Retracing Suriname’s colonial history and remembering Natalie Zemon Davis

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

Remembering Natalie Zemon Davis

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

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

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

Approaching the history of Suriname

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

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

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

Finding digitized books on Suriname’s history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The powers of history

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

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

A postscript

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

An atlas of Dutch crime and punishment

When creating texts nowadays it is challenging not to test here (yet!) the notorious ChatGPT tool, but we often try to get a good view of ideas and themes by creating a mind map. In this post I will look at a book promising to offer a historical atlas of Dutch crime and punishment. Paul Brood and Martin Berendse have recently published a series of fine historical atlases, and now Paul Nieuwbeerta joined them for the Historische atlas van misdaad en straf. Nederlanders over de schreef (Zwolle, 2022). Last year I did not want to review thrice a book on Dutch history, hence ny choice to bring it only now to your attention. In September 2022 our indefatigable colleagues at Ghent University already provided a brief description of this book in the monthly Rechtshistorische Courant, pointing also to a book announcement by Leiden University.

Overstepping the marks

Let’s introduce first of all the three authors. Paul Nieuwbeerta teaches criminology at Leiden University. Martin Berendse is director of the public library in Amsterdam and a former General Archivist, the head officer of the Dutch Nationaal Archief, The Hague. Paul Brood worked as an archivist at the Nationaal Archief, too, and at the Drents Archief in Assen. He is also the editor of the series of guides to procedure at regional courts published by the Foundation for Old Dutch Law, and indeed a most prolific author on Dutch (legal) history. Brood and Berendse present their series of atlases for Dutch history on their website Kaartmannetjes, the name itself a pun on the Dutch name of a bird (Panurus biarmicus) and the pair of a bearded ornithologist and poet promoting on television bird watching in my country. The web page on this book is nicely illustrated, a strong feature of the book, too.

The subtitle of their book, Nederlanders over de schreef, Dutchmen overstepping the mark, hints already at the clear objective of this well-organized book. The introduction brings four major questions: what is crime, how much and what kind of crimes are there, what is their origin, and lastly how are crimes punished? Five chapters deal in chronological order with these core questions, starting in the Middle Ages upto around 1570. The period of the Dutch Republic is covered in the next chapter that ends in 1795. A short chapter (pp. 74-93) deals with the period from 1795 to the mid-nineteenth century, followed by thirty pages leading you to 1940. The fifth chapter brings you right to the present. The book closes with ten pages on statistical data and trends, and a chapter with references for further reading, research, websites and also visiting interesting historical locations.

One of the threads in this book is the changing nature of both crimes and punishments. In particular the early nineteenth century is highlighted as a pivotal period in the wake of the French Revolution. You might object to the frequent statements about the development of a more human way of punishment. This by now somewhat old-fashioned vision of progress leads to some awkward pages. The abolition of the death penalty in the Netherlands in 1870 was indeed early in an European perspective (pp. 106-107), but the authors ignore here the fact that it continued to be used in Suriname, the Dutch Antilles islands in the Caribbean and the Dutch Indies [see Sanne Ravensbergen’s essay in Wereldgeschiedenis van Nederland, L. Heerma van Voss et alii (eds.) (Amsterdam 2018) pp. 439-444]. Luckily at some other points they do look beyond Dutch frontiers.

Some remarks

It is perhaps better to state here immediately some major characteristics of this atlas. With only some twenty-five historical maps this book is not exactly an exhaustive atlas as the four other volumes of the series of atlases co-authored by Berendse and Brood. The presence of numerous telling and lavish illustrations and its large format (25 by 31 cm) make clear this book with just 176 pages aims definitely at the general public. Each chronological chapter contains a two-page timeline of a particular period, and every page shows at least one illustration.

Interior of the Weteringschans prison, Amsterdam, ca. 1850 – drawing by Willem Hekking jr., Stadsarchief Amsterdam – image source: https://www.kaartmannetjes.nl/

The distinctive approach of this book is in my view probably due to criminologist Paul Nieuwbeerta. If he had in mind creating an attractive introduction to historical criminology for the Netherlands I can only applaud the result. In fact I think it would have been great to have been able to find such a work when I set my first steps on the road to legal history decades ago. From a scholarly point of view, too, it is refreshing to see this book with clear constraints on its subject and generous space for telling illustrations and maps. As for the selection of references, websites and locations some of the more general museums are indeed relevant, but I do not mention them on my own web page about museums and legal history. However, the authors did not add the URL’s of the websites for these museums. The credits and references for illustrations are too concise, and the numbering of the photos refers only to the paragraph numbers. The references to relevant literature and websites are beyond such reproach.

How should one do justice to this book? Did the authors themselves overstep the mark?! In the end I think it is genuinely important to have this most inviting introduction to the history of Dutch criminal law. It judiciously brings the qualities of modern historic criminology on a much broader canvas of Dutch legal history, however, without clearly affirming the existence of Dutch legal history as a larger subject for study or a discipline with the fields of legal study. For this omission Dutch legal historians can alas point to the rapid disappearance of their subject as an obligatory element in the educational program of some Dutch law schools. In my view legal historians should by all legal means try to reaffirm the necessity and vitality of legal history as an essential subject in studying law and jurisprudence. It will not do to have some scattered chairs for the history of criminal law, public, private or international law to deal with the historical dimensions of law. it is a bit ironic to write these words a few days before the start of the very interesting and lively Belgian-Dutch Days for Legal History at Leuven (March 30-31, 2023). The book by Nieuwbeerta, Berendse and Brood contributes certainly to the visibility of a part of Dutch legal history. Others should do their best to make more of it visible, attractive and meaningful for our time. The abundance of continituity and discontinuity within Dutch legal history and the interaction with a wide context should prove most helpful to achieve this aim. Hopefully Dutch law students, too, will pick up this book, and question its merits and omissions.

Paul Nieuwbeerta, Paul Brood and Martin Berendse, Historische atlas van misdaad en straf, Nederlanders over de schreef (Zwolle: WBOOKS, 2022; 176 pp., ISBN 978 94 525 8494 5)

Entering the field of Byzantine law

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

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

Changing perspectives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revisiting translations for Roman law

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

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

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

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

A journal for digital legal history

In some cases it can be very hard to find the right words for a post about a particular subject. Luckily announcing a new journal is a different matter! A few weeks ago the Journal for Digital Legal History has been launched by the Universiteit Gent on its platform for scientific journals in open access. The editors-in-chief of the new journal are Dirk Heirbaut, Annemiek Romein and Florenz Volkaert. Among the seven members of the editorial board are for example Andreas Wagner, officer for digital humanities at the Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt am Main, and Stephen Robertson (George Mason University). Familiar names in the advisory board are Serge Dauchy (Lille), Thomas Duve (MPILHLT), Heikki Pihlajamäki (Helsinki) and Dave de Ruysscher (Tilburg).

In their opening statement the editors-in-chief explain the need for a journal devoted to digital legal history as a wish expressed by several scholars during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year at the online digital legal history conference in March 2021 organized by the MPILHLT – reviewed here – scholars from Ghent did not hesitate to mention their wish to create and host a new journal with this particular focus. Other journals might devote more or less regularly space for articles on digital legal history, but creating a special platform is indeed welcome and sensible, too. Not just subjects touched by both legal history and digital humanities should get space in the JDLH, but digital methods, too, need to be presented, reviewed and discussed. Scholars are in particular invited to bring new approaches and widen the horizons of legal historians at large. Scholars willing to act as reviewers of digital projects are also invited to contact the editorial team.

Creating a journal is a sign of the willingness to create a part of the scholarly infrastructure that will help to lay sure foundations for any new discipline. It expresses also the seriousness of scholars devoting their creativity, curiosity and other scholarly qualities. Digital legal history is not a passing hype or whim. There is all reason for reflection on the digital turn and its impact on doing legal history in our days. It is up to all scholars with an active interest in digital legal history to contribute not only to this field in the ways they see fit, but also to help establishing this journal as a clear point of reference for this discipline. My best wishes for the future of the Journal for Digital Legal History (@DigiLegalHisto)!

Translating Justinian’s Digest with DeepL, a multiple challenge

The clivus Capitolinus, the slope of the Capitol Hill in Rome – image Wikimedia Commons

This post is a tale of the unexpected. Last week I received a message about a new translation of the Digesta Justiniani, the famous sixth-century compilation of texts by the classical Roman lawyers. Soon two things became clear: It was not just a single new translation into one particular language, but into a number of languages, and these translations were not the fruit of just one scholar, but mainly the product of the online translation tool DeepL. Béla Pokol, a Hungarian lawyer at the Eötvös Lorand University in Budapest, used the powerful DeepL tool for translating the Digest into fourteen (!) European languages. For this project he had to process some 45,000 pages. You can download the translations as PDF’s from the section Law Working Papers of the online journal Jogelméleti Szemle. Journal of Legal Theory. A cordial exchange of questions and answers with Béla Pokol followed quickly. Here I will look first of all at the Dutch translation, but whenever necessary other languages will figure here, too. I will try to distinguish carefully between the input of DeepL and Pokol’s own efforts.

DeepL takes the plunge

I suppose normally you would use the translation function of the browser created by one of the Big Tech Firms for occasionally translating some information in languages which are clearly out of your range of linguistic capacities. In these cases you get a rough idea of the core of a text, with for example a number of words even left untranslated. The seduction of DeepL’s offer to bring really good translations from and to a great number of languages sounds for me simply too good to be true. So far I received just once a translation created by DeepL which I ignored completely by going straight for the English original of an article.

Enter Béla Pokol who at the very least has designed a kind of ultimate test for DeepL, translating from a dead language like Latin into modern languages, and not just a general text from classical literature, but the very core text collection of Roman law. Classical Latin has a complex syntax and a rich idiom. The classical lawyers seem to prefer a less rich vocabulary, but their concise and trenchant arguments set a great challenge for translators. To mention just a few modern examples, the Dutch team led by Job Spruit worked between 1993 and 2011 on their translation in twelve volumes of the Digest, Code, the Justinian Institutes and the Novellae [Corpus Iuris Civilis. Tekst en Vertaling]. The German team led by Okko Behrends started in 1995 and reached with the fifth volume published in 2012 only D. 34. The recent project for a version of the Digest with Latin text and an Italian translation was first published in five volumes between 2005 and 2014; the web version was launched in 2017. In 2011 I wrote here a post on recent and older translations for Roman law. At the page for Roman law of my legal history website Rechtshistorie I mention more translations, a number of them available online.

The idea for using DeepL to tackle the intricacies of the Digest came after Pokol had used DeepL to translate his book Juristocracy from English into seven languages, with surprisingly few errors. He enlisted the help of his daughters to deal with the new challenge of the Digest, because he had noticed only a small number of translations of the Digest into modern European languages. Hence the decision to aim at fourteen languages, starting with Hungarian, followed by French, German, Portuguese, Spanish. Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Rumanian, Czech, Slovakian, Slovenian, Polish and Russian. It took Pokol and his daughters a year to produce the 45,000 pages of these translations.

First impressions

For the aim of this post I decided to look first at the translated results, and only afterwards at DeepL. How should one quickly assess the quality of these translations? As a matter of fact many years ago I selected three passages in the Digest for translation into four languages which figure at my legal history website as Exempla iuris Romanorum. D. 4.3.7.10 is a text on fraud, D. 19.2.59 a text about a building agreement, and D. 32.52.3 a text about hereditary law. I add to them the first case from the Digest I ever encountered, D. 9.2.52.2, a case of deadly damage caused by a collision of two carts on the slope of the Capitol. A fifth check was quickly found, too, using the words plumbum, lead, and balneum, bath, both terms frequently used in connection with water, as can be seen in the Topoi database in Berlin on Roman water law discussed here in 2019. As a quick reference I used the Amanuensis tool of Peter Riedlberger and Günther Rosenbaum.

The Dutch translation created by Pokol using DeepL has 3921 pages. The first translation seems really good (p. 261), especially when DeepL succeeds in keeping everything in a single sentence. Spruit and Wubbe, the Dutch team for D. 4, used two sentences in their translation of D. 4.3.7.10. The second example, D. 19.2.59 figures at pp. 1363-1364. Here I hesitate about the building being destroyed (verwoest), the verb concutio does mean to shake heavily. DeepL puts in the word ongeluk as a partial translation of acciderit. The case about a will speaking about books in D. 32.52.3 fares less well (p. 2164). In the first part the word bibliothecas has been translated as bibliotheken (libraries) but it is clear bookshelves are meant. In the second part the word scrinia does not mean writing tables but chests. Some words have more than one meaning, and it is vital to use the one clearly meant in the context of a case.

The case with the mules and two carts on the Capitol hill (D. 9.5.2.2) killing a young slave is somewhat longer than the fragments here above. At first DeepL impressed me with a clear disposition of this complicated case (p. 681). The mule-drivers (muliones) become only once koetsiers, coachmen. However, translating the term lege Aquilia by “Lex van Aquilia” is decidedly odd. This law and other Roman laws, with few exceptions, remains in Dutch untranslated. I cannot plod here through every occurrence of the word lead. In D. 32.35.3 the bath of Iulianus becomes the Julianabad (p. 3241), a very early homage to a former Dutch queen, instead of het badhuis van Julianus or het Juliaanse badhuis. Tibur has been left untranslated, but it is clearly Tivoli, and the word scitis has been promoted to Scitis. In the leges preceding this case DeepL has more luck with some difficult names of locations.

A multiple challenge

On closer inspection there are very real problems. The translation of the references to the works of Roman lawyers is a matter of some wonder. The book title membranae is translated as Perkamenten, parchments. Spruit cum suis opt for Notities (Notes). At some point an author Callistratus is mentioned, a name not mentioned at all within the Digest. The title page of the translation provides a clue to the origin of some of these problems. Pokol has not created a translation from the Latin original, but from the English translation by Samuel Scott, The Civil Law, including the Twelve Tables… (17 vol., Cincinnati 1932). This fact alone severely diminishes the value and possible importance of the translation under review here. It does matter much less which faults can be attributed to DeepL or to Pokol since the very starting point is awkward, and not what one would expect someone to do.

In his article ‘The enigma of Samuel Parsons Scott’, Roman Legal Tradition 10 (2014) 1-37 Timothy Kearley devotes pages 29 to 32 to an assessment of the value of Scott’s translation of the Justinian corpus. Reviewers accorded it mostly only value as a introduction for students and as a quick reference tool. Apart from mistakes in his translations they faulted Scott for ignoring the edition by Mommsen and Krüger, and generally being less aware of the latest (German) scholarship. Kearley expands his views in his study Lost in Translations. Roman Law Scholarship and Translation in Early Twentieth-Century America (Durham, NC, 2018).

What is the value of Pokol’s efforts? He wrote to me his explicit aim was helping modern lawyers to have “a speedy online help” for Roman law and to make it a living heritage. Alas as a reference tool the current translation is marred by a lack of running titles indicating on each page the title of the Digest. In some titles, in particular D. 50.17, De regulis iuris antiqui, the numbers of the leges are not given correctly. Book 50 ends with leges numbered above 1000. This has simply escaped his attention. Pokol did not include the introductory constitutions and the Index Florentinus. It shows definitely he aims indeed at lawyers in general, and not at students and scholars who want to study Roman law for its own sake. Let it be clear Pokol did not at all attempt to translate the Latin original of the Digest. In his view the Hungarian translation of the Digest by DeepL is quite good.

Looking deeper into DeepL

It brings us to the final question of this post, the value of DeepL for translating classical Latin into any modern European language. DeepL offers currently 26 languages. Apart from European languages only Chinese and Japanese are now included. Arabic, Hindi and Swahili are absent. The inclusion of Finnish and Hungarian, two Finoegrian languages, is remarkable. Polish and Russian, too, are languages with a number of very real difficulties. Swedish and Danish are present as Scandinavian languages. There is simply no Latin to test here with DeepL at the moment of writing. DeepL does succeed in faithfully translating English into Dutch at a notable level for fairly difficult texts as the ones used here as tests. It might make you certainly curious about the way it would work as an assisting tool, for example when translating a textbook for Roman law into another language.

To give DeepL quickly a second chance to prove it can produce something convincingly adequate when faced with a text offering some difficulties I entered the text of my recent contribution ‘A dictionary for the Spanish colonial empire and canon law’ for a translation from English to Dutch. Using the free version of DeepL without a trial period this meant each time only 5,000 signs could be entered, roughly half of my post. The translation of the first half contained only a few problems, and in the second part with many Spanish words these were correctly left untranslated, and only some easily detectable glitches in the syntax occurred.

For your interest – and perhaps consolation! – I looked around briefly for other online translation tools which do include Latin. I found a few websites featuring both Dutch and Latin. Translatiz depends on Google Translate. In its Latin-Dutch translation of D. 32.52.3 the word legatis becomes luitenants, lieutenants. ImTranslator seemed at first to offer besides Google also Microsoft and PROMT for Latin-Dutch, but the two last do not offer this functionality. A search in Dutch for online translating tools made in the Low Countries brought me to Webtran where you get only a word for word translation for Latin-Dutch filled with silly mistakes, and not even clear sentences at all. Opentran and the Dutch version of I Love Translation join the ranks of tools with insufficient qualities for translating legal Latin. Remembering just in time Cicero’s vehement sigh Quousque tandem abutere nostra patientia, Catilina? I will leave it at that for now, even though these tools did solve this particular Latin question correctly.

It is a feat to climb the Capitol Hill of faithful translation from any language and for any subject! No doubt sooner or later an online tool will appear which will be able using artificial knowledge to produce translations from Latin, not only for regular classical texts with their own peculiarities, but also for legal texts. Classicists are keen in using digital humanities to sensible ends. The challenge remains to learn yourself sufficient Latin and to find reliable translations made in years of toil and endless care for details, and secondly to have all necessary capacities for understanding the way Roman lawyers thought, argued and acted. A good translation is an act of interpretation in itself, a necessary foundation for further research. Meanwhile we can benefit from a substantial number of older and newer translations for Roman law. As for having an impact on modern lawyers and legislators the quality and vitality of thinking and writing about law and legal history by legal historians should seduce people to enter the realm of Roman law in all its manifestations through the centuries until now.

A postscript

In my post ‘Entering the field of Byzantine law’ (January 2023) I was thankful for Bela Pókol who had asked me again about the existence of translations in modern European languages of key texts for Roman law. The overview of such translations at my website could clearly be extended.

A great institution at 200: The École des Chartes

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

The institutional setting

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

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

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

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

Celebrating a bicentenaire

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

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

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

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

Beyond reading old scripts

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

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

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

Remembering Michael Stolleis

It seems difficult these weeks at my blog to leave Frankfurt am Main for other locations. The news about the death of Michael Stolleis on March 18, 2021 cannot be passed over here in silence, and thus again Frankfurt comes into view. Some obituaries succeeded very well in showing Stolleis’ role and achievements, and therefore I will not try to repeat everything already said with eloquent words.

The history of public law

On March 19, 2021 the Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory announced with sadness the death of Michael Stolleis (1941-2021) on March 18, aged 79 years. Stolleis was a director of the institute from 1991 until 2006, and acted as its interim director from 2007 to 2009. In view of his work for the institute it is certainly necessary to stress he was from 1974 to 2006 also a professor for public law and legal history at the university of Frankfurt. Klaus Günther wrote an obituary for the law faculty. He points to Stolleis’ role for the Research Centre Normative Orders in Frankfurt. In the obituary at the main website of the Universität Frankfurt Enrico Schleiff stressed the fact Stolleis was a true intellectual and a scholar who set Frankfurt on the map worldwide.

Patrick Bahners looked in his contribution for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in particular at the background. Stolleis’ father was burgomaster of Ludwigshafen between 1937 and 1941. After finishing secondary school Michael Stolleis followed the footsteps of his father who was both a vinegrower and lawyer, and started with learning viniculture. From a visit to a wine museum in Aigle I remember in particular how the plants and fruits need attention in every month of the year. Knowing about steps set before you, having to live in the present and working at the same time for the future is an excellent preparation for life. Bahners mentions rightly the way Stolleis combined objectivity with personal kindness. From the few times I met him I remember the word locker, relaxed, a label I did not associate at first with German professors, but luckily Stolleis could indeed look most happy and friendly. Stolleis contributed regularly to the FAZ with articles that struck me as most readable, well-informed and resonating in your mind long afterwards.

Stolleis studied law, German language and literature, and art history at the universities of Heidelberg and Würzburg. He wrote his doctoral thesis under the aegis of Sten Gagnér in Munich [Staatsraison, Recht und Moral in philosophischen Texten des späten 18. Jahrhunderts, defended 1967, published Meisenheim 1972)]. Stolleis wrote a moving article in remembrance of his Doktorvater, a piece telling you much about Stolleis himself, too [‘Sten Gagnér (1921-2000), ein großer Lehrer der europäischen Rechtsgeschichte’, Quaderni Fiorentini 29 (2000) 560-569; PDF]. In 1973 he defended in Munich his Habilitationsschrift (second thesis) on Gemeinwohlformeln im nationalsozialistischen Recht (Berlin 1974). At that time it was one of the first forays by German legal historians into the history of the Third Reich. Its theme, terms for the common good in Nazi law, can only be tackled successfully by someone trained also in German language and literature. Just a small example of Stolleis’ gifted pen and his calm judgment is his concise summary of the history of the Deutsche Rechtshistorikertag, in particular the paragraph on the dark years of the Third Reich.

The striking thing for me about Michael Stolleis is the combination of public law and legal history at one side, and promoting both fields whenever possible, as much for the general public as for fellow scholars. Frankfurt had a reputation for critical thinking with the Frankfurter Schule. Among the second generation of this group of scholars who focused on philosophy and social theory Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann stand out. Stolleis is responsible for putting the history of public law in Germany’s history on the same level as political and social history. The four volumes of his Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland (Munich 1988-2012) definitely widened for German legal historians their fields of interest, and opened a necessary perspective on German history long overlooked as a defining and decisive element. However interesting, the history of private law cannot be the sole focus of legal history. Public law belongs as much to it as criminal law, legal procedure and canon law.

Only in my last post I mentioned the Repertorium der Policeyordnungen der Frühen Neuzeit, a project started by Stolleis. Social law as a historical subject was the theme in his Geschichte des Sozialrechts im Deutschland. Ein Grundriss (Stuttgart 2003). If you think Stolleis focused only on Germany you might turn to his preface for the biographical dictionary Juristen. Ein biographisches Lexikon von der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (first edition Munich 1995). His book on the image and the metaphor of the eye of the law shows him at work also in in the field of legal iconography [Das Auge des Gesetzes: Geschichte einer Metapher (Munich 2004)].

The Max-Planck-Gesellschaft loses with Stolleis one of its most active and resourceful directors. Between 1991 and 2006 the institute in Frankfurt transformed already much by opening to wider fields and new approaches, and thus it prepared for the final touch, a change in its very name. Leading such transformations and normal scholarly business in sometimes difficult situations, and through losses as the untimely death of Marie Theres Fögen, is a great achievement. I will not try to list all awards, academy memberships and honorary doctorates Stolleis received. Let one prize suffice, the Hegel-Preis awarded by the city Stuttgart to Stolleis in 2018. Hegel was not just a very influential philosopher. His views became central to state building in nineteenth-century Germany and nineteenth-century science, in particular for historical research, with consequences for the twentieth century at large.

In a time when law faculties have turned into law schools or just Fachbereiche we should remember Stolleis as a truly outstanding thinker whose publications can help to free you from preconceived views and following trodden paths. My words can hardly do justice to Michael Stolleis whom I greatly admired. Sadness about his death should be mixed with gratitude for his life, achievements and example of a lawyer and historian firmly rooted in past and present.

A postscript

On March 23, 2021 Thomas Duve published on behalf of the Max-Planck-Institut a much more detailed obituary for Michael Stolleis, in German and English. A very insightful and moving tribute by Kjell Å Modéer was published in June 2021 at Sådant allt met rätta.

Questioning how to do legal history in a virtual world

This week I received a message from Andreas Wagner of the Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main, about an online survey concerning our views on scholarly events in a virtual world. I had already planned to look at the website of this institute and to ponder the impact of its new name. The word European did no longer fit the actual width and coverage of the scholarly research at the institute. Legal theory has come to the institute as a third branch with its own director. Even the name of the institutional Twitter account has been changed (@mpilhlt)!

With Sigrid Amedick Andreas Wagner is the convenor of the online conference Digital Methods and Resources in Legal History (March 1-5, 2021), originally planned as a normal scholarly event in 2020. At this Max-Planck-Institute Wagner is involved with digital humanities and the project concerning the School of Salamanca.

Let’s not hesitate and give you here right below the message about the questionnaire. Hopefully the answers scholars give will help to establish best practices for online scholarly events, and help fostering critical thought about the way digital humanities and online research have an impact on doing legal history.

The questionnaire

Dear colleagues,

After roughly one year of covid-19 pandemic, working from home office, online team meetings and many other online things have come to shape our academic lives. Even academic conferences nowadays are starting to be organized as virtual events rather than be postponed indefinitely. However, no clear picture of benefits and drawbacks of virtual conference formats has emerged, let alone a common knowledge about best practices and about the many different forms that such virtual events can take.

At the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, we thus had the idea to launch a survey in order to solicit the opinions of the legal historians’ community on these things. This survey is meant to establish a glimpse of the state of virtual events in our discipline: the expectations and demands of scholars, the traps to avoid, and maybe even some ideas worth probing.

We cordially invite legal historians of all shades to participate and fill out our questionnaire. It contains about 40 questions in 5 groups/pages (General Questions, Activity Formats, Socializing, Publishing, General Comment) and it should take you roughly 15 minutes to complete. We will be very thankful for every response.

https://s.gwdg.de/jPr7wK

The questionnaire will remain open throughout all of February, closing on Feb 28 at 23:59:59 UTC. Results will be published on our homepage (https://www.rg.mpg.de/) and announced or reported on at various media like twitter, newsletters, blogs and journal sites. The survey adheres to very strict rules about data protection, which is one reason why we will not be able to send you a confirmation message or information about the results individually (the questionnaire is simply not asking for your e-mail address).

If you have any questions about the survey, please send a message to dlh@rg.mpg.de and we will be happy to answer.

Best regards,

Andreas Wagner

May the best win! A look at legal history prizes

Some subjects on this blog come into view view thanks to kind alerts of scholars and institutions. Earlier this year the American Association for Legal History asked me to include a notice about one of its book awards in my congress calendar. Last week I received a message about an Italian premio in remembrance of Tullio Ascarelli and Domenico Maffei. The kind message of Paola Maffei prompted me to create a section in my congress calendar for the main prizes and awards in the field of legal history. Inevitably I will have overlooked some prizes in the first version, and hopefully you will inform me about other awards and prizes. Of course this offers me a chance to look here briefly at those prizes which I did find.

Prizes and awards

Legal history portals are the obvious starting point for searching prizes and awards. One of the oldest still existing portals is Legal history on the Web of Duke University Law School. Its list opens with the prizes of the American Association for Legal History. The list of Duke University mentions two awards of the Law and Society Association, and the Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition offered by the Legal History and Rare Books section of the American Association of Law Libraries.

The list of the prizes offered by the AALH is rather long, and the number of themes and subjects is wide. In the list of Legal History on the Web one recently created prize is missing, the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award which is offered for the best book outside the field of American legal history. The Squire Law Library of Cambridge University has a page with a tribute to Peter Stein (1926-2016) by Lesley Dingle and Daniel Bates.

The Law and Society Association, too, offers a number of awards, two of them can be awarded for work in legal history, the general dissertation award and more specifically the J. Willatd Hurst Prize for a study in the field of socio-legal history.

The prize named after Morris Cohen is awarded for an essay dealing with matters touching legal history, rare books and legal archives. Cohen taught at several American law schools. His magnum opus is the Bibliography of Early American Law (6 vol., Buffalo, NY, 1998; supplement 2003). Morris Cohen (1927-2010) worked as a law librarian at several American universities. His obituary and the comments of colleagues show his importance as an inspiring scholar, teacher and book collector.

An international prize named after a scholar who died very young is the Premio Gérard Boulvert awarded at the Università degli Studi di Napoli by an international jury. Gérard Boulvert (1936-1984) did research in the field of Roman law. Mainly works on Roman law are entered for this competition. The interesting thing here is the presence of other smaller prizes.

One of the questions you face in creating a list of relevant prizes and awards is the choice between national and international prizes. At least two prizes deserved inclusion right away. The Deutsche Rechtshistorikertag, a biannual event, is open to scholars from all over the world, though scholars from Germany, Switzerland and Austria form a numerical majority. The Preis des deutschen Rechtshistorikertages is for young scholars. The Hermann Conring-Preis is an award for work in the fields of legal history, legal philosophy or legal theory. Hermann Conring (1606-1681) was a most versatile scholar who taught rhetoric, philosophy, medicine and political science. In one of his works, De origine juris Germanici (1643) he laid the foundations for academic research into German legal history.

So far we have already seen a few examples of multiple prizes. The Premio Ascarelli-Maffei consists of three prizes, the first for lyrical chant (Marcella Ascarelli Ziffer), the second for commercial law (Tullio Ascarelli) and the third for legal history (Domenico Maffei). Franca Ascarelli put some articles, a full bibliography and a curriculum vitae of her husband Domenico Maffei (1925-2009) on Academia, and also a PDF of a manuscript catalogue to which he contributed, the Catálogo de los manuscritos jurídocos de la Biblioteca Capitular de La Seu d’Urgell, Antonio García y García (ed.) (La Seu d’Urgell 2009). The first recipient of the premio for legal history is Manuela Bragagnolo (Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History, Frankfurt am Main). She received the prize on October 5, 2019 in a ceremony held at the Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati in Siena, a most fitting surrounding for this event.

Looking back I realize the research for my Ph.D. thesis on Nicolaus Everardi was certainly written under the impression of Maffei’s first book, Gli inizi del umanesimo giuridico (Milan 1956). His first book has become a classic study. Among his book-length studies are works such as La donazione di Costantino nei giuristi (Milan 1964) on the Donation of Constantine, Giuristi medievali e falsificazioni editoriali del primo Cinquecento : Iacopo di Belviso in Provenza? (Frankfurt am Main 1979), and with Paola Maffei Angelo Gambiglioni giureconsulto aretino del Quattrocento. La vita, i libri, le opere (Rome 1994). He edited also the massive catalogue of the I codici del Collegio di Spagna di Bologna (Milan 1992). Maffei’s deep knowledge of juridical manuscripts and old legal books, and his wide interests made him into a legal historian who pointed to roads for doing comparative legal history.

Let’s end this post with another prize which owes its name to a towering figure in the field of comparative legal history, The Van Caenegem Prize created in 2014 by the European Society for Comparative Legal History, and awarded every two year to a young legal historian for an article in this field. Last year I wrote her my personal tribute to Raoul van Caenegem (1927-2018). Seeing his very name helps me to remember also the David Yale Prize and the Sir James Holt Award offered by the Selden Society. The existence of a substantial number of prizes in the field of legal history should work as an invitation, in particular for young scholars, to put your very best work under the scrutiny of the juries, and to make your research benefit from these awards. Hopefully the list of awards and prizes can help a bit to push aside hesitations to enter one of these competitions.

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

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

History, nationalism, Romanticism

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

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

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

A human history

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

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

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

A mighty enterprise

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to celebrate

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

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

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