When creating an article or even a blog post creating a mind map can be most helpful. Using maps to represent information about legal history or historic events and developments with a legal dimension can help you to see legal history in a wider perspective. This month Klaus Graf kindly alerted me at Archivalia to a German project with legal maps, Rechtskarten, the fruit of a cooperation between nine legal historians at a number of German universities. They aim at presenting an atlas touching on both legal and cultural history. Its current dimensions are still modest, but in my view thsi project can inspire other scholars to use or create maps for legal history, too. Somehow this project escaped my attention earlier on…
A variety of maps
The navigation of Rechtskarten is fairly simple. You can use the tabs for maps, authors, keywords (Stichwortregister) and timelines (Zeittafeln). Currently only sixteen subjects are presented, but their numbering shows at least one hundred subjects are in preparation. Thus it seems you should not worry too much about the fact four out of sixteen themes deal with the twentieth century. The earliest item concerns the Kaufunger Wald, a royal wood since the eight century until the late eleventh centuy. In this item created by Wilhelm A. Eckhardt the maps shown are both modern and old. The section Orte (locations) brings you to an interactive map guiding you to its exact location in the north of the modern Bundesland Hessen, to the north east of Kassel.
Wilhelm A. Eckhardt looks at legal iconography and legal ethnology in another contribution on village court locations in Hessen. Among the images is a photograph from the legal icongraphic collection of Karl Frölich held at and digitized by the Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie in Frankfurt am Main. I discussed the background and possible use of this collection in an earlier post (2015). In that post I mentioned already the LAGIS portal for the regional history of Hessen with a section on these Gerichtstätten. Eckhardt righly mentions this in the bibliography to his article, with the latest item in it dating from 2013. The original land registry maps for Hessen (Urkataster) can be searched online at the LAGIS portal, too.
Land registry map (Katasterkarte) of Reichensachsen in Hessen with a linden tree indicating the location of the village court, 1788 – image source Staatsarchiv Marburg, Karte B 234, photo by B. Krippner
Among the items for the twentieth century i was a bit disappointed when I saw the media for the German Democratic Republic (1949-1990). I had expected some maps of the former DDR, but Hans Hattenhauer only added three diagrams touching the organization of this state, in itself surely enlightening and useful, but not the kind of map you would expect. In his contribution Hattenhauer concisely shows the low position of law and lawyers with the DDR. This item is in a way rather close to using a mind map. The visualisation of in this case state organization can be very telling.
Mapping some subjects has progressed clearly since the start of this project, somewhere between 2000 and 2015; information about the background and start of Rechtskarten is lacking, but Jörn Eckert died in 2006. The articles on the foundation of universities in the Holy Roman Empire (Armin Wolf) and the coming of printing to Europe (Jörg Wolff) share the same map, and it is instructive to compare the presence of universities with the advance of printing presses. The Atlas of Early Printing (University of Iowa) does a better job in many respects. You can easily add a layer showing university towns to the interactive map. The question about universities and early printing remains certainly valuable.
It is rather strange that the interesting article on maps of the Holy Roman Empire and the perception of minor states by Armin Wolf lacks any image of the maps under discussion. Is German copyright here the problem or have the Rechtskarten simply been abandonded at some point? Anyway, updating articles is in some cases clearly needed. The bibliography for the article by Jörg Wolff concerning the Tractatus de fluminibus seu Tyberiadis of Bartolus de Saxoferrato (1313/1314-1357) mentions only literature in German until 1999. By the way, this is one of the three subjects within this project not exclusively connected with German legal history. Armin Wolf’s contribution on the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century as to some extent dynastic partitions lacks any map, image or location. The word Theatrum in the title of the work he discussed helped me to remember the project Welt und Wiissen auf der Bühne. Theatrum-Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit of the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel presented here in 2015.
Some musings
Sometimes things go differently than originally planned. Not every project succeeds, and though we all preach that you should learn from your faults and failures more often we hide them or try to forget about them. The Rechtskarten are in my view clearly an unfinished project, and not a failure. It is easy to point at shortcomings and omissions in this interesting pilot for a project with maps for legal history. I think the Rechtskarten can be revitalized. In fact it is a good exercise to come up with proposals for additions, corrections and updates. Some maps are now even only handwork. Only the articles on early printing and the foundation of universities belong to the field of cultural history. Many items lack a timetable, but the use of diagrams is an asset. The inclusion of some interactive maps is a sign this project certainly aimed – when feasible – at using modern tools. It would be great to have similar websites concerning subjects for other countries or regions, and I am sure you know some examples.
I had planned to open this year with other posts, but these I not have yet completed. Looking at an unfinished project with the potential to inspire others to create similar maps for their own field of interest seemed a wise thing to do!
Finding and describing sources can be a hard task. The efforts of scholars who start creating any kind of repertory face many challenges. For tracing manuscripts concerning the medieval ius commune some online repertories already exist. In IVS Commune online, a new project at the Università di Torino, not just manuscripts will be presented, but also early printed editions of the works of late medieval lawyers and other legal texts. The project will cover the period 1350-1650. In 2021 the start of work on this project was announced, and now the first results can be searched online. What are the core aims and distinctive qualities of the repertory? What does it bring for scholars, and what wishes can be expresses to strengthen it? In this post I would like to present some impressions of my first forays into this interesting repertory.
Legal texts in print and manuscripts
Two years ago, during the first online conference of Ius Illuminatum in September 2021, concisely reported upon here, Maria Alessandra Panzanelli Fratoni presented not only IVS Commune Online, but also a closely related project at the Italian MANUS manuscript portal called MANUS Iuridica. In fact visiting MANUS this month reminded me about the project in Turin, and it is by all means wise to devote here some space to it. I revisited the MANUS portal in a search for medieval manuscipts in Italy. Somehow I did not immediately think about the recent integration of the CODEX project for medieval manuscripts in Tuscany into the multiple catalogue search function at the Mirabile portal. The portal Nuova Bibliotheca Manoscritta for medieval manuscripts in Lombardy and the Veneto brings you not only a regional catalogue, but also a digital library. Manoscritti Datati d’Italia is another research tool fit for inclusion here.
The MANUS project explicitly builds on the pioneering overview by Gero Dolezalek and Hans van de Wouw, the Verzeichnis der Handschriften zum römischen Recht bis 1600 (4 vol., Frankfurt am Main 1974), now available online as the database Manuscripta juridica at a server of the Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie. In 1970 Dolezalek and Van de Wouw had to warn their readers that the descriptions given in the repertory in most cases did not stem from personal inspection. Fifty years ago a world with a plethora of online library catalogues, let alone digital access to medieval and Early Modern manuscripts, was still far away. Dolezalek promised an update with descriptions of canon law manuscripts, but alas no update of Manuscripta Iuridica has been performed since 2017.
The clear difference at IVS Commune online from the outset is the wish to add also printed editions of medieval legal texts. Panzarelli and her colleagues use data from incunable editions stored in the Text-Inc project of the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. Among other online resources that will be used to prepare the bibliographical data for authors, texts and editions is the European meta-catalogiue for Early Modern printed works, the Heritage of the Printed Book database (HPB).
Using IVS Commune online
The portal of IVS Commune online comes with three search interfaces, respectively for texts, names, and works. The first interface for texts contains in fact also search fields for names and works. semantic indexing, bibliographical data, and information concerning copies and references. The search interface for names shows you at the start an overview of names with cross-references to standardized versions of names. I could not help seeing immediately a nice example of two lawyers wrongly assigned under one name, Accursius (ca. 1182-1260) and his son Franciscus (1225-1293) are not identical. Luckily this seems to be an isolated mistake. For each author a core selection of data is given. In my opinion adding references to authority files for persons would be truly helpful, but building first a foundation is surely right, and entries in both Text-Inc and the HPB database are used as a base fo the earliest editions.
The interface for works presents the titles of texts as found in existing manuscripts and printed editions, and here, too, you see at the start an alphabetical overview combined with a search field. This means some titles will not be given in Latin, but in Italian, Spanish or other languages. An entry starting an alternative title with “Also known as” has escaped attention, but it helps you to be aware of alternative titles.
The section with guidelines is still empty. The news section alerts you to a recent workshop of the international Héloïse network for the history of universities, held at Turin on October 25 to 27, 2023 on digital approaches to the cultural heritage of universities.
In my view it is still a bit early to state already much about the qualities of IVS Commune online. Despite the presence of many names and titles the database seems yet rather empty when you know about the variety of works preserved in manuscripts. However, in its current phase you can see quite distinctly its qualities for the data concerning printed works. It looks very much like only the information from the Text-Inc project in Oxford has been entered into the database. Anyway focusing on printed books transmitting legal texts is a welcome addition to the more traditional focus on manuscripts with these texts.
Repertories, catalogues and standards in context
The alphabetical list of names reminded me of something else, too. The list starts with a number of Arabic authors. When studying Arabic texts and translations it is necessary to be very clear what exactly you are studying in order to prevent confusion. Already the fact Arabic translations and adaptations of texts exist, sometimes even in several versions, should serve as a reminder it pays off in the end to provide a lot of bibliographical information. The threefold entrance of IVS Commune online for texts, works and names looks to some extent akin to the multi-layered description in the Library Reference Model (LRM) proposed by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA).
My knowledge of this model stems from a library catalogue pioneering the implementation of LRM and related standards, for example RDA (Resource Description and Access). The Alkindi catalogue of the Institut Dominicain d’Études Orientales (IDEO) in Cairo has as one of its aims the provision of data in order to serve as a virtual reference tool for Arabic studies, close to becoming even an union catalogue. The Alkindi catalogue with a multilingual interface presents information about copies as a term for actual objects containing information, manifestations being specific publications, expressions being specific editions and works, the intellectual product. Persons, too, can be identified in their specifc roles and connectied to each other, in other words, matters concerning authority files are present, too.
Faceted research becomes feasible when using such standards. The standards combined here surpass the levels or ordinary alphabetical and systematical description for which international standards exist. At the library portal of the Diamond platform the Alkindi catalogue itself is part of a consortium with eleven libraries, including the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and several libraries in Cairo, Paris and even in Erbil, Irak. In my view IVS Commune online is moving on a similar road, and of course this means facing huge challenges to implement all facets succesfully. The team of IVS Commune online (ICo) indeed expresses its aim to offer both data for content analysus and bibliographical description, and – most importantly – information for text identification. The ICo team has addressed this subject in a number of publications. I had expected to find a reference to the use of a particular standard for the description of (medieval) manuscripts, too.
Thanks to the Hazine blog for Arabic studies I encountered the Alkindi catalogue some years ago. The online magazine The Digital Orientalist can serve as a fine starting point for gaining insight into the role of digital humanities for Arabic and Islamic studies.
Whatever you think of the aims behind projects such as ICo, MANUS Iuridica and Manuscripta juridica, and also about new bibliographical standards, in this case they do at least deal with a very particular situation for the study of medieval legal systems, be they the ius commune, the common law, customary law or regional law. They express a conciousness that only for a limited number of medieval legal texts modern critical editions are available. Scholars delving into medieval law have to become really close to their sources. Luckily repertories exist for many disciplines dealing with medieval sources. The SIEPM society for the study of medieval philosophy has created a most useful and wide overview of (online) repertories for medieval manuscripts and texts, mentioning also national portals for medieval manuscripts.
However, for medieval law only a number of periods and subjects are covered in repertories. For medieval canon law only the period until 1234 is covered in the manuscript repertories created by Stephan Kuttner, and by Lotte Kéry for the period 400 to 1100. The repertory of medieval legal manuscripts in the Vatican Library has not been completed; only two volumes have been published. To redress the balance, manuscripts concerning the medieval and Early Modern common law can be traced thanks to the repertories and catalogues edited by Sir John H. Baker. Ulrich-Dieter Oppitz included even images of manuscript fragments in his repertory of manuscripts for German regional law (Rechtsbücher).
Efforts to bridge such gaps are most welcome. I admire the courage and stamina of scholars who start or continue such projects, and my remarks do not matter that much in view of the tasks they have set themselves to serve the scholarly community. The ICo project is clearly in an early phase. It deserves attention and support helping the team to achieve its aims. Any repertory worthy of its name has its qualities and limits, be it print or online. This short post will serve its purpose when it inspires anyone to support work on modern repertories for the manuscript and print tradition of medieval law in its many forms.
A postscript
At Archivalia Klaus Graf wondered very much on November 27, 2023 about the inclusion by ICo of a work concerning the election for the German emperor Maximilian in 1486. I agree some pruning of works included at ICo is necessary. He also criticised my reference to the list of online manuscript repertories created by the SIEPM, in his view simply outdated, however, without pointing to a better list of such repertories. Graf’s own list of relevant repertories was last updated in 2018. Among the repertories which will disappear quite soon is the German portal Manuscripta Mediaevalia, to be taken down from December 11, 2023 onwards. As a successor the Handschriftenportal is indicated.
Meanwhile I will consider the feasability of creating an overview of repertories for distinct manuscript genres, perhaps combined with a handlist of national repertories for (medieval) manuscripts. It can do no harm to look at the splendid overview of manuscript catalogues and its section Special Interests created and maintained at the Universität Kassel, most probably the resource Klaus Graf would recommend. At my website I created in December 2023 a fairly concise overview of manuscript repertories, with due caution about its limits and with gratitude for other existing overviews. The CERL consortium, too, offers a fine overview of repertories and related websites for manuscript research (PDF).
In 2022 Gero Dolezalek gave an overview of the projected update for Manuscripta juridica in 2023, and he offered a similar overview of the 2017 update. Sometimes non-juridical works are bound with legal works.
In December 2022 I first spotted SION-Digit, a research project aiming at using notarial acts from Venice, Bordeaux and Amsterdam to gain new insights into Early Modern Jewish history. Project leader Evelien Chayes received in 2022 media attention for her discovery during this project of a rare letter by Michel de Montaigne amidst records from a notary’s archive held at Bordeaux. Even with only a project blog I think SION-Digit deserves attention here for its goal of using legal records as a historical source showing much hidden things about the history of Jews in Early Modern Europe. One of the things to investigate is the role of digitized records for this project.
The Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV) recently launched a nicely designed search engine, moreveneto for searching the many fondi. At first I was slightly disoriented, seeing on one side two collections for notai but also more than 1400 other collections. Using the term notarili brought me to twelve fondi in the 3500 Notarile record group. Fondo 3520 contains indici per parti contraenti per notai, without an indication about the period and only a general statement these indices being incomplete, and fondo 3550 with general chronological indices, however, only for the period 1801-1829. Another attempt at using the general search interface led me to fondo 003, Notarile. Testamenti. Indici with indices for wills from the period 1300-1802, with four subseries. Of course it will take you some time and effort to get used to any guide. Apart from the concise guidance in the section Patrimonio of moreveneto you can used the section Galleria, where I got 13 results for notarile and 8 results for notai, bringing you mostly digitized repertories, but also some notarial records.
At the website of the state archive in Venice you will note with me at Risorse in rete that two earlier online resources, including the digitization platform Progetto Divenire and an earlier online guide, are now part of moreveneto. However, it is not mentioned the ASV contributed also digitized materials to the platform Judaica Europeana, now maintained by the Jewish Heritage Network. The Brandeis University helped creating digital access to eighteenth-century pinkasim, community ledgers held at the ASV.
The website of the departmental archives for the Gironde region in Bordeaux brings you quickly – starting with Recherche and choosing Thèmes – to information about notarial records in their holdings. There is an online search form for the minutier des notaires, where you can search for names, places, and periods, and filter for some specific document genres or limit your search to either minutes or repertories. The AD Gironde holds now some 7 kilometer of notarial records. You will find also a digitized biographical register of notaries created by a group of volunteers between 1987 and 1998. The État général des fonds, too, leads you to this repertory for notaries.
Notarial acts from the Stadsarchief Amsterdam have been presented here already in a number of posts, for example in a post about Rembrandt’s life. In fact this resource genre received much attention from this institution recently. This has resulted in the creation of indices for a great number of acts, now integrated into the general search platform. You can limit your search to particular document genres. At the transcription platform Vele Handen [Many hands] two projects deal with notarial records from Amsterdam, Alle Amsterdamse Akten for creating indices, and Crowd leert computer lezen [Crowd helps computer learning to read] for creating a Transkribus base ground which led to two online public models for computerized transcription, the first for seventeenth-century notarial acts and the second one for the eighteenth century.
In a third project at Vele Handen together with other institutions the Stadsarchief Amsterdam let volunteers add tags to a number of transcribed notarial acts. The results can be found at the Transkribus subdomain Amsterdam City Archives. Interestingly, you can adjust the search mode for fuzzy results. By the way, at the portal Zoek in transcripties [Search in transcriptions] with the other tagged acts from the third project at Vele Handen you will find apart form VOC records as its core a nice selection of notarial records from Dutch provincial and regional archives.
The city archives of Amsterdam offer a concise online introduction to the indices for notarial records, and you can download the repertory of Early Modern notaries created by A.I. Bosma, Repertorium van notarissen residerende in Amsterdam Amstelland, ambachtsheerlijkheden en geannexeerde gemeenten 1524 – 1810 (1998) as a PDF.
Objects, texts and networks
The SION-Digit project has objects, texts and networks as its main focuses. By choosing three towns with a busy harbour the network side of things has surely a good foundation. The transport of people, objects, letters and ideas was very much helped from these towns. A principal aim of this project is to use the wealth of information in notarial acts for delving deeper into Early Modern Jewish history. The core of the project is using and creating digitized access to notarial deeds. At the project blog it is asserted until now state and town archives have not been used as much as the records held at specialised institutions for Jewish history.
The flat statement on the SION-Digit blog notarial acts in these three towns are hard to find or difficult to access is in dire need of some qualification. Luckily the French version of the project aims does not contain this lapidary statement. In view of the repertories for notarial registers at all three archives discussed here above it is simply not true one cannot find these registers or that there are severe blockades for finding them. At Venice there are indices for acts contained in notarial registers. In Bordeaux you can use the online search for the minutier and even find biographical information about individual notaries. The city archives of Amsterdam offer an online repertory of notaries, you can search directly for notarial registers in finding aid 5075, and there are online indices and digitized registers. For a fair number of registers you can even benefit from computerized transcriptions.
The problem for researching these Early Modern notarial acts is the degree of accessibility of individual acts. I guess the project description at the SION-Digit blog stems probably directly from a project proposal for funding, with alas a not uncommon exaggerated picture of gaps to be filled, hidden materials and great vistas awaiting at the completion. More to the point is the wish to combine materials from notarial records with existing projects for pinkasim, Early Modern Jewish community registers. In particular the Pinkasim project of the National Library of Israel is important in this respect. It offers an online repertory of this document genre and digitization of a number of registers stemming from several European Jewish communities. There is also a very extensive bibliography.
Instead of looking here somewhat closer at pinkasim I thought it would be more useful to look at notarial records about Jewish communities in Early Modern Europe. Gaining an overview of such records is helped by the existence of the European Jewish Archives Portal, created by the Yerusha network and the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe. The portal does list archival collections held at European archives, libraries, museums and documentation centers. There is both a simple search and an advanced search mode, and also an interactive map for finding locations. Very useful are the possibilities to use other spellings, translations and transliterationd of names and locations.
As with all portals and search machines aiming to give complete coverage of any particular subject the search results at Yerusha are subject to the primordial factor of relevant data being available and entered into them. A quick simple search at Yerusha for notaries and notarial records does bring you to descriptions at collection level of archival collections in many European countries, but currently not from France and the Netherlands. For Italy only notarial records at Mantua and Milan are presented. It will do no harm to note the current absence in the Yerusha portal of any information from French and Dutch institutions. The interactive map for holding institutions helps you to detect such gaps.
I will not try to fill in this post all such real or supposed gaps. Within the Italia Judaica portal of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspore Research Center, Tel Aviv University, there is a fine introduction for Venice (in Italian) with a bibliography and footnotes, but alas without any direct reference to notarial records. By the way, the city Venice offers a concise guide to comunal and other archives in Venice. The SIAR is a portal to archives in Venice and the Veneto region. I looked briefly at the website of the Commision Française des Archives Juives (CFAJ). Among the links the CFAJ mentions are the city archives of Bordeaux, and I might as well put here the current link to the Archives Bordeaux Métropole.
Any temptation to go further here with listing my own selection of either randomly or specifically found resources was checked to some extent by visiting the portal site Jewish Heritage Network, another initiative of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, with due attention to archival collections held by institutions for Jewish cultural heritage in Europe. However, it seems not amiss to start looking for notarial records at another central point, the Archives Portal Europe, and to benefit from the search facilities for Dutch notarial acts at the Archieven portal, because many Dutch archives have created indexes for this document genre. If you want to look further for Jewish archival collections, some of them even digitized, I can refer you to my own web page for digital archives with relevant links for a number of countries and periods.
As for notarial records in France it is good to note here the Minutier central des notaires de Paris. The Université de Tours has created the platform Renumar for searching late medieval and sixteenth-century notarial acts from Tours, Amboise, Bourges, Chartres and Chinon. With this project associated is LECTAUREP, an initiative for computerized use of notarial records. In Italy and Spain are several projects which focus on medieval notaries. You can quickly perform yourself a search for minutes notariales and related resources at the French portal FranceArchives to check where you can find them and to see where such records have been digitized.
The project blog brings you to more information about the newly found letter by Montaigne, for example an article in Dutch from the newspaper NRC Handelsblad on August 10, 2023 (PDF). Chayes wrote with Alain Legros, ‘Un brouillon inédit de Montaigne parmi des actes notariés’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 85/1 (2023) pp. 87-95. At the 2022 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America Evelien Chayes spoke about Letizia Nahmias, a remarkable woman in the seventeenth-century Venetian ghetto. It led to an interview by Esther Voet for the Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad 39 (July 8, 2022) pp. 24-25, ‘Een onafhankelijke vrouw in het ghetto’. Finding Letizia’s will was a key moment in understanding her life and actions which were for a long time overshadowed by her husband -also her nephew – who converted to Catholicism.
With SION-Digit we meet an international project on a vast scale developed and for some part to be executed single-handed by a scholar who is at home in the study of Early Modern literature, book history and library history. Her goal of bringing scarcely known aspects of Jewish lives and history into the limelight by using notarial acts should command respect. SION-Digit should invite and deserves support from those scholars better acquainted with notarial records in Italy, France and the Netherlands. The fact Evelien Chayes pinpoints women’s history as a key to detect networks is another stimulating aspect of this project. I wrote here at some length about SION-Digiti Sfarim exactly because Chayes wants to use sources too easily labelled as a territory of legal historians, local historians and genealogists. It is to the benefit of anyone who becomes fascinated by a particular source genre to meet others with their questions, approaches and tools, and to receive mutual support. Connecting scholarly research in various disciplines to gain insight into peoples and networks that tend to be overlooked is in my view a most valuable effort. Mazzeltov, good luck!
Manuscript with the trial of Jeanne d’Arc, 1431; written 15D/16A century – London, British Library, Egerton 984, f. 3r – image British Library
Some subjects deserve highlighting in general within historical research. On several occasions I therefore present here contributions on major themes in legal history such as justice and injustice, slavery and discrimination. Women’s history, too, should figure here more often. It took me some time to look carefully at the results of a special digitization project finished earlier this year by the British Library. In March 2023 an overview of some ninety manuscripts was presented in a PDF, and in May a further overview was added for more than 200 newly digitized charters and 25 rolls. Adding these archival records greatly strenghtens this project by bringing even more depth and width. Charters and rolls appear here almost every year. In fact I had to restrict myself severely and to choose only some subjects and items touching upon legal history to make this post worth some of your reading time, and wet your appetite for more. Earlier on in fact I wrote here about digitized legal manuscripts of the British Library, and about the project with the Bibliothèque nationale de France for digitizing manuscripts created in England and France from the period 800 to 1200.
Making women visible
The first thing to note about the two sections of this digitisation project is that the British Library (BL) included also manuscripts and documents from the Renaissance, enlarging the period covered to the year 1600. On three occasions the BL’s Medieval Manuscripts blog alerted to the completion of the two series. On March 25, 2023 the overview for the manuscrips was presented, with a notice work on charters and rolls was nearly finished. The second post (May 11, 2023) announced the completion of the work on the rolls and charters. In the third post (May 21, 2023) not only links to the two PDF’s are given, but also to versions in Excel. It goes without saying these posts contain marvellous images for the digitized manuscripts, charters and rolls. For some women figuring in this project the BL created separate pages presenting their lives and the newly digitized materials concerning them.
Let me start with admitting that although I found it really difficult and even unfair to select here just some examples showing the wealth of materials newly digitised within this project I could not help delving deeper into the background of two manuscripts about a rather famous woman from the fifteenth century. As a matter of fact I concluded one manuscript really deserves mentioning, because it is not mentioned at one of the main websites about her.
However, I would like to start to look here first more in general at the digitized manuscripts stemming from and concerning medieval women. Most interestingly, you will find in the manuscript section also manuscripts which are actually archival records. This fact makes it more natural for the BL to add charters and rolls as a second section to this project. In order not to focus only on individual women I will look here first at some documentary genres. For this project the BL has digitized in this section four cartularies, three of them of monastic institutions, from Stixwould Priory (Add. 46701), Wilton Abbey (Harley 436), and Coldstream Priory in Scotland (Harley 6670), The fourth cartulary stems from John de Vaux and his daughter and co-heiress Petronilla de Narford (Stowe 776). There is a manuscript containing a census from St Mary Magdalene’s Abbey in Cologne (Add. 21072), and from this institution comes also a manuscript with revenues and expenses (Add. 21177).
Very much in a royal lineage are two wardrobe accounts, the first for Eleanor of Castile for the years1289 and 1290 (Add. 35294), including expenses for her funeral, and for Thomas of Brotherton and Edmund of Woodstock, sons of Edward I and Margaret of France (Add. 37656), although the last manuscript is clearly concerned with two men expending sometimes money for women at court. The manuscript with patents granted by king Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn stems from her period as marquess of Pembroke (1532-1533) (Harley 303). Another manuscript contains the receipts and expenses for the expedition bringing queen Margaret of Anjou to England in 1444 and 1445 (Add. 23938). The manuscript Royal 17 B XXVIII, compiled between 1536 and 1581, is a book of expenses of Princess Mary, containing also an inventory of her jewels, and a catalogue of printed books in the Royal Library. A bit more personal perhaps is a letter written on a single leaf by Mary, Queen of Scots, to Jacques Bochetel de la Forest, the French ambassador to queen Elizabeth I from 1568 (Add. 89480), preserved with an engraving showing Mary. To end this royal section I would like to mention the manuscript Stowe 784 with a Complainte sur la mort d’Anne de Bretagne followed by a discours on the mariage of Anne de Foix with king Ladislas of Hungary in 1514.
We arrive straight into legal history with the last two manuscripts I want to mention here. With my selection of fifteen items with a content more or less relevant for legal historians from a total of ninety digitized manuscripts the British Library certainly serves legal historians. Actually these two last manuscripts are quite famous examples of records of trials dominated by the use of medieval canon law. It is fair to say these manuscripts play a major royal in our knowledge about and perception of an iconic trial.
Last page of the nullification trial with the notarial confirmation of the first notary; written 1455-1456- London, BL, Stowe 84, fol. 182r (detail) – image British Library
Those readers which read the caption under the first manuscript image in this post saw already the name Joan of Arc. The British Library digitized two manuscripts, Egerton 984, with the proceedings of the trial held in Rouen in 1431, written in the last quarter of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, and Stowe 84, an official copy of the proceedings of the rehabilitation trial in 1455-1456. At the portal Jeanne d’Arc the section on the trials tells you a lot about the manuscripts sources, editions and modern translations, but one of the manuscripts at the British Library, Egerton 984, once owned by Pierre Pithou, is somehow forgotten. It is tempting to provide you here with an overview of the manuscript tradition and modern editions, but this takes more space than I had expected. It is far more important to note the absence of any primary source for the interrogation held in Poitiers, the distance in time to the events of the manuscripts concerning the trial in 1431, and the closeness and official nature of the manuscripts concerning the second trial in 1455-1456, often called the rehabilitation or nullification trial. I created a PDF with an overview of the manuscripts and their digitized versions, and information about the most important editions.
Rolls and charters
The second section with digitized rolls and charters does bring you anyway a lot of legal documents featuring women in many capacities. The sheer number of some document genres prohibits their full selection here. There are for example 23 wills, 15 quitclaims (renunciations of right(s)), and nearly 90 grants. Eight rolls tell you about households, and nine chirographs have been digitized. Eight documents tell us about expenses for households. Seventeen documents concern medieval and sixteenth-century queens, and 27 documents mention a countess. It is definitively a challenge to show here women not only doing things they very obviously regularly could do and did, but also showing more exceptional cases, not forgetting to give a balanced view of social status and the origin of these archival records. With 200 charters and 25 rolls you are sure to find something touching your own personal or professional interests.
Sale of an enslaved woman, 1450 – BL, Add. Ch 15340 (upper half) – image British Library
Many documents concern land transactions, but another attraction caught my attention. Add, Ch. 15340 is a notarial act recording the sale in 1450 by two Venetian men of an enslaved Russian woman named Marta to Angelo Gadi from Florence. Alas the act contains few details in the lines 7 to 9 about this sclava, who was 22 years old and healthy of body and mind.
There is a huge difference between this woman treated as an object for sale, a victim of slavery, and women founding institutions. Between 1237 and 1241 Ela, countess of Salisbury, founded Lacock Abbey (Add, Ch. 75578). Empress Matilda founded Bordesley Abbey between 1141-1142, overruling the original founder Waleran, count of Meulan who acted as a witness in this charter (Add. Ch. 75724). In a further charter from 1141 she confirmed a grant of lamds to this abbey (Add. Ch. 20420). Matilda was also a benefactor of Reading Abbey (Add. Ch. 19576, 19577, 19578 and 17579). Margery de Crek founded Flixton Priory in Suffolk in the years 1258-1259 (Stowe Ch. 291). Confirmations of her foundation followed quickly (Stowe Ch. 292, 293 and 294; LFC Ch. V 15) as did even a royal gift of land (Stowe Ch. 296), interestingly for having a warren, a terrain with rabbits. The more remarkable charter about Flixton Priory is the confirmation by a widow of receiving lands in 1263 for her dowry from the prioress of this institution (Stowe 305). Among the Stowe documents are eleven records with transactions concerning three monasteries in Brescia. Not as a founder, but as protector to a university acted queen Juana de Castile who put her seal to a charter establishing her in this role in 1510 for the university of Alcalà de Henares (Egerton Ch. 127).
Even when I will not unduly focus here on queens and countesses you can find glimpses from their surroundings as well. There is a successful petition by a nurse serving king Henry VI to double her yearly salary in 1424 from £ 20 to £ 40 (Stowe Ch. 643). A very different petition was sent to pope Calixtus III (1455-1458) by Vaggia, widow of Bernardo de Bardi from Florence, to gain permission for herself and her two daughters to have their confessor celebrate mass with a portable altar during an interdict and similar ecclesiastical measures (Add. Ch. 67089). By the way, the description in the overview of this document mentions pope Celestine III, but the description in the online catalogue notes the right pope. A third petition in 1455 comes from queen Margaret of Anjou to her husband, king Henry VI, about sums to be given to her through the Exchequer (Cotton Ch. XVI 72). Another document shows Margaret of Anjou in another role. She was taken prisoner in 1471 and delivered safely to king Louis XI of France in 1476 after he had paid a ransom of 50,000 crowns (Add, Ch. 13932). Margaret had been kept in custody by Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk, formerly her lady-in-waiting. This is of course also an example of a woman figuring in both series of specially digitized documents.
One particular category of documents deserves here a bit more attention, even if it leads to inevitably arbitrary choices. I myself frowned when realizing the fifteen quitclaims contain renunciations of a right or rights. In what cases did women cede rights, and to whom did they renounce a particular right or some rights? The overview mentions almost always cases concerning rights to land ceded to either men or religious institutions. The term quitclaim is indeed reserved to cases concerning rights on lands or rents. One case involves a renunciation by Gonorra in the mid-thirteenth century of half a rent owned on lands given to a hospital in Southwark by her late husband William Bannastre (Add. Ch 23674). To this charter her seal is affixed, a reminder to look for seals of women and the way women are depicted on seals. Seven documents mention a rent or rents.
Let’s end an admittedly restricted choice of items in the second series with some documents which are in my view truly exceptional in the selection made by the British Library. Stowe Ch. XXXII 13 is a chirograph from 1355 with an arbitration by Thomas of Hampstead between Lady Katherine and her son John Latimer about her right to access the chapel at Braybrooke Castle. Another arbitration is found in Add. Ch. 28654. In 1352 an agreement was made about the access for the canons of Sankt Maria im Kapitol, Cologne, to the monastery led by abbess Elizabeth von Katzenellnbogen at this institution when they had to visit the chapter house. The arbiters confirmed in Latin an earlier verdict given in German included in this charter. Add. Ch. 27703 contains a covenant from 1380 between Joan, dowager of Wales, widow of Edward known as the Black Prince, and the community of Beverley in Yorkshire to pay to her an annual rent granted earlier to a kinswoman.
Finally it is sensible to note the only lawsuit among the newly digitized documents, a roll from the last decade of the fourteenth century with documents from of a case heard at Salisbury Cathedral between the abbess and convent of Canonsleigh Priory and parishioners of Morden, Dorset (Add. Ms. 52913). In 1392 the vicar-general of Salisbury judged in favor of the parishioners who had claimed the convent had failed to do an annual payment to the poor, forbidden them to cut woods in the cemetery, and the convent had diverted fruits from the parish church contrary to canon law to a layman.
Women in many roles
I did not write here about the four documents in the second series touching in some way on Flanders, and I have also skipped the manuscripts with rules and statutes. I did spot manuscripts from the Northern Netherlands, but these do not have a legal content. I could have delved into the many wills and grants, and looked in detail for the various motives formulated in these documents. I am afraid no one can present in a single blog post everything that makes this project so interesting! The British Library has made a fine selection of manuscripts and documents enriching our knowledge and helping us to ask questions about medieval women and their lives. Connecting some of the manuscripts with archival records and vice versa is just one of the possible routes to follow. Some archival records could equally be prized possessions of the National Archives, Kew or other record offices in the United Kingdom and even abroad.
It is only logical I could not open every window offered here, but I urge anyone to look at length and with lots of questions to the two overviews and the special web pages for some women to gain new insights into medieval lives and afterlife, not in the least to the legal sides of women’s lives to be found in these manuscripts and archival records. Any selection has its limits, but I think this project of the British Library is truly a gem.
In summer there is hopefully more time to look leisurely at new or augmented online resources. One of them came unexpectedly into view for me. Recently the Borthwick Institute for Archives of the University of York alerted to its newly digitized archival collection with four ecclesiastical visitations court books accessible at JSTOR. Soon it became clear this platform for scholarly publications – with already some subdomains for digital collections – has added a whole section for such collections, a substantial number of them in open access. What has JSTOR in store for legal historians among these collections? I will choose here at will some examples touching legal history, and probe the range and depth of this interesting new feature.
A wide range
The thing that triggered my curiosity about the digital collections was the fact the alert at Twitter from York presented a digitized archival collection connected with legal history. The University of York presents two digitized collections at JSTOR. You can go easily from each collection to the institution participating at this platform. The first collection contains 91 digitized chapbooks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mostly printed at York. On the page concerning digitized pamphlets of my legal history website chapbooks, too, have found a place. In 2020 I started creating a Zotero version of my list offering you better search possibilities with tags and categories.
At the moment of writing I could not yet find any announcement or link at the website of the Borthwick Institute in York to its two collections at JSTOR. Alas the information at JSTOR about the four court books is very succinct, pointing you mainly to the guide to the archival records created in 1973 by David M. Smith, luckily digitized in a PDF version. Only page 89 with the reference to the York Visitation Court Records (YV/CB) is mentioned at JSTOR, but the actual number of surviving court books has been omitted, eighteen registers dating from 1598 to 1836. The digitized items are the inventory numbers 1 (1598), 2 (1613), 3 (1664-1680) and 4 (1681-1690).
These records within the York Diocesan Archive have been placed among other visitation records, in the section concerning the archdeaconries. The meta-data at JSTOR with archival information for this collection are currently restricted to just one crucial fact, the very record reference in the concise guide by Smith (YV/CB with number). Fields for filtering the time range are provided, but you have to guess the time range of these registers. I did try to locate these records also in the online Borthwick Catalogue for the archival collections, but amazingly this was really difficult. It seems you cannot search directly for the archival abbreviations, and not everywjere can you reach the item level of a collection. A terse note for many descriptions tells you work on completing this catalogue continues, and that the 1973 arrangement of records can only be traced completely online using the Archives Hub, the central portal for archival research in the United Kingdom.
Instead of just hammering on the necessity of more archival information for these records, in itself surely important, I think it is more sensible to look for other archival collections presented by JSTOR within its generous section with digitized collections, as at this moment already nearly 2000. There is a free search field, you can filter between all collections and collections in open access, choose a particular institution and use a free search. 1653 collections are free accessible.
Searching with the word archive brings you nearly 500 results. In some cases the word has been used a synonym for collection, but other collections show a great scope in themes, record genres and periods. The Americas Archive of Rice University combines with 448 items many of these aspects. Straight on target for legal history is the substantial collection American Prison Newspapers provided by Reveal Digital (11,641 items). With more than 6,000 items the Xavier University of Louisiana offers in its Charles F. Heartman Manuscripts of Slavery a very interesting archival collection, supplemented by a smaller slavery and freedom collection (166 items). A pleasant surprise is the presence of the Université de Liège with eight collections, including an archival collection with documents from the Weissenburch family (152 items). It will not do to plod here through all results, but the range is impressive. It is also necessary to note the importance of good general descriptions to pinpoint a particular collection.
With a restriction to the term records I found 150 collections in open access. An interesting very modern collection is the digitized archive of United Nations secretary general Ban-Ki moon, serving between 2007 and 2016, held at the City College of New York, as is a collection of records from Kofi Annan who hold the same function between 1997 and 2006. Santa Clara University presents among its five collections mission records and registers for baptisms, marriages and burials in Santa Clara until the late nineteenth century. When yousearch with the generic term papers for archival collections you will find at least 170 collections, As a matter of fact, JSTOR Collections does come with fields for entering typical archival and bibliographical meta-data. I checked specifically in some collections. Thus it seems the Borthwick Institute can add further details to its court books collection.
Before narrowing my focus here to legal history it is good to know some 450 collections in open access contain photographs, and at least twenty collections concerning oral history. Among the 47 collections with digitized pamphlets are also some 26,000 items from a core JSTOR collection, 19th Century British Pamphlets, now available in open access, a most welcome change. The Irish Office Collection held at the Houses of the Oireachtas is also noteworthy (1,400 pamphlets). The rich collection with British pamphlets is presented at JSTOR as a part of JSTOR Primary Sources with two other large digital collections, one on the struggle for freedom in South Africa (27,000 items) and the other for African heritage sites (87,000 items). In fact these collections were earlier on available at the Aluka platform. The section is presented in the general overview What’s in JSTOR? I had expected to find there also the vast South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) featuring recently in my post on legal sources concerning princely states in colonial India. In the end I realized I had searched for South Asian instead of South Asia! JSTOR’s LibGuides does bring you a guide for the SAOA. Such lacks in clear overview seem to show the sheer scale of the JSTOR platform in its present form, its tools for digital humanities and its satellites such as ArtSTOR, now also available als a part of JSTOR Collections with 304 collections, however, with at JSTOR only ten collections currently available in open access. Searching these 300 collections and seeing previews is open to anyone, but for full access registration is needed.
Focusing on legal matters
After due attention to the larger context at JSTOR legal history should prevail in this section! My choice of search terms brought me interesting results. Among the five results for trials are the Dreyfus Affair collection of Johns Hopkins University (298 items) and the Dublin Castle Collection at the Houses of the Oireachtas. Even if only seventeen of the 9,018 items in this miscellaneous collection concern actual trials it is good to discover this Irish collection. For the term slavery I found sixteen collections, some of them well-known, others new for me, for example the Gail and Stephen Rudin Collection on American slavery created by Cornell University (517 items), and also from Cornell the Loewenstein African-American Photographs (622 items). Bangor University brings 33 records on slavery in Jamaica coming from Penrhyn Castle.
Only looking for trials would not suffice my appetite for relevant materials. I spotted somewhere an attorney. A search for cases did not only result in seeing 16 collections, but in particular the Julius Chamber Papers for the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education case on the authority of federal courts to regulate schools (177 items). JSTOR shows its strength and width by presenting also the collection of Benjamin S. Horack Papers with 82 items for the defense of this school board in this Supreme Court Case, held at the University of North Carolina. Courts figure in twelve collections. A place of honour should be given to the collection Doing Law and Justice of Monash Univerrsity with 205 speeches by former Marilyn Warren, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria, the first Australian woman to reach such high office in the judiciary. It is a good thing, too, to see at JSTOR both the British Parliamentary Publications set created by the University of Southampton and the Canadian Government Publications provided by the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, both bringing you 10,000 items. 44 collections are shown in a search with the term government, with for example the US Government Documents about Cuba (University of Florida, 7,772 items).
Somewhat lighter to view is perhaps the fascinating Biblioteca Fictiva (1,840 items), yet another contribution by the Johns Hopkins University, about (literary) forgery and publications about forgeries. However, let’s not yet turn away entirely from core legal history: Among the many collections with papers in their title the Arthur P. (“Skip”) Andres Papers at the Center for Migration Studies, New York, brings you into the heart of American legislation with nearly 1,100 documents from the House Judiciary Committee of the US Congress.
In order to stop myself from acute further immersion into JSTOR Collections I had best remind you about other digital collections created by the Borthwick Institute for Archives. Their existence shows this institute as a most valuable institution. Already many years ago I could mention here this institute for its projects to digitize the York Archbishops’ Registers and the York Cause Papers, both wonderful resources for the history and practice of medieval – and also Early Modern – canon law. The other current projects of the Borthwick Institute for online resources and digital collections elsewhere, too, command my respect, as does its very range of activities for the University of York and the general public.
Creating access in different ways
Writing this post has been to some extent a real adventure, bringing me certainly more than I had expected at the outset. JSTOR Collections is a major new feature presenting mainly collections contributed by American and British institutions. Other countries are not entirely absent. We saw the Université de Liège, and The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven comes with more than 3,000 digitized Early Modernand later dissertations. Two Japanese libraries, too, bring some interesting collections. In particular for France, Germany, and China you can find collections, and this is also the case for Africa and Asia in general. Even when over 300 collections stem from ArtSTOR – but just then of them free accessible at JSTOR – the sheer width of themes, subjects, object genres and periods is very impressive. I hardly mentioned films and sound recordings, but these are certainly represented, too, as are maps and newspapers, and to a lesser extent manuscripts and incunabula. Some institutions contribute more than ten collections, and Cornell University stands out with 67 collections.
Once you reach a particular collection at this platform five options are offered after entering anything into the search field for searching within a collection. You can also restrict the results to images and set a specific time range. I found the general search function for collections a bit fuzzy, but the quality of meta-data provided by contributing institutions is a major factor in getting sharply defined results. Sometimes fuzzy results help to widen your search and understanding of matters.
The very occasion for looking at JSTOR Collections, the two digitized collections presented by then Borthwick Institute for Archives, proved to be very instructive for me. Of course you can agree with me that these collections should be announced also at this institute’s website, and the apparent shortcomings of the Borthwick Catalogue, too should cause a frown. Yet at the same time I think you have to acknowledge the multiple tasks facing archives, libraries and documentation centers. They are confronted with the clear wish of governing boards and patrons to deliver online access to their collections, but at the same time they have to remain faithful to the task of describing, cataloguing and preserving collections following standards set for good reasons. Sometimes the glory of digital collections prevails above the more humble and basic job of charting what you have in sensible, even time-houred ways.
At the same time institutions are aware increasingly aware older descriptions are defective, not inclusive or outrageously offensive, and this situation calls out for action, too. The Borthwick Institute certainly merits recognition for its efforts to address the question of inclusiveness. One should not judge any institution by looking at just one major activity or output, and certainly not after a short moment of investigation. JSTOR has set an important step by presenting now much more collections in open access. From being a licensed portal for scholarly articles it has definitely widened its scope to support research in other ways, too.
It is tempting to view colonial empires of the Early Modern period as unified entities which can be described with thick lines. For a thick description of a more differentiated reality it can be challenging to find relevant sources. Thanks to a project for legal materials from numerous states on the Indian subcontinent it becomes feasible to adjust the general image of British rule over India during three centuries. Thanks to a number of scholars working at Dartmouth College and colleagues elsewhere in the United States the initiative for the Indian Princely States Online Legal History Archive (IPSOLHA) started a few months ago. In this post I would like to look at this project, at the contents and the functioning of the database in its current state, and I will try to put it in a larger context of resources and (online) research on South Asian legal history.
A wealth of legal information
The main institutions helping to create IPSOLHA are the Department of History at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) and the South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) program of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), Chicago. A grant for digital scholarship from the AIIS helped Elisabeth Lhost as a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College to do research and create the website and database for IPSOLHA. The acknowledgements at the IPSOLHA website do not mention her name, but they do list affiliated researchers and (former) research assistants of the project team.
Doing research on princely states from the seventeenth to the twentieth century means facing a lot of challenges. For example, the section with some 35,000 digitized printed items in the SAOA database at JSTOR contains materials in 27 languages, and only a dozen of them mainly spoken in India. Relevant legal materials are scattered over many collections, a major hindrance to getting started at all with researching the subject of law and justice in the many hundred states formerly headed by Indian princes.
From the start page of the IPSOLHA site you can immediately begin – below the introductory text – to browse materials of eight particular types with the headings archival collection, court decisions and opinions, law, document, gazetteers, manuals, legislation and proceedings. I found at the moment of writing two archival collections, some 340 court decisions and opinions, 350 items marked Law, 100 documents, some 90 gazetteers, 35 manuals, some 250 items filed under Legislation, and some 30 items under the heading Proceedings. Under Legislation you will find any form of legislation without the word law in its title, and also legal codes for some states. The heading Document is reserved for single documents.
The link Visit the collection on the start screen leads you to the search interface for the main collection with currently some 2,300 items in twenty languages, nearly one thousand of them in English. It would be helpful to have this essential link also in the top menu bar. This is almost the only wish for clearer navigation I can express, because you will have access to many filters and tools for ordening search results. Results can be shown in four ways using the view button. With the resource type filter you can easily distinguish between primary and secondary sources, and for some resource categories you can even select subspecies. As for now some thirty institutions contribute items to IPSOLHA, with the Library of Congress and the South Asia Open Archives as the main providers. Only a few Indian institutions participate in this project.
One kind of filter is conspicuously absent at the search interface, a filter for date of publication. Using the field Date in the advanced search mode with the option to add fields at will did not work. However, you can sort results by creation date. Filters such as holding institution and state help much to narrow your search. The number of states within IPSOLHA is large indeed. Within the current contents the Rajasthan States and Travancore have the largest number of items.
An important question for me is whether you can easily select materials from a particular period. Sofar I have been unable to find a way to do this, apart from sorting by creation date. I would very much like to know for which century the current contents in IPSOLHA offer most information. At the same time I guess the main collection of IPSOLHA is harvested from resources elsewhere, and perhaps there is a technical snag preventing this kind of selection. Surely any portal has its limitations. I spotted few things dating from the eighteenth century or earlier, and it is safe to assume the nineteenth and twentieth centuries form the core period addressed in IPSOLHA.
However, one aspect could be stated more candidly by the project team, especially in view of the word Online in the long title of IPSOLHA. Only when you filter the contents by item type, the very first filter, you can choose to view only digital resources, some 220, nearly ten percent of the current total of 2,300 items. Thus IPSOLHA offers now actually more an online catalogue of both archival records and printed works, and only to some extent a digital collection. Of course such a repertory of items to be digitized is already most useful.
Princely states in a larger Indian context
How does IPSOLHA fit in with other online resources for India’s legal history? The fact I could find this project at all thanks to the blog – now an integrated subdomain – South Asian Legal History Resources created by Mitra Sharafi, University of Wisconsin, Madison, says enough. Her information needs no laurels, only my repeated affirmation it is your first port of call for the subject. The online bibliography is one of the major assets, as was and is the extensive links section, although it lacks additional information about these resources.
Of course I have used Sharafi’s links selection as a basis for my own overview of digital libraries in India on my legal history website, but I have added concise descriptions to them. I could add only a few resources Sharafi does not mention. At India Code you can find not only acts enacted at the federal level, but also for states, in some cases with acts from the nineteenth century onwards. It took quite an effort at intervals to find digital libraries in India with relevant materials for legal history. Currently all institutions offering a Digital Library of India do not function or offer a more general educational resource, the National Digital Library of India. During the pandemic Sharafi wrote two blog posts on using digizited Indian legal journals (part 1 and part 2) as a supplement to her list of colonial law journals. You will find links to several regional legal journals published before 1947.
I hoped Elisabeth Lhost – who incidentally worked for some time also at the University of Wisconsin – would provide additional information about the IPSOLHA project, and maybe even some links worth mentioning here, but she does not do this at her personal blog. I think it is best to applaud here her initiative and the team of scholars and research students for starting with IPSOLHA. It is a valuable example of a project looking from a different angle at Indian society at large, and it is worth your detailed attention even in this pioneering phase. For many other countries such projects aiming to provide better access to regional legal resources would be most welcome, too. I am sure regular updates in the near future and afterwards will help to establish and maintain it as a major tool helping you to study India’s long legal history in depth, and to gain a new perspective on the history of the British colonial empire on the Indian subcontinent, its extent and context.
A postscript
A few days after writing this post I concluded it might be indeed worthwhile to look at Indian regional digital libraries for more digitized items concerning the administration, government, law and justice in formerly princely states. For two Indian regions I can mention examples which are in my view fit for inclusion at the IPSOLHA portal. The digital library of the West Bengal Secretariate, Kolkata and the digital collection of the West Bengal Cental State Library offer much for online research. For the southern region Kerala the State Public Library Digital Archive of the State Central Library and the digital documents of the State Public Library and Research Centre, Kozhikode (long known as Calicut) came into view. Looking at more central state libraries and their digital collections seems an obvious road for finding more relevant materials.
Recently Elizabeth Lhost contributed a series of posts about the legal situation of princely states in colonial India at the Islamic Law blog.
In 2023 I came across a digital version at the portal Indian Culture of The National Union Catalogue of Incunabula and Early Printed Books in India by R.D. Singh, G.S. Singh and A. Singh (Calcutta-Varanasi-Delhi 1986), a census of early printed works in the holdings of some sixty libraries and other cultural institutions in India. My general impression is that it is not evident which library – apart from the National Library – is particular rich for older (European) literature touching the Early Modern princely states.
Transporting goods by ship is a risky business, certainly without modern forms of insurance. In the Early Modern period European merchants, sailors and traders developed a number of ways to mitigate the costs of damage at sea. In the European project Average-Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalization (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries) (AveTransRisk) of the Centre for Maritime Historical Studies at the University of Exeter one particular solution comes into view. Interestingly, aspects of legal history come very much into view within this project with maritime history as its core. One of the many results of this project came unexpectedly for me into view, thus bringing a welcome chance to present it here and to look at some of its aspects.
An international project
The ERC-funded project AveTransRisk is led by Maria Fusaro, director of the centre in Exeter and also leader for the other major project of the centre, Sailing into modernity. The project aims at gaining insight into legal institutions helping to divide among parties the risks of costs due to damage during a voyage at sea. As a means to achieve this objective the legal construction of general average forms the focal point of the historical investigation of the large project team. For this project data were collected for the period 1500-1800 from five countries with a large shipping trade: England, France, Italy, the Low Countries and Spain.
A major result of this project is a database accompanied by a glossary and introductions to the source materials. These introductions come with examples of voyages and a filter to select these voyages directly. For Italy sources from Genoa and Tuscany are used. Pisa and Livorno are the two Tuscan ports in this section. The inclusion of Malta is most welcome, even though in this case the nineteenth century is the research period. For France the focus is on the Royal Insurance Chamber, in existence between 1668 and 1689. In the case of Spain the main source of information for this projet is the Casa de la Contratación in Seville. I will discuss some of the example voyages, but I encourage you to investigate these introductions and examples yourself.
Alas currently similar introductions for the two main ports of the Low Countries in the Early Modern period are not yet present, nor have data been entered into the current version of the database, and the same is the case for England. For Antwerp I cannot give you quick guidance except pointing you to the Felixarchief, and to publications by two members of the Exeter team, Gijs Dreijer and Dave de ruysscher. At my blog I discussed in 2014 a number of Dutch and Flemish examples of municipal courts led by aldermen, among them the schepenen of Amsterdam dealing with “Assurantiën, Averijen en Zeezaken” and the resources at the Stadsarchief Amsterdam for studying this tribunal. Luckily, this archive explains itself – only in Dutch – the nature of the averijgrossen for the period 1700-1810 in its holdings, with illustrations, references to other relevant archival records and resoiurces such as digitized newspapers, and examples of some cases. Some 10,000 cases can be searched online using an index leading you directly also to scans of the acts. This is a major difference with the situation in 2013 at the launch of this index. I suppose this information concerning Amsterdam will in some form appear eventually also at the website of the project in Exeter.
Cornelis Mahu (Antwerp, 1613-1689), Ships in a storm near a rocky coast – painting, Staatliche Museen Schwerin – image source: RKD, The Hague, https://rkd.nl/explore/images/12498
In happy cooperation Gijs Dreijer and I contributed an article about an Early Modern legal treatise on average by Quintyn Weytsen to a volume about important Dutch legal works since 1500, ‘Een tractaet van avarien – 1617 – Quintyn Weytsen (1517-1564)’, in: Juristen die schreven en bleven. Nederlandstalige rechtsgeleerde klassiekers, G. Martyn, L. Berkvens and P. Brood (eds.) (Hilversum 2020) 38-41 (also online, Pro Memorie 21/1 (2019) (PDF)). Weytsen’s treatise was often reprinted. In Amsterdam the Kamer van Assurantie en Averij referred to it, and it influenced also customary law in Antwerp. We had liked to add to our article an image of the impressive painting shown here above, but this was not possible, hence my choice here.
Using the AveTransRisk database
It is time to look more closely at the database. Of course there is at the start an example of the way general average was calculated. The vessel, the freight and cargo were all taken into consideration. It helps you to see how costs for damage would become substantially lower than without this legal precaution. The general free search mode of the database allows fuzzy search results. The advanced search mode helps you greatly for many kinds of questions. You can add and remove text fields and choice fields at will. With a choice filed you can select from a dropdown menu with a wide range of categories, and also restrict your search to one or more archives.
The range of fields to choose from is truly luxurious. The advanced search guide does lists and explains the various field types. You can check for particular weather conditions, and for all kind of measures. This helps you also to refine or reframe your own research aims. The guide indicates you can only enter for French records the insurance date, and only for Spanish records the trials section is available. Some of the query results, the ports involved and the events during a voyage can be shown also on a map. You can copy and print your results, or export them as a CSV file, Excel or PDF.
The database offers also six main list overviews: for averages, events, voyages, vessels, masters, and reports. When you select for example in the ports view Dunkerque you get an overview of all voyages mentioning this harbour town long feared by sailors and traders for its pirates. In my opinion it is a good idea to familiarise yourself with the database by using first these lists, and to check at will the information about the voyages in the results. The screenprint here above shows a part of the summary for voyage no. 10016 created from two archival records held at the Archivio di Stato di Pisa. The database allow you to distinguish between ports visited, ports of departure and ports of destination. The locations can be chosen from a dropdown menu, hinting at the obvious need to standardize the names of locations in different languages. For other aspects, too, you can choose the aspect you want to focus on. The maps help you to visualise the voyages and to consider the amount of time a voyage and its aftermath took. The glossary and the table on silver equivalence in currency are most useful, too.
Early Modern shipping news
It is seducing to look at further aspects of this rich database, even when you might have wanted to find now also English, Dutch and Flemish voyages and cases. Of course ports in England, Flanders and the Dutch Republic do figure now, too, in the database. The new thing to highlight in the data available here is the combination of economic, maritime and legal history which mutually enrich each other. It throws new light on Early Modern transport.
The examples adduced as sample data deserve our attention here. Among the example cases for Genoese records is the story of a ship in 1639 first colliding with another vessel while loading (!) and suffering damage by storms at sea (voyage 502297). For cases from Seville just one example is adduced of a voyage in 1585 with damage to the hull of the ship, jettisoned mechandise and angry merchants in court who did not believe the crew’s story (voyage 70011). Here I had expected an example showing one of the typical Spanish flotas, the fleets so typical of Spanish naval voyages. There is a wide range of examples from Tuscany. The Antwerp vessel Corvo Volante – I guess originally named something like the Vlieghende Raef – sailing in 1599 from Brasil with sugar destined for Lisbon had to jettison some of its cargo off the Azores and ended its voyage in Livorno (voyage 10022). A French example adduced by the team cannot be missed here. They mention a voyage in 1670 (no. 92799) from Le Havre to Guinea, hence to the Americas and back to Le Havre, a typical triangle voyage well known in the Transatlantic slave trade, with indeed enslaved persons as its merchandise.
The rich documentation assembled within the database has led the team to a fair stream of publications. The archival background is duly mentioned in the section on datasets. Let’s certainly not forget the fleet of other resources for maritime history brought together by the research centre in Exeter at its website. The guide to naval records in the National Archives, Kew (384 pp., PDF) and its introduction by the centre take for me the palm as something absolutely worth saving whatever your views of the project on general average and its European legal history. The project finally came to my attention again thanks to the transcription model four team members contributed to the Transkribus project for Italian administrative hands (1550-1700), one of just four Italian models now available. As for the Dutch side of these project, it is good to know Sabine Go (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam) leads hetrself in Amstedam the project Risky Business with Giovanni Ceccarelli and Antonio Iodice in her staff, Maria Fusaro on the advisory board, and some other members of the Exeter team (Dave de ruysscher, Guido Rossi and Lewis Wade) in its wider network.
The interplay between the economy, maritime trade, state regulations and city tribunals are at the heart of the AveTransRisk project. Legal historians can hardly complain about the efforts done here to bring general average into the limelight. The assessment of risks and the calculation of damages shed light on a very real aspect of Early Modern trade and commerce. This project is a contribution to comparative (legal) history helping you to compare for instance between city states and centrally governed countries. They bring the necessary details needed to confirm larger hypotheses in a more sophisticated way. Even now without the records from England, Flanders and the Low Countries the database is most valuable.
I will not hide my vivid interest in the very realistic stories told by people about their sometimes dramatic voyages at sea, or even suffering damage already on loading. They bridge the gap between legal abstractions and court narratives. It is great to have so many archival records now accessible online for anyone wanting to gain insight into general average as a matter of more than average interest for Early Modern and legal historians.
A postscript
You can now learn more about general average and the AveTransRisk project from the volume General Average and Risk Management in Medieval and Early Modern Maritime Business, edited by Maria Fusaro, Andrea Abboddati and Luisa Piccinno (2023), also available online in open access. Also available in open access is a special issue of the Quaderni storici 3 (2022) on risk management and jurisdictional boundaries in pre-modern Europe, edited by Maria Fusaro.
The loss of archival records by an accident, deliberate destruction or whatever other cause is one of the greatest threats for the collective memory of peoples and nations, and even for humankind in general. How can you substitute things lost for ever? Such thoughts were very much alive after June 30, 1922, when the Public Record Office of Ireland in Dublin went on fire during the Battle of Dublin. Munition stored in the building was hit by shells and multiple fires destroyed documents from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Only in 1928 the PRO could reopen. On June 30, 1922 the National Archives of Ireland launched the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, a portal with at its heart three reconstructed archival collections. In this post I will look at the new portal, and also at the project of Trinity College, Dublin, for the reconstruction of records for the medieval Irish Chancery.
Lost in one afternoon
The turns and key moments in irish history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can readily be defined as tragedies. The famine in the mid-nineteenth century became worse by appalling English actions and negligence. With the emigrants to the United States of America Ireland was bereft again of many thousand people. Gladstone could nearly bring Home Rule for Ierland, but both he and Asquith just before the First World War did not succeed in accomplishing it. The Easter Rising of 1916 and the civil war that led to the foundation of the Irish Republic took a heavy toll, and the Troubles since 1969 were another grim period which ended just a few decades ago. After the Brexit the Irish frontier has become again a real political frontier. By the way, the National Archives in Dublin bring the period between 1912 and 1923 to your attention with the apt heading Decade of Centenaries.
When even the memory of many periods with turmoil is destroyed more happens than just irreparable loss of documents. It is a cultural disaster, damaging the collective memory and removing a point of reference. Normally I try to avoid writing about centenaries and commemorations, but with the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland you have a very important sign of revival, a kind of light shining and bringing back things that seemed totally lost. For a long period after the Four Courts Blaze only the socalled Salved Records, charred record remains, survived as did rather miraculously the finding aids, catalogues and the staff library.
Let´s go immediately to the core of the new portal. Three collections are presented in a new digital form, starting in chronological order with the medieval exchequer from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, the Cromwellian Surveys from the late seventeenth century, and the 1766 religious census. If anything this choice of records ornamented with the lofty title Gold Seams shows already the range in time of the holdings at the National Archives of ireland.
The medieval exchequer
Example of a record from the Exchequer for Ireland, TNA E 101/237/5 – image source VRT / TNA
The collection concerning records of the medieval exchequer for Ireland is not entirely characteristic of the Virtual Record Treasury, because almost all these records are held at the National Archives, Kew. Three main record types are presented: issue rolls, receipt rolls, enrolled parchments and two memoranda rolls (NAI, EX 1/1 and EX 1/2) from the fourteenth century. Luckily the Irish Record Commission had made summaries of the memoranda rolls; a digital version of the 43 volumes is a desideratum. The web page with illustrated examples of these records series and related documents (Manuscripts Gallery) is very instructive. In the section Delving Deeper you will find more historical background and additional images, including editorial conventions and a liost of recurring phrases. The section with stories does what it promises.
Navigating the images of records can be done in several ways. The free text search filed offers the most simple search mode, but you can alo filter for reference code, title and creator. The advanced search mode functions for the whole Virtual Record Treasury. You can start with the fields for title, creator and reference code, and chnage them or add a field for repository and/or transcription. After scrolling down you can find under the heading Further search options filters for a particular time range, Gold Seam, query expansion, fuzzy search, and items without images. Apart from a particular Gold Seam you can also limit your search to the Treasures.
The option Gold Seam Highlight in the navigation menu for the exchequer brings you not only a number of useful general descriptions of medieval record genres, but also access to records
Document view screen in the highlights section for the medieval exchequer
Only after trying to use this view I succeeded in accessing actual images. By clicking on a record title you can access them in a kind of workspace with at your left several view options. Some way of highlighting the choices when you hover over them would be helpful. I did not yet find a concise user manual for this workspace. The use of the term manifests and the presence in the left corner of the distinctive logo are normally sufficient signs for indicating the use of the IIIF compliant Mirador viewer, but due to tropical temperatures I clearly failed to recognize them at first!
At this point I would like to mention the general User Guide which does not just help a casual visitor or a curious historian. In my opinion the National Archives of Ireland succeed here splendidly in explaining not only the features of the Virtual Record Treasury, but also a number of archival matters in an exemplary way. The distinctions between several possible grades of documents in relation to an original are given, and also a number of key description terms. A four colour code is used to indicate linked records in the three Gold Seams, the three core collections of this portal.
The Cromwellian surveys of the seventeenth century
The next core collection brings you to Early Modern Ireland in the period starting with the revolt of 1641 that eventually led to the end of landholding by the Catholic gentry and aristocracy. The landowners’ surveys of the 1650s formed a key element in this development. In the nineteenth century the Irish Manuscript Commission created a massive index for the socalled Down Surveys orCromwellian Surveys. The digitized surveys are reinforced by some 2,000 digitized maps. These resources show landed property in a very detailed way. The starting page of this section leads you also to a video and a background essay.
The Barony of Sheelburne in the County of Wexford by George Tuffin alias Johnson – London BL, add. ms.72868, f. 077
Exactly the combination of records and maps helps you to view matters in telling detail. The manuscript gallery for this section shows a fine example how using a number of survey records gives you a much fuller view than each of them separately. Land already owned by Protestant supporters of Cromwell is shown as blank spaces in the Down Survey. Among the items shown are also some editions of records, but the coloured maps attract your attention, too. I could not readily spot clear references for the resources shown. The highlights for the Cromwellian surveys contain documents held at Dublin, Belfast, London and Paris. Here, too, you can use the IIIF-compliant Mirador viewer to view images of records. I must again admit I was initially a bit confused by the way of navigating to the record images. However, I realize that until now I met the Mirador viewer exclusively for viewing medieval manuscripts, not for archival records or record series.
For understanding the Cromwellian Surveys it pays off to start with the page Delving Deeper. You can read here about the historical background of the plans for confiscation and their aftermath. There is precious information about parish maps and barony maps, on further archival resources elsewhere, editorial explanations, and information about some relevant publications about the digitization project. By the way the subdomain The Down Survey of Trinity College Dublin, offers another digital road to this survey.
The 1766 religious census
The importance of the 1766 religious census is the wealth of historical and genealogical information it provides concerning the period before the census of 1813. Just 59 original items survived the 1922 disaster, but luckily transcripts and records held elsewhere can now supplement this information bringing you some 50,000 names.
This time I started with the page Delving Deeper in order to get a good view of the documents and their background. The information for each parish was not uniformly recorded, and thus it is by chance some very rich records have survived. In some cases ministers added social or political comments in their record. The archival history and use of this census before 1922 is traced here, too. Some remnants of editorial remarks for preparing this webpage made me smile abou the efforts of the webteam preparing this splendid portal. We should not complain about every small blemish and forget the overall quality!
A Parliamentary Return, here for Cullen (detail) – Dublin, National Archives of Ireland, IHP/1/688
The manuscripts gallery for this section gives further illustrations of the record genres themselves and of the whole process to create and evaluate this census, including diocesan overviews of parishes and the final recording in the Book of Returns. The highlights bring you to six different records, not just the official Parliamentary Returns. Here again a better way of indicating the navigation is most welcome, for example by just adding some marker to each item, perhaps only a streak before each title. Maybe the fact the Mirador viewer was developed with the aim to contain single manuscripts plays a role here, but this viewer has now also been adapted by the Dutch Nationaal Archief for viewing some digitized records of the former Ministerie van Koloniën, and they can be navigated without any ado. Alas this archive did not translate its message of October 11, 2022 about this new feature into English, nor has it been duplicated in the research section. As an addition to the three aspects common to each of the three main collections you will find in the Virtual Record Treasury also a story section, albeit with currently just two essays.
Beyond digitized collections
The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland is a true treasure trove! It points also nicely to the fact the word treasure is both a noun and a verb. The rich collections of this portal help very much to rekindle interest in several periods of Ireland’s chequered history. Not the least bonus is the way light is shed on the importance of records elsewhere, in particular in England, and on the changing relations between England and Ireland. The word United Kingdom has definitely a hollow ring in view of some dark periods in Irish history where English rule seems to deserve the adjective colonial.
The new portal contains much more that I will only mention briefly here, because you will want to investigate these features yourself. There is a useful glossary of technical terms around digitization. The virtual tour of the old Public Record Office desrves your attention, too. It is also possible to browse the items from particular contributing institutions. The section Thematic collections brings you to more newly digitized collections with additional resources, such as the 1922 Salved Records, the Down Survey and Grand Jury maps. The overview of partners can serve you as a web directory for institutions with relevant holdings for Irish history.
Although I could point you to more corners of the Virtual Treasury of Ireland I would like to mention here a few other online projects well worth visiting. Somehow I had expected to find the respective links also at this portal, but this can readily be redeemed. The records of the medieval Irish exchequer can be supplemented with the project CIRCLE: A Calendar of Irish Chancery Rolls c. 1244-1509, created by Trinity College Dublin in a couple of decades. This institution created also the project The Down Survey: Mapping a century of change. where you can use a HISGIS map next to the survey records. The decision for the Cromwellian Survey came following a period of much turmoil. In particular The 1641 Depositions, another project from Dublin, from a decade before the great surveys, should not be forgotten. The Great Parchment Project of the London Metropolitan Archives focuses on a survey in 1639 of landed property in county Derby.
I promised at the start to look here also at the CIRCLE project of Trinity College Dublin. This project contains some 20,000 charters. Charters in Latin have been translated into English. It is possible to browse and search charters by reign and by roll type (patent rolls or close rolls). The advanced search mode offers you even more. The project helps your research with fine introductions, overviews of medieval and editorial abbreviations, a glossary and a bibliography. In the links section you will find more projects with medieval accounting rolls. For many items there are images. In my view this project is truly much more than just another calendar for medieval sources. Let’s not insist too much on the obvious fact that your research can benefit enormously from combining this resource with the exchequer records now available online in the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland.
I had intended to finish this post much earlier, but surely I mean this contribution as a heartfelt homage to all efforts shown here to bring Irish history to the widest possible public. Twenty years ago the archival building of my own employer, the Regionaal Archief Zuid-Utrecht in Wijk bij Duurstede, was flooded. Thanks to swift, massive and apt efforts almost every damaged record could be salvaged and restored. Such catastrophes make it less normal for me that we are are at all able to consult historical records, and hence my interest and admiration for this most valuable project in Dublin. Keeping archival records safe and creating access to them in various ways, from finding aids and indexes to transcriptions and digital collections, can only happen when we sustain efforts to investigate the past and to cherish cultural heritage for the present and for future generations.
To find current laws you will probably start by going to a national portal for legislation. Until two decades ago it was quite normal to search for new laws in legal gazettes, many of them now only appearing in an electronic format. Finding foreign legal gazettes can be a real challenge, especially for older issues. In this post I will look at some directories for foreign legal gazettes, and I will fcous in particular on the interactive map for finding legal gazettes created recently by the Law Library of Congress. This library is without any doubt the largest law library in the world. For me it meant a welcome opportunity to update the concise information about this subject on my legal history website Rechtshistorie and to write here at greater length about ways to trace legal gazettes.
Protecting the law
I was alerted to the new interactive map of the Law Library of Congress by a post at its blog In Custodia Legis. In fact several recent posts concern the efforts to create access to the LoC’s own vast collection of legal gazettes, for example a post from January 2021 with a video about the cataloging project leading to the interactive map, and a post in May 2022 about recent additions ot the digital collection of legal gazettes at the LoC.
Apart from navigating the interactive map you can also use the search filters provided at the start screen of the interactive legal gazettes map. It is most thoughtful to distinguish between national and subnational gazettes. In the overview below the map historical and municipal jurisdictions have not been forgotten, too, as is a succinct notice about the coverage of a legal gazette. You can also filter for six preset formats. There is also a mobile version of the interactive map. The menu button in the top right corner of the online map leads you to the LoC’s digital collection of legal gazettes, back to the main LoC website, or to the Ask a Librarian service. It would be helpful to provide here also a direct link to the Law Library itself which is not easily found from the startscreen of the Library of Congress. Its dimensions and importance make better visibility in my view an absolute must.
Strangely the website of the Library of Congress currently lacks a separate page devoted to its gazettes collection. The link to such a page does lead you only to its digital collection. The interactive map cum database is not included in the list with available databases, nor does it merit a guide among the rich choice of research guides. However, the LoC’s digital collection of legal gazettes – with currently nearly 8,500 items – is supported by a current number of 34 web archives of online legal gazettes worldwide. Maybe a kind of Quick Links section can help visitors of the website of the Law Library of Congress, at the collections page or its section Nations of the World of its Guide to Law Online. Internal references at such points can be most helpful, as are the directions provided in the introduction to its own important digital collection for this subject. I suppose we have to keep in mind the website of the Library of Congress is actually a portal site. It mirrors faithfully its vast dimensions and manifold qualities. The Law Library is one of the jewels in the crown of the Library of Congress that should shine more brightly at this great online portal! When you take into consideration the many positive aspects going often far beyond your expectations my remarks are not meant to diminish these qualities which I greatly admire.
Other roads to foreign legal gazettes
When writing this post it seemed the Library of Congress’ online repertory wins in importance by the fact I could not reach the online repertory for foreign legal gazettes created by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) in Chicago. In fact I could not reach the CRL and its digital collections at all. There is a more restricted Directory of Online Government Gazettes at a personal web page of the University of Michigan. It can be helpful to use the list of government gazettes at Wikipedia, even when considering the very succinct listing with few details wihtin the list, but for a number of these gazettes dedicated Wikipedia pages exist. The similar list of the German Wikipedia, called Liste gesamtstaatlicher Vorschriftensammlungen shows more details. The version at the Spanish Wikipedia is just a list, giving you only fifteen gazettes for Europe. most national gazettes for Latin America, and also regional gazettes for Spain and Mexico.
Luckily the FLARE Foreign Official Government Gazettes Database of the IALS, School of Advanced Legal Studies, London, is up and running. With a free text search field and six fields for advanced search some reassuring care for bibliographical and practical information of this database is clearly present. However, when you click on results you will not always find exact information about the publication period of a gazette, but surely the notes are helpful, such as no more than one year is missing in holdings, and sometimes there is very full information about legal online portals for a particular country.
The digital collection of some African and South Asian legal gazettes created by Harvard Law School Library has vanished from the HLS library website, nor can you quickly find an overview of all its digital collections after the latest overhaul of its website. It might be useful indeed to give some direction to the digital collections of Harvard University Library which brings you to these gazettes within its digital collections. Some kind of list or overview at a logical point would be helpful and certainly feasible, but this seems to have been only an element of earlier online forms of these rich collections. You will be happy to use the Excel sheet created in 2019 by LLMC Digital for holding of African legal prints at the Library of Congress and eighteen other libraries in the United States and Canada, with information about legal gazettes. law codes and legal journals. For Africa you can luckily use the subdomain for gazettes of Laws.Africa.
Some concluding remarks
From this brief post it becomes clear finding foreign legal gazettes can indeed be daunting, but the interactive map of the Library of Congress is surely a fine point to start your search for this document type, as is the database of the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies. Both institutions offer more than just information on current legal gazettes. The paragraph for the main portals to legal gazettes at my website needs definitely some updating. It is disturbing to note some very respected institutions do not longer offer the full information about the legal gazettes they hold, nor indicate the current gateway to their materials. For some continents addiitional overviews exists, and their information is a welcome addition. The longevity of Internet and digital collections is not as complete as you would like it to be. In my view legal historians should take due notice of the fact many overviews of legal gazettes focus on their current form and presence. Historical overviews are a rarity on the main online portals for foreign law, and also in library guides for the laws of particular countries.
Whenever I come across digital collections with a substantial number of older issues or earlier gazettes I try to list them, but of course I cannot guarantee complete coverage. We should very much appreciate and welcome the efforts of teams at some of the world’s most renown libraries to create effective overviews of particular resources. Such initiatives should be a spur for research institutions to create better visibility for their libraries which offer so much more than just stacks for holdings in print and access to databases, online repositories and digital collections.
A postscript
The Center for Research Libraries repeated in January 2022 the Foreign Official Gazettes Database has not been updated since 2007 and is now only maintained as a legacy project. The digitized legal gazettes formerly available throught CRL can now be consulted at LLMC Digital in licensed access.
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?
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
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 (xie siècle-1223), surely worth mentioning here, too. You can view also images of these charters and acts.
Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog 