Centers of legal history: the Munich IMCL

Deciding to post a series on centers for legal history was an easy decision, and choosing the first centers to write on was not difficult, too. In 1997-1998 I worked at the Stephan-Kuttner-Institute of Medieval Canon Law in Munich. The center is named after its founder, Stephan Kuttner (1907-1996). Kuttner started his institute in 1955 at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. When he moved to Yale University in 1964 and again to Berkeley in 1970, the institute followed. The institute houses a great variety of materials: some 3,000 books on medieval canon law and legal history, hundreds of microfilms of medieval manuscripts, a dazzling correspondence with scholars from all over the world, and thousands of offprints of articles sent to him by scholars as a sign of his position in the scientific world. The library catalogue can be consulted online, and also the database for the papal decretals of the twelfth century. And how could one forget the series of text editions, the quadrennial congresses, and the Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law? When you realize that you find on a walking distance apart from the IMCL, now affiliated to the Leopold-Wenger-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte, also the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and the Grabmann-Institut for the history of medieval theology, one can imagine the possibilities at Munich for doing research for medieval history and law.

The IMCL is supported by ICMAC, the Iuris Canonici Medii Aevi Consociatio or International Society of Medieval Canon Law has since February 2010 its own website at the University of Toronto.  Among the information presented you will find the digital version of the news bulletin Novellae. The design of the new website is graced by an image taken from the Utrecht Psalter.

A postscript

In 2013 the library of the IMCL has returned to the United States. Its new home is the Lillian Goldman Law Library of Yale University in New Haven, CT. The institute will move to Yale in 2015.

Centers of legal history: the Frankfurt MPI

Sooner or later you will notice in the field of legal history the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte at Frankfurt am Main. The Max-Planck-Gesellschaft is for most scientists and scholars a German institution known for institutes devoted to fields like molecular biology, but there exists MPI’s – the common abbreviation – for art history, the history of science, and for European legal history, too. The Frankfurt MPI is the home of a very well equipped library for its field. Its digital library offers many things, apart from the very detailed catalogue which yields more details than your average library catalogue. The Virtual Reading Room contains German books on civil law from the nineteenth century, a most important period for German law, and scores of law journals from this period. Many thousand old dissertations from the German Reich have been digitized. Of its own publications one can consult and download all issues of Ius Commune (1967-2001), and this is not the only journal published at Frankfurt: Rg-Rechtsgeschichte is the newest. Add to all riches (for example, the microfilms of manuscripts for both medieval and Byzantine law) of course a well organized and very useful link selection, and you will either visit often their web site or consider visiting Frankfurt.

In my post Revisiting Frankfurt am Main (September 2012) you will find a much more detailed and uptodate portrait of this institute.