Slavery depicted and described

Image from Marcus Rainsford, “St. Domingo, of het land der zwarten in Hayti en deszelfs omwenteling (…)” (2 vol., Amsterdam: Allart, 1806), used on the cover of the catalogue

Sometimes I find a new subject for a blog post by looking in my list with possible themes, sources and legal systems, but every now and then a subject appears without any prior notice. This week I found in my mailbox an announcement about a new catalogue of a rare books seller on the subject of slavery. One of the major changes in world history is surely the way slavery became the object of massive criticism and protests after many centuries of more or less accepted existence. Legal history should provide space not only for the study of the history of legal doctrine, its teaching and legal institutions, but also for the impact of both elements on society. Slavery was kept in place and force by laws and customs. Anyway, slavery is a major subject pointing to the grim consequences of plain injustice and enchained human liberty, but such views, too, have their history. The catalogue (PDF, 3,8 MB) contains items from many countries and periods, and you will find here only a selection to make you curious for more. Many items have beautiful illustrations.

Yet another reason to look at this catalogue is the firm behind it. Thirty years ago the rare books firm publishing this catalogue had its seat at the lovely Oudegracht, the main medieval canal in the old city of Utrecht, but it has retreated to a more rural setting in the hamlet ‘t Goy, now part of the garden city Houten to the south-east of Utrecht. In fact this firm was probably the first antiquarian book firm which I dared to visit as a student. At its present pretty location in a renovated old farm you will find a second antiquarian bookseller who works with the other firm in association. This legal figure is rather interesting, because you will want to be sure who is the seller of valuable items. I will briefly look at this legal aspect, too.

From highlight to highlight

In order to present here a somewhat coherent choice I had better start with the book figuring on the cover of the catalogue shown above. No. 24 in the catalogue with 28 items is the Dutch translation of a work by Marcus Rainsford. Rainsford came to Haiti in 1799 and became an admirer of Toussaint l’Ouverture, the leader of the Haitian slave rebellion. No. 5 is a French translation of a work by Willem Bosman, Voyage de Guinée (…) (Utrecht: Schouten, 1705), according to the catalogue one of the earliest descriptions in print of West-Africa and the slave trade in this region.

Among the most important items is no. 3, an official transcript of the will of a slave owner on Jamaica, the merchant Joseph Barnes († 1829). It is good to note the attached probate form of the court of Doctors’ Commons, and a seal of the prerogative court of the archbishop of Canterbury. Rather special is also a book by Philip Howard, Slave-catching in the Indian ocean (…) (London 1873) who wrote about the Asian slave trade (no. 7). Very rare is the book of Bartholomeus Georgiewitz (Bartol Djurdjevic), Voyage de la saincte cité de Hierusalemme (…) (Liège: Streel/De la Coste, 1600), a book written by a former slave who spent 13 years in Ottoman captivity after the battle of Mohács in Hungary (1526) (no. 9).

The catalogue is really a jigsaw puzzle of items stemming from many countries. In a number of cases we find translations, for instance a French translation of Alexander Grailhe’s plea in the case of the will of the philantropist John McDonogh (1779-1850) (no. 12) who bequeathed a fabulous amount of money for the foundation of public schools in New Orleans and Baltimore with free access for both white and black children. Texas figures in no. 26 with an edition of Ordinances and decrees of the consultation, provisional government of Texas (Houston: National Banner Office, 1838).

North Africa is the region in a book ascribed to Jean-Baptiste de La Faye, Voyage pour la redemption des captifs aux royaumes d’Alger et Tunis (…) (Paris: Sevestre and Giffart, 1721) (no. 18). The story told here concerns three members of the Ordre de la Sainte Trinité who tried to free Christian slaves. East Africa is the subject in no. 11, with two French reports about languages in East and Equatorial Africa and slavery, the first published in Mauritius in 1846, the second in Paris in 1850, with a letter by the ethnographer Eugène de Froberville. A Dutch translation of William George Browne, Nieuwe reize naar de binnenste gedeelten van Afrika, door Egypte, Syrie en Le Dar-four (…) (2 vol., Amsterdam: Allart, 1800), an account of travels in Egypt, Syria and Sudan figures as no. 6.

Dutch historians will note the works of two rather famous brothers, the politician Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp with a volume of letters about the end of the Dutch East India Company [Brieven aan een participant in den Oost-Indischen Compagnie (3 parts, Amsterdam: weduwe Doll, 1802-1803); no. 14], and a rare copy of a novel by his brother Willem van Hogendorp [Kraskoepol (…) (Rotterdam: Arrenberg, 1780) ; no. 15] about the dangers of harsh treatment of slaves. At the time of writing he was an official in the East India Company. A different slant on Dutch Caribbean history comes into view with no. 19, the illustrated album amicorum of Henry van Landsberge, governor of Suriname between 1859 and 1867, the period of the abolition of slavery in this Dutch colony (1863). British matters are at stake in two major reports about slavery for the House of Commons printed in 1848 and 1849 (no. 16).

Some reflections

In the paragraph above I have deliberately put some items together which might have been placed in a regional order in the catalogue, too, but the catalogue shows the random nature of the subjects covered in the books and manuscripts offered for sale.

The wide geographical range of subjects is daunting for most scholars and cataloguers. Each description follows the time-honoured practice of a concise bibliographical description, followed by the price, a summary of the contents and information about the author, the publisher and when necessary the rarity of an item. The descriptions end with a string of abbreviated titles and numbers, references to specialized bibliographies, national bibliographies and sometimes also collective library catalogues. In a number of cases I can determine to which publication or website a reference points, but at many turns I can only assume there is specialized scholarly literature with which I am not familiar. For me this catalogue would benefit from full references, but others will no doubt see familiar landmarks. I fail to understand why the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog (KVK) has not been used everywhere, be it even only to state “not in KVK”. The references to NCC stand for the Nederlandse Centrale Catalogus, a licensed online meta-catalogue for Dutch university libraries maintained at the Royal Library, The Hague. “Tiele” can stand for a variety of publications by Pieter Anton Tiele (1834-1889), librarian of Utrecht University Library. Tiele published major catalogues of pamphlets in Dutch holdings, a catalogue of the manuscripts in Utrecht UL, a catalogue of Frederik Muller’s collections of travel accounts, and the catalogue of the Bibliotheca Thysiana in Leiden, to mention just his most important contributions. The French and English Wikipedia have short articles about him. For Dutchies there is the website of the Dr. P.A. Tielestichting which promotes research into book history. In one case I could easily identify an abbreviation of a library. JCB stands for the John Carter Brown Library of Brown University, Providence, RI, renown for its rich holdings for American and Caribbean history and culture.

The things that strike me every time when I see announcements and catalogues of the two associated rare book firms Forum Rare Books and Asher Rare Books are the shared phone and fax numbers. Antiquariaat Forum started in 1970 and acquired Asher Rare Books in 2010. Forum Rare Books is active on Twitter for both firms (@ForumRareBooks). To complicate things, there is a third firm at the Tuurdijk 16 in ‘t Goy, Forum Islamic World. The terms of sale of the three firms follow normal book selling practice governed under Dutch law and the rules of the international antiquarian book world, but I cannot help musing about the liability of the seller when things go wrong, and pure humanly who represents a firm on a particular moment. Luckily, Forum is a member of the two major Dutch book selling associations and of ILAB, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers. I cannot detect the required registration number of the closest Chamber of Commerce, but surely you will find it on the invoice. On the other hand new buyers have to provide their credentials. Bas Hesselink of Forum Rare Books is known in my country also for the way he speaks about old books and prints in the Dutch television program Tussen Kunst & Kitsch (“Between Art and Kitch”) in which the general public brings objects for appraisal by art experts in the setting of museums.

My concern in writing about this catalogue comes also from my curiosity where these items will eventually be found. Some of them form a substantial enrichment of our knowledge of painful aspects of Early Modern history, and hopefully we will find most of them in the custody of public institutions.

Forum Rare Books and Asher Rare Books, catalogue 2017 Slavery – ‘t Goy (Houten), Netherlands

Law and music, a history of norms and sensitivity

Words from completely different domains can be used without even noticing their origin. Scholars conduct research but seldom think of conductors leading an orchestra or choir. A two-day conference in Aix-en-Province (June 30 and July 1, 2016) offers a rare chance to bring the two domains of law and music together. The title Droit et musique: Entre normes et sensibilité, “Law and Music, Between norms and sensitivity”, seems aptly chosen, even though anglophone readers should immediately be at their qui-vive to distinguish between sensibility and sensitivity.

In this post I will give you an impression of the themes to be addressed at this conference held at two locations in Aix-en-Provence, on June 30 at the Amphitheâtre Favoureu of the Faculté de droit et science politique, and on July 1 at the Musée Granet. I found the announcement about this conference at the events calendar Nomôdos, since last year a part of the French Portail universitaire du droit, where you can find also a section for law and culture (Droit et culture).

Two spheres

The two-day conference has two mottoes which link law and music to each other. Danielle Montet formulated reflecting on ancient history and philosophy the thought that both spheres, law and music, deal with composition. The law poses order on society, just like music supports a good disposition of things in the mind and in a city. The second motto stems from Norbert Rouland who wrote law is not the work of a legislator, enlightened or not, but an unconscious collective construction of the Volksgeist, mediated and interpreted by a lawyer. Composition and interpretation seem indeed shared features of law and music.

Let’s look at the program of the conference in Aix-en-Provence. The first day has as its central theme La musique revisitée par le droit, music revisited by law. In particular the section on philosophy and history has space for legal history. Maria Paolo Mittica looks at music and law in ancient Greece. Fouzi Rherrousse will speak about a musical movement within Islam. The Catholic codification of liturgical music in the nineteenth century is the subject of the contribution of Blandine Chelini-Pont. Emmanuele Saulnier-Cassia will present the musical interpretation of the fundamental rights of condemned people. Vassili Tokarev looks at the twin theme of musical criticism and legal criticism in Nietzsche’s work. Patricia Signorile will discuss the philosophical foundations of the connections between law and music.

In the other sections legal history does make less often an appearance. Marc Pena will take Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as a starting point for a paper about the realities and representation of Venice’s territory. Ugo Bellagamba looks at the uses of dissonance and musical resolution in operas about Tancredi from André Campra to Gioacchino Rossini to distill views and perspectives on the First Crusade. Interesting, too, is a paper by Antoine Leca about the judge Jean de Dieu d’Olivier, author of a treatise about the art of legislation, and his views on legal composition. It makes certainly curious about his Essai sur l’art de législation and its influence on French revolutionary and Restoration law. In Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, you can consult the editions of his work published in 1800 and 1815. Christian Bruschi will deal with Montesquieu and his views concerning music and society. Tchaikovsky as a failed lawyer and a succesful composer will be the subject of a paper by Anatoly Kovler.

Other contributors will take a more comparative point of view. Giorgio Resta will consider the way lawyers use musical metaphors. Alizée Cirino will discuss the problems of co-authorship of musical works, the possible clash of interests and the way rights are shared. André Roux looks at the relation between the French constitution and the national anthem. I remember the anecdote about the orchestral arrangement made by Hector Berlioz in 1830 of La Marseillaise which allegedly was banned by the French government because it was considered to be too rousing. At a concert in Utrecht decades ago with French revolutionary music by Méhul and Gossec Berlioz’s work indeed made a terrific impression.

It is possible to allude here to a Dutch link to the twin sisters law and music. At least one Dutch legal historian has all rights to feel himself familiar with music and the tasks of conducting, Not only is Jop Spruit the son of the Dutch conductor Henk Spruit (1906-1998), he actually worked a few years for the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. The way Spruit led a team of Dutch legal historians translating the various parts of the Corpus Iuris Civilis does in a way resemble the activity of a conductor. In my view it is not entirely a coincidence Jop Spruit started this project, and more importantly, conducted it to a resounding end. You can read more about his life and career in an interview by Louis Berkvens and Jean-François Gerkens, ‘Rechtshistorici uit de Lage Landen (13). Interview met J.E. Spruit’, Pro Memorie 17//1 (2015) 3-47.

The choice of themes and even a strong preponderance of French subjects at the conference in Aix-en-Provence should work as an invitation to explore this theme yourself. There is more to find out beyond for example the musical background of Anton Thibaut, the German lawyer advocating the codification of German law. He had to face the powerful rhetorical and legal skills of Friedrich Carl von Savigny whose views against legal codification prevailed for many years in the early nineteenth century. This contribution can be only a prelude to the real music. Interpreting law and subjects in legal history is such a common practice that it is most welcome to reflect on this core activity from an unexpected angle.

Journeys to journals on Classical Antiquity

At the end of each year it is difficult to avoid the great range of lists of all kinds of bests, and I hardly dare to even mention them here. In 2014 the Archaeological Institute of America gave an 2015 AIA Award for Outstanding Work in Digital archaeology to Charles E. Jones and his blog The Ancient World Online (AWOL) to honour his “work on open access material relation to the ancient world, serving archaeological information to more than 1.1 million unique visitors to the site since its inception in 2009”. AWOL needs no laurels, but this praise is certainly justified. One of the latest messages at AWOL in 2015 concerns scholarly journals in open access dealing with ancient law. On December 29, 2015 Charles Jones listed eighteen online journals which specifically deal with some field of legal history in classical Antiquity, and he challenges readers to find and report more journals. A number of these journals figure here in my blog roll, and thus I was immediately interested in checking this list. At AWOL is a list with now nearly 1,600 scholarly journals available in open access for the vast territories of the ancient world. Is this selection of journals touching legal history indeed complete? This post will look at some answers to this question. Indeed I was so eager to publish it that I somehow had posted it with a wrong date, a year ahead.

The power of a list

Lists can have uncanny powers. They might seem to offer everything available or they bring the best possible selection. A good list can enhance the authority of its author, and users of such lists feel comfortable with the knowledge of such lists. Thus it can feel awkward to question a list at all for its qualities, but in my view there is just one way to find about both the positive and negative sides of a list, and that it is by checking each item. This simple approach proved to be rewarding and revealing.

The international character of the list is remarkable. In most fields within Classical Studies the number of journals with English titles is impressive, but they do not outnumber journals in other languages. However, for legal history you will find in this list just two journals with an English title, Roman Legal Tradition, published online since its start in 2002 and edited at Glasgow, and The Journal of Juristic Papyrology, published since 1946 at Warsaw. I did wonder about the presence of other relevant journals with English titles, and thus I quickly checked among the titles of the main list of journals at AWOL. Two titles seemed worthy of inclusion, the Ancient Greek Law eJournal and the Ancient Roman Law eJournal, but they turned out to be something else, a quick reference point for recent research published at SSRN, the Social Sciences Research Network. Both e-journals bring together papers to be published or already published on either Greek or Roman law in other legal journals. The two selections show how both fields currently can appear outside the province of legal history: nine publications for ancient Greek law, and five for Roman law, mainly in American law journals. A third title does not refer to a scholarly journal, but to the reports of the Hellenic Society for Law and Archaeology, where the laws in question are obviously laws touching upon cultural heritage. I cannot figure why PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review figures at all at AWOL, in particular because only few issues are available in open access. Anyway, for good reasons these three journals were not deemed fit for inclusion in the new list of journals dealing with ancient legal history.

Two German titles in the list made me very curious because they did not seem to be current journals anymore. The Jahrbücher für historische und dogmatische Bearbeitung des römischen Rechts appeared three times between 1841 and 1844. The brothers Wilhelm and Karl Sell launched their journal from Zürich and Bonn. The second journal, Themis. Zeitschrift für Doctrin und Praxis des römischen Rechts, appeared in two short series between 1828 and 1848, the first series in 1828 and 1830, the second from 1838 until 1848. This journal was the idea of Christian Friedrich Elvers from Rostock. The subtitle of the first series was Zeitschrift für praktische Rechtswissenschaft, only the second series mentioned Roman law. Elvers filled the pages of his journal in particular in the second series mainly with his own contributions. In 1841 Elvers had become a judge at Kassel, and this move probably influenced his activities for the journal. Both journals have been digitized at the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main. In my view it is one of the characteristics of the study of Roman law in nineteenth-century Germany that articles and book reviews appeared not just in the journals devoted to legal history, but also in the profusion of general law journals. Such statements can be checked readily thanks to the massive digitization at Frankfurt am Main of relevant journals published between 1800 and 1918. Just for the record, I did look also at the sister project for eighteenth-century journals (Zeitschriften 1703-1830), but in this set Roman law was not used in any title. In 2011 I wrote here about digitization projects for old legal journals and also about projects for creating online access to current journals in the field of legal history.

At this point we still have sixteen journals correctly included in Jones’ list, and an implicit conclusion from the last paragraph should help me proceeding here. In a list with open access journals you expect to find journals currently appearing, and only on second thought also retrodigitized journals. Curiously, the list does include not only the Romanistische Abteilung of the Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte der Savigny-Stiftung, but also the Kanonistische Abteilung, a branched launched in 1910. The online issues of these journals have been digitized at Frankfurt, too, but this is a case of digitizing old issues, as for now up to 1919. Some journals in the list at AWOL do not offer exclusively articles concerning ancient law. Forum Historiae Iuris is one of the oldest online journals for legal history. Iura Orientalia does not only cover the field of ancient Oriental law, but also modern Oriental law, in particular ecclesiastical law. In fact the section on Byzantine law of this journal reminded me of two journals published in Groningen, the Subseciva Groningana (1984-), published only in print, and the Groninger Opmerkingen en Mededelingen, a journal for which only a number of individual contributions are available online in open access.

What more should be said here about the remaining journals of the list? It is good to see two online journals for the history of Greek law, the Rivista di Diritto Hellenico, alas possibly damaged by malware at the moment of writing, and Dike. Rivista di Storia del Diritto Greco ed Hellenistico (1998-). When I saw the title of The Journal of Juristic Papyrology I could not help thinking of the ZPE, the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik. You can check online for the titles of all articles since 1967, and this journal surely does contain contribution about ancient legal history. The issues 73 (1988) to 133 (2000) of the ZPE are now available in open access. I bumped into an article by Sir Ronald Syme, ‘Journeys to Hadrian’, ZPE 73 (1988) 159-170, My title is a tribute to a scholar who impressed me as a student with his compact style. I will try to follow his example here more than in previous years! The journal from Warsaw is available online at a special platform for Polish scholarly journals in the humanities, Czasopisma humanistyczne.

The Rivista di Diritto Romano does offer space for articles on diritti antichi, other ancient legal systems, too. In fact the website of this journal is almost a portal to Roman law and its afterlife with sections on the palingenesis of Roman law texts, the Basilica, a list of journals, and online versions of numerous Roman law texts. However, a major drawback is the navigation at its website where you can find only the latest issue online. The Russian journal Ius Antiquum is a further witness to the international character of Classical Studies. I leave it to you to have a look at the other journals of a list which if not exhaustive surely proved to be interesting

However, one journal must not be left out here. A few months ago I had already spotted the surprising online appearance of the third series of the very high regarded Revue internationale des droits de l’antiquité (RIDA). This journal, published by scholars at the Université de Liège, has digitized the issues XXVI (1979) to LIX (2012). The decision to publish such recent issues of a well-known. peer-reviewed international learned journal might well be a spur for other publishers to make moves in the direction of open access. The RIDA is even present at Facebook. The image of the new cover shows the new publisher, the Presses Universitaires de Liège, but on the RIDA website you can still subscribe to volumes published at Paris.

The changing world of scholarly journals

As for the 1,700 journal titles in the major overview at AWOL I am afraid a number of them is not in its entirety available in open access. One example: Brepols Online publishes the Revue d’Histoire des Textes, but only issues between 2006 and 2009 are to seen freely. Making a comparison with journals registered within the Directory of Open Journals is not as easy as one would expect today. You can search either by entering keywords in a search field for titles, forcing you to look for specific matters in a number of languages, or use the far too general subject filters. Even history or culture have not yet been deemed worthy independent subjects. At the start of a new year there are many days in which this sorry state of affairs can be changed, but anyway it will be useful to follow the posts labelled Law at AWOL – The Ancient World Online!

Order in a new church: Behind the headlines of the Reformation

Within any organization there is a constant tension between the original inspiration and its structure, and this is the case, too, within the various Christian churches. Auguste Sabatier (1839-1901) minted the phrases religion de l’Esprit against religion de la Lettre. When sixteenth-century reformers started to create their own church, the support many people gave them fueled their own enthusiasm about their views, but fairly quickly the need for proper structures arose. Luther famously burned the books of canon law in Wittenberg on December 10, 1520, but laws and regulations nevertheless rapidly did find a place in the Protestant churches.

At the new Reformationsportal Mitteldeutschland, nicely abbreviated as DigiRef, you will find digitized archival records from four German archives and libraries bringing you documents which tell the story of these young churches in their daily business of getting things organized, dealing with problems and meeting all kinds of people. The portal has three main sections, Visitationsakten, records of official visitations, Schaufenster, “showcases”, sets of records and images arranged around a number of themes, and last but not least Recherche, an interactive map of Europe where you can search and select information for particular regions and locations. The visitation records and church regulations at this portal prompted me to write here about this project, because these have clear connections with legal history. In Germany preparations for the Luther year 2017 have indeed already started, and it can do no harm to look in time at some of the accompanying projects.

Three archives and a library

DigiRef has been created by three German archives, the Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar, the Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg and the Landesarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt, joined by a library, the Thüringische Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Jena. This library organized in 2014 a two-day conference Reformation vor Ort. Zum Quellenwert von Visitationsprotokollen about the value of visitation records; Dagmar Blaha and Christopher Spehr will edit the papers of this conference (Leipzig 2016). Let’s look first at the actual records of church visitations in this project. The visitations aimed at reviewing systematically the situation of a particular church and its vicar(s). Apart from him whenever possible deacons, schoolmasters, sacristans and other officials, too, were interviewed. The visitation committees also looked at the moral behaviour of the parish and at its revenues, possessions and special funds. In this project not only the official reports of these visitations, the Protokolle, come into view, but also the Beiakten, the less conspicuous documents around the official reports, ranging from travel expenses to notes from interviews, come into the limelight.

Visitation at Wittenberg, 1528 – Weimar, LASA, A 29b, II Nr. 63, fol. 1v

The 118 archival records digitized for this project stem also from archives outside the four main DigiRef institutions. It is interesting to note monasteries, too, were visited. The aim was to present here the first visitations in the Reformation period. At Weimar four instructions have been preserved. The committees often indited people to come to a city from nearby villages or from lesser cities to a major town. As an example I have chosen the first ordinance for Wittenberg [Weimar, LASA, A 29b, II Nr. 63]. Wittenberg is dealt with in connection with the Amt surrounding this town and other towns and their surrounding territories. The register covers the years 1528-1529 and 1533-1534, it has 352 folia, and fol. 1r-34v contain an ordinance for the city of Wittenberg. Fol. 37r to 127r contain visitations for other locations in the Amt Wittenberg and two other towns in the Amt Wittenberg, Kernberg and Schmiedeberg.

The records can be shown in different ways: just the document, document and transcription or an image, transcription and modern German translation, and you can even add a column for a commentary (Historische Einordnung). Alas this service is not available for every item, and some items have been provided only partially with it. I list these possibilities in particular to show the value of this presentation next to earlier editions of a number of these protocols. The DigiRef portal does point to these editions and to relevant scholarly literature. When I looked at the 1525 visitation of the Allerheiligenstift at Wittenberg (Dresden, HStA, 10024, Loc. 8980/19) I did not find a transcription, translation or commentary. At Weimar a short list with questions in Latin from 1533 written by Justus Jonas from Wittenberg for visitation in Sachsen has been preserved (Weimar, ThHStAW, EGA, Reg. Ii 574), with at the website only images of this pivotal document for conducting a visitation. The portal promises you for some records a translation into English.

Admittedly you will have to become versatile in deciphering Early Modern German handwriting, and sixteenth-century handwriting can be notoriously challenging to read. When searching for online guidance you might start looking at the materials of the Ad fontes team in Zürich. Their website contains comprehensive information, examples of different scripts and exercises, references to literature, and since two years there is even an app. The Staatliche Archive Bayerns offer a lot of online examples of German writing in archival records from the eighth to the twentieth century, with transcriptions and brief introductions.

Showcasing the Reformation

The second approach to the digitized records is using the showcases. With 18 themes and 17 historic persons – including popes and princes – you are sure to find something that might interest you. You can choose to look first at the metadata concerning a record, view it immediately or to look at ist geographic origin. Taking again the Kirchenvisitationen you get now six documents in this showcase. I found in particular the printed ordinance about the visitations from 1528 by Kurfurst Johann von Sachsen interesting (Gotha, Thüringisches Staatsarchiv, Geheimes Archiv, KK2, vol. 1) . This document shows to a large extent the matters to be reviewed during the visitations, and it makes clear how important the backing of secular authorities was for the emerging new churches. Indeed the secular authorities proved to be decisive for their success or lack of success in particular towns, regions and countries.

It is tempting to single out here other archival records worthy of your attention, because I am sure you will find something in such sections as Reichstage (Imperial Diets), Universitäten, Kirchenordnungen, Bündnisse (contacts and leagues), and Kirchliche Neuordnung, ecclesiastical reform. In this last section you will find for example a letter by Luther from 1526 urging earl Johann von Sachsen to support church visitations for all his lands, not just for one or more Ämter. Founding new universities became another important matter.

A geographical approach

At first I was rather surprised the tab Recherche of DigiRef leads to an interactive map showing a large part of Europe instead of only a simple search form with a button leading me to an advanced search mode. At the top of the screen you can use a time bar to narrow you search, open an index of persons or a filter for locations, and there is a simple search field as well. It turns out to be really important to use these filters, because searching directly on the map can appear to be cumbersome and confusing. Not by clicking on a location with search results, but by clicking on an icon at the right side of the screen you arrive finally at a list of results for this location. The map does show locations with documents in its initial position, thus inviting you to go to particular places., but you will notice quickly some towns which do have results do not come into view immediately when you zoom in. In comparison with the interactive historical-geographical maps discussed here lately this operation mode is not quite what you would currently expect. The interactive map does save your latest choice for filtering. Instead of clicking a button you have to remove your choices from the red filter bar at the top of the screen. The filter for locations is also helpful to find locations mentioned in a visitation.

I cannot hide here my mixed feelings about the navigation of the DigiRef map, but in the end one thing is more important than only noticing the pros and cons of the navigation. The map makes it very clear that archival records in the three archives and the library at Jena do focus on Sachsen and Thüringen. Other regions figure mainly when there are clear relations with them within some document. Among the persons covered in the records I missed Erasmus.

Casting your nets wider

In my view the Reformationsportal Mitteldeutschland can be welcomed as a most useful resource to create a much more detailed image of the early Reformation. The archival records bring you a lot of things not found in contemporary books and treatises, and thus they help you to connect the issues at stake with actual people and places instead of staying content with a more abstract vision of the discussions, confusion and turmoil. Nevertheless it is of course necessary to use these records as elements of a much wider history, a decisive period in European history. Although the navigation of the interactive map is not as comfortable as you encounter elsewhere, this feature does not hamper completely access to digitized sources. In the last section of this post I will look at some other online resources for studying the history and impact of the Reformation, starting with the institutions behind DigiRef.

The Landesarchiv Hessen has created a relatively large number of online resources, but the Reformation is only seldom touched upon. At the Digitales Archiv Marburg a new online exhibition on Luther and Europa is currently being prepared. The Digitales Archiv Hessen-Darmstadt has a small section on the Reformation. It is good to remember here also the HISGIS system for Hessen, the Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS), without a section on religion, but you might like to consult the Hessische Bibliographie.

The Thüringische Staatsarchive do offer a general website for searching and accessing digitized archival records at the various offices, with for religious history for example the Oberkonsistorium Gotha and the Konsistorium Sondershausen, and they also have important digital resources for legal historians. Its Themis portal has been created together with the ThULB at Jena, and brings you digitized legislation nicely ordered along the several old territorial units of Thüringen. Thüringen Legislativ & Exekutiv is another project of these two partners, now for digitized official gazettes publishing laws and regulations for roughly the same set of territories. There is a separate portal to inform you about all archives in Thüringen.

For the third archive, the Landesarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt, I can point to a general search engine for archival records, but apart from their content at DigiRef there is no other project specifically dealing with the Reformation. Among its other projects the digital archive for the Friedliche Revolution 1989/90 [Friendly Revolution 1989-1990] deserves a mention.

With the Thüringische Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Jena we do reach a very important partner for the DigiRef project. Without its earlier projects touching upon the history of sixteen-century Germany, and the actual use of its servers for the digitized items, the three archives might still be struggling to work together. The ThULB can boast among its digital projects at the UrMEL server the Bibliotheca Electoralis with books stemming from the library of Kurfürst Friedrich der Weise, 800 of the so-called Lutherflugschriften, pamphlets kept at the Wartburg castle in Eisenach, and the Sammlung Georg Rörer. Rörer (1492-1557) worked closely with Martin Luther and was responsable for the Jenaer Lutherausgabe, one of the first complete editions of Luther’s prolific production. Rörer was probably responsable for creating Luther’s most famous but apocryphal words: “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise”, and he made the long neglected contemporary note about Luther proposing his theses at Wittenberg in 1517. Earlier on the ThULB helped creating the portal Digitales Thüringen with a search interface in German and English.

Instead of offering here as a bonus a nutshell guide to research on the Reformation I will mention just a few more general online resources concerning German history, some specific websites, and a good online guide and introduction for delving deeper into the Reformation. For some years you could benefit from the BAM portal for quickly accessing materials in German libraries, archives and museums, but this portal has recently been closed, with a notice that a number of its services are now part of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. For finding German archives you can use the Archivportal, a related project of this digital library. At the portal Kulturerbe Digital you can use the search interface – switchable to German, English or French – to find digital projects for a particular subject. For search terms such as the Reformation or Luther you will find easily projects, including those at the ThULB described here above. Museums in Sachsen-Anhalt have their own portal. The website of the Stiftung Luthergedenkstätten in Sachsen-Anhalt can only be viewed in German. In this respect the multilingual portal Luther 2017 does its job properly. For those convinced of the very power Luther gave to the German language going to the fine introduction and guide Reformation Digital at Historicum.net brings you much you will need to know, and in fact even a model to be followed. Historicum.net offers an impressing range of introductions, web guides and bibliographies for several historical subjects. Portals such as the Post-Reformation Digital Library and the Universal Short Title-Catalogue will help you to trace digital versions of many sixteenth-century books. At the blog Zwingli Redivivus: Flagellum Dei by Jim West you can find much about current research on early Protestant theology. His blog roll ends with a nice list of online editions of the works of the major reformers.

Looking at all these resources can help to shake yourself free from the temptation to view the Reformation as just a clash of theological views, an unfortunate mixture of events and persons leading sometimes to an outright war between religions. Matters were actually much more complicated. Theological questions and problems touched a raw nerve for many people in sixteenth-century Europe. How to lead a good life? How to be a Christian, and to form or reform a church actively committing itself to people and the Christian message? The need for structures or reform of structures connects the internal affairs of churches to matters pertaining also to legal history. The Reformation is one of these movements that changed Europe’s history and culture forever, and it can do no harm to be aware of its history and impact which reached far beyond the imagination of even such a creative mind as Luther himself.

A postscript

Soon after finishing this post I started thinking about adding at least a note that Luther was not the only major theologian of the new churches. His colleagues and adversaries are also present at DigiRef. It seemed this contribution yet lacked a Dutch touch. In April 2014 the Digital Humanities Lab of Utrecht University announced the inclusion of Luther’s own annotated bible at Annotated Books Online, more precisely his copy of Erasmus’ edition of the Novum Testamentum and Erasmus’ Annotationes in Novum Testamentum, both in the edition Basel 1527, from the holdings of the University Library at Groningen (HS 494).

For all those thirsting to know more about Martin Luther and legal matters I can point to the open access version of Christopher Spehr’s article on Luther in the second edition of the Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte III (Berlin 2013) col. 1100-1107. Christoph Strohm edited the volume Reformation und Recht : Ein Beitrag zur Kontroverse um die Kulturwirkungen der Reformation (Tübingen 2017) available online in open access at OAPEN.

A choice of languages

A year ago I wrote here about my efforts to repair the bilingual interface of my website Rechtshistorie. Due to a technical problem caused by the very progress of the engine behind it the navigation menu offering access in both English and Dutch had broken down definitely. I decided not to test online possible successors to the defunct multilingual tool, but to try things first on a standalone computer. You can imagine me sifting the advertisements of promising tools, making them work or deciding to go elsewhere instead of creating havoc, and facing solutions that either looked bad or could be handled only with the utmost care and precaution. During the past twelve months I did copy all changes and additions in the English version also into the Dutch version.

This weekend I have finally launched a new multilingual menu that seems to me easy to use and maintain. The language switchers are now part of the navigation menu. I have deleted the menu in the right sidebar. When you hover over the menu items pages linked to them will show themselves as before.

Preparing the future

My plans for further pages are not sleeping in a drawer! Such new pages are often a sequel to posts on my blog. Many changes and additions stem from blog posts, too. However, it takes time to prepare these new pages, not just for the research involved, but also for creating a lucid presentation that does justice to a subject.

The last major change on my website is the new order of presentation on the page for digital libraries. In the past I presented digital libraries from some seventy countries in alphabetical order. I have created a new version where you can find countries on their respective continents. The major benefit is easier navigation to a particular country, and a better view of the relative and absolute prominence of digital libraries in particular regions of the world. A major drawback is the preponderance of information about European countries, now much more visible. More than twenty of the seventy countries covered are in Europe. In my defence I would like to consider the fact that you will feel hard pressed to find similar overviews elsewhere. The challenge in creating my overview is for many countries to find anything which really should be included here. Any useful additions are most welcome!

The situation on my page with virtual exhibitions is roughly similar to my digital libraries page. Here the number of countries is not yet as large to make a reordering necessary. Lately I have added a number of links to interesting virtual exhibitions. Especially as a teaching tool or for the first reconnaissance of a theme or subject virtual exhibitions can be most useful. In fact some virtual exhibitions are explicitly meant to be companions to text books.

I am sorry that I have to conclude here with an announcement about Rechtsgeschiedenis, the partner website of Rechtshistorie. The content management system behind this website of the Foundation for Old Dutch Law showed all kind of defects, and it had to be taken down. The essential information about the foundation will eventually reappear, either at the new website for its scholarly journal Pro Memorie. Bijdragen tot de rechtsgeschiedenis der Nederlanden or at a renewed version of Rechtsgeschiedenis.org. Uitgeverij Verloren, the publisher of Pro Memorie, will start this year with digitizing older issues. Let’s hope that Dutch legal historians will soon succeed in reviving and renewing their website, or that they will build a basic website around the journal. The example of the Flemish website for legal history at Ghent will surely be a spur to create a new web team and work together closely with legal historians in Belgium.

Everything but law? On revisiting portals for medieval studies

However vast the variety of all possible sources of information on Internet, and however strong the seduction of One Tool to Find Them All, there has always been a need for gateways and portals to find your way to specific subjects. The field of medieval studies has been lucky to benefit since many years from some great virtual portals and gateways. Some have become my favorites, others I visit only rarely. Lately I realized I use at Reti Medievali only the Calendario, its calendar of scholarly events for searching events linked to legal history which I gather at the congress calendar of my blog. Reti Medievali translates literally as “medieval nets”, because the information of this portal is literally located at a number of separate websites. Can you fetch in medieval law with any of these nets? How does Reti Medievali compare with some other portals and gateways? At least some parts of Reti Medievali can be viewed not only in Italian, but also in English, French, German and Spanish. In the second part of this post I will look at a most valuable contribution to the history of medieval law, the online version of a multi-volume publication published last year. For me its presence at Reti Medievali was a welcome trigger to have a broader look at this portal, to write about it and to compare it with some of its companion portals.

Fishing the seas of medieval studies

Reti Medievali (RM) started in 1998 as an initiative of scholars at five Italian universities to support and unite medieval studies both in the real and the virtual world. RM has even its own society. Since 2001 RM worked also with scholars outside Italy. Nowadays you might see Reti Medievali as a fleet, with on its ships a library, an events calendar, teaching tools, e-books, essays, an internet guide for medieval studies and its own online journal. At RM the section RM Memoria has the least transparent title, but it offers a concise bibliographical introduction to the medieval history of Italian regions and a number of Italian medievalists, and also a small section with three medievalists from abroad and a corner for medieval Spain. Among these scholars are some famous legal historians, for example Carlo Guido Mor, Pietro Torelli and Giovanni Tabacco. Reinhard Elze figures among the three non-Italian medievalists.

My first port of call at Reti Medievali should be the Repertorio. Here you can find at a general level overviews of the situations of medieval studies in eight countries, an overview of scientific journals, and nearly thirty introductions on a number of subjects and themes. Each introduction contains a – sometimes elaborate – sketch on its subject, and then proceeds to relevant sources in archives and libraries, editions, online resources, and closes with a bibliography. Legal history is certainly present here. The report by Riccardo Rao on Le risorse colletive nell’Italia medievale (2007) deals with recent scholarship about communal goods and several forms of medieval commons; Italy gets the main focus, but Rao provides also some references to other countries. Primo G. Embriaco dealt in 2006 in a similar way with the Regnum Italicum and with the power of lords in Italy from the ninth to the thirteenth century. In both introductions he mentions law at a few turns. Enrica Salvatori only mentions statutes in her essay on La civiltà comunale italiana [The civilization of the Italian comune], and apart from the useful references concerning municipal statutes law is nearly absent as a primary subject. Anyway, updating this introduction written in 2003 would be sensible. Tommasso Duranti gives an introduction to late medieval diplomacy (2009), and Nicola Lorenzo Barile deals with Credito, usura, prestito a interesse [Credit, usury, loan with interest] (2010). Reti Medievali could score much higher here if they had not presented the general theme overview with a plugin that your browser might not support in any language version. Translating the titles of the contributions for a number of items within the general scheme would be a most desirable and not too difficult service.

A tour of medieval portals

Instead of being content with such criticisms I prefer to look now first at some other well-known portals and see whether they give more space, a wider view or a more up-to-date treatment of matters concerning medieval law and justice.

Can the minstrel of the French portal Ménestrel convince us to visit it regularly for information about medieval law? Luckily there is an English version of many pages, or at least an introduction in English, and in some cases a clear promise to translate particular pages. Ménestrel started as an offspring of the journal Le médiéviste et l’ordinateur (1979-2007), one of the earliest journals concerning the use of computers for medieval studies. Ménestrel wisely admits it will not try to outdo websites which fulfill all possible wishes about a subject, but instead this portal will refer to them. Alas this promise is not kept for the field of medieval law. Although this subject does show up many time when you use the free text search (droit) there is no attempt for a general overview. However, implicitly you can reach legal subjects by looking at the auxiliary sciences (palaeography, codicology, diplomatics) and some of the classic sources such as charters and cartularies. These sections rank with the best guides in this field. In its early days there was a fine section on medieval canon law maintained by Charles de Miramon (Paris, EHESS). but eventually this section was removed. Among the few spots at Ménestrel with space for ecclesiastical law was the section on histoire religieuse, but alas that section, too, is now defunct.

As a ray of light is the recent inclusion at Ménestrel of juridical documents in the section for Paris médiéval. In the section with documents you can learn about documents normatifs, sources such as ordinances, and sources judiciaires, in particular sources about the judiciary, but strangely also customary law. However great or small these deficiencies at Ménestrel, it is great to have this guide to medieval Paris. Ménestrel is wonderful for its country overviews of medieval studies and the overviews of archives and manuscripts, and there is also a section on teaching medieval history.

At the German portal Mediaevum, the great online gateway to medieval Germanic languages, it is only in the large section for dictionaries (Wörterbücher) that legal matters come to the surface. Gerhard Koebler (Innsbruck) has created online versions of several of his dictionaries, among them one for medieval High German (Mittelhochdeutsch). Koebler’s website is a veritable portal to Germany’s legal history. Of course Mediaevum mentions the Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch, a project described here in a post last year. A promising link to a bibliography about Jews in medieval Europe is actually broken, but I did arrive at the Arye-Maimon-Institut für Geschichte der Juden (Universität Trier) and at a project led by Christoph Cluse concerning Medieval Mediterranean Slavery which does contain both a bibliography and a bibliographical database.

There are several medieval portals with an exclusively English interface. The ORB (Online Resource Book for Medieval Studies) is one of the oldest still working portals. For this portal Brendan McManus created a concise section for medieval law, with reference to online version of Roman law texts, bibliographies for Roman law and canon law, and some links. The Labyrinth (Georgetown University) used to be a substantial gateway to medieval studies, but in its present clear design it is just a web repertory with commented links, lacking law as a general category. The number of relevant law links to be found with a free text search is meagre. Some links lead to the Medieval Sourcebook (Fordham University). This university in New York has placed this project conceived by Paul Halsall on a legacy subdomain, but you can still find here a splendid selection of sources in English translation for many subjects and themes, including medieval law and justice, for example about feudalism; the introductions, too, are interesting. However, The ORB and The Labyrinth do not attempt at covering the whole field of medieval studies. You will look in vain for an events calendar, a discussion forum or an online journal.

This parade of American portals for medieval history would not be complete without NetSerf, a classic web repertory for medieval studies. Its choice of general subjects is balanced, and every link is accompanied with a concise introduction. The section on medieval law has a main overview and seven subsections, one for documents and the six others for barbarian laws, criminal law and punishment, canon law, Roman law, the English common law and Spanish law. Some pruning might be needed. A nice example is a Carolingian capitulare, a law from 802 figuring among the “barbarian laws”, the “national laws” published within the territories of the Roman Empire between roughly 400 and 750 A.D. Thanks to further subdivisions the section on the medieval period English common law is thoroughly useful. The cross-references are often helpful, and NetSerf is certainly worth visiting.

Let’s not forget here the Online Medieval Sources Bibliography which often mentions translations, too. I should have added this reference to my recent post about digitized manor rolls at Harvard Law School, because in this resource you can search directly for editions of particular types of documents. The Avalon Project at the Lillian Goldman Library of Yale Law School has in its section for medieval documents (400-1399) some thirty legal documents and sources, most of them in English translation.

I would have been most happy to show you here a portal to medieval studies from the Netherlands and Belgium, but alas I cannot give you an unqualified example. The website of the Onderzoeksschool Mediëvistiek, the Dutch research school for medieval studies is strong in bringing news and information about scholarly events, as is its Flemish counterpart, the Vlaamse Werkgroep Mediëvistiek. The Contactgroep SIGNUM deals with the social, economic, legal and institutional history of Dutch and Flemish ecclesiastical institutions, but even the fine list of web links does not make this website into a portal site. The Francophone medievalists in Belgium have surely their useful society blog, and also the well-informed L’agenda du médiéviste, but as for now they have not yet launched a portal.

In Germany you will find in particular online tutorials for medieval history, for example Mittelalterliche Geschichte (Universität Augsburg), an online tutorial at Tübingen, and a Leitfaden Mittelalter at the e-Studies website of the Universität Köln. Within the Hypotheses network of scholarly blogs the Mittelalter blog has quickly gained a central role. This blog is close to current scholarly events and contributions. In a tree structure for scholarly disciplines at this blog legal history gets a niche in the section for Spezialgebiete (“special areas”), together with the history of medieval philosophy, religious orders and prosopography, surely nice company, but also a bit surprising. This tree has some other remarkable juxtapositions which gives you food for thought. Whatever you might think about this blog with its substantial blog roll, Martin Bertram did not hesitate to publish here last year an article about legal quaestiones from mid-thirteenth century Paris.

The results of this quick tour from a particular perspective are relatively clear. Ménestrel offers scattered information about legal history, but it almost turns the balance with the sections for the auxiliary sciences and its most valuable online guide to medieval Paris where legal records get judicious space. Mediaevum offers less relevant links than Ménestrel, but some of them are really useful. Thanks to its concise sections on medieval law the ORB Net scores better than the Labyrinth. NetSerf scores nicely with its section on medieval law which brings you to further sections with links, basic comments and cross-references. Paul Halsall’s Medieval Sourcebook and Yale’s Avalon project have both substantial attention for medieval legal history, and often they give you quick access to translations in modern English of important legal sources. A round-up of Dutch and Belgian websites did not add much to this tour, although all of them have at least one useful element. In Germany we saw a number of online tutorials for medieval history. The tree structure of the important Mittelalter blog left us somewhat bewildered about the role it accords to legal history.

Summa summarum

At the end of this post I bring Reti Medievali again into view. In my opinion this portal shines out for the sheer range of sections and approaches. Mediaevum is perhaps even better, but it is restricted to the Germanic languages and literature. Ménestrel satisfies many needs and it is strong on some fields with traditional importance for legal historians, but a general section about medieval law is sadly lacking, as are pointers to better resources. The absence of legal history is precisely more visible because the sheer width of disciplines is stunning, and some of these sections are truly superb. Italian medievalists can benefit for the auxiliary sciences from the Scrineum project at the Università degli studi di Pavia, and thus it does not matter so much that the Repertorio of Reti Medievali does have only one section from 2003 on this subject.

If you create a grid with a number of fields for elements at these portals, such as sections for various disciplines with guides and bibliographies, an event calendar, news, a blog, a digital library, teaching tools and a scholarly journal, preferably in open access, you can quickly see which portal meets most demands. Even though it does not offer you everything in this list, Reti Medievali trumps the other portals when you look primarily for sheer width. Of course I realize that you will often go from one portal to another, and in fact I have set out here how to do this for medieval legal history. RM has a digital library and an online journal, RM Rivista appears since 1999. This journal is supported by Firenze University Press which publishes more journals in open access.

RM e-Book, the series of digital publications, is published also in cooperation with FU Press. The twenty books so far published in open access often touch upon subject related to legal history. Political history, political theory and the interplay between secular and ecclesiastical powers are the main subjects. No. 19 of the series is in itself reason enough to start having a closer look at RM, and in fact this work spurred me to start writing this post. The four volumes of Honos alit artes. Studi per il settantesimo compleanno di Mario Ascheri, Paola Maffei and Gian Maria Varanini (eds.) (2014) are a Festschrift for one of the most versatile contemporary scholars in the field of legal history. These laudatory volumes for Ascheri (1944) deal not only with medieval Italy, but also with towns and cities in Early Modern Europe, the cultural dimensions of the history of law in Europe, and also contemporary law and institutions in Europe and America. The overview of the contents will reassure you immediately of the presence of contributions in English, German and French side by side with articles in Italian. Medieval consilia, Siena and Tuscany, to mention some of Ascheri’s beloved themes, are often addressed by the authors, but in fact you will find articles touching many corners of Europe. The online versions are not just helpful for everyone without access to the printed version, but give you the possibility to search quickly for your own favorite themes and subjects.

The gist of my post is clear: instead of staying with one portal it can be most useful to look elsewhere, sometimes for specific questions, sometimes because of sheer curiosity or the expectation of interesting news just outside your normal fishing grounds. In my experience you will surmount the difficulties of other languages whenever your interests are really awakened. When you come back from one of these portals you might turn to the mighty volumes of the great Festschrift for Mario Ascheri, and find at every turn new aspects of medieval and later legal history. The four volumes build an impressive plea for the importance of legal history, meriting not just a room of its own in the mansions of history, but more convincingly as core connections between periods, subjects and themes.

A postscript

The staff of the Mittelalter blog received my remarks about the tree structure with Spezialgebiete (“special areas”) with interest. They did indeed change the tree structure, and it looks now more convincingly. Legal history (Rechtsgeschichte) is now a an element of history (Geschichtswissenschaft).

A theatre of knowledge: Law and justice on show in old book titles

Theatrical representations of a trial can enthrall an audience. Even when you know actual proceedings were different you are lured into understanding matters in the way they are played in the theatre. Authors and publishers were not slow to realize the attraction of the theatre for book titles. In a German research project several books with the word “theatre” in their title printed between 1500 and 1800 have been brought together. Among them is a considerable number of books concerning law and justice. The project was finished a few years ago, but I think it is worth looking at here.

The right title

The project at the heart of this post has been supported by the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) in Wolfenbüttel. Earlier on I had not really noticed this project at the website of this research library with a focus on Early Modern and baroque literature. However, in the end this notice did awake my curiosity. Scholars from the Universität Kassel worked together with the staff of the HAB to create the project Welt und Wissen auf der Bühne – Theatrum-Literatur der frühen Neuzeit. “World and Knowledge on Stage – Theatrum-Literature of the Early Modern Period”.

The metaphor of the theatre helped to create a visual image for multiple purpose, not just constructing a setting but also the disposition and communication of knowledge. Apart from “Theater” and “Theatrum” authors and publishers used words such as Schau-Bühne and Schauplatz, and of course other languages used their own versions of these words, for example théâtre, teatro, schouwtoneel and schouwplaats. Apart from works in German, French and English Dutch, Spanish and Italian works were within the orbit of the project, The project at Wolfenbüttel aimed at creating a portal with bibliographical information and direct access to some 200 titles. Despite this multilingual starting point the project website is only accessible in German, in clear contrast with the HAB’s website which can be viewed in German, English and some pages even in Latin. At the project website you can go directly to each of the digitized works, execute a full text search in all titles or in a particular work, or visit first the repertory and benefit from the information about the works brought together here.

There is no shorter way to view the qualities of the project than starting to look at a particular work. I have chosen a work by Peter Dahlmann, his Historischer Schauplatz Vornehmer und berühmter Staats- und Rechts-Gelehrten (2 vol., Frankfurt and Berlin, 1710-1715), and I selected it because it was the first work in the list with the word Recht (law) in its title. This biographical dictionary appeared anonymously, but Dahlmann published a similar more general work in 1710 which made his authorship plausible. The description of this work with twenty-seven biographies is most useful, in particular for the overview of the content, information about the context and background, and bibliographical information.

When I looked at the list of extant copies of Dahlmann’s book I somehow became wary. A quick search in the Karlsruher Virtual Library shows indeed more copies than indicated here. The copy of the first volume at the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main, too, has been digitized, as announced on the project page at Wolfenbüttel, but I was really surprised to find this title in Frankfurt within the collection of German legal journals from the period 1703 to 1830. Anyway, this title is certainly not widely available in German libraries: VD18, the bibliographical project for eighteenth-century German imprints, has not yet included any copy from the five participating libraries, but the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich do have a copy of the rare second volume, which has been digitized at Munich. Checking the information about surviving copies seems advisable.

Law on stage

Let’s look which other legal works and books touching the subject of law, jurisprudence and justice have been included at Welt und Wissen auf der Bühne:

– anon., Schauplatz der Betrieger (Hamburg-Frankfurt 1687) – a book about impostors and forgers – description
– anon., Hamburgisches Mordt-Theatrum (s.l., 1687) – a book describing the trial for the murder of a merchant from Hamburg – description
– anon., Theatro politico del honor y manifiesto legal de la santa iglesia Catedral de Zamora (s.l. [Zamora], 2 vol., 1730-1732) – a treatise about the jurisdiction and rights of a Spanish cathedral
– [Christoph Peller], Theatrum Pacis, Hoc Est: Tractatuum Atque Instrumentorum Praecipuorum (2 vol., Neurenberg 1683-1685) – a collection of peace treaties
– Johann Abelinus and Matthaeus Merian, Theatrum Europaeum (21 vol., Frankfurt 1633-1738) – a chronicle of near contemporary European history, often supported with legal documents – description
– Giovanni Battista Argiro, Theatrum universi juris (2 vol., Rome 1729-1734) – a legal bibliographical repertory guiding to commentaries for Roman and canon law
– Lorenzo Arrazola et alii, Enciclopedia española de derecho y administracion, ó Nuevo teatro universal de la legislacion de España è Indias (13 vol., Madrid 1848-1872) – an encyclopedia for Spanish law and government, including colonial law
– Angelo Auda, Theatrum regularium, in quo brevi methodo, variae decisiones, tam apostolicae quam Ordinis Minorum de observantia […] exarantur (Rome 1664) – ecclesiastical law concerning the Franciscan order
– Giovanni Battista Carmen Fattolillo, Theatrum immunitatis, et libertatis ecclesiasticae tam theorice, quam practice fideliter excerptum juxta Gregorianam bulla (2 vol., Rom 1714) – a work concerning immunity in canon law
– Giovanni Battista de Luca, Theatrum veritatis et iustitiae (18 vol., Cologne 1688) – De Luca’s famous often reprinted encyclopedic overview of all fields of law
– Camillo della Ratta, Theatrum feudale (2 vol., Naples 1637) – a work on feudal law – online, volume 1 and 2, Madrid, Universidad Complutense (at the Hathi Trust Digital Library)
– Jacob Döpler, Theatrum poenarum (2 vol., Sondershausen-Leipzig 1693) – a work on penal law – description
– Anton Wilhelm Ertl, Neu-eröffnete Schau-Bühne, Von dem Fürsten-Recht (Neurenberg 1702) – a book about princes and the law
– idem, Neu-Eröffneter Schau-Platz der Lands-Fürstlichen Ober-Bottmässigkeit (Neurenberg 1694)
– idem, Theatrum Superioritatis Territorialis Noviter Extructum (Augsburg 1684) – these two titles are clearly the Latin original and the German translation of a book on the territorial power of princes
– Adam Joseph Greneck, Theatrum Jurisdictionis Austriacae (Vienna 1752) – an encyclopedia on jurisdiction within Austria
– Georg Philipp Härsdorffer, Der Grosse Schauplatz Jämerlicher Mordgeschichte (8 vol., Hamburg 1649-1652) – a collection of murder stories and trials – description
– Carl Johnson / Joachim Meier (transl.), Schauplatz der englischen See-Räuber (A general history of the robberies and murders of the most notorious pyrates) (Goslar 1728) – a book about pirates and piracy
– Milettus Hedrusius, Neu-eröffnete Mord- und Trauer-Bühne (Schwabach 1708) – murder stories
– Johannes Franciscus Löw, Theatrum Medico-Juridicum (Neurenberg 1725) – a collection of treatises on forensic law
– Johann Christian Lünig, Theatrum Ceremoniale Historico-Politicum (3 vol., Leipzig 1719-1720) – a pioneer work about elections and political ceremonies – description
– Karl Philipp Mentzel, Neuestes Teutsches Reichs-Tags-Theatrum (Neurenberg 1733) – a book about the German Reichstag from 1662 onwards
– Johann Joachim Müller, Des Heiligen Römischen Reichs, Teutscher Nation, Reichs Tags Theatrum (2 vol., Jena 1713) – the German Reichstag between 1440 and 1493
– Melchior Adam Pastorius, Theatrum Electionis Et Coronationis Romano-Caesareae (Frankfurt am Main 1657) – not only about the election of German emperors, but with an overview of emperors since Roman antiquity
– Antonio Javier Pérez y Lopez, Teatro de la legislacion universal de España é Indias (28 vol., Madrid 1791-1798) – legislation in Spain and its colonial empire
– Johannes Friederich Reiger, Theatrum juridicum theoretico-practicum (Neurenberg 1724 and 1740) – a German translation of Justinian’s Digest
– Johan van den Sande, Theatrum practicantium hoc est decisiones aureae sive rerum in supremo Frisiorum curia judicatarum (Cologne 1663) – a collection of cases before the Frisian supreme court in Leeuwarden
– Johann Salomon Schülin, Theatrum Conscientiosum Criminale, (2 vol., Frankfurt / Leipzig 1732-1733) – a handbook for procedures in criminal law
– Christoph Heinirch Schweser, Theatrum Servitutum oder Schau-Platz Der Dienstbarkeiten (Neurenberg 1709) – a handbook on legal servitudes and service contracts
– Carlo Spadazza, Theatrum viduile, seu De viduis, ac priuilegiis viduilibus Tractatus absolutissimus, tum legalis, tum moralis, in quo tota viduilis materia elaborata methodo explanatur (Ferrara 1672) – a treatise about widows with attention to relevant law – online, Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (at the portal Internet Culturale)
– Mattheus Surrentinus [Matteo Sorrentino], Theatrum et examen omnium decisionum regni Napolitani (Naples 1700) – a collection with jurisprudence from the kingdom of Naples
– Trobat, Juan Bautista: Tractatus de effectibus immemorialis praescriptionis et consuetudinis. Pars secunda, cum miscelanea casuum, et decisionum in Iurisprudentiae Theatrum (Valencia 1700) – a treatise on customary law
– Nicolás Bas y Galcerán, Theatrum jurisprudentiae forensis Valentinae romanorum iuri (2 vol., Valencia 1742-1762) – a book about legal practice and jurisprudence in Valencia
– [Zacharias Zwanzig], Theatrum Praecedentiae (Berlin 1705) – a treatise touching on international law and ceremonial law – description

With some 35 works in a selection of 200 books law and jurisprudence seem well represented. It is a pity that in view of a total of some 180 descriptions you find here for just seven legal works a specially created description. However impressive this list, it does lack at least one noted legal work, the Amphitheatrum legale of Agostino Fontana (4 vol., Parma 1688 – online, Hathi Trust Digital Library). On the other hand Jean Bodin’s Universae Naturae Theatrum (1596) has been included with a useful introduction. Sadly the list does not have for each work a description or a link to a digital version either from the collections of the Herzog August Bibliothek or elsewhere, and I have tried to supply such additional information here. On the other hand, in the case of the Theatrum Europaeum one is duly guided to a digital version of a later edition (21 vol., Frankfurt am Main 1646-1738; online at Augsburg).

In mentioning the Theatrum Europaeum we arrive at a central problem in dealing with this project. If the scholars creating the project had already difficulties in dealing with legal texts, how can a general user determine the nature of a particular work? In my view there is only one road to answer this question, to take the time to get hold of a work or to view a digital version, and to look beyond the title page. In this respect it would also have been helpful to have a translation of the book titles in Polish. In an earlier post I wrote about the Theatrum Europaeum as a useful source for the text of peace treaties. I am sure I have missed some works with legal contents in this list, but I have also excluded on purpose in my selection works on geography which surely do contain information about legal matters in a particular region or country.

Behind the scenes

How representative is the selection of works at Welt und Wissen auf der Bühne? It did cross my mind to look at the digital projects for Baroque literature at the Universität Mannheim. The CAMENA project created a network of digitized works from the Early Modern period, with for law a number of works in the section Historica & Politica. The Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC, University of St. Andrews) has as its aim bringing together sixteenth-century books. I invite you to check the digitized works at the Heinsius Collection of Neo-Latin works published in the Dutch Republic (Universiteit Leiden), to visit the website for Nordic Neo-Latin literature (Universitetet i Bergen), or to walk through the alphabetically ordered Philological Museum (Dana Sutton, University of Birmingham). The German project does include only three titles for music, and the USTC, too, gives a very restricted number of similar titles. In its present state it does already offer a fairly complete overview of literature with some form of theatre in its title published during this period.

More incisive is the question how important these legal works were and are. Do we have here a parade of the great and influential works? It is safe to say that at least De Luca’s work was most influential. Of some authors we have here less well-known works. Lünig (1662-1740) is better known for his massive Das Teutsche Reichsarchiv (24 vol., Leipzig 1710-1722; digitized at Augsburg) and his Corpus iuris militaris (2 vol., Leipzig, 1723). However, his book on ceremonial law is indeed a landmark, and its importance has been highlighted in a book by Miloš Vec, Zeremonialwissenschaft im Fürstenstaat. Studien zur juristischen und politischen Theorie absolutistischer Herrschaftsrepräsentation (Frankfurt am Main 1998). The selection of lawyers in Dahlmann’s Historischer Schauplatz is definitely not what you would expect nowadays of a book with juridical biographies, but this helps in fact to become aware of our own predefined ideas and conventions. One of the strengths of the project at Wolfenbüttel and Kassel are the references to relevant literature, even if this is often restricted to literature in German. A number of these modern scholarly texts can be read online.

The project title World and Knowledge on Stage itself immediately remembered me of proverbial lines by Joost van den Vondel, a seventeenth-century Dutch author: De wereld is een speeltoneel, elk speelt zijn rol en krijgt zijn deel, “the world is a theatre, everyone plays his role and gets his part”. These words were composed for the opening of the municipal theatre of Amsterdam in 1637 and put above its entrance. Maybe this echoes a thought expressed by Erasmus in his Praise of Folly (ch. 29). A second proverbial saying of Vondel brings us closer to law: “De wetten zwijgen stil voor wapens en trompetten” [The laws are silent in front of weapons and trumpets], which alludes to the Latin proverb inter arma silent leges. The metaphor of the theatre helps us to look for the roles people played and the subjects brought to the limelight or left in the wings. It struck me how many titles in the German project refer to wars and conflicts. Any title with the word theatre invites you to enter a different world. You might encounter unfamiliar laws or meet a kind of justice that functions differently than you had imagined before.

Creating convincing arguments in court

Lately I was gently pressed to add a particular blog to my blogroll. I argued that it does not deal primarily with legal history, although it is in many respects a most valuable blog. Even after a second plea, accompanied with a nice variant on Ceterum censeo… I still stick with my argument, but in fact this blog had already been included in my blogroll…  On closer inspection of the links now present I also looked at the growing number of online journals in open access dealing with legal history. The latest issue of Clio@Themis [8 (2014)] deals with the history of legal argumentation, a theme which has had my interest since many years. I also spotted the announcement of an upcoming scholarly event in May on this subject. Nomôdos, the blog of Clio@Themis, is most useful in tracing new publications and announcements concerning legal history in France. Thus it is a source for my congress calendar, and of course it is listed in my blogroll. These two subjects give me enough materials for this post.

Arguments in courts

Clio@Themis is a French scientific journal with most of its articles in French, with abstracts in English added to them. The journal has a tradition of including as a bonus a French version of classic legal articles. Its latest issue called L’argumentation au cœur du processus judiciaire skips this feature. Seven articles deal with legal argumentation in court proceedings. Two other contributions are only loosely connected with the general subject of this issue.

Catherine Denys and Naoko Seriu introduce the theme of this number and elucidate briefly the subjects of the seven articles which originated at three days of scholarly encounters around this theme in 2012 at the Centre d’Histoire Judiciaire (Université Lille-2). They describe a shift from viewing legal argumentation solely as part of legal doctrine to an approach akin to the way philosophers, sociologists and linguists deal with speech acts. The history of the judiciary and legal practice is here the primary field of investigation. The use of arguments is seen here as a part of a strategy to get favorable results in court.

The focus of all articles is on three European countries during the Early Modern period, with the exception of two articles dealing with subjects from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the first two articles the sixteenth century comes into light. Alain Wijffels discusses procedures claiming revisions of earlier trials at the Grand Conseil de Malines, the highest court of the Habsburgian Low Countries. The appeals for revision should be allowed in cases of factual errors (error facti) and in principle not for any legal error (error iuris), but in actual practice both kinds or error could be redeemed. The interesting thing is how lawyers at Malines argued about this state of affairs.

Marco Cavina deals in his contribution – in Italian – with the views of Carlo Ruini and Andrea Alciato concerning the different types of legal counseling in consilia. Alciato sketched a model with different approaches used by lawyers. Some went for subtle reasonings (subtilitates), others for the archetypical Renaissance – but essential medieval – abundance (copia) of allegations from Roman and canon law, and a third group imitated the brevitas of the classical Roman lawyers and their compact way of expressing opinions. Alciato frowned upon publishing consilia for several reasons, but his own contributions to this genre, too, were posthumously printed.

Isabelle Arnal-Corthier looks at materials sometimes presented to the Parlement de Toulouse in criminal appeal cases between 1670 and 1700. Instead of just a hearing of the accused for an appeal in criminal cases as punctuated in the royal ordinance of 1670 barristers often brought also a lettre de cassation to this court. The defense adduced in these cases mainly arguments about the competence of lower courts, insufficient evidence or irregularities during judicial procedures.

Yet another French court, the Parlement de Tournai and its third chamber in the late seventeenth century, figures in an article by Jacques Lorgnier who deals with cases concerning property rights and conflicts about the cost of church repairs. This foray into actual argumentation leads him to the hypothesis that the justiciables, the people going to court and their legal representatives, trusted the workings of rational arguments in the face of solid proofs within the framework of legal procedure.

At this point I would like to mention the great resource created by legal historians at Lille for doing research into the history of the Parlement de Flandre. In the database ParleFlandre you can find more than 30,000 dossiers from the série 8B1 at the Archives Départementales du Nord (ADN) in Lille. Lorgnier uses cases from another series of dossiers at the ADN, the série 8B2. For the history of the Low Countries the archival collections at the ADN contain many important documents. At Fontes Historiae Iuris, the virtual portal at Lille to digitized resources concerning French legal history, is a section with further resources for the Parlement de Flandre.

Naoko Seriu looks at a scarcely known crime at the end of the Ancien Régime, the illegal sale of military goods by deserters, in particular uniforms. Records of trials survive in which individuals were charged with buying these illegal uniforms or the vendors themselves were charged with this crime. Seriu compares the verbal strategies used and the particular differences in approach to exculpate themselves. I could not help noticing that the examples of cases stem mainly from Brittany, in fact from just one modern département, Ille-et-Vilaine. A comparison with other regions might be useful. At the EHESS in Paris Seriu studied with Arlette Farge, a French historian who has devoted much attention to the way stories are told in historical sources, recently in Condamnés au XVIIIe siècle (Lormont 2013).

Forays into the twentieth century

Bruno Debaenst (Ghent) brings us from France to Belgium and much closer to the twentieth-first century. In his contribution (in English) he has studied trials concerning accidents during work in around Mons between 1870 and 1914. Using dangerous machinery, imperfectly prepared surroundings, shortcomings in labor organization, and workmanship not up to demands were among the arguments heard around these cases. In these years the Belgian code of civil law still was a virtually unchanged version of the French Code civil, with scarcely attention to actual circumstances in an industrial society. Debaenst describes also the use of reports by experts, criminal investigations and testimonies. In the face of inadequate means to deal conclusively with liability defendants had much opportunity to evade responsibility for what happened in their firms, thus reaffirming the gap between workers and patrons.

In the last article of this special Frédéric Chavaud brings us to familiar scenes from modern crime series on television. He looks at the use of emotions between 1880 and 1940 as arguments at the Cour des Assises, the highest criminal court in French departments. Tears, laughter and fear were not only used by barristers and defendants, but also by others in court. Studying the history of emotions is not without its pitfalls, and Chavaud rightfully points to some pivotal studies. He uses mainly contemporary public reports about trials, and not the actual dossiers of the cases. These reports do convey a vivid image or proceedings, but one can suspect that their authors also follow well-known tracks to please the expectations of their readers. Of course it is exactly important to notice such bias and detect changes in them. Emotions can and could break rational arguments and reasonings, specially when directed at juries. Chavaud clearly focuses on the contemporary perception of emotions, and he rightly mentions studies about emotions in court published between 1920 and 1940.

The range in time of this special is pleasing, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, and we read about both civil and criminal law. The geographic focus, however, is on France, even when admittedly you get a most varied view of French legal history. Luckily the Low Countries, Belgium and Italy add a European dimension. Lorgnier is the only author to mention the use of topical argumentation. I am afraid it is not quite possible to expand here very much on any of the articles presented here. You can always wish for more, and therefore I invite you now to the second section of this post about a congress where you might pursue this aim very soon.

Studying legal controversies

La controverse. Études de l’histoire d’argumentation juridique [Controversy. Studies on the history of legal argumentation] is the title of the coming Journées internationales, the yearly congress organized by the Société d’Histoire du Droit. This year’s congress will be held at Rennes from May 28 to 31, 2015 with the Centre d’Histoire du Droit of the Université de Rennes-1 acting as its hosts. You might want to have a good look at the generous links section of their website and at its own digital library. Rennes is the capital of the département Ille-et-Vilaine mentioned above, and participants might want to visit the Archives départementales. The call for papers is still active. Proposals should be sent before March 10, 2015, and this is the closing date, too, for registration (mail: shd.rennes@gmail.com). Rennes is well worth visiting, in particular for the building of the old Parlement de Bretagne. Saint-Malo and the Mont-Saint-Michel are not far away.

Young scholars, too, get a chance at Rennes. There will be a atélier doctoral organized in cooperation with the Association française des jeunes historiens du droit, a society of young legal historians founded in 2013. You can send your proposals until March 30, 2015 (mail: assofjhd@gmail.com).

The congress wants to approach controversies both as a phenomenon within the territories of law, be it the judiciary, legislation or doctrine, and as historical cases of conflicts about a plethora of possible subjects. What was the impact of certain schools of thought? Which impact had other disciplines on legal theory and practice? It is perhaps necessary to keep in thought that the international dimension of the Journées was and is traditional that of the French-speaking world at large, the francophonie. The blog like website at Rennes nicely mentions the exceptional use of English for any communication. In a region with many British and Dutch visitors one might expect the start of a change to that tradition.

This post with a French flavor should also remind readers from the Anglophone world that those speaking and writing English are not the only possible center of the world of science. It can be truly useful and illuminating to know about different approaches in other countries, to practice them yourself or to use your approach on foreign ground in order to see how universal it really is. Anyway, I have tried to convey something of my joy in discovering this special of an online legal history journal, and I might well do this here again. In my blogroll or for example at Nomôdos or the blog of the European Society for Comparative Legal History you can choose from many online journals in the fields of legal history.

Charlemagne’s Europe, a construction

While busy with updating the congress calendar of my blog I spotted an announcement about a project at King’s College London, The Making of Charlemagne’s Europe. The website consists of a database containing one thousand early medieval documents, mainly charters. The database is surrounded with a series of useful guides, instructions, a bibliography and a selection of links. The first aim of the database is to create a unified framework to extract socio-economic and prosopographic information from the selected charters. A second aim is stimulating research into these early medieval legal documents themselves.

As a medievalist I have been trained to use all available written evidence to its utmost extent. My first frown when looking at this database was caused by the fact that not all surviving relevant documents, some 4,500 records, have been included here, but perhaps I expect too much. The database is clearly still in a beta phase. The list of charter editions from which documents have been extracted is fairly long. Some collections have been included entirely, for example the charters in the Diplomata Karolinorum series of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, and from many others at least a few items have been selected. From the edition of the Chartae Latinae Antiquiores all charters between 768 and 814 have been included.

It is probably wise to remember that we are looking in fact at a pilot project, and not to judge it too quickly. If you insist on having more materials immediately at your disposal, you can relish the presence of many online resources indicated in the splendid array of useful links. In this post I will tell you about my first experiences with the website of this project. The decision to create a database for researching Carolingian charters was not an easy choice. The visions behind this project are relevant for many comparable projects. What are the benefits of this project? Does it help to get closer to the legal realities within the Carolingian empire? Does it help us to refine our perceptions of legal history?

Back to basics

Chronicles and charters are the basic materials for doing historical research on subjects from medieval history. In a way the focus on charters of this project brings you back to a familiar playground. When you start to use the database in its simplest way, by browsing charters, you are immediately struck by the multitude of available filters, not only for classic attributes as the transmission date, repository and place names, but for many more determining elements. The filters help you to analyze a corpus of documents in a very structured way and helps to make comparisons possible on a sound base. In particular connections between people and changes in roles – and status – can become much clearer than they were before.

However, I could not help thinking that somehow you will find here only information that has been already labelled by others, but in fact the project team has done a lot more. They insist on making clear the multiple roles and significance of the information in charters. The student guide of the website gives good examples of the tiny differences in very similar charters that should make on think matters anew. In one charter a person is described as the abbot of a monastery, in the next example he is not. The first example mentions the patron saint of a church, in the next charter this information is not present. The examples show also the necessity of distinguishing the location where the charter was created, the place of a donation, places within a certain territory, and unidentified place names. Tucked away in one of the paragraphs of this guide is the very important remark that the database does not give you the actual text and images of charters. Links to digital versions will be added in the coming months. This basic feature, or should one say: basic lack, deserves more emphasis than just an oblique reference.

The selection of documents already included in the database was made with an eye to the greatest possible range of places, regions and types of transactions. It should not surprise you that I concluded that even the city of Utrecht, in the Carolingian period decidedly at a distance of the most important places and persons, is present in the database. The charter DKar I:117 (June 8, 777) proved to be a very instructive example. Utrecht is not only the name of the bishop’s see but also of his diocese. The charter was granted at Nijmegen. Several locations in the charter are within the diocese of Utrecht, a number of them at unidentified locations. The recipient of the grant is count Wigger for Alberic, the rector of St. Martin’s at Utrecht. Alberic is a priest. Charlemagne is credited with three qualities: king of the Franks, king of the Lombards, and patrician of the Romans. This is the only example of Utrecht in the database, but it contains enough to place it in a wider context. In 778 Alberic became the bishop of Utrecht. Gaining such personal information is one of the aims of the project.

Seemingly strange is the missing location of the Upkirika, one of the objects granted. The database gives for individual elements the exact wordings, and the location super Dorestad places this church at least clearly in the region surrounding this well-known trade centre south-east of Utrecht. Apart from properties the grant includes also a toll right. The image above does not show the large clickable map where you can see identified locations. To the left of the map is a list of all locations mentioned in a charter. A second overview mentions place relationships. In DKar I:117 Leusden is a place within a smaller territory, in Flettheti. I was somewhat mystified that the database has as a place entry Utrecht, territory (Flehiti), and not inversely Flehite, with as description “territory in Utrecht”. The procedures behind place relationships are discussed in an interesting contribution on the project website.

The list of useful links at The Making gives for the Netherlands only the online version of the registers of the counts of Holland and Hainaut between 1299 and 1345 and a link to the online list of medieval cartularies and modern editions at TELMA. In the list of charter sources only the Oorkondenboek van Noord-Brabant tot 1312 (ONB) has been included. However, a number of Dutch and Belgian charter editions (oorkondenboeken) is even available online. The Oorkondenboek van het Sticht Utrecht tot 1301 (OSU) has been digitized by the Huygens Institute, as are the ONB – in a partnership with a foundation for the history of Brabant –  and the Oorkondenboek van Holland en Zeeland tot 1299 (ONH). The portal Cartago leads you to charter editions for Friesland, Groningen and the German region Ostfriesland. Medieval charters from Belgium will become available online in 2015 within a project called Sources from the Medieval Low Countries, supported by the Belgian Royal Historical Commission. You can use a cd-rom with the Belgian Thesaurus diplomaticus from Brepols. The URL for the Diplomata Belgica does not yet function. Among the Scandinavian diplomataria the Svenskt Diplomatarium is not mentioned, perhaps because the oldest document in it dates from 817, just outside the period under consideration here. On that ground you could also exclude the Diplomatarium Norvegicum which starts in 1050. I am sure this and similar information will be swiftly added or corrected.

Apart from browsing for charters you can browse for agents and places with a similar wide range of filters. Conceptually the very act of creating of a charter is seen as amounting to a fact, called a factoid, with connections to places and peoples, and probably changing them, too. It is very advisable to read the contributions at the website about the choice to create a database instead of opting for the use of “mark-up” texts.

By the way, choosing Utrecht as an example in this post is not a random act. The Utrecht Centre for Medieval Studies has a fine tradition of research into many subjects of the Carolingian period, including legal history, for example the history of penitentials, see Rob Meens, Penance in medieval Europe, 600-1200 (Cambridge, etc., 2014). The latest project Charlemagne’s Backyard looks at the rural history of the Low Countries in the Carolingian period, combining both written and archeological evidence.

A first impression

Are there similar projects where you can find more? The Making of Charlemagne’s Europe does use data from the Nomen et Gens project at Tübingen with prosopographical and onomastic information from the eight century. CharteX deals with charters from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. The use of maps in the project of King’s College London reminded me of the interactive maps of Regnum Francorum Online, a project of Johan Åhlfeldt. It is certainly wise to use this geographical information to check and corroborate search results in the KCL’s project. It is surely possible to give more examples of digital projects which support your research into Carolingian legal documents, such as the Carolingian Canon Law Project led by Abigail Firey (University of Kentucky), and the Bibliotheca legum (Karl Ubl, Universität Köln) with the socalled Völkerrechte.

It is a silly joke but The Making of Charlemagne’s Europe is still a bit in the making. The rebuttal by the project team to this remark is really justifiable: They assemble the very evidence to help you to question the truth behind the assumption that Charlemagne and his successors aimed at creating something like a European presence. When you combine the data contained in their database with printed and online editions of Carolingian charters, and preferably also with any other kind of legal documents from this period, you will be able to get a much more detailed view of Carolingian society, the networks and relations. The Making is not the definitive answer to research questions, but it does deserve inclusion in your digital toolkit when doing Carolingian legal history. One of its great merits is its refined conceptual framework for studying and analyzing medieval charters. Even without a working database the approach to Carolingian charters is worth close study. 2015 is just a few days old, there is enough time this year to look at legal history with new eyes!

Legal history with a Dutch view

At the start of my blog, today five years ago, I had no clear idea what form it would take. After a start with twelve posts in one month, most of them short notices, the frequency of posting did not reach that level again. Occasionally there have been four or even five posts within a month, but mostly just two or three, and this year I could not publish here more than just one post every four or six weeks.

However low or high the number of postings it has been a joy to work on other features. It has been possible to expand the congress calendar from its tiny corner on my old webpages to a substantial page with due attention to both recurring and special events, attention for graduate seminars and guidance to other online calendars worth checking for the field of legal history.

A happy subtitle

Legal history with a Dutch view has been the subtitle of my blog right from the start. It offered and offers me chances to change perspectives, to add humorous notes or detached comments, and to bring in my own surroundings, from the fortifications around Utrecht, an old library and the former provincial court in my home town to the dovecotes of the Voorn estate and a number of Dutch towns. Even the hamlet ‘t Woudt near Delft could thus become the subject of a post which turned out to touch on many subjects. My visits to the Frisian isles helped me to reconsider notions about nature, law and natural law. It is a joy to write about these real and imaginary travels from the known to the unknown, and to discover surprising connections or hidden histories and meanings.

As you like it

Sometimes you will have encountered here really long posts. One reason to write somewhat longer contributions is my desire to give you complete stories. Even in these long posts I often worried whether I was not just skating the surface of any theme or subject. The longest post here published in 2011 dealt with the transmission in print of Early Modern peace treaties. A specialist in the field of these treaties said he had learned new things from it, another scholar complained I should have made an article out of it. Both scholars have a point, and I added a summary post to present the main lines of that contribution more clearly. I must add that the initial spur for this post came from an article by Klaus Graf about the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748).

To many posts I have added one or more postscripts with some afterthoughts, links to useful websites or substantial corrections based on comments I received here. Gradually I have grasped the very nature of a blog, its intermediary state between nascent thoughts, ideas and proposals on a side, and on the other side full-fledged articles or even more ambitious publications. Writing here about a wide variety of subjects helps to form and refine thoughts about particular questions and problems. The use of categories and tags proved to be a tool to connect posts which at first look concerned completely different themes, periods and subjects.

At the start of my blog I had no clue about the preferences of my readers. Would there be any readers at all? Some readers owe my great and lasting gratitude for their comments, proposals and continuing interest. The sheer number of readers has varied greatly according to the particular subject. It was a genuine surprise for me that a post about the Dutch lawyer Nicolaus Everardi (circa 1462-1532) attracted much readers. My comparison between two digital library projects, the Digital Library of America and the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, reached many people thanks to the alerts of some of my faithful readers. The day after the abdication of pope Benedict XVI in 2013 I could point to an article by a canon lawyer who had discussed papal abdication in modern canon law a month earlier on her blog. Her article deserved to be read, but as a side-effect my post reached an all time high number of readers.

Connecting and spanning

Marginal image of a scribe with glasses reading a charter – Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, ms. 400, fol. 113 recto

At this blog not only the posts matter. The blogroll in the right hand margin with some thirty blogs concerning legal history, a dozen law library blogs, twenty online journals and some twenty personal blogs connect whoever visits my blog to a much wider circle of historians and lawyers active both in the real and virtual world. For me it brings home the truth that the internet is a network which just happens to be virtual, but nevertheless first and foremost a network.

Much time in writing any post was and is consumed by searching for valuable links to websites. I include them on purpose, not as embellishments or to show my research capacities, but as resources bringing you to primary sources, secondary literature, bibliographies or further information. It satisfies also my curiosity to look at all kinds of printed and digital resources for doing legal history. I invite you to use these links and delve into their riches! You do not harm me or my blog by using a post or one of its links only as a stepping stone. It is the very purpose of these links to bring you at least one step further in the pursuit of your own goals.

Samuel Muller – drawing by Jan Veth, 1895 – image: Het Utrechts Archief

Speaking of curiosity, the funny marginal image of the medieval scribe wearing glasses to read a charter appears in the margin of a pontificale, a liturgical manuscript, probably written and illuminated around 1450 for the collegiate chapter of St. John’s in Utrecht. Bart Jaski, keeper of manuscripts at Utrecht University Library, has published a very interesting essay about this beautiful manuscript. Jaski sketches its background and points to a number of elements connected with medieval canon law. I first saw this image in a volume on the history of the States of Utrecht [Van standen tot staten. 600 jaren Staten van Utrecht, Huib Leeuwenberg a.o. (eds.) (Utrecht 1975)]. Many years later I could not help recognizing a resemblance between this man and the famous Dutch archivist Samuel Muller Fzn. (1848-1922) who did much to reform and organize Dutch archival practice. He worked for nearly half a century at the Utrecht archives.

The series of posts about centers for legal history came into existence thanks to the initial motive to start this blog. I have to thank Jörg Müller of the Leopold-Wenger-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte in Munich, who has done so much for the daily running of the Stephan-Kuttner-Institute for Medieval Canon Law, for asking me in 2009 to start blogging about legal history with the specific aim of discovering its possibilities and problems. Munich figured in one of the early posts in this ongoing series. For your benefit I have listed these posts and all posts which in fact amount to similar contributions about other institutions and cities on a separate page. Writing posts about legal iconography became a reality thanks to the remarks and questions of Mike Widener (Yale University).

“Connecting centuries, countries and continents” was at first only a lucky alliteration in an early post, but in five years I have indeed tried to fulfill this promise wholeheartedly. Choosing this approach again very explicitly in my November post about the World Legal Information Institute was no mere coincidence.

A Dutch view

There is a possible complaint about my blog that I must mention here. If you had expected to find here only posts about the legal history of the Netherlands, you might turn away with at its best mixed feelings. From time to time Dutch legal history does get here fair space, but it seems wise not to focus solely on this relatively small corner of Western Europe. In fact Dutch legal history is a kind of mélange of influences from many countries. Its geographical position together with Belgium between France, Germany and the United Kingdom have made it literally into crossroads. Its small dimensions and its many and diverse connections with these countries make it very sensible to look abroad. The ever-changing estuaries of the Rhine and Schelde river have shaped my country substantially. A part of the Low Countries, the famous polders, have been reclaimed from the sea and lakes. They are literally man-made.

My home town Utrecht started as a Roman army camp near the limes, the border of the Roman empire. This border, too, moved with the changes of the Rhine branches. Crossing borders and having to deal with them is perhaps almost a second nature for people living in such surroundings. However, geography does not explain everything, and it is rash to claim you can find here the only Dutch view of things. Creating my blog has helped me very much to cross borders more often. I thank you for your patience with my Dutch views, and as always I hope to welcome you here often to meet the varieties of legal history.