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.

Entering the field of Byzantine law

A mosaic with emperor Justinian – Ravenna, San Vitale – source: Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes real or supposed barriers keep you from investigating new subjects. For a long period I saw the sources of Byzantine law as a conglomerate of difficultly accessible sources. On my legal history website Rechtshistorie I scarely mentioned Byzantium and its laws, and to be honest, I was not always aware of this substantial omission. Nowadays algorithms tend to lead your focus to themes and issues, but this time a personal announcement about a new introduction to Byzantine law finally pushed me into adding some lines and references to my webpage on Roman law. On top of that came the question to look again for modern translations of the several components of the Justinian compilation. In this post I will tell you briefly about this new handbook and modern ways to approach Byzantine legal history.

Changing perspectives

When I started studying legal history in the early eighties of the last century three fields captured my attention: Roman law, medieval (canon) law and Old Dutch Law. Only gradually other fields such as the common law came into view, partially guided or seduced by the open stacks of the former law library at the Janskerkhof in Utrecht, a place often mentioned here. For my dissertation the medieval ius commune and its development during the Early Modern period became central in my research. When I looked at the study of the Justinian Digest Byzantine law at last came more into my view, thanks also to the projects of other researchers. At some point I detected the handbook by N. van der Wal and J.H.A. Lokin, Historiae graeco-romani iuris delineatio. Les sources du droit byzantin de 300 à 1453 (Groningen 1985). A month spent in Frankfurt am Main also meant literally coming a bit closer to current research on Byzantine law.

The history of the Byzantine empire or East Roman Empire spans a millennium. and somehow this period remained long at a distance for me, and I guess for many others, too. Judith Herrin’s classic work Byzantium (2007) did reach my bookshelves, but even though she devoted a short chapter to Byzantine legal history I was not pushed into action to update my website. This month I was surprised to reread a brief post from 2010 on my blog with some useful information about Byzantium and its legal sources. At Wikipedia you can now find articles on Byzantine law in various languages, often presenting in some detail the historical development of laws and legislation, but their sections on primary legal sources are often very succinct.

Thanks to Daphne Penna and her kind message last December I looked at the book she published with Roos Meijering, A sourcebook on Byzantine law. Illustrating Byzantine law through the sources (Leiden-Boston 2022). This introduction is also available online, with full access for private and institutional buyers, but with a bibliography in open access. The book of Meijering and Penna is more than just an anthology of well-chosen substantial and representative examples of sources for Byzantium’s legal history. The editors really want to make students and scholars first and foremost enthusiast about Byzantine law. Thus their book is more than only a modern successor to H.J. Scheltema’s Florilegium iurisprudentiae Graeco-Romanae (Leiden 1950).

With Scheltema we see one of the truly great scholars dealing with the sources of Byzantine law. Together with D. Holwerda and N. van der Wal he succeeded in completing the massive new edition of the Basilicorum libri LX (17 vol., The Hague-Groningen 1955-1988). This edition gives both the text of the Basilica and the accompanying scholia (glosslike commentaries) in two separate series. The Dutch translation of the entire Corpus Iuris Civilis has just thirteen volumes.

Last year I did notice the Basilica Online, but my first visit was coloured by the perception this resource was only accessible for subscribers and subscribing institutions. I did not want to present it here or at my website as a stand-alone resource for Byzantine law with most of its parts out of reach for casual visitors. Luckily the new handbook acted as a nudge to look at it longer and better. Two important features of the Basilica Online are presented in open access, a bibliography by Th. van Bochove and a new praefatio by B.H. Stolte. If the new anthology with all its qualities does not yet convince you it is possible to find safe guidance to Byzantine legal history, these contributions by Van Bochove and Stolte should make you rethink your assumptions about this subject. Both authors do not hide the problems of their field, but their explanations and guiding remarks are illuminating. Stolte stresses the value of the Latin translation offered by Heimbach, and he notes the lack of an overview of the various tituli, some consequences of the separation between text and scholia, and the absence of the promised new Prolegomena in the Groningen edition of the Basilica. This edition depended very much on the use of microfilmed manuscripts, and some important manuscripts came only very late into view.

For my website the challenge was now to find a balance between redoing without any need the efforts for full introductions done by these scholars from Groningen or presenting a succinct but helpful series of commented references to major publications and editions, and assuring the result gives due attention to the work done by scholars working elsewhere, too. Daphne Penna convinced me quickly to present such information on my webpage for Roman law.

In my concise overview I mention in particular modern introductions. For the Basilica I point of course to the modern edition and its online presence, but I point also to a digitized version of the older edition by Heimbach and other German scholars. It seemed logical to create a section with some other sources available in modern editions, and I added references to online resources for finding Greek manuscripts and modern translations of Greek works.

Revisiting translations for Roman law

In January 2022 I assumed my overview of modern translations for Roman law was fairly complete, and thus I perhaps underestimated the value of the idea to provide more translations in European languages of Justinian’s Digest, the obvious aim of the project of Bela Pokol (Budapest) who invoked the help of DeepL to create translations into fifteen languages, In my post about his massive enterprise, aiming at contemporary lawyers and less at scholars of Roman law, I tried to establish the merits of DeepL’s translating capacities and to assess the value of Pokol’s translation which has the English translation by Samuel P. Scott as its starting point, not the Latin original. By the way, DeepL deals now with 29 languages, including Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Bahasa Indonesia, but there is no Latin.

By sheer coincidence Bela Pokol asked me last week to look again at the presence of completed translations for Justinian’s Digest in modern languages. Using resources such as Unesco’s Index Translationum and the Karlsruher Virtual Catalogue I noticed I had not yet added everything I had deemed necessary at my web page. Even the incomplete but most valuable German translation project which reached D. 34 in 2012 was missing. I checked also the library catalogue of the Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie in Frankfurt am Main.

Eventually a second hunt for finding a digital version of the volumes of the Repertorium der Handschriften des byzantinischen Rechts led me inter alia to the French Pinakes portal for Greek manuscripts (IRHT, Paris-Orleans) which mentions among its links the databases of Princeton University Library for tracing digitized Greek manuscripts and modern translations of Byzantine sources. Both databases can be used with a filter for Law. Luckily at Pinakes the three volumes of the repertory for Byzantine legal manuscripts have been used. It seems the PDF’s of the repertory created by L. Burgmann, A. Schminck, D. Getov and other scholars are now absent at the server of the institute in Frankfurt; I could only retrieve them for the first and third volume. Many volumes of the Fontes Minores series edited in Frankfurt with articles and editions of legal texts are now available online in Göttingen.

You will agree with me that with a fair number of modern introductions in several languages, important online introductory essays and bibliographies in open access, a number of recent editions of legal texts, some of them with translation, and even online access to repertories for (digitized) manuscripts and translations, you can no longer deem Byzantine law completely out of your reach. I can imagine you might feel a bit dazzled by the efforts of eminent scholars! However, surely Penna and Meijering have done their utmost best to infect you with their enthusiasm to embark on your own journey into Byzantium’s legal history. An empire surviving more than one thousand years and covering in some periods large areas of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor deserves scholarly attention, in particular when you realize the Eastern Roman empire played a key role in transmitting the sources of the classical Roman lawyers.

Keys to understanding the ancient Egyptian empire

A few months ago already I spotted the beautiful catalogue Hieroglyphs. Unlocking ancient Egypt for the exhibition with this name at the British Museum (13 October 2022-19 February 2023). My initial interest was the palaeographical side of hieroglyphs. In 1822 Jean-François Champollion famously announced his decipherment of this script. One of the great merits of the exhibition is showing not only the Rosetta Stone as crucial to this breakthrough, but a combination of his own stamina and intellectual creativity, the comparison of several sources, languages and scripts, and not in the least cooperation with many people in Europe, Britain and Egypt. The exhibition traces in fact the development of what we now know as Egyptology from the Middle Ages to the present. I will not forget to look at legal sources in this fascinating story of philological work, the acquisition of cultural heritage by European countries and the challenges of Egyptology in our days. By choosing Egypt as a subject I follow my tradition of starting a new year with a contribution about an empire or imperial laws.

A story spanning centuries

My own encounters with hieroglyphs did not start at the British Museum in 1980 and admiring the Rosetta Stone, but already earlier on. In 1976 I saw a copy of the Rosetta Stone in the municipal museum of Figeac, Champollion’s place of birth. He was truly one of the few heroes in philology from the nineteenth century, next to scholars such as the Grimm brothers and Wilhelm von Humboldt. The exhibition catalogue does not start with the heroic struggle between Thomas Young and Champollion, but takes you first to the fascination for Egypt that started much earlier. The first chapter of the exhibition catalogue, edited and largely written by Ilona Regulski, is aptly called ‘The truth in translation’. She charts attempts at decipherment from medieval Islamic scholars upto 1835, the age of the European vogue of collecting Egyptian antiquities at all costs by governments, tourists, museums and scholars. Regulski opens the catalogue with an introduction to the aims of the exhibition, followed by a lucid and concise explanation of the writing system in the hieroglyphs by Pascal Vernus. The crucial features of hieroglyphs are the combined use of both logograms representing concepts and actual objects on one hand, and using ideograms for phonetic representation on the other hand. This combination worked for centuries as a code which proved very hard to crack.

Champollion’s manuscript and the first edition of the Lettre à M. Dacier, 1822 – image source British Museum

The second chapter describes the almost legendary race to decipherment led by Thomas Young (1773-1829) and Champollion (1790-1832) accelerated by the finding of the Rosetta Stone in 1799. Regulski shows that both men were only occasionly the archetypical chauvinist enemies so often depicted. Far more important were their individual choices to prefer at some point hieratic, demotic or Coptic script as the main road to understanding. Perhaps more important was Young’s vision of Egypt as a beneficiary of wisdom from classical Greece against Champollion’s perspective of Egypt as the origin of classical Antiquity. When you cloak such perspectives in terms of supremacy and inferiority a far more pervasive bias can easily develop. Both men made some wrong turns in their research. Champollion was very lucky with his scholarly training, his connections and his choice of other resources to combine with the Rosetta Stone. It was not just a matter of focusing on the royal names in cartouches, but of gaining insight in the peculiar qualities of hieroglyphs where logograms mostly represented concepts, but also could be used to represent sounds in the rendering of foreign names, such as Ptolemaios and Cleopatra, the two names that finally brought Champollion on the right track to complete and reliable decipherment. With the beautiful and most telling illustrations in view from several museums it becomes clear, too, how much easier it is now to compare such sources. On the website of the British Museum Regulski presents a concise overview of the steps taken by Young and Champollion in their attempts at decipherment.

My curiosity for hieroglyphs grew even more by an episode of the National Geographic tv series Lost treasures of Egypt on the written legacy of Tutanchamon. Deft research of a number of objects connected with this pharaoh led to the suspicion some objects were originally destined for or commissioned by a forgotten Egyptian queen who was almost literally written out of Egyptian history. The most obvious way to do this was tampering with the names in cartouches. In one case the new name was obviously superimposed with a different kind of gold leaf. In some cases there are indications similar attempts were done for Tutanchamon’s legacy, too.

In the third chapter of the catalogue Regulski leads you away from the pharaohs, religion and Egyptian dignitaries to the impact of decipherment for understanding Egypt’s culture and society at large. For example, rather slowly grew any true understanding of Egyptian poetry and its genres, as shown by Richard Bruce Parkinson in his contribution.

‘Rediscovering ancient Egypt’ is the title of the fourth chapter, but it could have been named discovering equally well. Understanding the pharaohs, their reigns and dynasties certainly did not escape from reinterpretation thanks to finally being able to read and understand hieroglyphs, hieratic and demotic script correctly. Bilingualism during the Ptolemaic period comes into view, as are the concept of time and views of the afterlife. Personal life gets attention, too, with subjects such as crime, family, marriage and divorce, satire, love, medicine and magic. Several specialists contributed to this chapter. Here and elsewhere in the catalogue you will find texts in translations as examples of particular source genres.

In the short paragraph on crime (pp. 201-204) Ilona Regulski looks at a variety of texts, from royal decrees to court proceedings and private notes. Legal documents could touch upon many subjects, including mortgages and loans. The evidence is preserved in inscriptions and papyri. For the history of daily life and family relations Susanne Beck points to the existence of family archives (pp. 204-209). The footnotes to both paragraphs point you to relevant literature. The great strength here is showing all kinds of documentary evidence and objects.

In the fifth and final chapter new approaches are presented. In the first paragraph Monica Betti and Franziska Naether introduce the Leipzig project for an online version of the Rosetta Stone. Fayza Haikal connects in her short contribution the decipherment of Egyptian scripts and the ongoing efforts of Egyptologists with the search for Egyptian identity. Her point of using knowledge of Arabic poetry to understand aspects of ancient Egyptian poetry is well made. Egypt’s fragmented ancient cultural heritage belongs both to mankind and to living Egyptians who can contribute from inside Egypt – mentally and physically – to research into Egypt’s multi-layered history. This contribution certainly serves its purpose to underline the need to prevent a kind of de vous, chez vous, sans vous in doing research concerning Egypt’s history of more than four millennia.

Matters for reflection

My summaries of the five main chapters of this splendid catalogue do hardly justice to the wealth of information and insights they bring, and to the wonderful accessible writing style of all contributors. The catalogue is a heavy book, but it is hard to put it down and not to read it in one session!

By showing objects now held in various countries and bringing in the assistance of scholars from many corners of the world the catalogue and the exhibition show graphically some of the dilemmas facing current Egyptologists. How must one deal with the fragile remains of antiquities that were taken from Egypt with care or carelessly from their original context? Hardly any untouched mummy has survived nowadays, and the few ones that do show – thanks to modern research methods – things we would not know in any other way. Even when you return objects to Egypt it is not or only seldom possible to restore their original configuration. It is much to the credit of Champollion he pleaded with the Ottoman authorities to impose at least some restrictions on the large-scale industry of providing Europe indiscriminately with Egyptian antiquities. Some most valuable object genres were disregarded at all. Objects were even simply thrown away immediately because Europeans were not interested in them in the early nineteenth century. Of course some scholars and institutions tried to work diligently, but they could not always maintain high standards of conduct. Surely it is important to see that the hunt for contemporary copies of the Rosetta Stone and for similar trilingual or bilingual inscriptions did help to see this object in a wider setting. The catalogue provides you with an overview of these inscriptions in an appendix.

The catalogue with so many qualities misses only a few things. There is no list of contributors and their affiliations. For some lenders of objects their location is specified, but for most institutions this is not mentioned at all. The lenders contribute immensely to the value of this exhibition with their willingness to lend in some cases truly unique objects. The very presence of Egyptian antiquities in so many institutions all over Europe, not only in London or Paris, could hardly have been shown better. Not only the major European countries took part in the race to acquire the supposedly or really most important objects.

Egyptology as a discipline recently received heavy blows by stories about outrageous behaviour around original sources, in particular papyri. This exhibition helps to show the genuine efforts for solid and reliable study of ancient resources which outshine the selfish aims of some people who acted against fundamental principles of good science. Cooperation, comparison and critical understanding are essential for keeping research into classical Antiquity at the level the many subjects and periods included within it fully deserve.

Hieroglyphs. Unlocking ancient Egypt – London, British Museum, 13 October 2022 – 19 February 2023

Medieval sources for Normandy’s (legal) history

Musing about a possible goal for a holiday this summer France is bound to enter my thoughts! Thus it made me really happy to find a new portal about French regional history with an European dimension. The portal Norécrit. Aus sources de la Normandie. Pratiques de l’écrit das la Normandie médiévale is a project at the Université de Caen Normandie bringing you a tripartite online corpus with sources for legal history, ecclesiastical administration and the history of medieval archives and libraries, in particular for the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel. In earlier posts I looked here at Norman customary law and at the cultural heritage in the form of manuscripts from Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres. What kind of sources can you find at Norécrit? How does the version presented at the new portal differ from earlier (online) editions?

Familiar and unfamiliar

The portal Norécrit came to my attention thanks to the Réseau des médiévistes belges de langue française (RMBLF) which offers a calendar of scholarly events concerning medieval studies in Europe, and much else, too, such as notices about new publications and online projects. Let’s first chart the institutional constellation for Norécrit. The portal is the fruit of a team at the Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines (MRSH), and more specifically its unit Centre Michel de Boüard – CRAHAM (UMR 6273). Earlier on this centre launched in cooperation with numerous other institutions already the Bibliothèque virtuelle du Mont Saint-Michel. You can read more about the CRAHAM also at its blog Les Échos du Craham.

Law in medieval Normandy

The first section of Norécrit is directly concerned with medieval legal history. The équipe for this section is led by the director of CRAHAM, Laurence Jean-Marie. Under the heading Ecrits nomratif et vitalité économique. Les coutumes des villes et des ports you will find nineteen texts with customary law. Those for harbors contain regulations for tolls, they are not just tariff lists. The introduction states clearly we should not expect too much uniformity. Many texts are not official statements, but instead more privately produced text collections. Texts concerning forestry law have not been included. The Grand Coutumier de Normandie is not mentioned at all, since these texts have clearly a more local range. The Coutumes de la prévôté d’Harfleur (1387) is the first text edited at Norécrit, and the edition comes with a useful introduction and a presentation of the sources. A nineteenth-century edition used only one archival source, but here three medieval sources have been used for the new edition. You can browse the text using the sommaire or use the search function (recherche). This section brings a most valuable addition for the study of customary law in Normandy.

Viewing church life in the archdiocese Rouen

Administration par l’écrit dans l’Église du XIIIe siècle is the theme of the second section, led by Grégory Combalbert, and more specifically the development of the use of written records in the archdiocese Rouen covering the territory of Normandy. Three sources brought together here can show you church life during the thirteenth century in great detail. Apart from a pouillé, an overview of parishes in this archdiocese and episcopal acts from four archbishops the main resource here is the famous register of archiepiscopal visitations created by Eudes (Odo) Rigaud, archbishop from 1248 until 1275.

I suppose I am not the only scholar remembering reading about him in the great synthesis of medieval ecclesiastical history by the late Sir Richard William Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth 1970). The concise introduction to the visitations refers to both old and modern literature about this very active archbishop and his register. The edition by Théodose Bonnin, Regestrum visitationum archiepiscopi Rothomagensis : journal des visites pastorales d’Eude Rigaud, archevêque de Rouen 1248-1269 (Rouen 1852) can be consulted online at Gallica as can also the manuscript Paris, BnF, ms. latin 1245, alas only taken from an old but serviceable microfilm. It is wise to look at the full description of this manuscript at the website of the BnF, too, because it points you to some scholarly articles and the English translation by Sidney M. Brown with an introduction by Jeremiah F. O’Sullivan, The register of Eudes of Rigaud (New York-London 1964).

A page of the pouillé for Rouen, 1236-1306 – Paris, BnF, ms. Latin 11052, fol, 5v – image source: Paris, BnF

The document with an overview of parishes in the archdiocese Rouen between 1236 and 1306, too, is preserved in a manuscript held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Ms. Latin 11052). Léopold Delisle published an edition of the text, ‘Polyptychum Rotomagensis dioecesis’, in: Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France XXIII (Paris, 1876) pp. 228-331. The manuscript has been digitized in full color at Gallica, and you can find a succinct description in the online Archives et manuscrits catalog of the BnF.

Acts of four archbishops of Rouen between 1231 and 1275 form the third and last element in this section. Currently only acts up to 1257 are presented in the online edition. For some acts of Eudes Rigaud copies are found in his register. The edition contains both the texts of original charters and of later copies. The critical apparatus and annotation are all you can desire. It has to be noted that some seventy acts of the 154 acts stem from Eudes Rigaud. This Franciscan scholar and archbishop was clearly in many ways exceptional, but even when you acknowledge the bias caused by his zealous personality he remains most remarkable.

The archives and libraries of monasteries

The third axe of the project at the Université de Caen is led by Marie Bisson and focuses on one particular and very singular abbey, the Benedictine abbey under royal protection of the Mont Saint-Michel. The projected corpus of texts at Norécrit has not yet been completed. As for now you will find liturgical texts, followed by De abbatibus, the chronicle written by abbot Robert de Torigni about earlier abbots, and a subsection with sources concerning miracles happening at or touching Mont Saint-Michel. In a later phase of the project a corpus of texts written and reunited by Dom Thomas Le Roy in 1647 and 1648 will be published, and also the Constitutiones abbatiae Sancti Michaelis (1258) and statutes issued by pope Gregory IX. The constitutions will be edited from the manuscript Avranches, BM, 214, f. 9-16, and the papal statutes are at fol. 8-9 of this manuscript which you can view online in the Bibliothèque virtuelle du Mont Saint-Michel. In fact you will find there a description of this manuscript and already the incipits and explicits. It would be helpful if the French team provides this link at Norécrit, too. As an excuse for not doing this they can point to the online journal Tabularia. Sources écrits des mondes normands médiévaux with in the 2019 issue a critical edition of De abbatibus with translations in English and Italian by Pierre Bouet, Marie Bisson and others [‘Écrire l’histoire des abbés du Mont Saint-Michel 3. Édition critique et traduction’]. As a bonus they can point to the blog Mondes nordidiques et normands médiévaux.

Three windows on medieval Normandy

After creating the Bibliothèque virtuell du Mont Saint-Michel with numerous digitized manuscripts, most of them held at Avranches, it is not by coincidence this abbey figures large, too, at the new Norécrit portal. Its preeminence simply cannot be denied, but the portal helps to create a more balanced view in the two other sections. It is is splendid to see customary law at a local and municipal level, thus helping to place the Grand Coutumier de Normandie in its original context. In the Bibliothèque David Hoüard, Bibliothèque numérique de droit normand you can find numerous digitized resources concerning law in Normandy from the Middle Ages onwards. You might want to look also at the blog for the project RIN CONDÉ  (Constitution d’un Droit européen : six siècles de coutumiers normands). By the way, Gallica has among its Essentiels du droit a fine section with books and medieval manuscripts around the Coutume de Normandie. The second section of Norécrit brings together precious and interesting sources on medieval church administration and canon law. When searching for synodal statutes from Rouen you can find fourteen texts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in the Corpus synodalium created at Stanford University.

The connections between Normandy and England, and the position of this duchy within France are obvious reasons for looking at Normandy as a region with European importance already in the medieval period. Hopefully my brief introduction to Norécrit and references to some accompanying projects and blogs helps you to put Normandy into perspective as more than just a lovely region for a summer holiday in France!

A postscript

At the CRAHAM Grégory Combalbert has created an online edition for acts of the bishops of Évreux from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Actes des évêques d’Évreux (xi^e siècle-1223), surely worth mentioning here, too. You can view also images of these charters and acts.

A great institution at 200: The École des Chartes

Jubilees come in various forms. Some are obviously too arbitrary or only remotely interesting, others call rigthly for your time and attention. Among French educational institutions the grandes établissements take pride of place. The École nationale des chartes (ENC) in Paris is surely very special among them. In 2021 it celebrates its bicentenary. Although it is obvious to make a comparison with the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich, commemorated here in 2019 for its own bicentenary, the ENC distinguishes itself by being a school for archivists and paleographers. In this post I will look at the fundamental aspects of the ENC, some of its former pupils and at some famous episodes from its history.

The institutional setting

The royal ordinance of February 22, 1821 for the foundation of the ENC – image ENC

Fairly recently the ENC became a part of the Université PSL (Paris Sciences & Lettres) after a period as part of the university Paris Sorbonne, hence the different URL’s for some elements of its current digital presence. I had better start here with stating that the ENC is formally not a grande école or grand établissement with an independent status, but it ranks decidedly with its equals. I should tell you also immediately I am deeply impressed by a work on the development of history as a profession in France during the nineteenth century, written by Pim den Boer, Geschiedenis als beroep. De professionalisering van de geschiedbeoefening in Frankrijk (1818-1914) (NIjmegen 1987). This study helps you very much to see major institutions, minor and major figures and developments in their context. During the nineteenth century the ENC provided France in the first place with archivists and paleographers who put their work in archives at the service of historians. The chartistes did write theses, but these stayed closed to the documents; aktengemäss was Den Boer’s vignette for their production. We tend to associate the ENC with critical source editions, but producing book length editions is a much later development. The ENC shows its core qualities in the new critical edition of the royal ordinance of February 22, 1821 founding this institution, available online as a PDF and introduced with a video.

The creation of a journal by the ENC, the Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes (BEC) in 1839 was an initiative of the newly founded Société de l’École des Chartes. It is one of the oldest still existing scientific journals. You can find digitized issues at the Persée portal up to 2015. Among the issues from this century are some thematic volumes. With its training in the auxiliary historical sciences and its insistence on using historical research methods the ENC soon became a model institution. Dlplomatics, paleography, chronolology and sigillography are perhaps the best known auxiliary sciences for historians. These disciplines are still taught at the ENC, but next to the classic training for archivists the ENC offers four other masters. digital humanities for historians, digital humanities, transnational history and medieval studies. At the Theleme portal the ENC offers course materials, dossiers on several themes, and a number of bibliographies. You can benefit for example from the materials on book history in the Cours section. When reading Early Modern French documents you will encounter abbreviations listed in the Dictionnaire des abréviations françaises.

The ENC uniquely has both a library and a journal called bibliothèque, and both deserve some attention here. Its collections brought the library a recognition for excellence (Collections d’Excellence). Of course there is also a bibliothèque numérique, with apart form licensed resources also three digital collections from its own holdings, and three virtual exhibits. For the theses of students the library has created a subdomain in its digital library called ThENC@. On a second subdomain Theses you search in all these since 1840. PhD theses defended at the ENC between 2013 and 2020 are conveniently mentioned in a list.

Celebrating a bicentenaire

Of course it is clear the projected celebrations for the bicentenaire could only partially proceed in its original planned format. I will therefore skip presenting the program, except for the special issue on the jubilee published by the history journal L’Histoire (PDF). It is much more interesting to look at some of the educational platforms creaetd by the ENC, one of them put online only a few weeks ago.

The French sense for structure has led the ENC to create yet another subdomain for is applications with the nice abbreviation DH, because a number of them are a part of digital humanities. You can have a look at applications under development, too. The best known is perhaps Éditions en ligne de l’École des chartes (Élec), with currently 32 electronic editions. A few years ago I wrote here a contribution about Graziella Pastore’s edition of the Livre de jostice et de plet. The most used online edition is probably the great dictionary – actually formally only a glossary – for medieval Latin created by Charles de Fresne du Cange. The theme range of the editions is really wide. There are also some acts of scientific congresses, and for example a repertory for medieval French translations of texts in classical Latin and Greek. Among other projects I simply did not know about the online version of the Dictionnaire topographique de la France (DicoTopo,) a very useful tool for tracing French (historical) geographical locations.

I had expected to find here also a reference to the Theleme portal, but the ENC views this as an educational resource. Theleme stands for Techniques pour l’Histoire en Ligne:: Études, Manuels, Exercices, Bibliographies, a host of things much needed by (French) historians. The bibliographies for the historical auxiliary disciplines are splendid. Among the tutorials (cours) I would single out those dealing with book and printing history. The Dictionnaire des abréviations françaises should inspire palaeographers worldwide to create similar tools showing abbreviations for their own country and language. The dossiers documentaires offer both historical and palaeographic commentaries for images of charters and other documents in French and Latin from France. They offer students a most useful introduction in studying medieval and later documents.

The latest addition to the fleet of subdomains and digital projects of the ENC is ADELE (Album de diplomatique en ligne), an online project providing images of medieval charters for diplomatics, the study of charters as an auxiliary historical discipline, a classic activity at the ENC since its foundation.

Beyond reading old scripts

Being able to study old scripts was perhaps the thing most clear to outsiders about chartistes. It was not a coincidence professors at and former students of the ENC got involved in looking at the infamous document posing itself as evidence in the Dreyfus case around 1900. Interestingly chartistes were found both among the dreyfusards, those defending captain Dreyfus, and among his fierce opponents. In an earlier contribution I looked at this case and the importance of a newly found secret dossier. I remember in particular reading the article about the position of former élèves by Bertrand Joly, ‘L’École des Chartes et l’Affaire Dreyfus’, BEC 147 (1989) 611-671 (online, Persée).

It is not entirely by chance that the scientist René Girard (1923-2015) , one of the most famous former students of the ENC, became interested in the role and importance of mechanisms for blaming people. His theories about scapegoat mechanisms made him most interesting for anthropologists, but legal historians, too, have to be aware of such phenomena, and not only when dealing with criminal law. Roger Martin du Gard (1881-1958) became an author of famous novels, foremost the series Les Thibaut (1922-1940), which brought him in 1937 the Nobel Prize for literature.

The ENC does not have its own various series of source editions like its slightly older German counterpart, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, but its professors and former students certainly produced numerous critical editions in the classic French series such as the Classiques de l’Histoire de France. Many theses defended at the ENC have as its core a source edition. Today the ENC offers four master degrees, including a degree for digital humanities, beside the original course for archiviste-paléographe. Its horizon goes beyond the Middle Ages. The MGH offer currently summer schools in the historical auxiliary sciences, but the institute does not have a school. A number of German historians did contributed editions for the MGH or were at some time a staff member. Both institutions have their own distinctive qualities and know an equally rich history with sometimes dramatic periods. Both deserve laurels as pioneers and models for contributing to historical research in Europe. For me 2021 would not be complete here without a commemoration of the ENC’s bicentennial!

Grotius through students’ eyes

During summer some lighter subjects can come into view, but sometimes you suddenly notice something well worth looking at. In order to protect you from too much centenary celebrations I try to choose every year just a few of them. A new virtual exhibit concerning Hugo Grotius starts with a winning title, Grotius: A life between freedom and oppression has been launched in March 2021 by Leiden University Library on a new platform for its web presentations. One of the most celebrated historic events in the canon of Dutch history is the escape of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) from castle Loevestein in 1621 where he was imprisoned as the chief follower of the late Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the statesman who had done so much in creating the blossoming Dutch Republic. An exhibition in Amersfoort on Van Oldenbarnevelt and prince Maurits (Maurice) came into view here a few years ago, and just like in that summer post a particular historical object will figure here. The matters under discussion here are in the end not just light-weight, and thus I finished this post only in autumn.

A canonical figure in Dutch legal history

Before you sigh at the prospect of going on well-trodden paths with me you should know nine students of Leiden University College in The Hague prepared the virtual exhibit in English. Together with their supervisors Hanne Cuyckens and Jacqueline Hylkema they did choose five focal points which are just different enough to make you curious again about Grotius. In the first section, Leiden, the student, he forming years of the child prodigy form the subject. Grotius matriculated at Leiden in 1594 at the age of ten years. For each subject a number of objects are shown, in this case for example the matriculation register, a portrait of Grotius at fifteen, the earliest printed map of Leiden and a portrait of the famous philologist Joseph Justus Scaliger, the best known teacher of Grotius. Grotius started at Leiden with literary studies, not with jurisprudence, freedom indeed for this child prodigy to develop himself in many directions. In 1598 he obtained his doctoral degree in law at Orléans.

In the second section we do not jump at once to his major publications such as Mare Liberum (1609), followed by De iure belli ac pacis (1625) and the Inleidinghe tot de Hollandsche rechtsgeleerdheid (1631). Even a young superstar as Grotius had to immerse himself in at least one subject not just in learned books and contemporary theory, but also in daily practice. Grotius was admitted in 1599 as an advocate to the Hof van Holland, the high court of Holland in The Hague. His position as a lawyer made him for Van Oldenbarnevelt the obvious candidate to set out at length the Dutch position on the freedom of the seas. Already in 1598 Grotius accompanied him on a embassy to France, and afterwards the two men stayed in contact with each other. In this section there is also attention for Grotius’ religious views articulated in his work Ordinum pietas (1613). It put him firmly on the side of the Remonstrant movement favored also by Oldenbarnevelt.

Castle Loevestein – image Wikimedia Commons

The third section brings you to Grotius’ imprisonment at Loevestein Castle on ground of his religious and political views. The castle is placed on a marvelous strategic spot in the Rhine delta where several of its branches come together. The nearby towns of Gorinchem and Woudrichem are not easily reached. The background with the execution of Oldenbarnevelt in 1619 gets due attention, as are his religious views. You can also look at two letters. When you try to navigate to subsequent items this does not always function correctly. I had expected a link to the online version of the edition of Grotius’ correspondence at the portal of the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam nor to the version at its philological platform Textual Scholarship or to the catalogue at Early Modern Letters Online, but you can look at scans of original letters held at Leiden. The project Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-Century Dutch Republic could be added as well.

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  The chest of the Rijksmuseum

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  The chest at Loevestein, photo Tom Haartsen

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  The chest at Delft, photo Ivo Hoekstra

At Loevestein Grotius was allowed to borrow books from Leiden university library. These books were transported in a large and heavy chest. Hidden in the book chest Grotius could famously escape on March 22, 1621 from castle Loevestein. In 2020 a part of the television series created by the Rijksmuseum on Historisch bewijs (Historical evidence) was devoted to establishing which book chest of three chests held at the Rijksmuseum, Loevestein and Museum Prinsenhof in Delft was probably the original book chest. The chest in Delft has suitable dimensions and a more reliable provenance from the Graswinckel family who was closely connected to the De Groot family in Delft, but no evidence was adduced to confirm its actual use beyond any doubt. Thus the chest is a kind of objet de mémoire connected with an almost mythical heroic story, and the natural point of focus at castle Loevestein, a typical nationalist lieu de mémoire on a beautiful spot at the point where the Waal branch of the Rhine and a branch of the Meuse come together.

In the fourth section of the online exhibit we arrive with Grotius as an exile in Paris. In this town he completed his treatise De iure belli ac pacis. Apart from letters and a map of Paris poetry by Grotius and a poem by Joost van den Vondel come into view here.

The autograph manuscript of “De iure praedae” – Leiden University Library, ms. BPL 917 – image Leiden University Library

The fifth and final section of the virtual exhibit deals with the major treatise by Grotius on prize law, De iure praedae. The Leiden manuscript BPL 917 is the sole handwritten and even autograph witness to the text of Grotius’ treatise on prize law and booty composed between 1604 and 1609. Only one chapter was published during his life as Mare Liberum (1609). The restoration of this manuscript and the subsequent digitization for the full digital edition published in 2015 are the very heart of this section.

By choosing four actual locations – Leiden, The Hague, Loevestein and Paris – the nine students succeed easily in freeing Grotius from a too narrow view of him as only a figure in Dutch history who became first a victim of religious strife and later on a figure head in the struggle for tolerance. These backgrounds do matter indeed. No doubt some Dutch people will be surprised to find the article on Grotius in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and its rich bibliography. He is regarded as the very founder of natural law. Thus there is an entry for Grotius, too, in the database Natural Law 1625-1850, one of the fruits of a research project of the universities at Halle, Erfurt and Bayreuth. By showing not just works by Grotius, and not only his legal works, but also his poems and a treatise on religion, the students show him as a major intellectual in European history. You might with me deplore the lack of further links or an essential bibliography, but there is surely a place for the approach chosen for this virtual exhibit.

Recently Leiden University launched a new platform for its online exhibits. Among the digital collections of Leiden University Library is a section with nearly fifty virtual exhibitions; in some cases only a PDF remains available.

As for creating a Grotius Year the museum Loevestein can readily be pardoned for seeking a way to attract visitors after the corona lockdowns in the Netherlands. The website for the public events around the Grotius commemoration does mention his importance as a lawyer, diplomat and theologian. Themes as the freedom of thought and religious tolerance are vitally relevant in our contemporary world. Showing things have been very different in the past shakes (young) people free from thinking the present has always been there as a a most natural thing.

In earlier posts about Grotius, in particular the one about a rare early edition of De iure beli ac pacis, I provided information about his main legal works concerning the first printed editions, modern editions, translations and digital versions. I would like to point again to the presence of text versions and seventeenth-century or modern translations into Dutch for a number of his works at the portal of the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (DBNL). In the DBNL you can find also digital versions of numerous older publications about Grotius, and the entry for his historical works by E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and G. van der Lem in their work on Early Modern Dutch historiography, Repertorium van geschiedschrijvers in Nederland 1500-1800 (The Hague 1990).

The riches of the Peace Palace Library

The Peace Palace Library (PPL) in The Hague is the natural starting point for any research on Hugo Grotius. Lately this library has put its digital collections on a new separate platform, but for some silly reason the actual URL is not easily found at the website of the PPL, as are alas some other web addresses. A few years ago I wrote here about the Scheldt River collection which now can be found, too, at this new platform. It seems the PPL provides for each collection on this platform a special page with the correct link. However, there is no page or news item for the new platform itself, or maybe it has only to be added to the top bar menu. A platform with eight interesting collections in open access merits a place in the spotlights.

The PPL contributes two collections in open access to LLMC Digital, but no direct links are give on the PPL’s special page for its collections at LLMC Digital. It is only fair to say that finding these collections at the LLMC portal is a feat in itself. So far my attempts to locate them simply failed. Both LLMC Digital and the website of the PPL lack a general search function and a sitemap. The collections at both websites deserve better accessibility. As for the licensed digital collections and also for the databases accessible through the PPL you might contemplate acquiring a library card of this library. For this choice, too, hving a clear overview of digitized materials and their access is most practical.

Grotius figures of course also on the website of the PPL, starting with the chat function called Ask Hugo! The web page on the Grotius Collection tells you about the general background and the famous bibliography by Ter Meulen and Diermanse [J. ter Meulen and P.P.J. Diermanse (eds.), Bibliographie des écrits imprimés de Hugo Grotius (The Hague 1950)] and a more recent catalogue of the PPL’s holdings of works by Grotius. Instead of the direct link to the licensed Grotius Collection Online: Printed Works of Brill only a link to the title in the PPL library catalogue is provided, yet another minor howler. In fact this digital collection contains also numerous works dealing with Old Dutch law, and I would even single it out as a very representative selection of legal books from the Dutch Republic brought most conveniently together. A research guide for Grotius would be a welcome addition to the thirty existing online guides on the website of the Peace Palace Library. A quick search for a nutshell guide to Grotius brought me only to a very concise guide created by the Alexander Campbell King Law Library at the University of Georgia. It is sensible to look at the Grotius pages of Wikipedia in several languages.

Gaining a wider view

I would like to end this post constructively, and not with criticism on defects. Grotius belongs to the group of thinkers students and scholars cannot approach completely straightforward. Often there is abundant scholarly activity, there might be opposing schools and roads of interpretation and across linguistic borders studies can take refreshing turns closed to those staying content with Anglo-American scholarship. Luckily regularly guides are published in the form of essay volumes by an international team of distinguished scholars to bridge such gaps and bring together different views and themes surrounding a major thinker. In September 2021 the Cambridge Companion to Hugo Grotius appeared in print and online, edited by Randall Lesaffer and Janne Nijman. Interestingly this seems to be the first companion volume to Grotius. There is not yet A Very Short Introduction on Grotius from Oxford, presumably exactly because his versatility can hardly be sufficiently shown in a slim volume by a single author. Hopefully different views on Grotius find space in the scholarly journal Grotiana with apart for the printed version some articles published online in open access.

This year’s International Open Access Week will take place from October 25 to 31, 2021. The existence of a number of vital online resources for doing research on Grotius only accessible as licensed resources, most often through the services of libraries, diminishes the chances for those outside the circle of blessed beneficiaries to learn more about Grotius or about other major intellectuals whose thought changed the world forever. Institutions not caring or simply forgetting to provide even links to their own digital collections, be they in open or licensed access, should reflect on their duties and capacities to help both scholars and the general public. Of course in some cases it is a matter of discommunication or worse between for example a library staff, a project leader and the communication officers.

It might seem seducing to bring your collections under the flag of a prestigious publishing company, but if this means closing access to your priceless possessions for most of the world the ultimate blame should be in my view on their original holder. In my view individual scholars, scholarly communities, publishers and research institutions, including university presses, all have their own ongoing responsibility to discuss matters concerning access to scholarly publications. In actual life both institutions with digitized resources and publishers increasingly offer digitized materials both in licensed and in open access, depending on their policies. Hopefully solutions can be found to create and assure wider access whenever possible and feasible for us and future generations interested in the versatile mind of Grotius and the impact of his works through the centuries. Sailing oceans with free, affordable and sustainable access to research resources would be most helpful to achieve this aim.

Finding the right form for medieval formulae

Medieval sources come in a variety of genres. Among sources for medieval legal history the Early Medieval formulae are in a class of its own. The kind of Latin is not as classical as you might like it to be, and the rather old standard edition has now too many defects to be useful. Creating a new edition will be a project requiring besides excellent knowledge of medieval Latin and among much more also stamina and financial support during many years. The Universität Hamburg has got the courage to start the edition project Formulae – Litterae – Chartae led by Philippe Depreux in cooperation with the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Munich. The project is scheduled to run from 2017 to 2031, and thus I look here at it in a relatively early phase.

Legal actions, letters and charters

The title of the project might be the first surprise. Why include also letters and charters when formulae are the core? In the edition of Karl Zeumer, Formulae Merowingici et Karolini aevi. Accedunt ordines iudiciorum Dei (Hannover, 1882-1886; online, Munich) the formulae have been edited not in the sequence of the manuscripts he used, but in his own order, interspersed with other materials. This way of proceeding is rather remarkable in view of German philological practice in the late nineteenth century, and certainly it stands out among the editions published under the aegis of the MGH.

Formulae were not just formalized legal actions. The project team explains that Early Medieval formulae were a kind of model letters to be used, each with a distinct purpose. The formulae were to be followed as strictly as the formulae of the oldest Romans before standard actions came into existence. They could also serve as models of letters and charters from which you could benefit with some freedom. In my view the mixture of letters and charters is somewhat akin to the mix of both letters and charters in the project Epistolae: Medieval Women’s Latin Letters discussed here some years ago. Both projects face the challenge of dealing with two different genres, not just in view of their content, but also for editorial policies.

Apart from an introduction to the formulae the project team offers also introductions to letters and charters. Their character as a means not just for private communication, but as elements of public communication is stressed. The transmission of formulae in collections was not straightforward in clear sections with a discernable order. Karl Zeumer and Eugène de Rozière, an earlier editor of formulae in the nineteenth century, were indeed faced with a genre which called for deep reflection and great skills. Zeumer’s edition can be found in a searchable version also at the digital platform dMGH of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. De Rozière (1820-1896) was very young when he published his first edition of formulae, the Formulae Andegavenses publiées d’après le manuscrit de Weingarten actuellement à Fulde (Paris 1844; online, Google (copy Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague)). He was in 1855 one of the founders of the Revue historique de droit français et étranger. In 1869 he published an edition of the Liber Diurnus with formulae used in the papal chancery from the fifth to the eleventh century.

Work in progress

Now you might already sigh that even fifteen years is too short to tackle this complex of three resource genres, but here comes a second surprise: The team at Hamburg gives you online access in their Werkstatt to a reading interface and an editorial interface for the collections. The interface can be viewed in German, English and French. The online laboratory brings you to the beta version for the formulae Andecavenses (from Angers), to an edition for one manuscript (Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, D1), to charters and letters, and also to a bibliography and a list of manuscripts and charters. Amazingly, at least one manuscript is still held in the library of a functioning Benedictine abbey, at Egmond-Binnen in the Dutch province North Holland near Alkmaar. At Leiden are five manuscripts, but most manuscripts can be found in Munich, Paris, Vienna and Vatican City. One of the reasons for writing about formulae is my memory of a workshop about this genre held at Leiden with some of the manuscripts in front of the participants. The list of manuscripts ends with the editions created for formulae from the seventeenth century until the twentieth century, with names as Étienne Baluze and Jean Mabillon among the editors.

Interface with the manuscript Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, D 1, f. 136r (detail)

In the section for charters and letters you can read older editions of these sources. When you look at the manuscript Fulda, Hessische Landesbibliothek, D 1, again the Formulae Andecavenses come into view. Currently the list of manuscripts show only the locations, signatures and editiorial sigla. It would be wonderful to have here also descriptions of these manuscripts and links to digitized versions, qualities giving strength to the projects Bibliotheca Legum: eine Handschriftendatenbank zum weltlichen Recht im Frankenreich and Capitularia: Edition der fränkischen Herrschererlasse, both led by Karl Ubl at the Universität Köln. Information about the manuscript at Fulda is indeed present in the Bibliotheca legum. No doubt relevant manuscripts will eventually become accessible at the editorial interface in Hamburg.

At least two databases elsewhere help you to look at the various collections with formulae. The repertory Geschichtsquellen des deutschen Mittelalters (Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften) contains information about the transmission and relevant literature for many relevant collections with formulae. The Heidelberger Hypertextserver has a section on Formelbucher which touches also later periods. Among the Early Medieval formulae in particular the Formulae Marculfi receive attention in Heidelberg.

Surely the project at Hamburg will benefit enormously from the way you can nowadays have digitized versions of manuscripts in front of you on your computer screen, but creating new editions for this century will have to take into account much more than in the old editions the interplay with letters and surviving charters which are now, too, much more easily within our reach thanks to modern editions and digital versions. The differences in transmission of the texts, too, are much more visible. Once upon a time it was seducing to create an edition with the supposed Urtext, but seeing every manuscript, letter or charter as a witness with its own qualities and defects will do more justice to the life and afterlife of these intriguing texts. Some of the manuscripts are quite small. You might want to look at the place of formulae between other texts in a manuscript, too. The project website in Hamburg has a section Fokus der Forschung with recent contributions about many aspects of the Early Medieval formulae. Hopefully the new edition will help to bring the formulae again into view for scholars wanting to investigate in particular the way Late Antiquity evolved into the medieval period. Legal history, the uses of literacy and the interaction between various genres are just a few of the subjects to be enriched from careful and inventive studies of formulae.

200 years Monumenta Germaniae Historica, a story of editions, projects and scholars

Every year some subjects and themes are brought to your attention just because there is some jubilee or centenary. In the face of their sheer number I wisely do not venture to trouble you with all centennial or even bicentennial celebrations. For me the Monumenta Germaniae Historica are exceptional in many ways. In view of the scholarly impact on the field of medieval history, German and European history, and in particular many fields of legal history. A meeting in Frankfurt am Main on January 20, 1819 has had a very important influence on the shaping of history as a scholarly discipline taught at universities. The flow of editions produced in two centuries is one thing to marvel at, but the story of this institution is much richer. Some celebrations have already been held in January, but the last week of June 2019 has been chosen as the week with more events around this bicentenary. I will try to be as concise as possible, but the story of the MGH deserves space!

History, nationalism, Romanticism

The start of the project we now know as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica happened in a particular time and place. Horst Fuhrmann analyzed concisely in his splendid book on the scholars of the MGH the start of this enterprise and much more, and I follow here his lead [Sind eben alles menschen gewesen. Gelehrtenleben im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Dargestellt am Beispiel der Monumenta Germaniae Historica und ihrer Mitarbeiter (Munich 1998; online, MGH (PDF))]. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1803, according to the late Peter Landau more important in Germany’s history than the reforms created by Napoleon, after the Napoleonic wars and the establishment of a new political order in Europe at the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) there was time in Germany to look backwards. You would assume that a number of people influenced by Romanticism founded the Gesellschaft für ältere deuttsche Geschichtskunde. the society for the study of older German history, but Lorenz vom Stein (1757-1831) and his visitors were not the archetypical romantics. This lawyer and former Prussian minister met at Frankfurt am Main with four delegates of the Bundestag, the central organ of the Deutsche Bund (1815). Vom Stein was known for his proposals for reforming public law and administration. Instead of looking back at the past he wanted to work to rebuild and strengthen Germany as a nation. The project originally set out to publish a number of sources in a relatively short time span, maybe ten years. Vom Stein had been in contact with leading German romantics to ask for their opinion and support.

In the first years the project met with some approval but also with indifference, criticism and even derision. Metternich subjected the first volumes to censorship. One of the ironies was the fact a team of students was sent to Paris to copy medieval manuscripts, because they were more bountiful and better accessible in the French capital than in other major libraries. The German states did not want to put money into the MGH. An offer for funding the project came not from German politicians, but from the Russian tsar. Vom Stein politely declined and spend a lot of his own money. In 1820 an accompanying journal was started, the Archiv für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde, the ancestor of the current Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters. From 1823 onwards an archivist from Hannover, Georg Heinrich Pertz (1795-1876), led the small team around Vom Stein. He designed the division of the editions into five major series, the Scriptores for editions of works dealing with history, the Leges with legal resources, the Epistolae for letters, the Diplomata for charters, and the Antiquitates for other sources. Pertz stayed with the Monumenta for fifty years.

Fuhrmann, himself a former president of the MGH, was quite right in writing a story about scholars as people, ordinary mortals with great gifts and sometimes wilful personal characteristics. The strife between Pertz and Georg Waitz (1813-1886) was not only a matter of different visions of history and scholarly practices, an archivist developing on his own the historical-critical method to edit sources against a scholar trained by Ranke, but also a clash of two humans. Some projects stemming from the MGH belong to the Vorarbeiten, preliminary works such as the Regesta Imperii started by Johann Friedrich Böhmer who later on after quarrels with the MGH decided to edit a series Fontes rerum Germanicarum (4 vol., Stuttgart 1843-1868). Others, too, had their trouble with the MGH and started their own series. Philipp Jaffé edited after his break with Pertz the series Bibliotheca rerum Germanicarum (6 vol., Berlin 1864-1873). Thus the MGH delivered not only its editions, but set path-breaking examples of using the historical-critical method. It became a model for projects abroad by the very fact they initially stuck to just publishing sources, not scholarly monographs. Controversies about its role and aims led to other important scholarly projects in the field of medieval history.

A human history

With Philipp Jaffé (1819-1870) we encounter perhaps the most tragic of all Monumentisten. Jaffé had studied in Berlin, and without getting a Ph.D. he started his own projects. The first edition of his Regesta pontificum Romanorum, a work listing 11,000 papal acts and charters up to 1198, appeared in 1851. In these years he studied medicine in Berlin and Vienna, believing he had no chance to make a career as an historian being a Jew. However, Ranke considered Jaffé his very best student and made him the first ausserplanmässiger professor in all Germany. Between 1854 and 1862 he worked for the MGH. On the title pages of the six volumes of the Scriptores series Jaffé helped editing his name was not mentioned. In 1863 a feud developed between him and Pertz, who eventually wanted to deny him access to the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Jaffé started his own series with major source editions. He got estranged from his family, converted to Lutheranism, and in growing isolation he took his life in 1870, a fact that shocked the scholarly world.

It is impossible to follow here the MGH and its contributors through all its history, if only for the sheer number of scholars for which you can find photographs at the MGH website. Jews had indeed a great role for the published editions. In particular Harry Bresslau, the author of the Geschichte der Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Hannover 1921; reprint 1976; online, MGH) felt hurt under antisemitic attacks. During the period of the Third Reich Ernst Perels and Wilhelm Levison were among the targets of the Nazi regime. The MGH became a Reichsinstitut für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde, but Nazi control was not total. In 1939 Levison could find a refuge in Durham. In 1944 the MGH had to leave Berlin for Pommersfelden near Bamberg. In 1949 the institute came to Munich where the MGH found in 1967 its current location in the main building of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. You can find the titles of the MGH’s own publications about its history on this web page.

The library collection of the MGH is now famous for its riches, but it was only after getting in 1907 the books of Ludwig Traube and in 1911 those of Oswald Holder-Egger a substantial library came into existence [see Norbert Martin, ‘Die Bibliothek der Monumenta Germaniae’, Bibliotheksforum Bayern 19/3 (1991) 287-294]. One of the special qualities of the online catalogue is the presence of links to reviews of works in the Deutsches Archiv. Nowadays we may take dMGH, the digital MGH, for granted, but such projects are solely possible with financial means and other support by institutions as for example the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The MGH have a legal status under public law as an institution for the Freistaat Bayern with subventions by other Bundesländer. I have been fortunate to work in 1997 and 1998 with the library staff of the MGH, and my fond memories of these days prompt me to write here, too. Apart from the vast collection with printed books on the history of medieval Europe the Virtueller Lesesaal offers a lot of books in several sections. Here I would like to single out the digital version of Paul Oskar Kristeller’s Latin manuscript books before 1600. A list of the printed catalogues and unpublished inventories of extant collections (4th edition, 1993; supplement, 2006; revised digital edition 2016). This indispensable guide has been revised and updated by Sigrid Krämer and Birgit Christine Arensmann.

A mighty enterprise

The time with just five massive series of editions is long ago, a mighty fleet of series has sailed into our century. The Monumenta Germaniae Historica in its printed form take many shelves in a library and make a mighty impression. In the early eighties the very stacks with the folio volumes of the MGH collapsed in the rather new library of the history department in Utrecht, luckily before opening hours. Apart from a library catalogue you might better use the yearly leaflet with an overview of the editions which duly was posted near these stacks. The Gesamtverzeichnis 2019 is also available online (PDF). In 1997 even the library of the MGH decided to catalog again all editions since 1826.

Legal historians will within the old series and the current program of edition projects first of all turn to the Leges and Diplomata series. In the Leges series there are currently projects for sources such as the Collectio Gaudenziana (Wolfgang Kaiser), the Collectio Walcausina (Charles Radding), a part of the Leges Langobardorum, capitularies, formulae, and even for the most intriguing and difficult corpus of Pseudo-Isidorian decretals, just one example of a project which cannot be seen properly without looking to other forged collections around it. More soberly it is also an example of a project running over many decades. If you remember Antonio Agustín’s reluctance in the late sixteenth century to pronounce a clear verdict, a forgery or genuine material, even though he was in the best position to do this, you will understand the courage of scholars such as Horst Fuhrmann, Schafer Williams, Klaus Zechiel-Eckes and now Eric Knibbs to proceed in their wake with finally producing a critical text edition. Among other projects in this series are editions of medieval councils, a new edition of Regino of Prüm, royal constitutions, the glosses to the Sachsenspiegel, and the Latin version of an other treatise on German law, the Schwabenspiegel. It is good to see here attention for several kinds of legal systems

The publications within the Diplomata series may seem more straightforward. The sheer mass of charters issued from the Carolingian period onwards is indeed much greater than one could calculate in the first half of the nineteenth century. Nowadays not only charters of kings and emperors are being edited, volumes for some princes have appeared, too, and also for the Latin kings of Jerusalem. For the charters of the emperors Henry V and Henry VI there is even a digital pre-edition online, for the latter only for German recipients. Dieter Hägemann and Jaap Kruisheer, assisted by Alfred Gawlik, edited the two volumes of Die Urkunden Heinrich Raspes und Wilhelms von Holland (2 vol., Wiesbaden 1989-2006) with the charters of the only Roman king from the Low Countries. It is also the only case in which a Dutch scholar worked on a volume published for the MGH.

As for the newer series it is sensible to look here at just three series. In the series MGH Hilfsmittel we find works such as Uwe Horst, Die Kanonessammlung Polycarpus des Gregor von S. Grisogono. Quellen und Tendenzen (Wiesbaden 1980), the Wortkonkordanz zum Decretum Gratiani, Timothy Reuter and Gabriel Silagi (eds.) (5 vol., Wiesbaden 1990), the monograph of Rudolf Pokorny and Hartmut Hoffmann, Das Dekret des Bischofs Burchard von Worms. Textstufen – Frühe Verbreitung – Vorlagen (Wiesbaden 1991), and the printed edition of Linda Fowler-Magerl, Clavis Canonum. Selected canon law collections before 1140 (2005). Her work is now available online in a database with a German and English interface. Danica Summerlin and Christoph Rolker have added new canonical collections to the database.

The series Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica is one of the oldest series to supplement the original program. You can choose at will in this series for classic studies. I mention here for legal history Arno Borst, Die Katharer (Stuttgart 1953), Horst Fuhrmann, Einfluß und Verbreitung der pseudoisidorischen Fälschungen von ihrem Auftauchen bis in die neuere Zeit (3 vol., Stuttgart 1972-1974), the six volumes of the congress Fälschungen im Mittelalter (6 vol., Stuttgart 1988-1990), Harald Siems, Handel und Wucher im Spiegel frühmittelalterlicher Rechtsquellen (Stuttgart 1992), and Maike Huneke, Iurisprudentia romano-saxonica. Die Glosse zum Sachsenspiegel-Lehnrecht und die Anfänge deutscher Rechtswissenschaft (Wiesbaden 2014).

Within Studien und Texte, the third series which I like to mention, you will find indeed both source editions and monographs, such as Stephan Beulertz, Das Verbot der Laieninvestitur im Investiturstreit (Wiesbaden 1991), and Sascha Ragg, Ketzer und Recht. Die weltliche Ketzergesetzgebung des Hochmittelalters unter dem Einfluß des römischen und kanonischen Rechts (Wiesbaden 2006), the first of a number of recent volumes in this series with studies and editions concerning medieval inquisitions. For your convenience I refer to the page on medieval legal procedure of my legal history website where I have included these works.

Time to celebrate

In its long and illustrious history the Monumenta Germaniae Historica had to deal with many crises and decisive moments. Think only of the 1880 fire in the house of Theodor Mommsen in Charlottenburg which destroyed working materials of the Monumenta, his personal library and some precious manuscripts in his custody! Remember the periods with a stifling political climate in the dark times of the Nazi regime. During the Second World War some materials were stored in a mine which was destroyed in 1945. Many projects suffered setbacks when editors failed to do their jobs properly, when death came too soon for experts dealing with most difficult matters, or clashes happened between scholars. The presidents and the Zentraldirektion have to steer between many rocks. Sometimes the presence of particular scholars is most helpful. From my own period I cherish the memory of Reinhard Elze, former director of the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome, who walked each day from his home to the MGH in the Ludwigstrasse. I think his steady rhythm and kind presence helped everyone in a way to stay focused and open to people and ways to solve problems of any kind. The funny poster makes me remember the way Horst Fuhrmann could make jokes and show his happiness.

The program for the jubilee contained events in Berlin and Vienna in January, the festivities of last week in Munich, and a symposium to be held at the DHI in Rome on November 28-29, 2019 on “Das Reichsinstitut für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde 1935 bis 1945 – ein “Kriegsbeitrag der Geisteswissenschaften”? [The research institute of the Reich for the study of older German history, 1935-1945. A war contribution of the humanities?]. The DHI and the MGH were forced to merge in 1935. What impact did the control of the Reich have, and not only for substantially widening the budget? On June 28 a discussion panel rightly stressed the international character of the MGH has today. In 1947 the MGH for the first time elected corresponding fellows, then and ever since from abroad. The flyer for this event shows a list with more than fifty scholars from Europe, the USA and Japan. The main scholarly meeting on June 28 and 29 dealt with the theme Quellenforschung im 21. Jahrhundert [Research on sources in the 21st century].

What laurels does the MGH need? The founders put a crown of oak leafs around the motto in Latin which defies translation, but inspiration and labor of love is the very heart, not only the forests of medieval Germany. Using the older volumes with the introductions in Latin, slowing down your reading speed to digest the wealth of information in the double apparatus of the annotation, checking the Deutsches Archiv for thorough articles, concise information about new works, and the yearly messages of the Zentraldirektion on the progress of editions in preparation, looking at the website for new books in the holdings of the MGH which you might want to use yourself, too, you realize the contributors to the MGH put all their talents into helping to create sure foundations for research, Grundlagenforschung. They challenge you to do your own tasks in a similar dedicated way. Let’s hope the staff and fellows of the MGH can continue to work for the community of scholars in the fields of medieval law and history!

 

Encircled by knowledge: New life for old encyclopedias

In happy and carefree moments you can be tempted to think that only the internet made it possible to have all possible kinds of knowledge within you reach. However, for centuries having a compact or massive encyclopedia on the shelves of your personal library seemed already to warrant this vision. Lawyers were no strangers to this opinion as I showed in a post about Early Modern legal encyclopedias. Interestingly there is a movement to recreate the world of old encyclopedias. In this post I want to look at some projects which bring you to online versions of older encyclopedic works. Some of them are still familiar among historians, others will come as a surprise.

On digital and real shelves

Among the Early Modern works that you might still turn to is at least one German work. I confess I had not quite realized how voluminous the Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexikon aller Kunste und Wissenschaften by Johann Heinrich Zedler (1706-1751), published in 64 volumes between 1732 and 1750, followed by a supplement in four volumes. In 2006 two German libraries held an exhibition in his honour, Seine Welt Wissen. Enzyklopädien in der Frühen Neuzeit [Knowing your world. Encyclopedias in the Early Modern age]. This year I could use the Zedler in its online version provided by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich to expand scarce information about members of a family in Kleve who served the Brandenburg government of this duchy. The makers of the 2006 exhibition drily note the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences. des arts et métiers by Diderot and D’Alembert has only 17 volumes with 72,000 articles on 23,000 pages, whereas Zedler serves you 290,000 articles on 68,000 pages.

Before exploring other works it is fair to look quickly at the great Encyclopédie and its current digital availability. Foremost among its modern incarnations is the searchable version offered by the team of ARTFL in Chicago. Its editors, Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe, immediately mention the 11 volumes with illustrations that set this encyclopedia apart from all its predecessors and contemporary competitors. These plates and the character and quality of the contributions still command respect and admiration. The editors at ARTFL count 74,000 articles on 18,000 text pages. The information about supplements published after 1772, links to forerunners of the Encyclopédie, a bibliography and other essays enhance the ARTFL version which stands out for the search possibilities of Philologic4.

More traditionally looking at first sight is the ENCCRE online version recently created by the French Académie des Sciences, with modern introductions and search facilities using a corrected Wikisource transcription. The acronym ENCCRE is a French pun on the word encre, ink. The Encyclopedia project for an English translation at the University of Michigan, too, offers more than a strict rendering from French into English. The plates can be quickly searched at Planches. Lexilogos does a great job in offering both the ARTFL and ENCCRE versions, and adding links to the text-only version in the French Wikisource, and last but not least to the digitized original volumes at Mazarinum, the digital library of the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris. This copy is used at ENCCRE, too.

In the limelight

Zedler and the Encyclopédie deserve scholarly attention and quickly accessible modern versions, but other valuable works can readily be found. Let’s look at a few websites which bring you both to other general encyclopedias and to works focusing on specific scientific disciplines. Let’s go straightforward to the heart of this post, a tour of the wonderful German Enzyklothek. A few years ago I had briefly visited this portal, and I put it aside with the impression it does not contain much for legal history. However, this time I became intrigued by its sheer coverage, and I marvelled at its holdings.

Peter Ketsch launched the Enzyklothek Historische Nachslchlagwerke in 2014. He offers access to digital versions or information about printed works in five sections: bibliographies, secondary literature, general encyclopedias, encyclopedias for specific disciplines, and biographic dictionaries. The sixth section for dictionaries is empty, a reminder you cannot expect everything at one portal. First of all it was a surprise for me to find here bibliographies. You will find here a number of entries concerning national bibliographies, but also some items for individual authors. For legal history I found in this corner only Rolf Lieberwirth’s study Christian Thomasius. Sein wissenschaftliches Lebenswerk. Eine Bibliographie (Weimar 1955). Among the bibliographies for specific disciplines Rechts- und Staatswissenschaften (disciplines concerning law, jurisprudence and government) are only announced, but alas no items have yet appeared under this heading. The general section on bibliographies starts with just one work from the late sixteenth century, and to me the choice of works in this section seems rather at random but nevertheless interesting. The section Enzyklopädistik with historical overviews and bibliographies of encyclopedias and specialised dictionaries is much richer.

The section Sekundärliteratur contains a more personal mix of things. In the corner with websites it is good to note the projects at Wolfenbüttel and Braunschweig for a virtual recreation of the Thesaurus eruditionis and similar works, and also Welt und Wissen auf der Bühne, a project about Early Modern works which used the metaphore of the theatre, a project I discussed here, too. For the legal disciplines Ketsch mentions just three titles in this part of his portal, on various subjects, from Zeremonialliteratur, texts written by lawyers about official ceremonies, to economical treatises and their forerunners, the Hausväterliteratur. By the way, here Ketsch indicates titles can appear in more rubrics. At this point the question about using either rubrics or a form of classification using a thesaurus or another form of tagging entries, and a second question is the choice for a database versus single pages. The search function clearly suggests the presence of a database, but the tagging of entries could be more generous. However, you can apply multiple filters for author, title, year, location, publisher and language. For the genre Hausväterliteratur there are now 784 entries. A section such as the one concerning publications about single medieval encyclopedic works contains nearly 4,000 items. As for now there is a total of 21,000 titles in this database. Whatever the quality of the coverage, the quantity of entries commands respect. For many entries Ketsch has added links to translations in other languages, reference works and bibliographies. In some cases you will see a series of incunabula editions of works, this seems too much of a good thing, even for Diogenes Laertius’ Vitae phlosophorum.

We must proceed now to the heart of Ketsch’s website, the general and specialized encyclopedias. For the general encyclopedias there is a division in periods (Antiquity, Middle Ages and Early Modern) and in entries for several modern languages. The presence of works in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian is a most welcome addition. In the section with Dutch encyclopedic works I encountered several books which you do not encounter often. In this respect it is good to see more popular and educational works. For the legal disciplines Ketsch mentions three German Konversationlexikons, in particular Herman Wagener’s Neues Conversations-Lexikon. Staats- und Gesellschafts-Lexikon (23 vol., Berlin, 1859-1867) was a massive project followed by modern successors. Ketsch scores by guiding you also to studies about the genre of the Konversationslexikon. If you want to know more about the Zedler Ketsch gives you some thirty publications.

The biographical section of the Enzyklothek shows national biographies for twenty countries, showing their rich history from printed works to online databases. The subsection with women’ biographies contains some eighty titles, almost exclusively translations of and studies about Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus. I had hoped for a very different content… At this point I must alert to Ketsch’s invitation for anyone interested to help him with his project.

How show one judge the merits of the Enzyklothek? The Swiss project on Enzyklopädien, Allgemeinwissen und Gesellschaft [Encyclopedias, general knowledge and society] stopped adding entries after the launch of Ketsch’s website. The overview of works of the Swiss project, launched in 2001, offers an alphabetical list of authors, a chronological overview and a drop down menu for particular genres. Its strength lies in the descriptions of works and the attention to the context and variety of encyclopedic works.

The project N-Zyklop (Universität Trier) which started in 2005 is another attempt at a full-scale database for finding encyclopedias. I checked here for works concerning Law (Recht). At first I was bewildered by the wide choice of works concerning trade and the presence of some biographical dictionaries, but you will find also the Vocabularium jurisprudentiae romanum by Otto Gradenwitz and other German scholars (Berlin 1903-1939). In particular the first edition of Jacob Bes’ Scheepvaarttermen. Handboek voor handel en scheepvaart (Amsterdam 1949) seemed gone astray, but in its multilingual version it became a classic work for maritime law, Chartering and shipping terms (1951). With some 5,000 entries and the possibillity to search for Dewey Decimal Classification codes in the advanced search mode N-Zyklop is certainly worth a visit, even if you have to translate the German terms used for every DDC code.

Lists versus databases

While preparing this post I thought I had spotted in the Enzyklothek an entry for the digitized version of the Lexikon für Kirchen- und Staatskirchenrecht, Axel von Campenhausen et alii (eds.) (3 vol., Paderborn, etc., 2000) in the section Digi20 of the Digitale Sammlungen of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, but I looked at the wrong place, and thus I was at first unable to retrace it. Finally I realized I had seen it in the German Wikisource list of online encyclopedias and lexicons. This work brings me to the final section of this contribution for a quick comparison of the specialized encyclopedia websites with the lists of encyclopedias offered at Wikisource. Some of my readers might well ask why I choose not to start with them. The main reason for my choice is the fact the lists at Wikisource and Wikipedia are not always the fruit of systematic and methodic search, but there is a clear degree of control, and thus the information can be most useful. In fact I had expected the name of a very conscious and active contributor to the German Wikisource as the main author or coordinating editor of this splendid list.

The German Wikisource page for encyclopedias has a section on Politik und Recht, politics and law. When you look at the works mentioned on it the Enzyklothek clearly is deficient. Among the notable works is the Deutsches Staats-Wörterbuch by Johann Kaspar Bluntschli and Karl Brater (11 vol., Stuttgart-Leipzig, 1857-1870). Bluntschli’s draft for a civil law code of the Swiss canton Zürich influenced the Schweizerisches Zivilgesetzbuch designed by Eugen Huber (1907). Bluntschli is better known as one of the founders of the Institute for International Law-Institut de Droit International. You will find als the first three editions of the Staatslexikon published by the Görres-Gesellschaft since 1887, with the eight edition now being published. Even today one can benefit from Emil Seckel’s continuation of the Heumanns Handlexikon zu den Quellen des römischen Rechts; the sixth edition (Jena 1929) has been digitized in Sevilla (PDF, 80 MB).

I would have been most happy to report here on the wealth of information in the English and French Wikisource for legal encyclopedias, but alas this is not possible. The English Wikisource bring you to the first edition of a single multivolume work, The laws of Engeland, being a complete statement of the whole law of Engeland (31 vol., London, 1907-1917) by the Earl of Halsbury, an encyclopedia from beginning to the end and nevertheless avoiding this word in its title. The English Wikipedia lists five online legal encyclopedias. For completeness’ sake I note that the similar French and Ukrainian Wikisource pages do not give you any legal encyclopedias, but the Russian Wikisource mentions three legal encyclopedias. It is only logical the German Wikisource has also an interesting page Rechtswissenschaft for digitized old laws and older legal works. Both the various Wikisources and Wikipedias as resources in open access gain everything from the input and efforts of contributors. In my view it is wrong not to take them as serious as other encyclopedias in print or online.

Some conclusions

This rapid tour of legal encyclopedias taught me a few things. Apart from my preference to delve into old books it is simply important to realize the great encyclopedias in print and online of our century have many forerunners, a number of them taking much space on your shelves. The famous ones had their competitors, but there was also a market for abridged versions. It is good to see you can often hardly distinguish between legal encyclopedias and legal dictionaries. Another thing is almost a returning refrain here: do not stay content using just one major resource for any subject. The question of languages is a second thread on my blog. The use of the translation tool in a particular web browser from an omnipresent IT firm helps you to get at least a rough idea of contents, and it teaches you knowing a language inside out does help you in many ways. The books on early economic thought and their focus on running a household is a welcome reminder economics only started in the nineteenth century to claim an existence as a science. Private law has captured more attention from legal historian than public law, and this bias, too, becomes more clear thanks to these projects.

Last but not least the predominance of German resources in this post is indeed due to my familiarity with German research. For German legal historians having the second edition of the Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte in front of you on your computer screen as HRG Digital has been a major qualitative step, although you have to subscribe to it or find a university library with a license for this online resource. It is one of the dictionaries containing much more than you would expect. There is also a printed version of the second edition. It is fitting to end here with the efforts of Gerhard Köbler in Innsbruck, who has not only published a number of historical legal dictionaries, but also maintains a massive portal on German and Austrian law and legal history, including for examples concise biographies of many lawyers. Köbler prefers web pages above a database. As for libraries with collections of Early Modern legal works, and increasingly also digital collections, you will not stop me pointing here regularly to the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main.

An update

In November 2023 Peter Ketsch, the founder of the Enzyklothek, kindly informed about some major updates at his portal for historical encyclopaedias and dictionaries. The choice of legal works, and for example also for works in Dutch, is often interesting, and Ketsch heklps you by often providing links to digitized versions of works. He even includes some pages of late medieval manuscripts. It is pleasant to revisit the Enzyklothek and to marvek at its wide coverage of subjects.

Between French and Roman law: Li livres de jostice et de plet

A few days after the celebrations of Quatorze Juillet, the French national day, I looked in the digital library with editions of the École nationale de Chartes, one of the French grands établissements, the famous school for the training of archivists and palaeographers. Not only can you find here a heading Édition de textes juridiques, but the text edited here anew and online since November 2016, Li livres de jostice et de plet, belongs to the classic legal texts of medieval France. The edition appeared online in 2016. Interestingly this text survives in its entirety only in a single manuscript at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (ms. fr. 2844). The text shows clear influences of Roman law, a fact sometimes used to frown upon. How sensible is it to judge the value of its text depending on the presence or absence of influences? It seems useful to look at it here in some detail, also because the new edition curated by Graziella Pastore comes into its own thanks to an accompanying website with more information, a combination that could serve as a model.

Between two laws

Li livres de jostice de plet is a treatise written in Old French and composed in the mid-thirteenth century in the Orléanais, the region around Orleans. Its twenty chapters follow the divisions of the Digesta Iustiniani: The chapters 1 to 10 follow the Digestum Vetus (D. 1 to D. 24.2), chapters 11 and 12 correspond with the Infortiatum (D. 24.3-D. 38), and the remaining chapters 13 to 20 with the Digestum Novum (D. 38-D. 50). The university of Orleans was famous for its law faculty, a fact which came into new light only since the twentieth century in research conducted at Leiden. I will refer to both universities later on.

In the edition published in 1850 by P.N. Rapetti – online in the Internet Archive – the parts of the chapters which contained translations of the Justinian Digest had been skipped. The manuscript Paris, BnF, ms. français 2844 has been digitized (Gallica). Some rather prominent notes written in later centuries show up on the cover and the first pages of the black-and-white digitized microfilm. The description of the edition explains that two other manuscripts have been adduced to complete textual lacunae in the part corresponding to the Infortiatum.The manuscript Bordeaux BM, 354 can be consulted online in the Selène digital library of the Bibliothèque Municipale in Bordeaux, but I could not find an online version of the other manuscript, Rouen BM 794. The use of these manuscript reminded met about my post last year about medieval laws in translation where I did not mention the Livres de jostice et de plet. In the online Catalogue collectif de France you can restrict your search to manuscripts and archives, and you will find in it information about both manuscripts, although this often leads you only to the nineteenth-century Catalogue général. On the other hand, the information about the manuscript BnF, ms. fr. 2844 given in the online edition is also very general. In the new edition all paragraphs with direct translations from the Digest are given in blue print.

In my earlier post I referred to the online bibliography of the Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français (DEAF), and this time I was much more aware how succinct the information it gives is. Interestingly there are two articles for the Livres de jostice et de plet, the first for the old edition without the Digest fragments, the second for those parts taken over from Roman law edited by Pastore. The entry in the DEAF points even to some mistakes in her edition.

Another rather elemental thing jumped into my face: How should one translate the title of this treatise, and where do we find online information about Old French? Jostice is clearly to be associated with justice, but plet is not a quite transparent word. Luckily a number of French dictionaries can be consulted online, including those for medieval French. The ATILF platform leads you to research projects, digital text corpora and dictionaries such as the Dictionnaire du Moyen Français for medieval French between 1300 and 1500, and the bibliography for the Godefroy, the nickname of the Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle edited by Frédéric Godefroy (10 vol., Paris 1880-1905), digitized in the Gallica digital library of the BnF. It is also very nifty accessible at Lexilogos with an option to switch dictionaries. Godefroy brings you to the word plait, with as its primary meaning “accord, convention, traité”, but also “procès, querelle, jugement, discussion”, to mention only the most relevant meanings. The compact dictionary edited by the famous linguist A. Greimas, Dictionnaire de l’ancien français jusqu’au milieu du XIVe siècle (Paris 1968) gives for plait seven main meanings with brief examples.

The etymology of plait is revealing: Plait stems from placitum, explained in the lemma plaid as being conform to the will. In Italian legal history the placita are charters with verdicts which contain in a number of cases formulaic references to Justinian’s Digest. Only in the eleventh century such references clearly point to actual use of the Digest. The online version of the DEAF with a preliminary version of the letters G to K gives a very elaborate lemma for justice and its various spellings. It is seducing to translate the title of the treatise with an alliteration, The Book of Justice and Judgment, but “The Book of Justice and Procedure” seems a reasonable translation.

The second website

On purpose I wrote the first part of my post without using the accompanying website, in the hope it will correct some of my findings and anyway tell us much more than I can do here. However, I cannot hide some mixed feelings in my first impressions. The second website is to a large extent a kind of pilot project for the proper use of meta-data. In fact in the introduction Pastore states this clearly. With just twenty titles in the bibliography and five persons discussed in the biographical section this seems too much of a good thing, especially when you see the wide range of possible output forms and the thoughtful addition of preset links to a host of websites, catalogues and digital libraries. Pastore mentions at the second site only the 1918 offprint of an article by Henri Stein, ‘Conjectures sur l’auteur du Livre de jostice et de plet’, Nouvelle revue historique de droit français et étranger 41 (1917) 346-382, but it figures correct in the bibliographical section of her introduction to the online edition. Stein’s contribution is not included at all in the online Bibliographie d’histoire du droit en langue française (Université de Lorraine, Nancy). The bibliography at the second website consists of printed and online editions of archival resources and texts, but the critical studies do not figure in it. The DEAF bibliography refers to a short article by Jaana Seppänen, ‘”Livre de jostice et de plet” – un texte à rééditer?’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 91 (1990) 153-156. The references in Stein’s article were used as materials to give some bones to this prototype website.

The section Le manuscrit brings you to an embedded version of the digitized microfilm of the manuscript, and to a link for the description of it in the Jonas database of the IRHT at Paris-Orléans. This database with a repertory of medieval manuscripts with texts in medieval French and Occitan gives a short description of the manuscript in the BnF – essentially: written on parchment, 200 folia, dimensions: 350 x 270 mm; language: French (langue d’oil); datation: 1260-1275; origin: Orléanais-Île de France, and the incipit of the main text – and refers for more details to an upcoming article by Graziella Pastore and [Frédéric] Duval, ‘La tradition française de l’Infortiat et le Livre de jostice et de plet’ in the Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, one of the oldest European history journals; it appeared in 2017 in BEC 121 (2013) 199-226. The issues from 1840 to 2012 can be consulted online at Persée. The entry in the Jonas database does not give the first name of Duval. You might want to check in the online bibliography of the Regesta Imperii how many medievalists share the name Duval! At Academia you can look at a poster created by Pastore concerning the matters to be discussed in the promised article, and even better, you can view online a registration of her lecture about Li livres de jostice et de plet given at the École nationale de Chartes on November 29, 2016 for the presentation of the online edition. The results she announces in her lecture make you impatient to read the full story. I will not give a complete spoiler here, but one of the elements which comes into focus is the role of medieval canon law.

The Jonas database does not indicate the presence at the start of the BnF manuscript of a royal ordinance from 1254 (fol. 1r-3r) and some chapters of the Établissements de Saint Louis at fol. 3r-4r, things duly noted by Rapetti. His introduction is certainly still worth reading. For further study of this second legal text the translation by F.R.P. Akehurst, The Etablissements de Saint Louis. Thirteenth-century legal texts from Tours, Orléans and Paris (Philadelphia, 1996) offers itself as a starting point. Of course Pastore should get credits for giving some information about five historical figures around the Livres de jostice et de plet, but you would want to have not only references to old editions or to Stein’s article. These persons were mainly officers with a royal charge, for example baillif (bailli), and their presence is suggestive. A recent essay by Bernard Ribémont, ‘Compiling and writing a legal treatise in France: the Livre de Jostice et de Plet’, in: News from the Raven: Essays from Sam Houston State University on Medieval and Renaissance Thought, Darci N. Hill (ed.) (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2014) 133-142, gives you an idea of paths to pursue. Ribémont does look in particular at the role of medieval canon law and the way canon law texts were translated and adapted in the Livres de jostice et de plet.

Between Paris and Orleans

In my view there is another fruitful way to approach these legal treatises, by paying attention to the university of Orleans. Only last year the online legal history journal Clio@Themis published a special dedicated to the theme La forge du droit. Naissance des identités juridiques en Europe (IV^e-XIII^e siècles), “The forge of law. The birth of legal identities in Europe (4th-13th centuries)”, with an article by Kees Bezemer (Leiden), ‘Jacques de Revigny (d. 1296): Roman law as a means to shape French law’. His footnotes refer to a number of his own publications, including ‘French customs in the commentaries of Jacques de Revigny’, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 62 (1994) 81-112. Bezemer devoted a book to Revigny, What Jacques saw. Thirteenth-century France through the eyes of Jacques de Revigny, professor of law at Orleans (Frankfurt am Main, 1997). Custom law in the eyes of De Revigny is the subject of the thesis of Laurent Waelkens (Universiteit Leuven) defended thirty years ago at Leiden, La théorie de la coutume chez Jacques de Révigny: édition et analyse de sa répétition sur la loi De quibus (D. 1, 3, 32) (Leiden, 1984). Sadly the online bibliography at Nancy does not contain this study of Waelkens, and for Bezemer only one publication has been entered. Bezemer and Waelkens follow the lead of the late Robert Feenstra who had entered the paths first walked by Eduard Maurits Meijers (1880-1954).

We will probably have to look also at an earlier generation of professors at Orleans, to the predecessors of Jacques de Revigny and Pierre de Belleperche, such as Guido de Cumis and Jean de Monchy. In this respect and for a good balance I have to mention a study by Marie Bassano, “Dominus domini mei dixit. . . “; Enseignement du droit et construction d’une identité des juristes et de la science juridique. Le studium d’Orléans (c. 1230-c. 1320) (Ph.D. thesis, Université Paris-2, 2008).

There is a clear need to look past the blinkers! From my point of view there seems to be a gap between an outdated belief on one side that any influence of Roman law in French medieval legal history is harmful, perhaps because this legal system contributed to the power of the French kings, and on the other side the fact Roman law offered itself as a normative system with the possibility to give legal customs a proper place. The French kings had indeed strong ambitions to become as powerful as their English counterpart and the German emperor, and they, too, enlisted everything and everyone that seemed useful for that purpose, with or without explicit use of Roman law. The online edition of Graziella Pastore should indeed offer yet another stimulus to look again at France in the thirteenth century in an open way. Using the French translations of Meijers’ articles concerning Orléans and French law provided by Robert Feenstra and H.FW.D. Fischer [Études d’histoire du droit (4 vol., Leiden 1956-1973)], and the studies of Bezemer and Waelkens, often accessible in French, give us the critical mass to do this. Let’s hope Pastore quickly puts things in order at the second website and brings us the promised new article in the Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes which should do justice to the almost two centuries long tradition of the École nationale des Chartes.

A postscript

On September 22, 2017 Kees Bezemer will retire from Leiden University after 42 years. A meeting in his honour will be held at the Law Faculty.

Graziella Pastore kindly provided me with complete information about her article which finally has been published. The second website is indeed a prototype she built around Stein’s article. Pastore pointed me also to the description of the manuscript at the BnF in the Miroir des classiques project of Frédéric Duval at the École nationale des Chartes.