Mapping the legal past

How often did you look this summer on a map? You no doubt checked an interactive map for the weather forecasts, and you might have used an app to guide you on the roads you took during your vacation. In this post I would like to look at interactive online maps, more specifically HISGIS systems, historical-geographical maps, which have a clear connection with legal history. The choice of maps is rather great, and I am sure you will pick those closest to your own interests and curiosity.

Several overviews have helped me to bring together the maps I mention here, first of all the overview at Anterosis, a project of John Levin. The Historical GIS Research Network, is one of the oldest websites with an overview of HISGIS projects. Lately I noticed the Electronical Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), but the best current international overview of HISGIS websites has been created by the HGIS Lab, University of Saskatchewan. I dealt with a number of Dutch and Belgian projects in an earlier post concerning the bicentenary of the Dutch Cadastral Service, and thus I thought I could hardly bring you my typical Dutch slant. However, last week I noticed a veritable portal with a number of interactive maps concerning Dutch culture and history which seems perfectly fit for inclusion here.

The British isles

Let’s start the tour with the United Kingdom to honor the work of the team of the Historical GIS Research Network. I could mention a lot of projects concerning London, but Locating London’s Past can stand as a fine representative of other projects. A more general map project deals with Ordnance Survey Maps (National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh). Tithes are the subject of a project of the West Yorkshire Archives Service, Tracks in Time: The Leeds Tithe Map Project. Another project with tithes, Cynefin Project: Welsh Tithe Maps, brings us to the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

The project City Witness: Medieval Swansea contains some materials which I found particularly fascinating. Maps are only one aspect of this project with as one of its cores the story of nine men around 1300 about the hanging and miraculous survival of William Cragh. Among the textual witnesses used at City Witness is the manuscript Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Vat. lat. 4015, for which you can access online in DigiVatLib a digitzed version of a black-and-white microfilm. For Ireland one has to single out the project The Down Survey of Ireland: Mapping a change (Trinity College Library, Dublin) with information about this very early land survey made between 1656 and 1658, and also Ordnance Survey maps and three historical GIS maps.

Around the world

Surely HISGIS projects are not confined to the United Kingdom or Europe. The best example to show this is perhaps The Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty (University of California, Merced). A book about the rulers and administration of this Chinese dynasty (960-1276) was the starting point for Ruth Mostern and Elijah Meeks to create a much larger project to visualize the locations and extent of the power exercised by this dynasty. Ruth Mostern’s 2011 book provided the spur to start building this HISGIS.

It did cross my mind to look for projects dealing with Classical Antiquity, but I had a firm impression that interactive maps and the use of digital tools are far more common among classicists than among legal historians. The choice of online projects as shown at The Digital Classicist Wiki is stunning. I do not know where to start best with the plethora of projects. Elsewhere I came luckily across a pilot version of a modern representation of the Tabula Peutingerana created by Jean-Baptiste Piggin not yet mentioned in this wiki. Piggin tries to use his knowledge about diagrams to go beyond the Peutinger map website by Richard Talbert. You might want to follow the relevant posts about his project at Piggin’s blog. For an idea of what has been done for HISGIS and Classical Antiquity you can get a distinct idea at the Ancient World Mapping Center (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and the Antiquity À la Carte application. It is possible to commission new features to be added to this set of interactive maps.

I propose to turn now to North America. Among the sites I would like to signal here are first of all projects with the closest affinity to normal maps. The Atlas of Historical County Boundaries (Newberry Library, Chicago) should in my opinion be viewed in tandem with Lincoln Mullen’s project Historical Boundaries of the United States, 1783-1912. Quite different are projects such as Jack Dougherty’s On the Line: How Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and its Suburbs, and Redlining Richmond, a project around the House Owners’ Loan Corporation and the New Deal in this town. Social and economic history comes into view at IWW History Project: Industrial Workers of the World 1905-1935 (University of Washington). I could not resist adding here a digital collecion without HISGIS maps, but I am sure the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps digitized at the Library of Congress is a wonderful resource for American history.

Inevitably some projects seems less easy to fit under one heading with similar projects. Close to geography are projects such as LandMark: Global Platform of Indigenous and Community Lands and Danske Herregaarde (Danish manors) of the Dansk Center for Herregårdsforskning. The Colonial Despatches: The Colonial Despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia 1846-1871 (University of Victoria) is based on the actions of the colonial government in these Canadian regions.

Traces of slavery

One theme is clearly seen as most suitable for the use of HISGIS systems. It is striking how many sites for the study of the history of slavery use it to present sources or the results of research. Instead of going straight for matters connected in the first place with the United States of America or the United Kingdom it can be instructive to start elsewhere.

The HGIS de la Indias (Universität Graz) is a portal with a Spanish interface presenting interactive maps for the period 1701-1808. The Caribbean is the setting of Slave Revolts in Jamaica, 1760/1761. A Cartographic Narrative. Transatlantic Slave Trade is one of the most studied elements in the history of slavery. MCC Slave Voyage The Unity 1761-1763 is a website of the Zeeuws Archief, Middelburg about one particular ship of a Dutch slave trading company. At Mapping Slavery NL you can trace Dutch slave owners in several towns. There are books and websites for city walks along traces of slavery, for example in Amsterdam and Utrecht, but I could not readily find these links at Mapping Slavery NL.

For the United States we meet again Lincoln Mullen, this time for his project Mapping the Spread of American Slavery. The Texas Slavery Project focuses on a single state. For a long time it belonged to the so-called Territories, the states joining the United States at a later point in time. Visualizing Emancipation (University of Richmond) is concerned with a later phase. The aftermath and long repercussions of slavery are a stake at Collective Violence: Mapping Mob Violence, Riots and Pogroms against African American Communities, 1824 to 1974. The United Kingdom comes into view with Legacies of British Slave-Ownership (University College, London). The University of Edinburgh has created the portal Cartographie des Mémoires de l’Esclavage.

Looking at this overview I am sure I have probably missed a number of projects, but it is my objective to make the visual impact of maps for literally mapping slavery and other subjects more clear. When you read descriptions as the topography of terror we are inclined to think only of the Second World War, but creating maps of other events and phenomena is every bit as helpful and important.

A cultural atlas

The last website I want to introduce here is a portal created by the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (RCE, Dutch National Cultural Heritage Service) in Amersfoort. The new WebGIS: Themakaart Portaal offers 22 different maps and atlases covering Dutch cultural heritage. As for now the riches of this portal can only be viewed in Dutch, and I cannot imagine why a version in English has not yet been created or at least announced for the near future. The landscape maps are also accessible at Landschap in Nederland, and the archaeological maps can be found also at a sister site, Archeologie in Nederland. A possible starting point is the Kaart van de verstedelijking (Map of urbanization) where you can among other things view Dutch urbanization between 1200 and 2010 and look at city plans taken from the major cartographical project executed by Jacob van Deventer during the second half of the sixteenth century. It is a pity that this cartographical portal does not contain all supporting information present at the landscape and archaeology portals. You can benefit from information about Van Deventer’s maps and the growth of 35 cities. On the other hand, can you really expect to find everything at a single portal? At least one of the maps has very substantial connections with legal history, the map concerning the medieval and later development of fen regions (Agrarische veenontginningen). Newly developed regions often came under a specific jurisdiction. In the north west of the province Utrecht a region is known for a peculiar tax, the dertiende penning (thirteenth penny) which had to be paid until recently at the sale of landed property. These jurisdictions have yet to be added to this RCE map.

While looking at the map concerning flooding risks and cultural heritage I realize how much good maps are needed in regions of India, Nepal and Bangladesh suffering flooding right now, in late August 2017. Creating road maps for Nepal is one of the challenges the Red Cross – for example Missing Maps, American Red Cross – brought to the attention of the world. Volunteers are invited to use recent satellite photographs to make reliable maps for those striving to help people. Historical GIS systems can be as interesting as their modern forerunners, and there is space for legal historians to add to them anything they judge to be important.

Canada´s confederation at 150 years

With the summer approaching you can be busy enough to almost miss events such as centenary celebrations. Thus the celebration of 150 years Canadian confederation, a major step to Canada´s independence almost escaped my attention. Centenary celebrations should not stand in the way of other subjects, but I think this one is interesting enough for a post here. At the heart of this contributions are the main constitutional documents in Canadian history, both before and after 1867. It will be instructive to make a tour of the major online portals with historic and current constitutions.

Before and after 1867

The websites which bring us online versions of constitutions worldwide often restrict themselves to current versions, but happily there are exceptions. Some portals give primarily historical versions. The Archivio delle Costituzione Storiche (Università di Torino) gives for Canada only documents from 1871 to 1943, and only in English. The Digithèque MJP (Université Perpignan) gives a very generous selection of constitutional documents concerning Canada, a number of them located at this portal and other elsewhere. The wealth of information from Perpignan, including an overview of major facts in Canadian history, is such that it is helpful to have a direct link to its version of the 1867 act. Canada is absent among the German translations at Verfassungen der Welt, but the English version is present at its Anglophone counterpart, International Constitutional Law (Universität Bern). I could not find quickly any Canadian document in the Avalon Project (Yale Law School).

William F. Maton created the webpage Canadian Constitutional Documents, with first of all a consolidated version of the British North America Act 1867, followed by later constitutional documents up to 2001. Alas the Spanish page gives no Spanish translations of the texts, only a translation of the introductions and explanatory notes. The Constitutional Society offers only the English version of the 1867 act. Among the facsimiles at The Rise of Modern Constitutionalism, 1776-1849 there are simply no documents relating to Canada, which helps to create the false impression no such documents came into being before the mid-nineteenth century. The Constitution Finder (University of Richmond School of Law) contains for Canada seven documents (1867, 1982, 2011). In the Constitute Project of the University of Texas at Austin you will find only the current version of the Canadian 1867 act. A Russian project for constitutions worldwide brings you Russian and French translations of the Canadian constitution (1867, 1982, 1989).

I made this tour of websites for the history of constitutions because it appeared that the URL for Canada in the Making at the digital portal Canadiana was broken, and also for checking the other web addresses of constitutional portals. The English version of Verfassungen der Welt had moved to a new URL, and I had to update the page for digital libraries at Rechtshistorie where you can find a section with these portal sites. The Internet Archive saved the pages of Canada in the Making, evidently an educational resource which got skipped at Canadiana without a trace. It seems there has developed a paradox between its absence and the abundance of sister portals for Canadiana, a general portal for online resources, the Héritage/Heritage portal for archival collections, and Early Canadiana Online, to mention only the most important offsprings. If you search for the word constitution at Early Canadiana Online you will get nearly 3,000 results.

Canada in the Making featured not only Canadian constitutional history, but also sections on aboriginal treaties and relations, and on pioneers and immigrants. The very words used for these two sections can cause frowns, and you might guess they explain at least a part of its disappearance. The section on constitutional history starts its story in the seventeenth century, and makes it sufficiently clear that the 1867 act is surely a milestone, but decidedly not the only one in Canadian history.

For a concise introduction to Canada’s constitutional history the page of the online Canadian Encyclopedia on this subject and separate pages about the 1867 constitution and other major acts are most rewarding. Dutch readers will recognize in particular the role of unwritten conventions in Canadian law which closely resemble Dutch constitutional law.

One of the gateways to educational resources for Canadian history is the bilingual portal Then/Hier. You might expect some attention to the current celebrations, but this portal shows no signs of them. Among the teaching resources is a section on constitutional history, and if this is not enough for your taste you might have a look at the generous selection of links at Then/Hier, both in Canada and elsewhere.

If you want to continue a search for digital resources you should have a look at the Canadian National Digital Heritage Index (CNDHI), a portal for searching digital collections. At its start the number of collections included was rather small, but now it seems the team behind CNDHI has put in a lot of effort to create a sensible covering of available digital collections. A simple search with the word constitution resulted in nearly 500 hits.

On my legal history portal I put on the digital archives page the CNDHI among the general resources concerning Canadian archives. The first section of this page leads you to general overviews and gateways to digital inventories and finding aids, the second section brings you to digital archival collections. The links for Canada should help you to pursue your own interests. In the final section you will find among specific tools, sites and societies of archivists also The Association of Canadian Archivists. Writing here about Canadian history has been for me a stimulus to continue to make my overviews of digital archives and libraries better tuned to the needs of legal historians. I can recommend visiting the Borealia blog for much more information about current research on early Canadian history.

A postscript

Some sessions at the upcoming conference Canada’s Legal Past: Future Directions in Canadain Legal History (Calgary, July 17-18, 2017) will deal with Canada’s constitutional history. The Law Society of Upper Canada will organize on September 27, 2017 at Toronto the symposium Lawyers and Canada at 150. The blog of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History keeps you informed about scholarly events and publications.

Looking for and beyond origins

Finding the origin of something can be fascinating, and this kind of search can bring you much more than just a satisfying conclusion. The direction in which you search for a particular origin can be revealing in itself. Often it is tempting to search within the framework and the borders of current nations and states, but some origins are to be found in periods before these territorial units were shaped or are just outside our normal view of things. In this post I will look at some examples of searches for origins and the way they can bring us at the best partial answers, and in the worst cases only the views of history’s winners.

One of the major current movements with attention to origins is the trend in the United States to search for the original meaning of elements in the American Constitution, especially for the interpretation of a number of the famous amendments. I will not advocate here any particular way to tackle specific questions or to complete quests in this field, but it is tempting to write a kind of nutshell guide to a number of relevant primary sources. Today you can find an increasing number of them in online digital collections. Thus you can check the marvellous Founders Online (National Archives) with papers from six influential Founding Fathers. Interestingly this project includes records from the colonial period (1706-1775), a valuable hint the history of the United States did not start ex nihilo. At The Founders’ Constitution (University of Chicago), a web version of the book by Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner (5 vol., Chicago, 1986) you can consult the sources in the works of philosophers and other authors of many ideas discussed and taken up by the founders of the United States.

Last year I looked here at the legal history of New Amsterdam, and some legal elements from the Dutch period survived into later centuries. For almost every founding father there are separate digital collections, in particular for the first presidents. It is possible to widen their circle with others, for instance with The Federalist Papers (Library of Congress), also available at Founding Fathers, where you can find conveniently many other key documents. Among the most valuable extensions of this inner circle are the digital projects for the John Jay Papers (Columbia University), the digitized books from the library of John Adams (Boston Public Library), and the digitized archival records in The Papers of the War Department (1784-1800). The Library of Congress provides anyone interested with a quick guide to digital versions of core documents in its web guide Primary Documents in American History.

However valuable these digital resources might be, it seems they leave out a substantial part of American history. Some vigorous recent alerts on social media and blogs, and in particular the launch of a new digital collection have made me aware of this painful truth. Even my own collection of relevant digital libraries shows the same lacunae, apart from some exceptions which will feature here. It is not just a case of something missing, but a number of people who lived in the Americas are almost absent. It dawned on me that I have been seduced to look too much along the lines of nations and states still present on contemporary maps. To make things worse, there is a problem in designating these people, and this explains also to some extent my omissions. Where are the original inhabitants of both North and South America? Where are the people defeated by the conquistadores? Where are the various tribes we used to name Indians? How useful and truthful is it to use words as native or indigenous people?

In this post I will look at some new digital projects concerning the “colonial period” of the United States, and I will try to provide here some information about projects bringing us to resources and primary sources concerning the people living in the Americas before and during the period shaped by the presence of people from Europe. If I succeed here in documenting here at least some of the gaps and omissions, it is of course just a first step in doing things better in the future, and not a definitive answer to some of the questions to be addressed here.

Colonies and their context

Among the prompts for writing this post is the Colonial North American Project at Harvard University. In this digital collection items from many institutions at Harvard will eventually appear. At present I could find some 120 items when searching very globally for Indians, and this number stands in relation to a current overall number of 2,200 digitized items. With the advanced search mode you can pursue much more detailed questions. Various Indian tribes and aspects of relations of the colonies with both tribes and individual persons might well come more into view when more archival records and books will have been digitized.

Where should one start looking for materials concerning the original inhabitants of the Americas? The Indigenous Law Portal of the Library of Congress can serve as a starting point. One of its strengths is the indication at the very start of both divisions along the frontiers of nations and a more general approach. You can use selections for Alaska, Canada, the United States, North America and Mexico, and you will find links to a number of major relevant portals. The portal was launched in 2014. Interestingly it was Jolande Goldberg, a bibliographer trained as a legal historian, who developed a new classification system, the KIA-KIX series, for the relevant materials in the Library of Congress; this part of the story is nicely told in a post on the In Custodia Legis blog. The portal contains in the United States section first of all a massive and yet compact listing of links to websites, projects and collections elsewhere, and you can narrow your search to large regions or go to a specific current state within the USA. Earlier on the Library of Congress had already digitized a number of Indian constitutions, ranging from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Their sheer number will be a surprise.

Just how large the challenge is to approach the history of original inhabitants is very clear at the portal Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada. This portal mentions status tribes, Inuit, Métis and non-status Indians, and urban original people. Many of the tribes refer to themselves nowadays as First Nations. Here, too, the very number of tribes, groups and other units will be an eye-opener. Until now I had just missed the concept First Nations on my page with digital libraries. Among the links I had included for Canada until now you might perhaps first go to Peel’s Prairie Provinces (University of Alberta), a portal with digital collections containing a substantial number of books about Indian tribes.

Another thing is clear for me, too. It will not help to lament about lacks, gaps and omissions. Some of the links on my digital libraries page do touch the subject of indigenous people. In fact, this page does gather a number of things not easily found elsewhere at all, and it might become necessary to divide the information on a number of sister pages. Lately I have added to some of the sections for continents a list of general projects which touch several countries. These links used to be positioned near the end, but now they can be found in a better position.

North America

Several ways offer themselves to find out more about current indigenous law and earlier periods. One of the tools will be for example finding a blog that helps you to become aware of current matters and which might offer also a repertory of useful resources. In my view the Turtle Talk blog of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University College of Law does fit into this description, and its blogroll brings you to more blogs.

For the United States I did see in the past six years a number of relevant projects:

• Indian Affairs: Laws and Treatises, Oklahoma State University – both the five original volumes edited by Charles J. Kappler (1902-1941) as the two 1979 supplements
• Early Recognized Treaties with American Indian Nations, University of Nebraska-Lincoln – nine treaties not included in Kappler’s collection
• Native American Constitution and Law Digitization Project, University of Oklahoma Law Library and The National Indian Law Library
• Documents relating to Indian affairs, 1801-1869, University of Wisconsin
• Yale Indian Papers Project, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University – digitized documents from several archives, libraries and museums concerning the New England region

For Canada my links collection might be meagre, but luckily I did find two collections tucked away on my page for virtual exhibitions in the field of legal history. Libraries and Archives Canada created a digital collection called Aboriginal Documentary Heritage, and there is a small collection around the first settlement with native people in 1899, Treaty 8. It proved to be relatively easy to find more relevant digital collections in Canada, and in order to make this post not too long, I will offer here just a list:

• Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada – a governmental website
• Canada’s First Peoples – an educational project
• Digital Collections, Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs – with for example Our Homes Are Bleeding, the First Nations Digital Document Source and the Louise Mandell Collection documenting very recent history in the works of this lawyer

The History Education Network / Histoire et Éducation en Réseau offers a useful repertory of digitized primary sources for Canadian history, yet another starting point for further research. I was aware of projects such as Early Canadiana Online, but I had simply overlooked its section on Aboriginal Studies with some 900 digitized titles. The wealth of specific collections for a particular theme does not always diminish the value of more general portals. Only when you decide to create a database for links collections and provide sufficient tagging you can largely avoid such omissions. Such projects require the forces of teamwork or crowdsourcing. My appeal on my website for additions and corrections is not just a kind gesture or a rhetorical phrase, but a very serious question!

Latin America, Australia and New Zealand

For South America, too, I can point to some digital collections. In Chile the Memoria Chilena: Salas Virtuales created by the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile does have a section Derecho indiano as a part of a larger field termed Política y legislación. The University of Arizona is home to the Morales de Escarcéga Collection, accompanied by a virtual exhibit. For two of the historic people in Latin America I can at present not point to a digital collection, but instead we have at least the guidance of a fine virtual exhibit at the Tarlton Law Library (University of Texas at Austin) with a bibliography devoted to Aztec and Maya Law.

At least a part of the legal history of the aboriginal people in Australia is documented in two digital collections, Founding Documents: Documenting a Democracy of the National Archives of Australia – with 110 digitized documents – and Agreements, Treaties and Negotiated Settlements Project (University of Melbourne). Centers have been founded to study indigenous people and law, for example the Indigenous Law Centre of the University of New South Wales. New Zealand can point to the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (Victoria University of Wellington) with among their projects for example He Pātaka Kupu Ture – The Legal Maori Archive. The New Zealand Digital Library is in fact a portal to several digital collections, one of them concerns Indigenous People. The Treaty of Waitangi – Te Tiriti o Waitangi is the subject of a virtual exhibition of Archives New Zealand which puts on display not only this treaty from 1840, but also the subsequent treaties.

Instead of giving here more examples it is better to mention just the Endangered Archives Project of the British Library, yet another galaxy of resources discussed here earlier. In many cases projects focus on minorities in many parts of our world whose cultural heritage needs urgently to be described and preserved, or they document historical phases threatened to disappear completely. The very short lengh of this section should at least remind me there is a lot of work to!

Some steps towards a search strategy

If you want to find more virtual exhibitions about indigenous people all over the world you can benefit as much as I have done so far from the marvellous database of the Smithsonian Libraries. Virtual exhibitions often provide a basic bibliography, bring you telling images and point to other relevant websites. Some of them are in a class of its own, and I cannot help pointing to the virtual exhibit about Aztec and Maya Law of the Tarlton Law Library, not just because Mike Widener helped creating it, but because of its excellent qualities.

Indigenous people live on all continents, and it is simply not feasible to present here an exhaustive search strategy. In this section I will look at some tools guiding you to digital collections with a focus on the United States, but often you might find materials relating to other countries, regions and people. Let’s start with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), a portal created with the support of an increasing number of digital projects; I wrote here about it in 2013. The DPLA portal serves as an aggregator of these projects and you can enjoy the harvest. A blurb on the website tells us there are now nearly 12 million digitized items in the DPLA. When you use the subjects tab you will find a list in either alphabetical or descending order with the number of items for a particular subject. The general subject United States is used for 450,000 items, the highest number for any subject. The term Native Americans is good for nearly 70,000 items, Indians of North America for 22,000 items, and Indigenous population yields some 6,000 items.

A few weeks ago I noticed the link to the project Opening History of the Grainger Engineering Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign did not function anymore. This project was launched in 2007, and consisted of nothing less than an exhaustive searchable database for finding digital collections created by libraries, museums and archives in the USA concerning US history. When you still might mutter I did exclude aspects of history from my website you might question yourself why you never or seldom used this resource for doing North American history. The change of the university’s name into University of Illinois has to be taken into account for the changes in many web addresses. Under its new name IMLS Digital Collections and Content – and a new logo cleverly suggesting you look at a beta version of DPLA – you can search among some 2,400 digital collections. If this is too much of a good thing, you might like to look at two web guides of the Library of Congress, the first for State Digital Resources: Memory Projects, Online Encyclopedias, Historical and Cultural Materials Collections, the second called State Resource Guides. When you use these overviews it might be enlightening to compare them with the links put together as Resources for Doing Legal History provided by the American Society for Legal History. A very practical need for historical research can be served by HISGIS systems such as the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries (Chicago, Newberry Library).

In an exchange with Klaus Graf a year ago at Archivalia – this happened originally at its old address – we discussed concisely the overviews of a number of suppliers of systems for digital collections. Graf admired the overview by Bepress of book and archival collections created by users of its Digital Commons system. However impressive this and four other lists of collections using this system are, they remain just alphabetically organized lists. I will not repeat here my discussion of other suppliers, but in my view the best representation of digital collections powered by the same system is the Collection of Collections database for the CONTENT-dm system, a product of OCLC. You can use the simple search or the advanced search to find collections for a particular subject. For tracking down a relevant collection among the nearly thousand digital collections you simply need a relational database. Since many of these collections are either based in the United States or deal with aspects of its history it is good to have a look at it. Part of the fun here is that the overview, too, has been built using this very collection system. In fact other suppliers, too, provide a database to search for particular digital collections using their systems. Alas there is only a list of examples for the open access Greenstone system.

Facing complexity

Let me close the circle of this post and return to the colonial period, and more specifically to New Amsterdam. The digital collections of the New York Public Library are a mer à boire. It is a joy to look at them and it makes your curious about what else you might encounter. Among the digital collections of Harvard University you should take a look at other projects concerning colonial history, Images of Colonialism: Africa and Asia and Harvard in the 17th and 18th Centuries.

If you conclude there is not a single gateway to the history of indigenous people, this mirrors exactly the challenge facing our world. The UNESCO devotes a section of its portal to indigenous people. If you want to look at current indigenous law, you could start with the concise research guide at Globalex. The complexity of matters touching indigenous people, the complexity of talking in a sensible and direct way about them, is not something coming out of the blue. History and law, legislation, jurisprudence and treaties, court decisions, legal education, the use of languages and much more come together here.

Sometimes you need to be pushed into action. Last week a tweet of David Armitage brought me to Rebecca Onion’s article at Slate on the colonial trade in North American slaves, more precisely, “Indians”. Yet another spur to write was this week’s post about Chief Justice Roger Taney at the Maryland Appellate Blog. I might perhaps have chosen ‘First Impressions’ as my title! This post is more or less a field report. It might be impossible to see and understand everything, but I am convinced you cannot reach perfection. You can only make faults and mistakes if you start at all with looking beyond your comfort zone and the tacitly agreed limits of a discipline. Keeping a portal on legal history up to date will always include making minor and major adjustments, spotting omissions, and gaining insight. To rephrase words of Timothy Radcliffe, if you want to debate the results, let’s talk about them, not to win an argument, but to become wiser together.

Crossing many borders: the study of medieval canon law

When I started my blog in 2009 this happened not only because I wished to do so, but also in answer to the very question how to blog about legal history. The question came from the Stephan-Kuttner-Institute of Medieval Canon Law (IMCL) at the University of Munich. Since 1996 this institute is housed at the Leopold-Wenger-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte. One of the earliest posts in my series Centers of legal history centered around both institutions.

Stephan Kuttner and the modern study of medieval canon law

The IMCL is a creation of the late Stephan Kuttner (1907-1996). Kuttner was born in Bonn. He studied law in Berlin. His family was originally Jewish, but they had converted to Lutheranism. After his promotion in 1930 Kuttner was refused the opportunity to do research for a Habilitationsschrift at any university in the German-speaking world. Kuttner left Germany and was during a few years able to teach at the Lateran University, and to do the research for two studies which altered the study of medieval canon law radically, a model study on the canon law theory of guilt and a repertory of manuscripts with medieval canon law texts. Eventually Kuttner had to leave Italy and succeeded in 1940 in entering the United States. He taught at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., at Yale University since 1964, and finally from 1970 onwards at the University of California at Berkeley, where he became one of the directors of the Robbins Collection at Boalt Hall, Berkeley’s law school. In 1955 Kuttner founded the IMCL.

In the sixties Kuttner and Gérard Fransen from the Université Catholique de Louvain decided to organize an international congress for the field of medieval canon law. The first congress took place in 1963 at Boston College. In 1968 the university of Strasbourg hosted the second congress, and in that year it was decided to organize the congress every four years, with the venue alternating between Europe and America. From August 5 to 11, 2012, the University of Toronto hosted for the second time – 1972 was the first time – this congress, the fourteenth of a distinguished series. Andreas Hetzenecker used the resources of the IMCL to write a study about Kuttner’s early years in America and his scholarly role for the multidisciplinary field of medieval canon law, Stephan Kuttner in Amerika 1940-1964 : Grundlegung der modernen historisch-kanonistischen Forschung  (Berlin 2007). Kuttner ranks with other brilliant German scholars such as Erich Auerbach and Richard Krautheimer, Fritz Stern, Paul Oskar Kristeller and Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Kantorowicz and Hermann Ulrich Kantorowicz, and many others who had to flee from Germany in the face of the Nazi regime.

Languages and medieval canon law

Both the IMCL and the series of congresses are supported by a society with a Latin and an English name, Iuris Canonici Medii Aevi Consociatio or International Society of Medieval Canon Law, which should not surprise you in view of the language of many sources concerning medieval canon law. When you look at the book titles in the online catalogue of the library of the IMCL you will find works in many languages which is a faithful reflection of the worldwide community of scholars studying medieval canon law.

Quite recently Dante Figueroa wrote for In Custodia Legis, the blog of the Law Library of Congress, a guest post on medieval canon law with at its center the edition of the proceedings of the 2008 congress on medieval canon law at Esztergom. The author evidently was surprised not only by the uncut pages of the proceedings published by the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in 2010, but also by the very fact of scholars publishing in a wide variety of languages on a subject which in itself has so many sides. I added a comment to this post mentioning this year’s congress in Toronto, and the fact that the first see of the Institute for Medieval Canon Law was in Washington, D.C., more precisely at the Catholic University of America, where the webpages of Kenneth Pennington remain one of the earliest and most informative pages on the study of medieval canon law.

I always feel slightly disappointed when links in the often very interesting posts at In Custodia Legis lead you only to the venerable Encylopedia Britannica. However, Figueroa has taken the trouble of searching for online information sometimes far away, but he could have found much online in Washington, too. If someone of the fine blogging team at the Library of Congress would take the trouble to add the category canon law to all relevant and often revealing posts at In Custodia Legis they would save anyone interested some time in finding them… Anyway, I am most willing to admit that the post by Figueroa made me think about addressing the subject of languages and medieval canon law.

Medieval canon law in Toronto

When starting this post I soon realized that Toronto would surely qualify for inclusion in my series on centers of legal history. Writers’ received wisdom says you should not mix up things too much in one story, and I confess to a strong tendency to put too much of a good thing in one post. Let’s therefore opt for the best of two worlds and just refer to the Toronto institutions involved in the 2012 congress. The Centre for Medieval Studies is the first to mention. I am intrigued by the references to research projects on the Florentine monte and on Beneventan script, but the website of the CMS does nor bring you directly to more information about them. Among the scholars doing research in legal history one can point to Alexander C. Murray and Giulio Silano. At present Lawrin Armstrong is the editor of the series Toronto Studies in Medieval Law. Medievalists all around the world turn to the well-known series with sources in translation, the Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations.

The second institution at Toronto was the venue of the congress – which incidentally I had liked very much to attend – St. Michael’s College, which can boast Marshall McLuhan, Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain among its former teaching staff. The third institution is the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS). To honour the memory of Leonard Boyle O.P. (1923-1999), for many years not just a renown palaeographer and codicologist but also a scholar working in the vast territory of medieval canon law, a chair with his name has been founded. The sheer width of his scholarship and his interest in modern technology is mirrored in the Internexus part of the PIMS website which amounts to a full-scale portal for medieval studies online. Here Boyle’s motto taken from Hugh of Saint Victor’s Didascalicon should serve as a reminder that you will never look in vain for something to learn which will help you to understand the medieval world at large and medieval canon law as one of its essential components. The PIMS has its own series of publications, including the journal Medieval Studies and the Mediaeval Sources in Translation. Legal history and medieval canon law are among the subjects of the publications. The PIMS is home to the project Monumenta Liturgica Beneventana in which Roger E. Reynolds takes account of medieval canon law.

Blogging about legal history

In my blog roll I try to present as many relevant blogs for legal history as I can. My collection is surely not complete, but at least many countries and languages are represented. Returning briefly to the opening of this post where I told about the impulse I received from Germany in 2009  it is only quite recent that German scholars have started embracing this medium. Klaus Graf is probably the best known pioneer, if not the very godfather of German history blogs. He started his Archivalia blog in 2003. The German branch of the French Hypotheses blogging network was officially launched during a symposium Weblogs in den Geisteswissenschaften in Munich on March 9, 2012. At de.hypotheses.org you can now find 23 German scholarly blogs, including a new one edited by Klaus Graf with references to reviews of recent studies on Early Modern history, the Frühneuzeit-Blog der RWTH. Graf wrote a very substantial paper for this meeting, with many links to blogs on history instead of traditional German footnotes, and a picture of a hilarious game in which you will win by noticing as many stock prejudices against the use of Internet as possible. It is no incident that the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Paris and its librarian Mareike König have taken a lead in getting German scholars to create blogs and to use Twitter.

As for blogging about canon law by a Dutchman, this should not surprise you anymore at the end of a post where linguistic borders are just one of the frontiers to conquer when studying medieval canon law. A recent inquiry from the United States made me think again about the importance and afterlife of medieval ecclesiastical law, and I hope to add soon some pages to my website to show this in more detail.

A postscript

In a comment Anders Winroth (Yale University) announces the return to New Haven of the Institute of Medieval Canon Law in 2013. Some of the contributions to this year’s congress at Toronto are the topic of recent posts at Medievalists.