisian law from 1312, can be viewed with the IIIF viewer, with some additional information, in particular on the language, stated as Western Frisian. The binding is described in the overview as medieval. At MMDC you will find just one coloured image, but there are two references to scholarly literature, and also the nickname and siglum of this manuscript, the Derde Emsinger handschrift (“E3”).

The website for the Richthofenkolleksje gives the name, the signature and siglum of the manuscript, the date of the single text, without a date for the manuscript itself. The page on the manuscripts does lead you to the two reports by the Pastei group. The description in the Pastei report runs for twelve pages. The language is determined as Oosterlauwers Fries, East Frisian, which seems more probalble than Western Frisian; I suppose there is just a typing mistake at eCodicesNL. The binding is dated in the late eighteenth century. The provenance at eCodicesNL stems from this report which states the fact it is only a summary of a publication by a group member. In this report the content of the Emsinger Landrecht is meticulously described in its consisting parts.

In the digital library of Tresoar one is referred for information about the contents to the manuscript catalogue edited by Jacob van Sluis, Inventaris van de handschriften van de voormalige Provinsjale Biblioteek fan Fryslân (Ljouwert, 2007), online in this digital library. Van Sluis devotes just two pages to the ten Richthofen manuscripts (pp. 406-407), with some key references to editions and scholarly literature but omitting dimensions and the number of folios, evidently a decision taken in view of the sheer mass of other manuscripts to be described in this summary manuscript catalogue. The digital library of Tresoar, too, refers you for the ten legal manuscripts to the reports of the Pastei research group for full information. Hopefully the educational material of the Richthofen website uses the chance to tell children and students something about medieval book production, Frisian law or material subjects around the manuscipts. Already a single extra page on one of these themes would make this website more substantial.

My first impression after just checking just one example is that you can use both eCodicesNL and MMDC for finding a reliable concise codicological description, and with its access to digitized manuscripts eCodicesNL scores clearly. The Richthofen website and the digital library of Tresoar point you to the reports created by the members of Pastei for very full descriptions meriting close attention. The staff of the eCodicesNL project, Irene van Renswoude, Renée Schilling and Mariken Teeuwen, clearly states the fact that their three-year project (2020-2023) is still incomplete, notably for bibliographical references and digitized manuscripts yet to be uploaded and description to be added. Most of the current descriptions stem from the MMDC portal. The XML-TEI data are not yet publicly available, and DOI’s have to be added to each item. 180 out of 205 digitized manuscripts for the pilot project are now online. By choosing the Swiss e-codices platform as its model, even frankly as best practice to be followed, the team of eCodicesNL sets its aim high and hopes to find funding for a sequel to attain to a full extent the high quality level it strives for.

Paths to be discovered and pursued

At the end of a rather long post showing various sides of current research on and access to Frisian legal sources it is clear these resources help you very much to delve into them and use them for widening your view of both Frisian, German and Scandinavian medieval law. In a post on Nordic manuscripts and inscriptions with runes I presented some of the online resources for Scandinavian medieval laws, and in another post I looked at translations of Scandinavian laws from the Middle Ages and projects for other languages. These posts are already a bit older, from 2011 and 2016, and this makes me happier to mention here the project Voices of Law: Languages, Text and Practice which I detected only when finishing this contribution. Translators of medieval legal texts face multiple challenges just as much as editors do. De Jong, Hallebeek and Nijdam did not start from scratch, but I was really surprised they offer their translations, too. May their volume serve as a bridge and an invitation for closer cooperation between translators, and of course also as a spur to integrate medieval Frisian laws when comparing Scandinavian and other legislation from the northern part of medieval Europe!

A postscript

The Athenaeumbibliotheek in Deventer presents its digital collections – with manuscripts, printed books, maps and a database on printers in Deventer – on a separate platform, Athenaeum Collecties. The Huis van het Boek in The Hague presents under the heading Collecties Online only its online catalogue. Digitized illuminated medieval manuscripts of this museum can be found at the shared platform of the Dutch Royal Library for this genre. Currently 69 manuscripts from The Hague, 59 from Deventer and 52 from Leeuwarden are online at eCodicesNL.