Deciding to post a series on centers for legal history was an easy decision, and choosing the first centers to write on was not difficult, too. In 1997-1998 I worked at the Stephan-Kuttner-Institute of Medieval Canon Law in Munich. The center is named after its founder, Stephan Kuttner (1907-1996). Kuttner started his institute in 1955 at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. When he moved to Yale University in 1964 and again to Berkeley in 1970, the institute followed. The institute houses a great variety of materials: some 3,000 books on medieval canon law and legal history, hundreds of microfilms of medieval manuscripts, a dazzling correspondence with scholars from all over the world, and thousands of offprints of articles sent to him by scholars as a sign of his position in the scientific world. The library catalogue can be consulted online, and also the database for the papal decretals of the twelfth century. And how could one forget the series of text editions, the quadrennial congresses, and the Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law? When you realize that you find on a walking distance apart from the IMCL, now affiliated to the Leopold-Wenger-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte, also the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and the Grabmann-Institut for the history of medieval theology, one can imagine the possibilities at Munich for doing research for medieval history and law.
The IMCL is supported by ICMAC, the Iuris Canonici Medii Aevi Consociatio or International Society of Medieval Canon Law has since February 2010 its own website at the University of Toronto. Among the information presented you will find the digital version of the news bulletin Novellae. The design of the new website is graced by an image taken from the Utrecht Psalter.
A postscript
In 2013 the library of the IMCL has returned to the United States. Its new home is the Lillian Goldman Law Library of Yale University in New Haven, CT. The institute will move to Yale in 2015.
Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog 