Looking at fragments

In December bloggers face the perennial challenge of the seasonal post. In my view 2020 has hardly had any regular season. The world has changed in many ways. What seemed certain has become the object of doubts, and uncertainties have come into the spotlights. I will not pretend to see things better here than anyone else. My Dutch view is no cure for everything!

Like someone standing outside Utrecht University Library you cannot look directly into what’s inside. Our visions are often fragmented, and thus it seems appropriate to look here simply at some fragments of charters and manuscripts I could recently study at the Special Collections of Utrecht University Library. Reporting from field work may not have the same status as presenting glorious final results, but it is in a way closer to tangible objects. Fragments offer a glimpse of a larger whole, and sometimes they are a kind of time capsule. Faithful readers know about my penchant to bring in here every now and then a very particular location, but this time it comes just briefly into view, perhaps only as a possible sequel in 2021.

History in fragments

Once upon a time it was clear a library contained books and an archive archival collections, but this nicely organized world seldom existed in real life. Archives can have a substantial library collection, and a research library can have important archival collections in its holdings. The history of a number of archival collections from medieval institutions and manuscripts held at Het Utrechts Archief and Utrecht University Library is a good example. Generally archival collections can be found now at the combined municipal and provincial archive, and most manuscripts are held at the university library, but some remarkable exceptions exist. Luckily Utrecht University Library created an online repertory for its archival collections. The manuscripts at Het Utrechts Archief can be found in the online library catalogue. Some of these manuscripts have been digitized.

Sometimes there is another explanation. The Wttewaal van Stoetwegen family brought the papers of the Wickenburg estate (‘t Goy, now part of Houten) into the care of Het Utrechts Archief [toegang (finding aid) 254], but other papers and charters are kept since the early twentieth century at the university library. Its inventory lacked descriptions of the charters, After a frst foray it became only natural to describe these charters as a sequel of the fruitful cooperation between both institutions in recent years, in particular for the exhibition and essay volume Perkament in stukken [Parchment in pieces] (2018).

Fragments of charters came also into view in my project which thus goes beyond the eighty charters of the Wttewaal family. A number of charter fragments had been described summarily in Latin in the manuscript catalogue [P.A. Tiele, A. Hulshof and B. Kruitwagen (eds.), Catalogus codicum manu scriptorum Bibliothecae Universitatis Rheno-Trajectinae (2 vol., Utrecht-The Hague, 1887-1909; online, UB Utrecht, vol. I and II)]. The manuscript catalogue and later additions have been integrated into the online library catalogue; a guide for special materials helps you to use the catalogue and other resources efficiently. A substantial number of fragments has been taken from the bindings they once reinforced, some of them without due reference to the host volume, others with clear references to their origin.

Other fragments can in particular be found in situ in bookbindings made for Hubert van Buchel (1513-1599), a canon of the collegiate chapter of St. Mary’s at Utrecht. In 1569 Buchel fled to Cologne. In his will he donated his books to the parish of St. James’ at Utrecht, but no doubt the church wardens must have influenced the final decision to add them to the collections of the city library founded in 1584, the nucleus of the university library founded in 1636. My project was restricted to charter fragments. Vito Santoliquido (ENNSIB, Lyon) recently looked for Fragmentarium at the entire corpus of maculature fragments in books with a Van Buchel provenance, a collection with some 1,000 relevant volumes. I dealt with just over one hundred charter fragments.

For strengthening the bindings of his books Van Buchel provided the bookbinder with parchment and paper from books which might have belonged to the chapter of St. Mary’s. He even jotted down the costs of many bindings. Few manuscripts from this collegiate chapter survive nowadays. The fragments might offer a kind of window on the books held and read by the canons of St. Mary’s at Utrecht. At Fragmentarium Vito Santoliquido gives a sketch of his research project Maculature in the Van Buchel Collection.

It is tempting to continue here with a paragraph about the aims of fragments research. In the past years it has become a discipline with a name of its own, fragmentology, and even a journal with this title, thus claiming its own distinct place next to codicology and palaeography. In the second part of this post I will look at some fragments with a clear connection to legal history. At my blog Glossae. Middeleeuwse juridische handschriften in beeld I published a few days ago a succinct account of these fragments in German, ‘Utrechter Fragmenten und Urkunden’. At Glossae you can find also an overview of projects and catalogues concerning medieval manuscript and charter fragments.

Some legal fragments

Two parts of fragment Hs. fr. 6.92 reunited – Utrecht UB, Hs fr. 6.92

Legal history is the focus in the second part of this post, but it is necessary to remember other perspectives can be equally interesting and important. I would like to start with Utrecht UB, Hs fr. 6.92, coming from a Van Buchel volume (108 O 12), not just one fragment, but two sets of cuttings, group A with ten larger and one small scrap, and group B with ten cuttings. Of course I started trying to fit the parts of group A together, but this did not work. Combining the two sets was the obvious solution, but actually they still are kept as distinct sets, with a notice on the combinations I worked out for them.

Looking at fitting underlinings and dates proved to be clues to find adjacent parts of the cuttings. Here the data helped me to find the right parts, January 13, 1528. Other parts contain information about a case concerning a house in Cologne, the question of the validity of a mandate, and a letter from the official of the archbishop of Cologne, his ecclestastical judge, to the plebanus of Bonn. Some of the acts in these cuttings have marginal annotations about an act. One of the questions around these cuttings is their nature: Are they part of a kind of trial file or are we looking at a legal consultation (consilium)? As for now I opt for the first interpretation. Apart from two dates in 1527 and 1528 the names of some lawyers appear. At least one of them, Bernhardus de Harderwijck, can be traced in the Repertorium Academicum Germanicum and the Repertorium Germanicum for papal registers at the Romana Repertoria portal (Deutsches Historisches Institut, Rome). He started his studies at Cologne in 1486 and got his doctoral degree in law in 1510, the year he also joined the tribunal of the Reichskammergericht, then at Speyer.

There is a second set with sixteen similar cuttings, Hs. fr. 6.77, from F. oct. 76, another Van Buchel volume. The year 1522 is mentioned in them, and also the word Coloniensis appears within a very similar layout and the same cursive script, which suggests they could belong to the other fragment. However, these sixteen cuttings did not fit together when I tried to repeat my actions with them.

A fragment of a trial document bound with Utrecht 108 N 9

In the volume 108 N 9, also with a Van Buchel provenance, I saw yet another cutting which seems to stem from the document cut into pieces and now kept as fragments 6.92 and 6.77. The handwriting looks very similar, although the interlinear space here is larger. It seems safe to assume at least a datation between 1520 and 1530. It seems logical, too, to locate its origin in the German Lower Rhine region. This fragment mentions a dean and a church without any further indication of a specific location. It would be wonderful to trace yet another fragment still in situ within one of the volumes once owned by Van Buchel or among separately kept fragments, but with possibly three witnesses of the existence of a legal document the harvest is already interesting in itself. One of the immediate challenges facing me is to try to fit pairs of these cuttings into single folia. As for now for each act there are only beginnings, parts representing texts halfway and endings, a tantalizing state of affairs. It is a sobering thought other fragments need to be described first consistently, too, before starting a miniature quest to reconstruct these acts.

A canon law fragment bound with the volume E oct. 122

The third example I want to present here concerns two fragments of a lecture on canon law, bound with the Van Buchel volume E oct. 122. On one side of the fragment with two columns the words per osti. in su., “per Hostiensem in summa”, stand for Hostiensis, the nickname of Henricus de Segusio, cardinal of Ostia (around 1190/1200-1271). The first version of his summa was completed in 1250-1251, which provides us with a terminus post quem for dating this text which seems to be a lecture on the Decretales Gregorii IX. On closer inspection you can read at the top of the right column Spec. in ti., which I read as “Speculum – or Speculator – in titulo”. Guillaume Durand (Durandus) (1231-1296) finished the first version of his Speculum iudiciale around 1271, a second terminus post quem for dating the text and these fragments. Alas both columns of the original page have suffered when cut into pieces, making the number of clues for identification much smaller. The fragment bound at the front in this volume shows an allegation no. Pe. de Ve., a medieval lawyer I have not yet identified.

A story of fragments and history in fragments

Normally a scholar would probably thirst for much more information, daring hypotheses and smashing conclusions. In my view it is wiser to start just getting things right for each fragment. Creating consistent descriptions might seem straightforward, but already the fact fragments and volumes did not arrive at my desk at Special Collections in numerical order should make you pause a moment. I took photos in the order of inspection, and my notes follow the same order. It is a nice job to combine my photos correctly with the normal order of the fragments. By sheer luck I could view side by side as the very first and second Early Modern editions I consulted two volumes with in their bindings corresponding fragments of a charter referring to Hubert van Buchel himself!

In a period with restricted possibilities for research on location I feel lucky and even blessed with all efforts of my colleagues of Utrecht University Library to bring fragments, manuscripts and printed books to the reading room. I am sure I will look back at these months with Special Collections as one of the most extraordinary periods in my scholarly life. I could arrange and photograph objects using as much space as I liked, but working often alone in a reading room was a strange experience. The collection of the reading room with books about book history, manuscripts, palaeography and other relevant subjects was within immediate reach. In a year where so many people were forced to work at home, under sometimes difficult circumstances, I had the privilege of working on location, touching even historical artefacts, the very traces of past periods, sometimes susceptible to quick reconstruction, but more often just sign posts of a larger whole lost to us. Describing charters and fragments is doing fundamental research. For me doing this is among the solaces, the comforting things and rays of light in a period darkened by the pandemic which cut into our world as sharply as the scissors cutting manuscript pages into fragments.

At the very end of this project I saw a number of references to manuscript with fragments turned out to be small and medium-sized archival collections with a number of charters, not just single fragments. It would not do to hastily create descriptions of these charters, even when using Tiele’s descriptions as a starting point. They deserve equal attention as the other charters and fragments I described this year. When I noticed in one case charters and deeds referring to houses near and atthe Janskerkhof square in Utrecht I knew I could complete the circle of this year for my faithful readers! Between 1584 and 1820 the Janskerk was home first to the city library and later to Utrecht University Library. Instead of lamenting unfinished work it is better to look at the things which against all odds did succeed. I am not the only one much more conscious how vulnerable life is, and how many obstacles can hinder the completion of any project now and in the near future. Hopefully the kind of research you dream of or do normally can become (again) reality in 2021.

The Dutch Republic, order and ordinances

Last year ordinances rightly figured here in a post about the Dutch book trade in the seventeenth century. Printing and publishing ordinances on behalf of authorities formed a stable core business for printers and publishers. In 2019 a project started to digitize Belgian and Dutch Early Modern printed collections of ordinances, the socalled plakaatboeken. In January 2020 the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the Dutch national library, published at KB LAB, its digital humanities platform, the results of the project Entangled Histories: Ordinances of the Low Countries.

For a very particular type of ordinances a study appeared recently, also in January 2020, which forms a perfect candidate for a comparison between research using archival and printed resources at one side, and the use of datasets on the other side. This post shows ordinances also at the crossroads of government, politics and medicine at a point in time where this has become a new reality.

Choosing your approach

In my post on the book trade and ordinances in the Dutch Republic I looked at the study of Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen on Dutch book production and sales during the seventeenth century. They pointed out how vital the task of printing and publishing ordinances was for printers and publishers. Each order for a single ordinance meant printing a fixed number of copies for which a low quantity of paper was needed, and best of all it guaranteed an immediate sum of money from the issuing authority, all factors making publishing and printing a stable business. The authors rightly concluded that the chance of printing and selling ephemeral works on a regular basis was probably essential for the success of the Dutch book trade.

Pettegree and Der Weduwen could not only locate rare editions in archives and libraries all over Europe, they also studied stock catalogues and auction catalogues for editions now lost. As members of the team for the Universal Short Title Catalogue they add information about existing copies of newly detected works to this online resource.

Getting hold of ordinances was important also for those authors venturing to create printed collections of ordinances called plakkaatboeken. A number of authors worked at provincial courts where you could expect to find the largest possible relevant collections. Finding out about these printed collections is much helped by using library catalogues with clear information about the nature of these works. The spelling of the very word plakkaatboek was not yet standardized, and thus you can encounter forms such as placaetboeck or placcaetboek. A few months ago I wrestled to locate digitized versions of the main collections for the Dutch Republic and Flanders in order to add them to my web page about Old Dutch Law. This task was hampered by the fact some digital libraries provide a link to an entire multivolume set, but others give you only links to each individual volume of a particular set.

However, even having online access to digital versions of these works, preferably combined with index volumes to them which I mentioned whenever available, is just the beginning of your research. These online versions are only to a limited extent searchable. Some digital versions have behind the screen an OCR-ed version, but it is notoriously difficult to get sufficiently reliable results when scanning Early Modern editions with the ordinary OCR process. These editions use several print types which pose difficulties in correct rendering, not to mention ligatures for certain letter combinations and abbreviations. Exactly for coping with this point the project of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, led by Annemiek Romein, comes into its strength.

The project Entangled Histories: Ordinances of the Low Countries set out to provide reliable texts in three ways. First of all existing scans of digitized books were improved by creating new scans using HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) with the Transkribus software. A second step was establishing each ordinance – or other element – as a distinct textual unit. The third step was enabling computerized categorisation of these units using a pre-established model. The project website provides explanations for each step.

The results of Entangled Histories are given as datasets, decidedly in plural. On the page explaining access to them it is stated the data are available in five formats, Alto, Page, XML, .docx and .txt for each book. An implication of this variety is the absence of a straightforward toolkit to use these data, because you can pick out your own format and determine the way you will handle them. The datasets are accessible at the Zenodo platform, with a separate page at Zenodo giving you a list of all works included. A quick overview is possible when you search with the tag Entangled Histories at Zenodo. The page with examples does not deal with the end result of the digital process, but with the models used for training the computers of Transkribus to read the pages.

Nearly 110 volumes for a total of 40 works have been included in this project. A number of them contain also texts on customary law (coutumes or costumen), statutes and other regulations. It is most thoughtful of the team at the Dutch Royal Library to include these works as well. The title of each dataset begins with an abbreviations pointing to the library from which a copy has been used. It seems only for one index volume accompanyng a plakkaatboek a dataset has been created, the Generale inhoud van alle de placaten (…) Groot Utrechtsch Placaetboek (Utrecht: Van Poolsum, 1733). You can deplore the absence of some editions from the sixteenth century, but this fact highlights only the clear need for decisions for any project.

It is possible to create your own workflow with these datasets and save them online. I had expected Annemiek Romein (Universiteit Gent), who created the project during her period in 2019 as a researcher in residence at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, to create also a searchable textual corpus which you might access online, but this has not happened. Romein and the project members did not lock the data into only one format allowing only restricted research possibilities. In January 2020 I contacted Annemiek Romein to explain such decisions. She explained to me textmining was not the principal aim of this project. The version of a text coded in XML can be used for an online searchable edition. The focus of this project was more on the use and comparison of OCR and HTR scanning. In the overview of the volumes included you can use the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) address to go directly to a particular dataset. A direct combination of the datasets with the original scans cannot be offered at this moment, because these scans were made by the Grand Omniscient Firm for the cooperating libraries.

In view of this situation it is perhaps wise to remember such decisions for this project with datasets would have been entirely within the reach of the former Dutch NCRD institute for documentation on legal history and legal iconography. The NCRD had its office at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague. The institute had been created by the KB and Dutch universities. At some point in its history the board of directors had to decide whether the database with a bibliography and scanned images, still only accessible under license, would run at a single computer or become available on more computers on a network. In my view Dutch and Belgian legal historians should not only start using the datasets of Entangled Histories, but also start working together to create its own infrastructure, both in the real world and in virtualibus, in order to combine knowledge and efforts in the field of digital humanities. No doubt the Foundation for Old Dutch Law could play a role in such matters, too.

Approaching lethal illnesses

Until this point you might have become impatient with me about the promised second part of this post, a particular subject which can be linked with our own times. You might have wondered why I seem to search solace in writing about a glorious period in Dutch history which was not so happy for many people, as if nothing else happens in the world right now. The study of A.H.M. Kerkhoff, Per imperatief plakkaat. Overheid en pestbestrijding in de Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Nederlanden [By strict order. Government and fighting plagues in the Dutch Republic] (Hilversum 2020) deals with policies and ordinances against the plague and other contagious diseases during the Early Modern period. At the publisher’s website is a preview of the first fourteen pages of this book.

The main question in Kerkhoff’s study is why it took almost three centuries before the Staten Generaal, the central governing body of the Dutch Republic, decided to enact general measures againt contagion in periods with threats of plague. Kerkhoff starts his study by looking at the first successfull policies against contagion made by Italian cities around 1400. He even translated a statute against the plage issued in Ragusa in 1377. It needs stressing these Italian towns were in some cases large city states, a fact other states might have noticed, too. However, for centuries local Dutch towns issued their own pestordonnanties. Only in 1664 the Staten Generaal came with an ordinance pertaining to all provinces and other regions. Other authors, for example Leo Noordegraaf and Gerrit Vlak, De gave Gods. De pest in Holland vanaf de late middeleeuwen (Amsterdam 1996; online, Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (PDF)), did certainly mention this ordinance, but they and others focused on one region or on a single town. In the Groot Placaet-boek (…) Staten Generael ende (…) Staten van Holland en West-Vrieslandt (…) edited by Cornelis Cau et alii (9 vol., ‘s-Gravenhage-Amsterdam 1658-1795) the second volume contains the ordinance issued on July 31, 1664 by the Court of Holland, Zeeland and West-Friesland (II, col. 3171-3174). A few days later the States of Holland came with its own resolution concerning measures to be taken. Kerkhoff combines research in archives with the use of relevant historical studies. Using digitized collections of ordinances or even the new datasets, provided you can tune them quickly to your preferred way to approach them, can be most helpful to support more traditional ways of research, and it will also be most instructive to become better aware of the restrictions and limits of both approaches.

Kerkhoff wants to show that the political will to impose measures in the most general possible way was more important than medical views of contagion control. The author briefly mentions some examples of modern diseases which confronted Dutch authorities in recent decades and reminds us of the clash of interests in the debates about the policies against these diseases. With currently the new corona virus as a very real and growing presence in many countries this study seems to have been written with an uncanny intuition about the return of such matters of grave concern. Medical and epidemological knowledge, wisdom and vision are certainly needed to deal with different views about actions against this virus. With yet another project on its way at the Huygens Instituut for the digitization of the resolutions of the States of the provinces in the Dutch Republic between 1576 and 1795 and their reIease in a open access research environment I am sure a combination of the datasets of Entangled Histories with these resolutions will open new vistas and roads to ask new questions, to probe deeper into them and shed new light on older studies and views.

A postscript

In June 2020 the first tranch of some 5,000 scanned pages with resolutions of the States General appeared on the Dutch crowdsourcing platform Vele Handen. The REPUBLIC project, too, works with Transkribus. Volunteers will check the scans and correct the computerized transcriptions.

Annemiek Romein, Sara Veldhoen and Michiel de Gruijter published the article, ‘The Datafication of Early Modern Ordinances’, DH Benelus Journal 2 (2020) about the Entangled Histories project.

Early Modern celebrations and legal iconography

Sometimes history is almost literally on parade. Events can be an occasion for festivities, and even stronger, an event can be organized as a feast. The signing of peace treaties is celebrated, as are the ascension to the thrones of monarchs and popes, their entries to cities, marriages and funerals. Historians search for eyewitness accounts to find out what actually happened, but there is attention, too, for the image rulers and other authorities wanted to convey, in particular views of law and order, justice and policies. The generic term for books published for such occasions is festival books. Their often lavish illustrations make them into a most interesting resource in the field of legal iconography. The very term festival books has somewhat misled me to view them only as a source for the history of art and culture. In this post I will look at some resources to approach festival books, and of course some of them are discussed in some detail. A number of festival books are no longer than a pamphlet, a genre which significance for legal history comes increasingly into view on my blog.

Representations of power

Earlier this year I could take over a copy of a study by Ria van Bragt, De Blijde Inkomst van de hertogen van Brabant Johanna en Wenceslas (3 januari 1356) [The Joyeuse Entrée of Joanna and Wenceslas as dukes of Brabant] (Louvain 1956; Standen en Landen/Anciens Pays et Assemblées d’États, 13). This study deals with a charter granted to the States of the duchy of Brabant on the occasion of the Joyeuse Entrée, a document containing promises about the way the duke and duchess would rule. The charter became an example for later similar charters elsewhere, for example the 1375 Landbrief consented by Arnold van Horne, bishop of Utrecht. Such documents are primary sources for the political and institutional history of the medieval Low Countries, but the actual surroundings of both occasions remain largely hidden. In this contribution I will look at printed sources, but I am sure archival records exist for medieval entries and accompanying festivities, too.

For years the main online resource for Early Modern festival books was the digital collection Renaissance Festival Books of the British Library, created in cooperation with the University of Warwick. The British Library digitized 253 books from their holdings with more than two thousand festival books. The concise introduction to the collection focuses on the mixture of art history and political history offered by festival books. Its reference section points to a number of major studies and to two bibliographies. On the opening page of the collection you will find a list of subjects which can be associated with this genre. In the links section nine other collections are mentioned, and we will see a number of them in this post. You can also read a number of articles written by experts in the field of festival books.

The Early Modern Festival Books Database has been created in 2011 at Oxford as an updated and expanded version of Festivals and Ceremonies. A Bibliography of Works Relating to Court, Civic and Religious Festivals in Europe 1500-1800, edited by Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Anne Simon (London 2000). The database rekindled my interest in festival books. The original bibliography described books in the collections of the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal – administrated by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) – and the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel. In the database a fifth collection has been added with books held by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. The menu of the database provides five ways to search for these festival books, 3000 items in twelve languages. You can search directly for particular works, proceed from the artists or places involved, the kind of event or the kind of festival elements, and for participants. Thus it is possible to search for events with everything from cannonades, horse ballets and orations to jousts, tableaux or water processions. The participants are seen as persons involved as key figures with particular festivities. When digital versions of books exist their URL is indicated.

For me it is a fairly obvious matter to establish whether you can easily find all relevant digitized copies of a particular collection. However, the advanced search mode of the online bibliography with fourteen search fields does not contain a field for collection. The Victoria and Albert Museum has no longer information on its Piot Collection, neither does the website of the National Art Library housed in the V & A. The BnF offers a good introduction to the Collection Auiguste Rondel of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. The Herzog August Bibliothek has a subdomain for Festkultur Online with 314 digitized books which illustrations can be searched thematically with Iconclass. At the website of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek I could not find a page about its festival books.

It is only natural to pursue this path for the other relevant collections mentioned at Renaissance Festival Books, a list repeated at the website of the Society for European Festivals Research of the University of Warwick. The Getty Institute in Malibu, CA, has a good introduction on this subject, and this institution has created a subset in its digital collections for 1,300 digitized festival books. The New York Public Library has a very brief page about the Spencer Collection without any indication of the festival books. The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden offer no information for our subject, but you can search for festival books in their digital collection. The 102 digitized festival books in the library of The Warburg Institute in London are at the current version of the website only hinted at under the header cultural history. However, they can be found as a preset selection in the digital collections of the Senate House Libraries of the University of London; entering “Warburg Institute digital copy Festivals” in the keyword field will do the trick.

The crowning of emporer Charles V in Bologna, 1530

Pope Clement VII and Charles V in procession at Bologna, 1530, February 24 – Nicolaus Hogenberg, ca. 1535-1539 – The Getty Institute, Malibu, CA, (CMalG) no. 1366-954 (detail of print 27, resized)

By chance The Getty Institute shows at its page about festival books an image of the procession in Bologna in 1530 around the coronation of Charles V as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire from a printed scroll by Nicolaus Hogenberg, published between around 1535-1539. Print 27 of this lavishly illustrated scroll shows the pope and the emperor, both wearing their crowns and riding on horseback under a beautiful canopy. If you think I indulge here in art history I would like to remind you of the study on the thought of medieval Italian lawyers about the crowning of emperors by Marco Cavina, Imperator triplici corona coronatur. Studi sull’incoronazione imperiale nella scienza giuridica italiana fra Tre e Cinquecento (Milan 1991). The emperor’s coronation in Bologna in 1530 was the last of its kind, and it was certainly not in all aspects similar to other coronations, if only already for its very location. Surely visual display was an important element of Charles’ coronation. The pope and the emperor had stayed for months in Bologna, but only after prolonged consultations it was finally decided to celebrate the coronation in this city.

While searching for more collections of festival books and if possible also digital versions I found an online bibliography created at the McGill University, Montreal, Theatrical space as a model for architecture. Here the focus is on temporary buildings and their relation with theatre. A focus on a single town and one singular princely court can be found at the website Mantova Capitale Europea dello Spettacolo with an Italian and English interface. The database of the Archivio Herla contains some 12,000 documents documenting theatrical spectacles during the long reign of the Gonzaga family (1480-1630), to be seen in connection with three other database at the portal Banche dati Gonzaga. It is seducing to pursue a quest for more websites and resources, but let’s least not forget the German project Welt und Wissen auf der Bühne. Theatrum-Literature der Frühen Neuzeit, the subject of an earlier post here. In the Early Modern world there was definitely an awareness of the theatrical side of life and printed publications about many subjects. For any research in the field of Early Modern printed books the Heritage of the Printed Book Database of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) can help you very much. It will help you for example in checking for the presence and absence of relevant works in the Oxford festival books database. Apart from the digital collections with festival books mentioned at the project websites under discussion I can at least add one specific digital collection created at the Beinecke Library of Yale University, Celebrating Italian Festivals, with 231 works.

Which texts and prints around the coronation of emperor Charles V in 1530 figure in Early Modern Festival Books? The database mentions some twenty works, a number of them not dated. The Hogenberg scroll figures as no. 696, dated in 1532 with The Hague as printing location. The records points to a digital version of it in the British Library (signature 603.I.16), one of four copies in this library. This copy has not been colored, and like the copy at The Getty Institute it has no title page. For me it is interesting to notice also verses by the famous Neolatin poet Janus Secundus (1511-1536), a son of Nicolaus Everardi (around 1462-1532), president of the Hof van Holland (1516-1528) and the Grote Raad van Mechelen (Great Council of Malines) (1528-1532). I checked for this work also in the digital collection Renaissance Festival Books of the British Library, and a second copy in this library has been digitized, too (sign. 144.g.3 (1.)). The BL’s digital collection has 1529 as date of the coronation. Exceptionally the poem has been used as the identifying title, starting with the words Gratae et laboribus aequae posteritati. I was intrigued by the different versions of this remarkable print, and therefore it was only natural to check the catalogues of the other four libraries of the Oxford project. The Herzog August Bibliothek has a damaged copy (sign. 31.3.1 Geom. 2°). It is the only copy with this title in the HPB database. The Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) has two entries for the same edition. The first entry mentions the copies of the BL, the second entry has been created for a copy in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce Prints b.31, both dated in 1532. The COPAC entry rightly shows a question mark behind this date. Henricus Hondius can only be associated with later editions.

“Unnumerable canonists and legists”, plate 66 – Nicolaas Hogenberg, 1530-1536 – Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, object RP-P-OB-78.624-30 [Frederik Muller, Nederlandsche historieprenten, no. 377-d/29]

To cut a long story short, this print can also be found in the holdings of museums such as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Its catalogue contains references to the catalogues of historiated prints which document the various states and later use of the original plates. There are versions with and without blazons above the pageant. The lack of a title and the possibility to approach this work both as a book and as a print show nicely the difficulties you encounter when studying festival books. Book historians and art historians study them with their own approach and methods, and the way such prints are catalogued differs, too. Apart from the different versions you will have to be alert for individual copies and their aspects. In this case it should be no surprise that the Karlsruher Virtuelle Katalog can add only a few copies: Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Kupferstichkabinett and Pesaro, Biblioteca Oliveriana. When you check the library catalog for Pesaro and Urbino you will see it is an edition from 1582.

The Early Modern Festival Books bibliography and online database should be seen as one tool among others. I think I showed here one of the most remarkable but perhaps not totally representative examples which also show some of the problems you might encounter when dealing with festival books. The database helps you to compare many aspects of books concerning major events and festive occasions, but it is asking too much to view it as a catalogue of existing copies of a particular work, sometimes even for the participating libraries. As legal historians we might prefer to stick to sources concerning the legal side of events such as the double coronation of Charles V. Marco Cavina’s study is by all means most helpful to look at doctrinal matters concerning imperial coronations from the thirteenth century onwards. Exploring visual resources can remind us how very much alive people and surroundings of such events were. Such events made indeed a graphic impact.

A postscript

In March 2020 the blog Franco-Fil published the post ‘Die Livres de fête aus der Sammlung Jacques Doucet in der Bibliothek des INHA (Mittwochstipp 123)’ on books held at the library of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA). Fanny Lambert and Julie Ramos created between 2009 and 2013 a catalogue of this festival books collection. In 2010 the library of the INHA organized an exhibition about festival books, the accompanying catalogue is available for downloading. This collection, searchable at the INHA’s Agora platform, does contain a copy of the work about the imperial entry in Bologna [INHA, Collections Jacques Doucet, Fol Est 364 (cote BINHA), II E 22 (numéro d’inventaire], cautiously dated only as a work from the sixteenth century.

A German gateway to applied Early Modern sciences

There is a great difference between articles and monographs presenting the latest thought and results of new experiments on one end of the scientific world, and at the other end popularised science in cheap books and leaflets. A blog offers both the possibility to publish early results of new research or to bring synthesized contributions aiming at a wide public. Legal historians can feel the seduction to look only at the developments which in our eyes brought decisive changes, but discontinuity and continuities are all parts of one world. Faithful readers will no doubt know about my interest in digitized pamphlets. Legal pocket books have appeared here, too. In this post I will look at a genre which in my view stands nicely between both poles of attraction. The German portal Fachtexte offers scientific text books from the Early Modern period which aimed at presenting practical knowledge for several disciplines. The project is an offspring of the Kallimachos portal for digital humanities of the department for German linguistics at the university of Würzburg. Legal works are included in this project. The very word Fachtexte cries out for an English equivalent, yet another reason besides the linguistic approach to look at this initiative from Würzburg.

For anyone wondering how I encountered this project I must give you a very simple answer. It is not the first time that I found a notice about an interesting project at the Archivalia blog of Klaus Graf (RWTH, Aachen). On many occasions Graf adds some remarks about a project, often concerning open access, easy or cumbersome navigation and durability of links. Sometimes guest posts appear, too, but the majority of posts stems from this most active archivist.

The attraction of variety

There is a third factor making a tour of the Fachtexte project interesting. On the start screen of the German website you will find at the right a wordle with the disciplines represented in the digital collection. The dimensions of a discipline are equal to its numeric presence. Law and jurisprudence loom large here, but they are accompanied by other disciplines. A second thing to note immediately is that this project does not primarily or only touch technical matters, dictionaries and handbooks.

In order to establish a correct English translation of the concept Fachtexte we might as well look at some of the other disciplines. Rhetorik und Formularbücher remind us of the role of rhetorics and formularies in law. With Bergbau und Metallurgie you will encounter mining law. Wirtschaft und Handel, economy and trade are not far away from legal theory and legal business. In the title of this blog I opt for applied sciences as a valid way to render faithfully the scientific discipline behind the texts under discussion. In German and Dutch you have the words Fachliteratur and vakliteratuur, literature for a particular discipline. Only the Dutch German and Lithuanian version of Wikipedia have an entry about this genre.

Legal books for daily business 

Let’s not wait any longer before proceeding to legal books! You can click on Jurisprudenz in the wordle or choose this subject in a more regular list of the Sachbereiche. In this list of subject fields law and jurisprudence are the fifth discipline with 363 digitized items. Medicine scores almost one thousand items, nearly a quarter of the 4,200 digitized items. Apart from the general search field on top of the screen there is also a search page Werke (works) where you can browse alphabetically or in chronological order for works. On a similar page for authors you can search for them, and search also author biographies. The page Datenbankabfrage (database search) gives you a number of search fields and clickable preset filters. You can perform here quickly searches for digitized items from a particular century, printing location or providing institution. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich and the Staats- und Landesbibliothek Dresden provide respectively 883 and 824 items, a third part of all items. The project in Würzburg offers no items from its own university library. Using this search mask you get not only particular results, but also a nice visual representation of related information.

For the sixteenth century you will find nearly 1,100 items and for the seventeenth century 2,900 items. I wondered a bit about the presence of medieval items, but the Fachtexte project does indeed also include some digitized manuscripts. In two cases you will be directed to a text-only version of a text in the colorful and multilingual Bibliotheca Augustana of Ulrich Harsch in Augsburg. In other cases the German Wikisource provides online versions of texts.

The earliest legal text in the Fachtexte project is perhaps surprisingly the Sachsenspiegel (“Mirror of Saxony”), the thirteenth-century treatise about Saxon law by Eike von Repgow. My surprise is the fact this text certainly contains more a description of law than legislation or doctrine, yet it received the honor of several (!) series of glosses. The Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich published in recent years editions by Frank-Michael Kaufmann of the “Buch’se Glosse”, the gloss created by Johann von Buch, for the Landrecht (2002) and the Lehnrecht (2006), and also the Kürzere Glosse (2009) and the Längere Glosse (2013). There is even an accompanying glossary [Glossar zum Buch’sen Glosse (3 vol., 2015)]. In 2014 appeared Maike Huneke’s book on Iurisprudentia romana-saxonica. Die Glosse zum Sachsenspiegel-Lehnrecht und die Anfänge deutscher Rechtswissenschaft (Wiesbaden 2014; MGH Schriften, 68). Huneke argued this gloss is the first scientific product of lawyers of Saxony concerning the law of their own region. Earlier Bernd Kannowski had already underlined in his study Die Umgestaltung des Sachsenspiegelrechts durch die Buch‘sche Glosse (Wiesbaden 2007; MGH Schriften, 56) the way the glosses change the nature of this work radically. It seems the team at Würzburg finds the closeness to regional law of the Sachsenspiegel – and also of the Schwabenspiegel for Swabia – a sign of closeness to legal practice. The Schwabenspiegel has been fitted into several categories.

For the Fachtexte portal other late medieval Landrechte, regional law books, and Stadtrechte, municipal law books, have also been included in the legal section. For the fifteenth century there is for example a German version of the infamous Malleus maleficarum, the seminal work about supposed witches, Von den Unholden oder hexen (1489), and an imperial ordinance on the quality of wines (Ordnung unnd satzung über weynne, 1498). When you click on the link for the latter text you will see indeed two categories in the meta-data for this incunabula edition. The last incunabula edition of a legal text is most interesting, a book by Johannes Sleidanus about Plato’s view of (city) government, Eine kurtze summa oder Jnhalt der Platonischen Lere (1500).

Among the legal books from the sixteenth century is a great diversity of ordinances, books on feudal law and other treatises. it might be worthwhile to look here at some books that fit into more than one category. There is a Rhetorik vnd Teutsch Formular In allen Gerichts Händlen by Ludwig Fruck from 1530 dealing with rhetorical devices and legal formulas for all kind of actions in courts. An earlier edition of this book with the title Teütsch Formular, wie mann in Gerichts-Sachen Brieffe unnd Instrument stellen mag (1529) definitively should have been listed also under jurisprudence. Having easy access at Fachtexte to a list with works on rhetoric makes it possible to check for such matters. With Johann Haselberg’s Der Vrspruncg gemeynner Berckrecht (1535) we encounter a very early treatise on mining law.

Comparing categories of Fachtexte is a fruitful exercise. It leads also to some results which need further investigation or seem open to criticism. The group of legal books shows for 1552 a Kirchenordnung (ecclesiastical ordinance) by duke Johann Albrecht I of Mecklenburg tagged for both law and theology. A quick check in the theological corner shows a 1543 edition of a work by Andreas Osiander, Kirchenordnung. Wie es mit der Christlichen Lehre, heyligen Sakramenten und allerley andern Ceremonien (…). I will refrain from delving here into major publications by leading theologians in the German Reformation, but I am sure that Osiander’s work, first published in 1533, was adopted by the princes of several German regions. In a number of cases official publications such as city law books are listed at Fachtexte as works without an author, but an indication they were issued by on behalf of a particular authority is no luxury.

Legal practice in Early Modern Germany

With a book by Heinrich Knaust with a very particular title, Fewrzeugk gerichtlicher Hendel und Ordnung (Erfurt 1558) we finally see the kind of book I would expect here, a treatise aiming to distill information from medieval works by authors such as Henricus de Segusio (Hostiensis) (around 1200-1271), Johannes Andreae (around 1270-1348) and Nicolaus de Tudeschis (Panormitanus) (1386-1445) which he mentions in the long title of his work. The very first word of the title, Fewrzeugk or Fewerzeugk is intriguing. At the German dictionary portal Wörterbuchnetz it is explained under Feuerzeug, meaning a flintstone. In a recent study by Piotr Witmann, «Der da sein Practic auß Teutschen Tractaten will lernen». Rechtspraktiker in deutschsprachiger Praktikerliteratur des 16. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main, etc., 2015; Rechtshistorische Reihe, 458) Knaust and other sixteenth-century authors of practical legal works are discussed. Knaust appears in this section with more works aimed at legal practicioners. I could not help spotting that the digitized copy at Munich is part of the collection with the abbreviated siglum J. pract., “Jus practicum”.

A different combination of categories is found in a work by Leonhard Fronsberger, his Kriegßbuch, present at Fachtexte with editions from 1571, 1573 and 1578. Only the last edition is apart from the label Militär und Kampfkunst [Military and martial arts] labeled as a legal work. If you browse the edition 1571 you will see for yourself that the title starts emphatically with Vom kayserlichem Kriegsrechten. The first part of his work is concerned with legal matters, the organization of fighting units, military law and the authority of officers. I will not trouble you here with the question of correct labelling, but it is a matter of some concern indeed. Among the best known books for legal practitioners are the manuals for inquisitors and witch hunters. You will find here a number of them here, and also a translation of Jean Bodin’s De la demonomanie des sorciers (first edition, Paris 1580) into German by Johann Fischart, published in 1581 as De Daemonomania magorum : Vom Außgelassnen Wütigen Teuffelsheer der Besessenen. Here it has been overlooked that this 1581 edition already mentions Fischart as translator, and not only in the 1591 edition. It seems that some basic matters have not always been correctly recorded. However, the inclusion of multiple editions helps to correct such infelicities.

It is tempting to show your more interesting books, but I would like you to find them yourself. I could not resist mentioning the Newe Bauordnung des Fürstenthumbs Würtemberg, a building ordinance issued in 1587 by the duke of Württemberg. It contains a number of articles you would expect in late nineteenth-century legislation to control building companies. The famous Reinheitsgebot, a Bavarian ordinance from 1516 on beer brewing, is not included in the section Weinbau und Bierbrauerei. However, you will encounter ordinances for apothecaries, for architects, forest ordinances, a treatise discussing the legal or illegal nature of alchemy, ordinances for millers and much more. I leave it to you to discover here works from the seventeenth century, where you will surely find results as interesting as those selected here from the sixteenth century.

Some conclusions

It is brave to attempt selecting works for more than thirty different disciplines, be they close to the medieval artes mechanicae or to modern occupational manuals, or closer to popular versions of standard works for fields such as law, medicine, theology and mathematics. One of the strengths of the Fachtexte portal is the combination of categories which helps you to look beyond the normal borders of a particular discipline. Widening your horizons is not a bad quality for any project!

Fachtexte is part of a far more encompassing project in Würzburg, Kallimachos, which takes its name from one of the librarians of the ancient library of Alexandria. It brings together a number of linguistic projects, but also for example a project to study school plates, Schulwandbilder. It will be interesting to look into that project for legal iconography. However, I am happy to present here this project concerning applied sciences, because mirabile dictu you cannot find the Fachtexte project with the search function at the Kallimachos platform. One of the lessons in this post is the need to accept – once again, with relief or more neutral! – the fact you cannot find everything yourself. We should be thankful to those people who surf the oceans of online knowledge and share their discoveries as regularly as Klaus Graf!

The long years of the Council of Konstanz

Once upon a time the history of church councils seemed a matter of Christian theology slowly but inevitably reaching new levels of dogmatic intricacy, either led by wise popes or marred by popes who thought more of themselves than of the Catholic church. Things get more interesting when you look at the proceedings not as a distraction to theological matters at stake, but as historical events just as important as the canons and decrees finally proclaimed. One of the longest councils was the Council of Konstanz (1414-1418). Recently I was alerted to a modern representation of a chronicle showing the daily business of this medieval council. The virtual presence of this council is worth the attention of legal historians, too. In this post you will find a tour of some of the most important resources. As in my earlier post about the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) I will look also at images of this international meeting in fifteenth-century Germany, close to the modern border with Switzerland.

Five long years

Probably the most famous event of the Council of Konstanz was the trial of Jan Hus. In order to avoid too much coverage of modern memorial years I decided not to write about him here. One reason for writing here about this church council was my amusement about the tweets of Ulrich Richental, a modern incarnation of the fifteenth-century author of a chronicle about the Council of Konstanz. The tweets tell you on a day-to-day basis about events during the council, and they are directly linked to the multilingual website Konstanz Konzilstadt.

King Sigismund of the Holy Roman Empire succeeded in conveying a church council at Konstanz in a time when Western Europe had to face the presence of three popes, three because one of them, John XXIII, was a so-called antipope who resided in Bologna. Gregory II was pope in Rome and Benedict XIII reigned from Avignon. One of the problems for this council was the division between those in favour of full power over the church in the hands of a council (conciliarists), and those sticking to papal and curial power (curialists). Imagine the international crowd of ecclesiastical dignitaries and the courtiers of king Sigismund all together in a small town on the lovely Lake Constance, and you get the picture.

We can form our own picture of this council in a very literal and pictorial way thanks to the illustrated chronicle of Ulrich Richental (around 1360-1437). The famous illustrated manuscript at the Rosgartenmuseum in Konstanz is available in a modern facsimile edition [Chronik des Konzils zu Konstanz 1414–1418. Die Konstanzer Handschrift der Konzilschronik des Ulrich Richental, Jürgen Klöckler (ed.) (2nd ed., Darmstadt 2015)]. Interestingly, the list of manuscripts given in the German Wikipedia article on Ulrich Richental contains more items than the online database of the Handschriftencensus which omits two manuscripts that went missing. Many of these manuscripts have been digitized. This chronicle is the well from which the modern successor of Ulrich gets the information for his tweets. The tweets started only in 2016. It is safe to assume the idea for daily tweets was inspired by similar Twitter accounts and blogs for the commemoration of the First World War.

As for scholarly literature concerning the Council of Konstanz I was surprised that the online bibliography of the Regesta Imperii (accessible in German and English) for some reason lists only literature published before 2010 when you use the thesaurus search. You will have to check many titles using the various translations of the city name Konstanz to find relevant publications.

Acts and decrees

A second reason to write here about the Council of Konstanz brings us safely back to the sources legal historians will want foremost to consult, the manuscripts and archival records, and when available critical editions of the sources. Finding out about such editions for medieval councils can be daunting. On my legal history website the first section of the page concerning relevant editions for canon law deals with councils. For sound foundations I could rely here on an article by Joseph Avril, ‘Les décisions des conciles et synodes’, in: Jacques Berlioz et alii (eds.), Identifier sources et citations (Turnhout 1994) 177-189. Lately I checked for the online availability of a number of Early Modern editions of conciliar decrees and decisions, but some modern editions, too, have been digitized, too. The edition of the Acta concilii Constantientis by Heinrich Finke (ed.) (4 vols., Münster 1896-1928) has been digitized at the Internet Archive. Finke gives in the first volume materials from the preparatory phase of the council (1410-1413). It was harder to find a complete set with a single point of reference for other modern editions. The Monumenta conciliorum generalium saeculi decimi quinti, F. Palacky et alii (eds.) (4 vols., Vienna 1857-1935), with sources for the Council of Basel can be found conveniently online in Gallica. The second major edition for the Council of Basel, Concilium Basiliense. Studien und Quellen zur Geschichte des Konzils von Basel, J. Haller (ed.) (8 vols., Basel 1896-1936) has been digitized in its entirety at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. In the case of Basel having easy access to the editions is only the start of finding your way in a myriad of documents.

Among the participants at Konstanz were French dignitaries with more than a basic knowledge of canon law, among them cardinal Pierre D’Ailly (1350-1420), Jean Gerson (1363-1429) and cardinal Guillaume Filastre (1348-1428). Finke published a journal held by Filastre in his Forschungen und Quellen zur Geschichte des Konstanzer Konzils (Paderborn 1889; online, Internet Archive). With Francesco de Zabarella (1360-1417) we meet a great canon lawyer. In 1410 he became archbishop of Florence and year later he was created cardinal, hence his nickname Cardinalis. Zabarella died in Konstanz on September 26, 1417. Studies by Dieter Girgensohn and Thomas Morrissey have considerably enlarged our knowledge about him and his views. As a papal legate he was involved with the Council of Konstanz from the moment he was sent in 1413 as a papal legate to king Sigismund to discuss the chances for a church council.

Another canon lawyer wrote a dedicatory letter in the first printed edition of the acts of the Council of Konstanz, the Acta scitu dignissima docteque concinnata Constantiensis concilii celebratissimi (Hagenau: Gran 1500) by Hieronymus de Croaria (ca. 1460/63-1527). The Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (GW 07287) and the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC 00800000) habitually summarize titles of works stemming from institutions and authorities. Searching in the ISTC for Concilium Constantiense yields four results. The GW has a separate page for the incunabula editions of conciliar decrees. Both the GW and the ISTC point to digitized copies of incunabula. Konrad Summenhart (1460-1502) studied in Paris and Heidelberg before becoming a professor of theology and even chancellor of the university of Tübingen. In his work Opus septipartitum de contractibus he looked both at contractual law as administered in courts as on the impact on the forum conscientiae, the personal conscience. He wrote about subjects as usury and tithes. Hieronymus de Croaria had been his colleague in Tübingen as a professor of canon law before he went to Ingolstadt. Later on he worked also as a judge.

Heinrich Finke guided the research of Joseph Riegel who defended a thesis on the wildly varying numbers of participants at the Council of Konstanz [Die Teilnehmerlisten des Konstanzer Konzils. Ein Beitrag zur mittelalterlichen Statistik (Freiburg im Breisgau 1916; online, Internet Archive)], a thing already debated by contemporaries.The Council of Konstanz became during five years a focus of European politics and church reform, a place where many influential people met. The sheer number of participants, their background and views, and the impact on church life merit and warrant a good chance at finding always new perspectives, not to mention resources, to make it worthwhile to look again this event, not in the least with an eye to legal history.

A postscript

In this post I tried to be as concise as possible, but I think it is right to point here also to another old edition concerning the Council of Konstanz, the seven volumes of the edition edited by Hermann von der Hardt, Magnum Oecumenicum Constantiense Concilium (…) (Frankfurt am Main 1697-1700), digitized by the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Düsseldorf. I had preferred to give you the exact link to a completely digitised set, but searching in this digital library brings you quickly to the volumes. I found the reference to the digitized set at Düsseldorf in a 2015 blog post by Klaus Graf at Archivalia where he dealt with the entry for this council in the Historisches Lexikon Bayerns. However, Graf mentioned only two volumes of Hardt’s edition. Only much later did I realize there is indeed a link for the whole set digitized at Düsseldorf using the German URB:NBN resolver of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

Another resource worth mentioning is the online version of Chris Nighman and Phillip Stump, A Bibliographical Register of the Sermons & Other Orations Delivered at the Council of Constance (1414-1418) (2006, updated 2007) available at the website of the Bibliographical Society of America.

A book that should figure here, too, is Martin Cable, “Cum essem in Constantie…”: Raffaele Fulgosio and the Council of Constance 1414-1415 (Leiden 2015). Fulgosio (1367-1427) was a notable lawyer.

In December 2019 the Monumenta Germaniae Historica launched a digital edition by Thomas Martin Buck of the three versions of the famous chronicle by Ulrich Richental about the council of Konstanz. The latest literature on the council is reviewed by Heribert Müller, ‘Neue Forschungen zum Konstanzer Konzil. Literaturbericht’, Historisches Jahrbuch 139 (2019) 513–559.

 

Editing medieval royal laws from Spain

Last month I wanted to refresh my blogroll. Among the additions one blog stands out because its name does not start with a letter, but with a number, and it appears now as the very first item of the blogroll, reason enough for further exploration. It is a project for a new edition of laws created by a king with perhaps the best reputation of all medieval kings, at least in modern perception. Alfonso el Sabio, or Alfonso X of Castile, king Alphonso the Wise, wrote the songs of the Cantigas de Santa Maria, and he created a famous law collection, the Siete Partidas (Seven Parts). For a new critical edition of this collection the Spanish team of editors have created the blog 7 Partidas Digital: Edición critica de las Siete Partidas, hosted by the Hypotheses network. In this post I will look at this project and I will try to provide some context for it.

Studying medieval laws

Royal legislation in the Middle Ages is not easy to bring under one common denominator. Scholars such as Sten Gagnér (1921-2000) have helped us much to see legislation in new light, in particular in his Studien zur Ideengeschichte der Gesetzgebung (Stockholm, etc., 1960). Armin Wolf focuses in his research on medieval legislation, in particular in Gesetzgebung in Europa 1100–1500: Zur Entstehung der Territorialstaaten (2nd edition, Munich 1996), and like Gagnér he has written about a great variety of laws and lawgivers, including Alfonso el Sabio (1221-1284). In 2002 the Max-Planck-Institut for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main could acquire the vast library of Gagnér. Michael Stolleis, for many years the director of this institute and a scholar trained by Gagnér, wrote a moving and most instructive tribute to Gagnér [‘Sten Gagnér (1921-2000), ein großer Lehrer der europäischen Rechtsgeschichte’, Quaderni Fiorentini 29 (2000) 560-569; PDF]. For many years Wolf, too, worked for and at this institute. His fundamental book about medieval legislation first appeared in a volume of Helmut Coing’s Handbuch der europäischen Privatrechtsgeschichte. It is by all means wise to benefit here, too, from the rich resources of this Max-Planck-Institut, starting perhaps with the online catalogue of its library.

Let’s start a tour of the blog 7Partidas Digital, a project at the Universidad de Valladolid. There have been two major adaptations of this legal collection, in the incunabula edition of 1491 (Alonso Díaz de Montalvo) and the edition published in 1555 (Gregorio López), and a semi-official edition in 1807 by the Real Academia de la Historia, but not yet a critical edition. The aim of the project is to bring together all textual sources and present them online, to create an online critical edition and to provide a up-to-date bibliography of relevant scholarship in a Zotero group. The bibliography takes as its starting point the study of Jerry Craddock, The legislative work of Alfonso X. A critical bibliography (London 1986; 2nd edition, 2011). You can consult the 1986-1990 update of Craddock’s bibliography online (eScholarship, University of California). Already the fact that Craddock could adduce manuscripts not earlier included and comment on them should make you aware of the complicated textual tradition of the Siete Partidas and other Alphonsine laws. By the way, Robert Burns added an introduction to the reprint of the English translation of the Siete Partidas by S.P. Scott (first edition 1931; reprint 5 vol., Philadelphia, 2001, 2012).

The core of the project is the online edition hosted at GitHub which is being created using XML / TEI. TEI stands for Text Encoding Initiative, one of the major metadata standards in creating digital text editions. As for now the project has resulted in editions of some textual witnesses kept at Valladolid. The Siete Partidas is a rather large legal code. The section Léxico explains the incunabula edition in 1491 contains 772,000 words. The first part (Primera partida a.k.a. Libro de los leyes) in one particular manuscript (London, British Library, Add. 20787, sigle LBL) good for more than 165,000 words. The image of a kind of Spanish armada, a fleet with an outsize flagship and many minor vessels around it, is probably a fair description. The project will create a special dictionary for the Siete Partidas, of which the letter Z, the only one already published, gives you an idea.

The section Testimonios gives you a general overview of relevant manuscripts and their contents, mainly as noted in the Philobiblon project for Iberian medieval manuscripts (Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley), and for a number of them – including LBL mentioned above – extensive descriptions. One of the scholars helping to track down manuscripts with laws issued by Alfonso el Sabio was the late Antonio García y García. A further asset on this web page is an interactive map showing where institutions have relevant manuscripts within their collections. An essential element in this project are the Normas de codificación, the rules for the encoding of the text and the critical apparatus in the XML / TEI pages, and additional guidelines for the transcription of the legal texts.

Access to Alfonso’s laws

By now you might think all this information does not yet bring you directly to the texts associated with king Alfonso el Sabio, but you could as well admit that some preparation is needed indeed to approach them. I had expected to find here both images of manuscripts and an edition on your computer screen, and therefore I would like to provide you at least with some information about the most important printed editions. A text of the Sieta Partidas was printed twice in 1491 [Las siete partidas de Alfonso X el Sabio, con las adiciones de Alfonso Díaz de Montalvo (Seville: Meinardus Ungut and Stanislaus Polonus, 25 October 1491; GW M42026, online for example in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica)], and two months later again with the same title [(Seville: Compañeros alemanes, 24 December 1491) GW M42028, online in the Biblioteca Virtual del Patrimonio Bibliográfico (BVPB)]. The Gesamtkatolog der Wiegendrucke (GW) (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin) and the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (British Library and CERL) show you concise bibliographical information and lists with extant copies worldwide, for both editions rather short lists. The edition by Gregorio de López de Tovar appeared in 1555 and can be viewed online in the BVPB [Las Siete Partidas del Sabio Rey don Alonso el nono (…) (Salamanca: Andrea de Portonariis, 1555)].

The Biblioteca Digital Hispánica brings you not only a number of old reprints, some of them enhanced with useful registers, but also a number of digitized manuscripts. It contains also a digital version of the edition published by the Real Academia de la Historia (Las Siete Partidas del Rey Don Alfonso el Sabio cotejada con varios códices antiguos (…) (Madrid 1807)]. The Hispanic Seminary provides you in its Digital Library of Old Spanish texts in the section for Spanish legal texts with a transcription of the Primera Partida in the 1491 edition. You can find more editions and books about the Siete Partidas in the Catálogo Colectivo del Patrimonio Bibliográfico Español, and for example in the Bibliografía Española en Línea, a service of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, and more specifically in the Repertorio del Medievalismo Hispánico (Institución Milà y Fontanals, Barcelona).

In the midst of all these elements I would almost forget to mention the blog posts of Siete Partidas Digital, to be found under Entradas. The most recent contribution in this second is a full-scale article by José Domingues (Porto) about the Portuguese version of the Siete Partidas and its manuscript tradition (A Tradição Medieval das Sete Partidas em Portugal). The first blog post alerts to the 2015 revised online version of Dwayne E. Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews: An Edition of and Commentary on Siete Partidas 7.24 «De los judios» (thesis, University of California, 1986), and to new textual witnesses found in the Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid, referred to in the edition with the sigle VA4, but alas the links to the finding aid with these archival records and to the article describing them are broken. However, here the project in Valladolid scores with its section on text bearers: The page on VA4 gives you full information, but here, too, you have to reckon with links to Spanish archival records which stem from expired web sessions. You will have to repeat yourself each consecutive step of the search at the rich but cumbersome navigable PARES portal, the digital home to both online inventories and many digitized archival records in Spanish state archives. You will find a quick introduction to Alfonso el Sabio and the texts concerning the legal status of religious minorities in the Siete Partidas in the database of the RELMIN project around the position of these minorities in the medieval Mediterranean, with also some references to basic modern literature, and for each of the relevant texts a translation, an analysis and references to further studies. RELMIN provides you with sometimes both English and French translations.

Normally I would feel rather exhausted, or to be honest definitely feel irritated, to say the least, about such a sorry state of affairs, the combination of a broken link and arduous recovering information using the PARES portal, but this time I can appreciate very much one of the things Sten Gagnér taught his students, not only in his lectures and seminars, but foremost by his own example. At the end of this post I really want to mention something Michael Stolleis made crystal clear in his tribute to Gagnér. He wanted his students to see things for himself in sources, to trace back and check the steps others had set, be they the pioneers and leaders in the various fields of legal history or more average scholars, to see the very words in the sources they found, to assess the meaning and context of words anew. Studying legislation in past and present in all its forms should be an exercise in good thinking, not a slipshod affair, as if you only have to dip your spoon in an ocean of sources. No school, department or faculty can provide you completely with his kind of training, because here your own intellectual honesty and drive to become and be a true historian should work for all you are worth, for all things and people you value most.

A postscript

After the things I said about the PARES portal I must do justice to the riches of this portal by referring to the wonderful online guide by Scott Cave and Ashleigh Dean, aptly called Taming PARES. Their guide really unlocks this treasure trove!

The Casa Velasquez in Madrid will host from November 2 to 4, 2017 the conference Las Siete Partidas: une codification nomrative pour un nouveau monde.

Between printed books and social media

On this blog digitization is often shown at its best when digital initiatives bring you closer to sources and texts which used to be difficult to access. Even though blogs themselves belong to the social media I have seldom commented here on their use or abuse in the field of legal history. Museum Meermanno in The Hague is host to an exhibition in cooperation with institutions in Göttingen, Antwerp and Hasselt to show books and other printed media from a period when printing itself could be dubbed the agent of change. Conn3ct: Impact van drukpers en sociale media has got “media” as the extension of its web address. With Erasmus (1469-1536) on the start page browsing a smart phone the message of this exhibition website becomes more personal. His presence reinforces the theme of the exhibition with communication and its manifestations in the sixteenth century as its heart. Erasmus’ role and position in the international scholarly community as a prince of letters and literature is indeed hardly conceivable without the printing press and public exchanges of views on many subjects. Interestingly, there is attention to law and justice, too, in this exhibition. The website can be viewed in Dutch, English and German.

The exhibition currently on display in The Hague has been created by the Vlaamse Erfgoedbibliotheek [Flemish Heritage Library] in Antwerp and the Dutch Royal Library (The Hague) in cooperation with the Provinciale Bibliotheek Limburg in Hasselt and the Universiteit Antwerpen. The Dutch-Flemish presentation at the Frankfurter Buchmesse in 2016 was the occasion to organize the exhibit first shown in Göttingen thanks to the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen.

Similar and different

The core of the Conn3ct website is the theme section with nine themes concerning communication and action. “Enter”, “Start” and “Change” are seemingly straightforward. With “Status”, “Follow” and “Control” you enter clearly the empire of the social media, and “Delete” “Community” and “Chat” follow naturally. Here I will look rather at random at some of these themes. “Change” brings a comparison between the early days of book printing, with books without a title page, and sixteenth-century books with title pages. Many features of the virtual world we now take for granted have come gradually within the first twenty-five years of the virtual world. Under “Control” you will find items concerning censorship, but also its counterpart, pirated editions and edition with a fictive printing address and origin. It is a useful reminder that not only ecclesiastical authorities acted against books when you see here for example an ordinance of emperor Charles V forbidding books [Mandament der Keyserlijcker Maiesteit. Met dintitulatie vanden gereprobeerde boecken (Leuven: Servaes van Sassen, 1546)], a decade before the first papal Index librorum prohibitorum. The virtual delete button brings you to subjects as printed ephemera, very rare editions and early bibliographies, even one created in 1523 by Erasmus of his own works, on one side, and notions such as anonymous internet surfing and the questions of virtual longevity.

The second main section, Books and videos at the Conn3ct website is more traditional. It offers a searchable overview of the books, videos and other media, just over one hundred items. You can choose at will among themes, media, technical aspects such as illustrations, general characteristics, for example bestsellers, de luxe-editions or corrected versions, language, year of publication, and contributing institution. I would almost forget you can connect any item quickly to actual social media or store them in your favorites. It is worth looking also at the section with ideas for digital initiatives of Dutch and Flemish schools for the arts.

It is easy to point to similarities between the sixteenth and the twenty-first century, but this exhibition show also the differences. In my view the juxtaposition of two periods helps to perceive the precise impact of the variety of forms of communications in print versus the proliferation of social media creating either a virtual reality or increasingly a normal part of the world. In a cartoon the two ducks Fokke and Sukke commented like medieval monks in their version of the Canon of Dutch History (2007) on the printing press: “This invention will not stay with us. People will always want to read handwritten books!”

The oldest museum for the history of the book

The Museum Meermanno at the Prinsessegracht, The Hague – image source: Monumentenzorg Den Haag

Two collections form the heart of the Museum Meermanno, in the twentieth century known under a longer name, Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum. Johan Meerman (1753-1815) had studied law in Leipzig, Göttingen and Leiden and became a politician, serving for example as a mayor of Rotterdam. His father, Gerard Meerman (1721-1772), pensionaris (city secretary) of Rotterdam, was also a lawyer. He had already started collecting books about law and jurisprudence which led to the publication of the Novus thesaurus juris civilis et canonici (7 vol., The Hague 1751-1753; online, Hathi Trust Digital Library). Gerard Meerman edited also the Epitome Gai in a very rare edition [Specimen animadversationum criticarum in Caii Jcti Institutiones (…) (Lutetiae Parisiorum: apud Merigot, 1747)] which I mentioned last year in a post about Pieter Gillis and Thomas More’s Utopia. Meerman’s edition was reprinted in the Novus thesaurus. Later on he started also collecting manuscripts and incunabula, books printed in the fifteenth century. In 1764 he bought for example the manuscript collection of the Jesuit college Louis le Grand. Gerard Meerman’s research into book history led to his study Origines typographicae (2 vol., The Hague 1765; online, Hathi Trust).

A nephew of Johan, Willem van Westreenen van Tiellandt (1783-1848), too, was an avid collector of books, coins and Egyptian artefacts. During the French period he served as an adjunct-archivist of the Kingdom Holland. In the new Kingdom of the Netherlands he became in 1815 the treasurer of the new Hoge Raad van Adel (High Council of Nobility) and in 1842 director of the Royal Library. He bought substantial parts of the Meerman collections at an auction in 1824, and in his will he bequeathed his collections and house to the Dutch nation. The location of the Museum Meermanno, close to the Royal Library, explains the easy cooperation between both institutions. Some of the most renown Dutch librarians served at both locations. The modern museum collects especially bibliophile and rare editions.

The world of law and justice is by all means not only a place of the spoken word, but also a world of words in print or in online databases and digital collections. It is only fitting that two lawyers created book collections which are still the central features of a remarkable museum. The exhibition is certainly worth your virtual visit, and it should be a good reason to visit The Hague, too.

The Hague, Museum Meermanno: Conn3ct, impact van drukpers en sociale media – February 24-May 21, 2017 – from June 22 at Antwerp and from October 14 in Hasselt

Publishing laws in Early Modern Italy

This month I could add a number of digital resources for legal history to my website Rechtshistorie, but with summertime approaching I could not help asking myself during some fleeting moments whether scholars actually use these resources. However, when I encountered in a collection held at Het Utrechts Archief, the municipal and provincial archives of the city and province Utrecht, a seventeenth-century piece of printed ecclesiastical legislation from Italy I was only too happy to be able to use these online resources. In this post I offer a small tour of projects concerning legislation in Italy during the Early Modern Period.

What’s in a name?

My curiosity was evoked by a notice in an inventory about a publication in print of a condemnation by pope Innocent XI in 1679 of sixty-five theses concerning probabilism, an approach of Christian beliefs building on the works of some Jesuit theologians in the seventeenth century. Being a medievalist my first reaction was to look at the formal aspects of this publication: Is it a papal bull, a decree, a letter, a motu proprio or something else? Each of this forms has its own characteristics which can be used in particular to determine its age and nature, whether it is truly a papal publication, a forgery or something else.

The condemnation of probabilism by pope Innocent XI, 1679 – Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, Per.est 18_14.313

Let’s look at the document I encountered, and I use here an image from an Italian database for Early Modern ecclesiastical legislation. Within the Scaffali digitali, the digital library of the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome, the series of nearly 1,100 editti e bandi pontifici take pride of place. The Scaffali digitali can be viewed in Italian and English. In fact this collection can be accessed also using the portal site Internet Culturale. The first thing to notice in this digital collection is the presence of two editions of this text both issued on March 2, 1679. The edition I found is almost a poster, and described at the Casanatense as a manifesto. The other edition (shelfmark Per.est. 18_14.311) is a quire in folio format, a small booklet. The identical title of both documents, Feria 5. die 2. Martij 1679. In generali Congregatione sanctae Romanae, & vniuersalis Inquisitionis habita in Palatio Apostolico Vaticano coram sanctissimo D.N.D. Innocentio diuina prouidentia papa 11. (…), mentions in both cases clearly the congregation for the inquisition, the Congregazione dell’Inquisizione. The Latin text states clearly that pope Innocent was at a meeting of this congregation to promulgate his condemnation. From this I would conclude this condemnation is a decree published by the Roman inquisition of a papal condemnation. The description in the inventory at Utrecht will have to be adjusted to do justice to the nature of this document.

As for its theological and doctrinal continent it might be wise to add a note to the well-known standard editions of texts concerning doctrines of faith, the Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum edited by Heinrich Denzinger. The only trick is to indicate clearly the edition you used because in modern editions the numbering has been reshuffled (2101-2167 against 1151-1216). There are translations of Denzinger in several languages. In at least one online version Denzinger gives as the title for the sixty-five condemned propositions Propositiones LXV condemnatae in Decreto Sancti Officii.

At the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Rome is yet another collection with digitized ecclesiastical legislation, Bandi e bolli pontificie del XVI secolo, accessible at Internet Culturale, the digital portal of a number of Italian libraries with a multilingual interface, but this collection is limited to the sixteenth century. It is a reminder to look not only in the several constituent parts of the Corpus Iuris Canonici for canon law as it was brought together since the sixteenth century, but also in the material sources of law which sometimes did touch the whole Church as much as this main set of canonical collections. The position of the papal states and the Vatican within the borders of Italy inevitably make it necessary to look for its legal history not just at legislation for the Catholic Church, but also at sources elsewhere in Italy. I would almost forget to underline that reading the original publication adds a dimension to studying theological developments in the seventeenth century.

Old Italian laws at your screen

So far I have already mentioned editti, edicts, bolle, bulls, and bandi, an almost untranslatable word, and more terms will follow. Yet bandi with the singular bando is the word most used for publications of single laws and decrees. The entry Bando in the online version of the Enciclopedia Treccani interestingly links the word bando and banno with the German word Bann. The word bandit stems from bandito, someone banned, i.e. expelled by formal proclamation. The Fondazione Querini Stampalia has created at Internet Culturale the digital collection Vox Venetica: Bandi della Repubblica Venezia di secoli 16-17 with more than three thousand legal proclamations from Venice. Even if this is not actually a digital collection, it is useful to point to the project Ecclesiae Venetae of the Venetian Archivio di Stato and other partner institutions with online inventories of the archives of ecclesiastical institutions, with special attention to Italian archives concerning the inquisition. The Archivio di Stato di Venezia has started digitizing thirteenth-century charters in volgare in the project Chartae Vulgares Antiquiores. Bologna is in the Early Modern period a case of a city under the aegis of the papal state. The cardinal-legate reigning Bologna issued many thousands municipal ordinances and decrees for which the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio has made La Raccolta dei Bandi Merlani, a digital collection with publications printed between 1601 and 1796. Nearly 23,000 of some 75,000 items have been digitized. It is perhaps wise to point to the online introduction Il governo di Bologna. Amministratizione comunale dal 1141 al 1945.

In Milan we encounter different terms, gridi and gridari. The Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica, part of the Italian national science foundation Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, has created the collection for Le gride e gli editi dello Stato di Milano (1560-1796). One has to register before you can use these digitized sources. A part of the same ground is covered by the project I gridari del ducato di Milano nel XVIII secolo of the Università degli Studi di Milano. A third project brings you to Gride e Gridari Seicenteschi del Ducato di Milano (1600-1700) with 47 digitized gridari, accessible at the portal Lombardia Beni Culturali, a cultural heritage portal for the region Lombardy. This portal has also a section with nineteenth-century legislation in the field of public law in Lombardy, the Archivio lombardo della legislazione storica (1749-1859). Lombardia Beni Culturali is home to more projects with connections to legal history, for example the Codice diplomatico della Lombardia medievale and registers from the chancery of Francesco I Sforza (1450-1466), but here we leave the field of Early Modern legislation.

On my webpage with digital libraries I have put together a lot of commented links for Italy. I cannot vouch for its completeness, but it would be excessive to repeat here verbatim everything you can find there. The new portal BibVio, Biblioteche virtuali online of the main Italian research libraries, including 46 Italian biblioteche pubbliche statali, deserves mentioning here, however it does not bring an easy overview of their digital presence. I would have loved to write here about Florence, but I can provide you here at least the links to Archivi Storici Toscani, a portal focusing on municipal archives in Tuscany, and the portal Archivi in Toscana, and for archives in Italy the portal of the Direzione generale per gli archivi. A recent digital publication in its digital library using materials pertaining also to Florentine legal history is the volume l carteggio della Signoria fiorentina all’epoca del cancellierato di Carlo Marsuppini (1444-1453) edited by Raffaela Maria Zaccaria (2015) (online, PDF, 4,7 MB). This digital library contains more publications which touch upon both legal and ecclesiastical history. The Archivio di Stato in Florence and its veritable portal to the history of Florence should be both online and in real life a fine starting point to find and use more. Seeing the decree of Innocent XI and the collections digitized in Rome brought me happy memories of my visits to the Biblioteca Casanatense.

Opening a book: Legal consulting in the Dutch Republic

A post at my blog in December brought you to three foundations created in Utrecht by seventeenth-century Dutch lawyers. In this post I will look again at one of them, Evert van de Poll, and in particular at traces of his work as a lawyer. Van de Poll had become the advocate of the States of Utrecht and councillor in the provincial court of Utrecht. In his will he had stipulated his books should become part of the municipal library, in 1634 an important collection at the start of the university library at Utrecht. The books in the spotlight of this contribution which fits into my series Opening a book are collections with legal consultations from the seventeenth century. Dealing with them is not a straightforward business, and I will show here some of the problems you encounter when approaching this juridical genre.

J. van Kuyk, the author of the brief biographical notice on Evert van de Poll (around 1560-1602) in the Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek (10 vol., Leiden, 1911-1937) II [1912], col. 1114-1115 – online at Biografisch Portaal – refers to a juridical consultation signed by Van de Poll and included in the Hollandsche Consultatiën, in the third volume published in 1662, no. 95. Alas tracking this reference is not as straightforward as Van Kuyk might have thought, because there are several editions of the Consultatiën, advysen en advertissementen, gegeven ende geschreven by verscheyden treffelijcke rechts-geleerden in Holland. It took me some time to find a digital version of this work. Joannes Naeranus published at Rotterdam editions of this work in six volumes, but he did not publish the volumes in consecutive order, a nice challenge for bibliographers. The first set appeared at Rotterdam between 1645 and 1666 with also an Amsterdam version of the third volume (1647), the second set between 1648 and 1669, and the third set between 1661 and 1670. A fourth set was printed from 1683 onward by his successor Isaac Naeranus. There are also sets printed in Amsterdam from 1716 and 1728, in their turn also reprinted.

The Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog does not bring you to a digital version of the right volume from this edition, and after trying some portals to digitized books – actually the Dutch Delpher portal, the portal of the Polish Digital Libraries Federation and the Spanish Biblioteca Virtual del Patrimonio Bibliográfico – it slowly dawned upon me this book might be included at a subscriber’s only project. and thus out of reach for the average researcher. The Firm with the Famous Online Search Engine has digitized volumes from the edition Amsterdam-Utrecht 1736-1768 in the library of the University of Amsterdam, and at Amsterdam are other sets as well. By sheer luck I started my online search in subscribers’ online collections with Early European Books [EEB], a commercial project with for users in the Netherlands free access to books held at the Dutch Royal Library. At first I seemed to have asked for too much, because when looking for consultatiën only other works with Dutch juridical consultations from the seventeenth and eighteenth century appeared to have been digitized, in itself a substantial harvest.

Only when I tried rather desperately to find digitized copies of works published by Naeranus the third volume of the edition Rotterdam 1662 [4°, [8], 716, [68] p.] did appear, and something else became clear, too. On close inspection of the first thirteen results from a title search at EBB I should have noticed the five digitized volumes of the Consultatiën are not from the same edition. For one volume the actual number of volumes of a set was indicated in the search results, and thus I wondered why the Royal Library seemingly did not digitize an entire set. To all appearances it seems that for a number of works in EEB only a part of the title has been included within the meta-data. In the screen print here above you can see “Het derde deel” has been entered as the title, and not the full title, even though you can see at the right the actual title page. For some other volumes the part of the title with the volume number has been recorded as an alternative title. You can imagine how I looked at my computer screen in utter disbelief at this digitization record! A proper description of multi-volume works is distinctly different. Let the record show that the library catalogue at The Hague does contain correct information, but only the Short Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN) makes you unequivocally aware of the exact composition of the sets, but neither catalogue mentions the digitization, something the STCN does normally. The Nederlandse Centrale Catalogus, the Dutch Central Catalogue, only accessible for subscribers and cardholders of the Royal Library, adds only for one eighteenth-century set the digitization by The Firm (6 vol., Amsterdam: Boom and Van Poolsum, 1736-1768). The NCC’s information about holding libraries is not complete, and without the STCN you would not notice this defect. Anyway a caveat lector seems first of all appropriate when you use Early European Books.

Dutch books in American libraries

When searching all this information for your benefit, and surely also to learn something myself, I realized the great search engine of the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue does not offer much in the field of American libraries apart from the Hathi Trust and the Internet Archive. WorldCat is not always helpful with books printed before 1800, although I did look at the beta version of OCLC’s new Classify tool to see how this set is described. Luckily you can since a few months search online in The National Union-Catalogue, pre-1956 imprints (…) [NUC] (754 vol., London 1968-1981), digitized for the Hathi Trust Digital Library at the University of Michigan with the help of other institutions and the original publisher. You can search individual volumes of the NUC, but when you use the advanced full-text search mode with the full-text search field for your own search term(s) and setting the title field to “National union catalog, pre-1956”, you can conduct a multi-volume search. The Library of Congress provides a handy PDF with the tables of content for each NUC volume. The only additional trick is probably memorizing quickly at least some of the abbreviated codes for library locations printed at the start of each volume. Unfortunately it seems only a copy at the Library of Congress appears in the NUC, first without a clear indication in vol. 25, p. 529, but completed in the supplementary volume 713, p. 247. In the midst of all bibliographical details it is perhaps necessary to say the Hathi Trust Digital Library does not contain any digitized set of the Consultatiën.

Frontispice of the first volume of the 1648-1669 Rotterdam edition of the Consultatiën – image Yale University, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Rare 26 10-0473 v.1

Another approach to find sets in the United States might be checking only the catalogues of some major collections where for good reasons you can expect the presence of a particular work. The Library of Congress has indeed sets from both the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, Harvard has two sets from the eighteenth century. The Robbins Collection at Berkeley has what seems to me according to the Melvyl catalog for Californian libraries a mixed set printed at Rotterdam, and two eighteenth-century sets. Columbia has three eighteenth-century sets, and there is one incomplete seventeenth-century set with some volumes from later editions. The Orbis catalog of Yale University Library does not include the set of the second – or maybe the first because of the third volume printed in 1647 at Amsterdam? – Rotterdam edition at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, its volumes are described in the Morris catalog. I did not find any set at Stanford, Cornell and Boston College.

The title page of the third volume (1662) – copy Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit – image STCN

At this point it might at last become very clear that you will need to create or use reliable bibliographical information in order to determine and assess exactly which book you are looking at. How sure can we be that the sets mentioned above are indeed original sets? The library of the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main houses a very large collection of old Dutch juridical books, and there is a most detailed separate catalogue by Douglas Osler, Catalogue of books printed in Spain, Portugal and the Southern and Northern Netherlands from the beginning of printing to 1800 in the library of the Max-Planck-Institut für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main 2000). The STCN gives detailed bibliographical information about each volume of the various sets with consultatiën, advysen en advertissementen, in fact more than the online catalogue of the library at Frankfurt. However, having a printed catalogue at your disposal is not always enough. The catalogue of old books at the Library of the Hoge Raad, the Dutch Supreme Court, does not indicate the printing date of the volumes in their sets.¹ The Law Library of Utrecht University does provide in its own summary catalogue and in the main library catalogue sufficient indication of each volume within a set, thus corroborating our information. You will need such information in the face of sequels to our subject, such as the Nieuwe consultatiën, and because of the existence of similar sets for Gelre (Guelders) and Utrecht, with often very similar titles.

Van de Poll cum suis on feudal law

I had better tell you now more about consultation no. 95. It deals with a case in feudal law in Guelders. The case description and the consultation are to be found at pp. 319-323 and were signed on September 20, 1597 by Cornelis Oem, Folkert van Montzema, “E. Pollio” and Folkert Oem. The books from Van de Poll’s legacy at Utrecht University show as their provenance ex dono E. Pollionis. The councillors of the court at Utrecht issued this opinion in an appeal procedure from the provincial court of Guelders where Pieter Doois, dean of the church in Deventer, had brought the case against his younger brother Dirk concerning a fief called Madakker. Earlier Pieter had sold the possession of this fief at the feudal court of the provost (proosdij) of Salland in Deventer. Among the issues at stake was the jurisdiction and law valid for cases concerning a fief, that of its location or that of the court under which it belonged, in this case either the feudal customary law of the proosdij or those of the duchy of Guelders. To complicate matters the appellant pointed also to the matrimonial contract from 1556 which had been confirmed by the lord of his fief. With remarkable speed and economy the councillors at Utrecht decided that this case fell under the feudal law of Guelders. The conditions in the matrimonial contract were null and void. This learned opinion mixes Dutch – with a distinct Eastern flavour – printed in a Fraktur like type with sentences and references in Latin printed in Roman type. Van Kuyk did probably use a register to the six volumes in order to find this reference, probably the earliest register printed in 1696 as a seventh volume of the last seventeenth-century set. The 1696 edition can be viewed online at Early European Books, and I did not find an author index in this volume. Van Kuyk probably used another edition.

Some conclusions

At the end of this post I would like to stress how necessary it is to conduct a full bibliographical search into the printing history of these Dutch consultations before pronouncing with any certainty on the completeness of any set. In this case it is not enough to rely exclusively on the main online catalogues and meta-catalogues. A second conclusion is that even if you are used to sailing the oceans of law and old editions there are some foggy regions. In fact I have hesitated very much about writing this post which does offer only a glimpse of much more work to be done before using these sets with legal consultations in a sensible way. Of course it is very useful that the editors of Grotius’ Inleidinge tot de Hollandsche rechts-geleerdheid, F. Dovring, H.F.W.D. Fischer and E.M. Meijers (eds.) (2nd ed., Leiden 1965) provide a concise overview of consultations signed by Grotius on the base of the 1696 register to the Hollandsche Consultatiën, but they only copied the seventeenth-century summaries. In my view finding an edition of old legal consultations is just a start. The background of the lawyers and the edition should rightfully claim our attention, too, in order to establish its value as a historical source. It is seducing to use digital collections as a kind of sea from which you can haul your information without much ado, but alas this is an illusion exposed already long ago. My encounter with Early European Books may serve as a warning that digital resources can be deceptive. Digital libraries might neglect bibliographical accuracy at their own peril, and this is true for scholars, too.

Notes

1. P.P. Schmidt, Catalogus oude drukken in de bibliotheek van de Hoge Raad der Nederlanden (Zwolle 1988) and Joost Pikkemaat, The old library of the Supreme Court of the Netherlands (Hilversum 2008), with on a cd-rom Schmidt’s catalogue.

Legacies in brick

Somehow the walking historian has not appeared at all here this year, but I did certainly walk in 2015 at various locations. One of my recent tours led me to a subject fit for a new contribution. In the old inner city of Utrecht you can spot among the nearly one thousand historic buildings at least three buildings with a clear connection to lawyers from the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Two of them still have a function connected with the aim of their founders. In this post I would like to introduce you to the three buildings, their background and to the lawyers who founded them.

The Bruntenhof

The first foundation I would like to show you is the Bruntenhof, a charitable foundation created in 1621 by Frederik Brunt. Its buildings have been lovingly restored between 1979 and 1983. For some reason the very sign at the entrance “ANNO 1621” has not yet been renewed after recent painting work. You can find a lot of information about old buildings in Utrecht in the Utrechts Documentatiesyteem (UDS), with maps, old and modern photographs, research notes and scans of relevant publications about historic buildings. At present the Bruntenhof is a property of the Utrechts Monumentenfonds, a foundation which owns more than one hundred historic buildings. Their website gives a good succinct overview of the history of the Bruntenhof. Frederik Brunt used the garden of his own home Klein Lepelenburg as the space for his foundation with fifteen small houses called cameren, “chambers”, houses with just one room. Brunt also made provisions for fuel, food and other means of livings, and this made his foundation uncommon. His heirs did something which Brunt must have intended but had not dictated. As a Roman Catholic living in a protestant country he wisely did not say anything about religion in the foundation charters, but he wanted poor Roman Catholic widows to live in the Bruntenhof.

I tried to find more information about Frederik Brunt, but apart from genealogical information nothing did surface immediately. Interestingly, I did find online the registration of his death (“Mr. Frederick Brunt, licentiaet”) on March 30, 1622 in a transcribed register for the tolling of bells of Utrecht Cathedral (register van overluiden) between 1614 and 1651 [P.A.N.S. van Meurs, Overluidingen te Utrecht 1614-1651]. This register mentions often the occupations and academic degrees of the deceased, and thus you might use it also to find quickly other lawyers in Utrecht during the first half of the seventeenth century. It was surprising to find this register among other digitized resources for the history of Utrecht at GeneaKnowHow in its section for digitized sources. There is a much more reliable modern transcription of a similar register for the years 1562 to 1614 which shows the sums paid for tolling the bells. For quick information about persons not included in biographical dictionaries such registers can be quite useful. The time the bells tolled and the amount of money often show the status of the deceased. J.W.C. van Campen, for many decades head of the municipal archive of Utrecht, made many notes about the area around the Bruntenhof and the Brunt family [Utrecht, Het Utrechts Archief (HUA), Verzameling historisch werkmateriaal, no. 666].

The Gronsveltcameren

Smaller than Brunt’s foundation are the six cameren, one-room buildings erected in 1652 to fulfill the will of Johan van Gronsvelt who had stipulated this should happen when his wife died. A stone in the building indicated he was a barrister at the Court of Utrecht. The register mentioned above puts his death at August 5, 1642. These houses stand originally in the Agnietenstraat, but they had to move in the eighteenth century for another foundation, a combination of orphanage and surveyors school, the Fundatie van Renswoude (1754). In 1756 the houses were rebuilt in the Nicolaasdwarsstraat near the Nicolaaskerk (St. Nicholas). An inscription with a chronogram in it to show the year to those people who know this kind of riddle. The second half of this inscription merits attention, Uit liifde puur gesticht door loutre charitaat / Tot Bystand van de lien om Godswil anders niit, “Founded from pure love by charity alone / As a support of people for Gods will and nothing else”. A second inscription below it tells us about the removal in 1756.

When walking here in November an acquaintance pointed to the difference in the model of the rain gutters which according to her had to do with the religious background of the people living in a particular house. In fact there had been a fight over the management of this foundation and after a split-up maintenance was done differently ever since. Nos. 1, 2, 5 and 6 were maintained since 1719 by the Roman Catholic almshouse, the other two by the original foundation. In 1746 the almshouse itself was split into an “Old Catholic” office responsible for the houses 5 and 6, and a Roman Catholic office for nos. 1 and 2. After the removal of 1756 different ways of maintenance continued. A housing corporation currently owns the Gronsveltcameren.

Of course I have looked at the inventory of the archive of the provincial court of Utrecht kept at Het Utrechts Archief, but there is no separate register of advocates and barristers. However, with the third lawyer we will look at a person whose legal practice, too, will come into view.

Evert van de Poll, a veritable founder

At the other side of the Nicolaasdwarsstraat is a much older building, a former monastery, the location of one of the foundations created by Evert van de Poll. Den VIII^en Septembris mr. Evert van de Poll, raet ende advocaet van de edele heeren Staten sLants van Utrecht, II uren met Salvator, XII gl. reads the notice in the account for the tolling of bells in 1602. The fine history of Utrecht University Library published in 1986 did tell the story of the books which entered in 1602 the municipal library, the core of the university’s library founded in 1636, but the exact date of Van de Poll’s death was not known thirty years ago.¹ The books from Van de Poll’s legacy were inscribed with a note “Ex dono Ev. Pollionis”. However, the authors duly noted a notice from 1609 about his foundation of a workhouse for the poor. His explicit aim was to help and educate poor children in order to prevent them becoming vagabonds and people without work whose live would end badly.

This text echoes the very inscription found above the entrance of the workhouse, “(…) hating all idleness (…) erected for those who prefer to win a living with work above empty begging (…)”. The archive of this foundation at Het Utrechts Archief is not very large, and thus it is well worth pointing here to a resolutieboek, a register with decisions of the board of directors for the period 1634 to 1751 kept in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague as part of the archival collection of the Calkoen family [NA, Familiearchief Calkoen, inv. no. 1687]. In the eighteenth century the workhouse did not function properly anymore, and the main purpose became providing poor people with some money (preuve), paid with the rents coming from four apartments created in the former workhouse. Van de Poll founded a second workhouse at Amersfoort, and a small archival collection survives at the Nationaal Archief.

Let’s look here somewhat longer at Evert van de Poll. He was probably born around 1560. His father had been the city secretary of Utrecht, and his mother was the sister of Floris Thin, the advocate of the Dutch Republic. In 1580 he started studying law in Leiden, and in 1587 he matriculated at Heidelberg. In 1597 he had become the advocate of the States of Utrecht. Recently John Tholen wrote in the year book of the historical society Oud-Utrecht about the humanistic interests of Van de Poll who exchanged letters with Justus Lipsius, and had even lived two years in his house.² In Utrecht van de Poll lived in a large house on the spot of the present-day building at Drift 21, one of the houses formerly belonging to the canons of the collegiate chapter of St. John’s.³

Again at the Janskerkhof

The banner image of Huizen aan het Janskerkhof

The website Huizen aan het Janskerkhof of Caroline Pelser gives a nice overview of the consecutive possessors of Van de Poll’s house near the Janskerkhof. Interestingly Van de Poll inherited the house in 1580 from Floris Thin. Nowadays Drift 21 is part of the inner city location of Utrecht University Library. Van de Poll’s printed books and manuscripts are at the modern building of this library on the campus east of the old city, where they are kept within the Special Collections. At her website Caroline Pelser has created a most useful index of important online finding aids at Het Utrechts Archief concerning law and justice in Utrecht, with also links to digitzed printed accounts of some cases heard and verdicts given at Utrecht in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and last nut not least digitized printed ordinances for court procedure, both for the municipal court and the provincial court.

We have looked here at three lawyers and their contribution to Dutch society after their death, and surely more can be said about them and about their colleagues, but for now we have come to the end of this walk. The Janskerkhof has figured at my blog already several times, in particular in some seasonal postings. This year winter seems far away. In December the weather at Utrecht has even broken all records since 1901 for high temperatures. Anyway it is fitting indeed to end this year’s contributions again at and near the Janskerkhof. The States of Utrecht convened since 1579 in a former Franciscan convent at the Janskerkhof, in the twentieth century for thirty years home to the law library of Utrecht University. Between 1597 and 1602 Evert van de Poll must have visited this building often. A part of the Janskerk was since 1584 home to the city library and from 1634 onwards until 1820 for the university library. Next year I would like to look somewhat longer at Van de Poll, his books and his activity as a lawyer. I hope you liked this tour of Utrecht, and welcome here again in 2016!

Notes
1. D. Grosheide, A.D.A. Monna and P.G.N. Pesch (eds.), Vier eeuwen Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, I: De eerste drie eeuwen (Utrecht 1986) 37-40.
2. John Tholen, ‘Zonder pracht of pomp : Evert van de Poll en zijn verlangen naar de muzen’, Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht 2012, 69-90.
3. Marceline Dolfin, E.M. Kylstra and Jean Penders, Utrecht. De huizen binnen de singels. Beschrijving (The Hague 1989) 330-335.