A parade of Belgian and Dutch legal history

Among the postponed scholarly events of 2020 were also the 23rd Belgian-Dutch Legal History Days in Rotterdam. Finally it took place as an online event on December 16 and 17, 2021. With some fifty participants and most of the time two parallel sessions the program was certainly substantial and varied. This event upheld its tradition of giving first of all space for graduate students to present their research, but other scholars contributed to it as well. In this post I will offer some impressions of the two days organized by Tammo Wallinga.

Hearing new voices

Presenting in front of a computer screen is by now common practice for scholars, but your first paper at a larger event will remain special. In some cases both senior scholars and young aspiring researchers had to deal with some technical problems, but most of them succeeded in presenting a fine PowerPoint and a well-structured paper. It is impossible to do here justice to the variety of subjects and sessions, also in view of a total of thirty-five papers in the program… At Twitter Frederik Dhondt (@HerakleitosMD, Vrije Universiteit, Brussels) bravely attempted to report live from parallel sessions, but I will not imitate his efforts at virtual bilocation! I have uploaded the abstracts, most of them are in Dutch.

Dirk Heirbaut (Universiteit Gent) opened the conference with a paper on the rather curious difference in approach to attempts in European countries at codification. Some countries seem to see it as a feat for victorious generals and former generals. In Belgium one cannot imagine a committee creating a code, but in the Netherlands one is sceptic about the feasibility a one-man codification. In this respect comparisons can enormously widen the horizons of lawyers and scholars. Vincent van Hoof (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen) did look at the image of the schepenen (aldermen) of Amsterdam and their supposed favor for Roman law in preferring their acts ratifying security arrangements above notarial acts. Amsterdam was not unique in its policies. Other capitals and main harbors of Western Europe followed similar policies.

Some sessions combined very different subjects, others were clearly focused around one theme. You will see here in particular young scholars working at Flemish universities, but also scholars from other countries, as in the first parallel session I attended. Marvin Wiegand (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) is a German scholar studying the influence of Roman law on late medieval Frisian law. In the case he presented a widow arguing for prolongation of her guardianship could successfully use a wrongly chosen text from Roman law… Pedro Ricardo de Salvo Santos (Leuven) talked about the seventeenth-century Leuven law professor Petrus Gudelinus and his views cocnerning sovereignty and public law.

In a following session I heard Tom Bervoets (Vrije Universiteit Brussels) speaking on the reforms of parishes in eighteenth-century Brabant and the role of the Raad van Brabant in making changes happen or not. Paul Nève (emeritus professor, Nijmegen) spoke about the research he did during twenty years with Michel Oosterbosch on the history of notaries in Europe. Notaries were sometimes subjected to quite different regulations for qualification. In the Dutch Republic the provinces took over the task of maintaining standards and admitting new notaries. With Oosterbosch Nève has created a biographical repertory for a particular kind of notaries, the apostolic protonotaries and the paltsgraven (comites palatini). Pim Oosterhuis (Maastricht University) presented a paper on the changing place of commercial law as a separate field within private law since the early nineteenth century. Was it really exclusively the law of and for a particular segment of society?

In a following session I presented a paper on legal consultations from the seventeenth century in the province Utrecht. Recently I studied a number of manuscripts held at Utrecht University Library and Het Utrechts Archief. You can choose from several sets of manuscripts with either only copies or also originals of legal consultations. I could report already on some surprising findings, and it is clear a follow-up will yield even more interesting results and certainly more context to understand things that seem now special or odd. Manon Moerman (Maatsricht) spoke about Early Modern contracts for investment partnerships and companies in Amsterdam. Not only financial motives played a role in creating companies. Flip Batselé (Ghent and Brussels) took his audience to the twentieth century for his paper on international investment law and Royal Dutch Shell between 1955 and 1989. A group of oil companies and banks tried to influence politicians and lawyers, with sometimes a major role for Shell and its staff members.

Variety and focus

On Friday December 17, 2021 three sets with two parallel sessions were held and a closing section with one plenary. From the riches I have chosen here at will some sessions. The first session I want to mention briefly brought two papers. Together Wouter Druwé and Geert Sluijs (Leuven) presented a paper on educational reform at the seventeenth-century law faculty in Louvain and the view in this respect of Diodorus Tuldenus (1594-1645). An ordinance of the Habsburgian archdukes in 1617 prompted efforts for reform. Tuldenus showed hi as critical of the moral standards of aspiring law students, pleaded for stricter admission standards and wanted them also to use handbooks. In his view public law, too, should become a part of the curriculum. Interestingly, the second paper in this session, too, involved legal education. Bruno Debaenst (Uppsala) reported on his Swedish experience with law students tackling subjects in legal history in the master phase. It seems some retired professors of legal history in Sweden did not supervise at all student papers and theses for legal history. Debaenst found his students quite interested to set their first steps in Swedish legal history. This fact becomes important also for the Netherlands where for instance at Rotterdam legal history will no longer be an obligatory subject for bachelor students.

In the last full section I want to mention here three graduate students at Louvain focused in particular on the history of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. In her paper Shiri Roelofs discussed the views of theologian Robertus Bellarminus (1542-1621) on letters of exchange and their admissability. He took over parts of later medieval theologians, but added also his own distinctions. Wout Vandermeulen took us to another professor of theology, Johannes Malderus (1563-1633) and his views on monopolies. The School of Salamanca seems the wider context of these views, and Vandermeulen looked also at possible connection between this movement and the origins of current law on monoplies in the European Union where he will try to pinpoint the influence of German lawyers. Martijn Vermeersch took Balthazar de Ayala (around 1548-1584) as the key figure for his paper, a man who became the auditor-general of the Spanish army in Flanders under Alexander Farnese. His treatise De iure et officiis bellicis et disciplina militari libri tres. In his work he combined the laws of war, military strategy and discipline in a new way. De Ayala’s penchant for the mere legality of actions by princes has been criticized in the past. His views seemed unjust and too much influenced by the Spanish and his own position. However, his work gives the rare opportunity to gain a perspective from someone actually taking part in warlike situation such as the Dutch Revolt.

In the closing lecture Laurens Winkel (professor emeritus, Rotterdam) sketched a mighty tableau of fundamental questions concerning the degrees of culpability in criminal law from the Romans up to the present. His determination to tackle large questions and to opt for a kind of Big Legal History affirmed how much alive legal history can be and how wide in its aims. It was not only exemplary for his scholarship, but also an example for others to bravely approach large subjects by going from the earliest foundations to our present.

Promises for the future

In my brief contribution I have scarcely dealt with one half of all contributions, but luckily I can provide you at least with all abstracts. For me it was a most welcome thing to a varied and rich choice of subjects currently under close scrutiny by graduate students. Some senior and very senior scholars showed here a number of larger subjects, but some research student, too, show a willingness to use wider perspectives. No apologies are needed for looking here at many contributions from or about Leuven, because for many centuries Leuven was simply the only university in the Southern Low Countries. At the end of the conference Wouter Druwé could express our shared thankfulness to Tammo Walinga for his calm leadership in organizing this online conference and steering it not through the Meuse river within Rotterdam, but certainly in stormy times to a good and promising end. In 2023 the next Belgian-Dutch Legal History Days will take place in Leuven.

Grotius through students’ eyes

During summer some lighter subjects can come into view, but sometimes you suddenly notice something well worth looking at. In order to protect you from too much centenary celebrations I try to choose every year just a few of them. A new virtual exhibit concerning Hugo Grotius starts with a winning title, Grotius: A life between freedom and oppression has been launched in March 2021 by Leiden University Library on a new platform for its web presentations. One of the most celebrated historic events in the canon of Dutch history is the escape of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) from castle Loevestein in 1621 where he was imprisoned as the chief follower of the late Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the statesman who had done so much in creating the blossoming Dutch Republic. An exhibition in Amersfoort on Van Oldenbarnevelt and prince Maurits (Maurice) came into view here a few years ago, and just like in that summer post a particular historical object will figure here. The matters under discussion here are in the end not just light-weight, and thus I finished this post only in autumn.

A canonical figure in Dutch legal history

Before you sigh at the prospect of going on well-trodden paths with me you should know nine students of Leiden University College in The Hague prepared the virtual exhibit in English. Together with their supervisors Hanne Cuyckens and Jacqueline Hylkema they did choose five focal points which are just different enough to make you curious again about Grotius. In the first section, Leiden, the student, he forming years of the child prodigy form the subject. Grotius matriculated at Leiden in 1594 at the age of ten years. For each subject a number of objects are shown, in this case for example the matriculation register, a portrait of Grotius at fifteen, the earliest printed map of Leiden and a portrait of the famous philologist Joseph Justus Scaliger, the best known teacher of Grotius. Grotius started at Leiden with literary studies, not with jurisprudence, freedom indeed for this child prodigy to develop himself in many directions. In 1598 he obtained his doctoral degree in law at Orléans.

In the second section we do not jump at once to his major publications such as Mare Liberum (1609), followed by De iure belli ac pacis (1625) and the Inleidinghe tot de Hollandsche rechtsgeleerdheid (1631). Even a young superstar as Grotius had to immerse himself in at least one subject not just in learned books and contemporary theory, but also in daily practice. Grotius was admitted in 1599 as an advocate to the Hof van Holland, the high court of Holland in The Hague. His position as a lawyer made him for Van Oldenbarnevelt the obvious candidate to set out at length the Dutch position on the freedom of the seas. Already in 1598 Grotius accompanied him on a embassy to France, and afterwards the two men stayed in contact with each other. In this section there is also attention for Grotius’ religious views articulated in his work Ordinum pietas (1613). It put him firmly on the side of the Remonstrant movement favored also by Oldenbarnevelt.

Castle Loevestein – image Wikimedia Commons

The third section brings you to Grotius’ imprisonment at Loevestein Castle on ground of his religious and political views. The castle is placed on a marvelous strategic spot in the Rhine delta where several of its branches come together. The nearby towns of Gorinchem and Woudrichem are not easily reached. The background with the execution of Oldenbarnevelt in 1619 gets due attention, as are his religious views. You can also look at two letters. When you try to navigate to subsequent items this does not always function correctly. I had expected a link to the online version of the edition of Grotius’ correspondence at the portal of the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam nor to the version at its philological platform Textual Scholarship or to the catalogue at Early Modern Letters Online, but you can look at scans of original letters held at Leiden. The project Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-Century Dutch Republic could be added as well.

• 

  The chest of the Rijksmuseum

• 

  The chest at Loevestein, photo Tom Haartsen

• 

  The chest at Delft, photo Ivo Hoekstra

At Loevestein Grotius was allowed to borrow books from Leiden university library. These books were transported in a large and heavy chest. Hidden in the book chest Grotius could famously escape on March 22, 1621 from castle Loevestein. In 2020 a part of the television series created by the Rijksmuseum on Historisch bewijs (Historical evidence) was devoted to establishing which book chest of three chests held at the Rijksmuseum, Loevestein and Museum Prinsenhof in Delft was probably the original book chest. The chest in Delft has suitable dimensions and a more reliable provenance from the Graswinckel family who was closely connected to the De Groot family in Delft, but no evidence was adduced to confirm its actual use beyond any doubt. Thus the chest is a kind of objet de mémoire connected with an almost mythical heroic story, and the natural point of focus at castle Loevestein, a typical nationalist lieu de mémoire on a beautiful spot at the point where the Waal branch of the Rhine and a branch of the Meuse come together.

In the fourth section of the online exhibit we arrive with Grotius as an exile in Paris. In this town he completed his treatise De iure belli ac pacis. Apart from letters and a map of Paris poetry by Grotius and a poem by Joost van den Vondel come into view here.

The autograph manuscript of “De iure praedae” – Leiden University Library, ms. BPL 917 – image Leiden University Library

The fifth and final section of the virtual exhibit deals with the major treatise by Grotius on prize law, De iure praedae. The Leiden manuscript BPL 917 is the sole handwritten and even autograph witness to the text of Grotius’ treatise on prize law and booty composed between 1604 and 1609. Only one chapter was published during his life as Mare Liberum (1609). The restoration of this manuscript and the subsequent digitization for the full digital edition published in 2015 are the very heart of this section.

By choosing four actual locations – Leiden, The Hague, Loevestein and Paris – the nine students succeed easily in freeing Grotius from a too narrow view of him as only a figure in Dutch history who became first a victim of religious strife and later on a figure head in the struggle for tolerance. These backgrounds do matter indeed. No doubt some Dutch people will be surprised to find the article on Grotius in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and its rich bibliography. He is regarded as the very founder of natural law. Thus there is an entry for Grotius, too, in the database Natural Law 1625-1850, one of the fruits of a research project of the universities at Halle, Erfurt and Bayreuth. By showing not just works by Grotius, and not only his legal works, but also his poems and a treatise on religion, the students show him as a major intellectual in European history. You might with me deplore the lack of further links or an essential bibliography, but there is surely a place for the approach chosen for this virtual exhibit.

Recently Leiden University launched a new platform for its online exhibits. Among the digital collections of Leiden University Library is a section with nearly fifty virtual exhibitions; in some cases only a PDF remains available.

As for creating a Grotius Year the museum Loevestein can readily be pardoned for seeking a way to attract visitors after the corona lockdowns in the Netherlands. The website for the public events around the Grotius commemoration does mention his importance as a lawyer, diplomat and theologian. Themes as the freedom of thought and religious tolerance are vitally relevant in our contemporary world. Showing things have been very different in the past shakes (young) people free from thinking the present has always been there as a a most natural thing.

In earlier posts about Grotius, in particular the one about a rare early edition of De iure beli ac pacis, I provided information about his main legal works concerning the first printed editions, modern editions, translations and digital versions. I would like to point again to the presence of text versions and seventeenth-century or modern translations into Dutch for a number of his works at the portal of the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (DBNL). In the DBNL you can find also digital versions of numerous older publications about Grotius, and the entry for his historical works by E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and G. van der Lem in their work on Early Modern Dutch historiography, Repertorium van geschiedschrijvers in Nederland 1500-1800 (The Hague 1990).

The riches of the Peace Palace Library

The Peace Palace Library (PPL) in The Hague is the natural starting point for any research on Hugo Grotius. Lately this library has put its digital collections on a new separate platform, but for some silly reason the actual URL is not easily found at the website of the PPL, as are alas some other web addresses. A few years ago I wrote here about the Scheldt River collection which now can be found, too, at this new platform. It seems the PPL provides for each collection on this platform a special page with the correct link. However, there is no page or news item for the new platform itself, or maybe it has only to be added to the top bar menu. A platform with eight interesting collections in open access merits a place in the spotlights.

The PPL contributes two collections in open access to LLMC Digital, but no direct links are give on the PPL’s special page for its collections at LLMC Digital. It is only fair to say that finding these collections at the LLMC portal is a feat in itself. So far my attempts to locate them simply failed. Both LLMC Digital and the website of the PPL lack a general search function and a sitemap. The collections at both websites deserve better accessibility. As for the licensed digital collections and also for the databases accessible through the PPL you might contemplate acquiring a library card of this library. For this choice, too, hving a clear overview of digitized materials and their access is most practical.

Grotius figures of course also on the website of the PPL, starting with the chat function called Ask Hugo! The web page on the Grotius Collection tells you about the general background and the famous bibliography by Ter Meulen and Diermanse [J. ter Meulen and P.P.J. Diermanse (eds.), Bibliographie des écrits imprimés de Hugo Grotius (The Hague 1950)] and a more recent catalogue of the PPL’s holdings of works by Grotius. Instead of the direct link to the licensed Grotius Collection Online: Printed Works of Brill only a link to the title in the PPL library catalogue is provided, yet another minor howler. In fact this digital collection contains also numerous works dealing with Old Dutch law, and I would even single it out as a very representative selection of legal books from the Dutch Republic brought most conveniently together. A research guide for Grotius would be a welcome addition to the thirty existing online guides on the website of the Peace Palace Library. A quick search for a nutshell guide to Grotius brought me only to a very concise guide created by the Alexander Campbell King Law Library at the University of Georgia. It is sensible to look at the Grotius pages of Wikipedia in several languages.

Gaining a wider view

I would like to end this post constructively, and not with criticism on defects. Grotius belongs to the group of thinkers students and scholars cannot approach completely straightforward. Often there is abundant scholarly activity, there might be opposing schools and roads of interpretation and across linguistic borders studies can take refreshing turns closed to those staying content with Anglo-American scholarship. Luckily regularly guides are published in the form of essay volumes by an international team of distinguished scholars to bridge such gaps and bring together different views and themes surrounding a major thinker. In September 2021 the Cambridge Companion to Hugo Grotius appeared in print and online, edited by Randall Lesaffer and Janne Nijman. Interestingly this seems to be the first companion volume to Grotius. There is not yet A Very Short Introduction on Grotius from Oxford, presumably exactly because his versatility can hardly be sufficiently shown in a slim volume by a single author. Hopefully different views on Grotius find space in the scholarly journal Grotiana with apart for the printed version some articles published online in open access.

This year’s International Open Access Week will take place from October 25 to 31, 2021. The existence of a number of vital online resources for doing research on Grotius only accessible as licensed resources, most often through the services of libraries, diminishes the chances for those outside the circle of blessed beneficiaries to learn more about Grotius or about other major intellectuals whose thought changed the world forever. Institutions not caring or simply forgetting to provide even links to their own digital collections, be they in open or licensed access, should reflect on their duties and capacities to help both scholars and the general public. Of course in some cases it is a matter of discommunication or worse between for example a library staff, a project leader and the communication officers.

It might seem seducing to bring your collections under the flag of a prestigious publishing company, but if this means closing access to your priceless possessions for most of the world the ultimate blame should be in my view on their original holder. In my view individual scholars, scholarly communities, publishers and research institutions, including university presses, all have their own ongoing responsibility to discuss matters concerning access to scholarly publications. In actual life both institutions with digitized resources and publishers increasingly offer digitized materials both in licensed and in open access, depending on their policies. Hopefully solutions can be found to create and assure wider access whenever possible and feasible for us and future generations interested in the versatile mind of Grotius and the impact of his works through the centuries. Sailing oceans with free, affordable and sustainable access to research resources would be most helpful to achieve this aim.

Learning to read German legal responsa

Modern technology has taken up the challenge of reading old scripts, the domain of palaeography. One of the best known tools, Transkribus, is currently used in a project on legal resources held at the university archives in Greifswald. The project Rechtsprechung im Ostseeraum. Digitization & Handwritten Text Recognition focuses on sources dealing with Germany’s legal history in the region on the borders of the Baltic Sea. The project aims at making accessible 102,000 pages of legal instructions of the Faculty of Law of the Universität Greifswald (Spruchakten der Greifswalder Juristenfakultät, 1580-1800), 130,000 pages of opinions of the judges at the Wismar Tribunal (Relationen der Assessoren am Wismarer Tribunal, 1746-1845) as well as 25,000 pages of opinions of the judges of the Wismar Council Court (Relationen des Wismarer Ratsgericht) (1701-1879). Users will get access to images of these sources and they will be able to perform text searches in this corpus. The Transkribus tool is being trained to recognize Early Modern handwriting of very different scribes. Does it succeed indeed in creating reliable transcriptions? What efforts are necessary to make such sources ready for computerized approaches?

Scribal varieties and the use of computers

At various European universities and archives teams use the Transkribus tool of the READ (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents) project and even a special portable scanning tent for projects with many thousand pages in Early Modern or medieval scripts. Combined with a very active presence on Twitter it can sometimes almost seem Transkribus is virtually the only proven tool in this field. Until now the number of projects with the Transkribus tool for documents specifically dealing with legal history is small. The recent announcement of the project at Greifswald at the Transkribus blog offers an opportunity to see the tool at last at work for legal historians.

A “Spruchakte” from 1586, Universitätsarchiv Greifswald – image: Digitale Bibliothek Mecklenburg-Vorpommern

At the bilingual project website in Greifswald it becomes quickly clear in the sources overview that you can find currently only images of four registers of Spruchakten from Greifswald shown at the Digitale Bibliothek Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The initial choice for only four registers was made as a “training set” with a view to the Transkribus tool which has to digest letter forms and writing patterns in order to become a functional reading tool. The registers contain documents from 1586, 1603, 1607 and 1643. The Universitätsarchiv Greifswald has digitized several series, among them matriculation registers and charters, but the Spruchakten are not mentioned in this overview. On the other hand the university archive and library are currently present with the largest collections in the Digitale Bibliothek Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The other institutional partners in this project are the Universitätsbibliothek Greifswald, the Stadtarchiv Wismar and the Landesarchiv Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in Schwerin. The Stadtarchiv Wismar has a web page about the creation of finding aids for the records of the Wismarer Tribunal in its holdings and also those in other archives, with some references to relevant literature.

One of the reasons to use digital tools for studying these legal materials is their nature. The series of legal instructions and verdicts are organized in chronological order and only indexed for the names of claimants and defendants. The sheer working power in dealing with a massive set of (textual) data can make a huge difference for starting at all with a project concerning documents linked with a particular legal court in some or all of its dimensions.

Using the Transkribus tool

For using the Transkribus tool you need to create a free account. You need to download the tool. There is a succinct user guide (PDF) and an extensive online guide in the Wiki format. The tool is the core of a set of accompanying websites and cloud services. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) are both possible. You will need to contact the team at the Universität Innsbruck for starting the “training” of the tool, the process of recognizing and correctly deciphering various forms of writing. Among the most interesting results with this tool is the high percentage of correctly resolved texts in Early Modern Dutch archival records. The “model” succeeded not only in reading just one kind of script, but dealt equally successful with several kinds of handwriting. Depending on the number of words fed into the machine the character error rate (CER) can reach very low levels. A recent post at Rechtsprechung im Ostseeraum discusses the difference between word error rate and CER.

On Tuesday October 29, 2019 Annemiek Romein (Universiteit Gent) and Jeroen Vandommele gave a webinar at the Dutch Royal Library about using Transkribus. Provided you can follow Dutch, viewing this webinar gives you a very useful introduction to the practical use of this transcription tool, albeit with a focus on optical character recognition for dealing with printed texts, in particular collections of ordinances and the resolutions of the Staten-Generaal. I was in particular impressed by the way you can zoom in on and select text blocks. Aspects such as the costs of using Transkribus and surely the most asked question, its final reading speed, currently one page within a minute, come also into view.

As for now the project in Greifswald brings only a set of legal instructions by the law faculty of Greifswald. These gain in importance when sets from the other two resources, the opinions of the Wismar Ratsgericht and the Tribunal are added. It will be most interesting to see whether the opinions of the law professors deal with cases heard at one of the two legal courts. Combining them with the verdicts themselves is a logical sequel. I had hoped to report here more about the ins and outs of this project, but on the other hand it is a realistic example of work in progress, not a finalized and fully dressed product.

Despite carefully looking at the project website I could not readily detect the entrance to transcribed records, but I did reach a password protected page. You must forgive me my predilection for websites with site maps and clear navigation! However, the project team gives a very good description of the various stages of preparations needed for the workflow of their project. The team is right in approaching these stages as separate but intertwined projects which all need due attention. In the blog posts at the project website a lot of subjects have been touched upon, and this steadily stream will hopefully continue in coming years. It is certainly useful to get acquainted with this and other tools, to look at its procedures and terminology in order to carefully consider the chances and risks of using such tools.

It seems wise to look in more detail at the Transkribus website and its subdomains. On the main website the overview of pages for the Transkribus tool is essential. The transcription tool itself is hosted at a subdomain. Perhaps surprisingly there is also a page about the palaeography module offered by Transkribus at another subdomain, Transkribus LEARN. Here you can find hundreds of script examples. It is understandable Transkribus focuses at its transcription tool, but this palaeographical resource deserves to be known by anyone wanting to learn reading old scripts. This way of learning by doing it yourself has to be distinguished from the “learning” of the “model”, the process by which the transcription tool digests information about scripts from a set of documents for automatic deciphering. As an extra you might want to visit Famous Hands, a site with documents showing the handwriting of famous European persons. It is a bit amusing to see how Transkribus LEARN and Famous Hands can seem almost hidden from direct view, but Transkribus LEARN is duly listed at the services page. Here, too, a sitemap would be helpful.

The datasets of Transkribus have been put at the Zenodo platform with the title ScriptNet – READ. The fleet of deliverables, the newspeak term for finished products from a project, are listed at a separate page of the main website. Components such as the transcription tool, the portable ScanTent which works with Transkribus’ own DocScan app, the link to Famous hands, the GitHub repository of Transkribus and also the several components of the tools developed by various European teams can be found at this page. The so-called Transkribus KWS interface for keyword spotting brings you to a project for Finnish court records from 1810 to 1870 held at the Kansallisarkisto, the National Archives of Finland (interface Finnish and English), yet another subject touching upon legal history.

At the end of this brief presentation of the Transkribus tool and its current uses for legal history it is fair to mention at least concisely some other available tools, following no particular order. Transcripto is a tool with a German and English interface created at the Universität Trier. Looking at Scripto I thought for some time it might also be a transciption tool like Transkribus, but it is a transcription interface created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media for crowdsourcing projects which can be integrated with several CMS systems. The Università Roma Tre works on the project In Codice Ratio with the aim of automatic text recognition and transcription, in particular for the holdings of the Vatican archives. The French Himanis project has at its core a tool for text recognition used for indexing the text of 68,000 charters and documents in the Trésor des chartes of the Archives nationales in Paris.

TranScriptorium was the earlier incarnation of the READ project. Among the five datasets at the old project website are transcriptions of verdicts given by the German Reichsgericht between 1900 and 1914, a project led by Jan Thiessen (Universität Tübingen). This set of documents in the Kurrent script has been transferred to the document sets of Transkribus; you can access it after free registration. Christian Reul (Würzburg) has created OCR4ALL, a tool for dealing with OCR scanning of historical printed editions. It turns out it is fairly easy to find transcription platforms with various levels of image and transcription integration. In some cases there are even distinct layers for guiding and moderating crowdsourcing projects, but finding a tool for electronic recognition and transcription of historical handwriting and old printed works remains a challenge which certainly deserves a separate contribution.

A postscript

Within a few days Elisabeth Heigl of the project team at Greifswald kindly sent a comment with the good news of a very useful overview in English for searching and browsing the documents in the Digitale Bibliothek Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. With the search function you will see the result of the HTR done by Transkribus.

For all those curious about Transkribus and wanting to start using you might have a look for example at these blog posts elsewhere, ‘Digitize a Collection of Letters using Transkribus and XSLT‘ at the blog How to of the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, ‘How to historical text recognition: A Transkribus Quickstart Guide‘ at LaTex Ninja’ing and the Digital Humanities, and Issue 13: OCR (July 2019) of Europeana Tech.

Comparing law professors of the past

Sometimes I feel the sad duty here to write about recently deceased legal historians. In a brief post you will read foremost about the person, but much less about his background, the places where he worked as a judge, a law professor or in other professions. Today I would like to look here at some projects which bring many law professors of the past together. I will focus on a French and a Spanish project, though projects from other countries will not completely be overlooked. In some cases I will look at individual professors, too.

I was alerted to both projects thanks to a blog that started in March 2018, The Making of Legal Knowledge, a international blog with a French and Italian subtitle on legal history and its historiography.

Looking at generations in France

The first project in this post is already a few years active, but I spotted the second one only recently. Let’s start in France with the database of SIPROJURIS, an acronym for “Système d’information des professeurs de droit (1804-1950)”, an information system on law professors between 1804 and 1950. Siprojuris is a project of Catherine Fillon (Université Saint-Étienne) with the support of Jean-Louis Halpérin (École Normale Supérieure, Paris) and Frédéric Audren (CNRS). Many other French scholars contribute to this project. The database can be approached in three ways, by looking at the professors (enseignants), at their institutions (établissements) and at the disciplines they taught (enseignements). The corner called Statuts provides welcome information on the legal and educational position of French law professors from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and thus you can find out about the differences between a chargé de cours, a chargé de conférences, a professeur suppléant, a professeur titulaire sans chaire and of course those with the fullest possible positions. There are even a few paragraphs about the rank of law professors during the Ancien Régime. The page Sources dépouillées (Sources used) looks at the kind of sources used to compile the database. Information in the Quidam database of the Archives nationales de France has been corrected whenever necessary. It is important to note that a number of dossiers kept at Fontainebleau is since 2014 not accessible.

The Spirojuris database sets 1804 as its terminus post quem, but when a person did teach already before 1804 you will find also information about this earlier period. Jean-François Berthelot (1744-1814) taught for example already in Paris since 1779. Thus this database helps you to gain insight in personal continuity between the Ancien Régime and the nineteenth century. Information about persons has been divided on seven tabs, for external life dates (élements biographiques), training and qualifications (Formation et diplômes), university career, scientific production and information on family matters. bibliographical information and an interactive map. The length of the bibliographical section with an overview of publications differs widely in length and substance.

The heading Enseignements has a few surprises in stock. First of all the number of distinct subjects taught at French law faculties is striking, more than 200. The well-known diversity of subjects in modern law schools is not a new thing. The tradition of major and minor legal subjects is another factor which explains this high number, and this division explains to a certain extent also the different kind of chairs and charges. By clicking on a discipline you get an overview which you can sort by start and end date. You can also search for a particular discipline and filter for a particular period.

Among the qualities of Spirojuris is the fact it enables you to look beyond professors teaching in Paris. You can see much better the differences between Paris, its central place in France and its relations with other towns and regions. The inclusion of the law faculty at Algiers – from 1907 – onwards is another asset. Sadly on the days I looked at Spirojuris the section on law faculties and other institutions did not work.

The Spirojuris project is connected to the Héloïse network for digital academic history, an European platform for similar projects. Their website gives an overview of relevant repositories and databases.

While writing about Spirojuris I remembered two virtual exhibitions about French nineteenth-century lawyers. You can find these exhibitions on the special page for virtual exhibitions of my legal history portal Rechtshistorie. The Special Collections of the University of Missouri have created a small online exhibit on the Life of Geofroi Jacques Flach (1846-1919). Flach was born in Strasbourg. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 the German army captured his native town. Flach decided to go to Paris. He became a specialist in the field of comparative law, but he also studied a wide variety of subjects in legal history. In 1920 6,000 books from his library were acquired by the University of Missouri. The second virtual exhibition, Paul Viollet (1840-1914): “Un grand savant assoiffé de justice”, Université Paris-I, is much more elaborate. It tells the story of an archivist who became the librarian of the law faculty at Paris. He led the construction of a new law library, and he became also a law professor. It is no coincidence that he was interested in legal history, publishing a number of manuals on French legal history. Viollet was not afraid to take a stand in contemporary debates. He defended the rights of indigenous people at a time this was not at all fashionable.

Teaching law in Spain

The second project in this post is duly noted at the Héloïse platform. For Spain the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid is home to the Diccionario de catedráticos españoles de Derecho (1847-1943). Scholars from twelve Spanish universities helped to create this online dictionary; you can find under Miembros information about them and a list of the entries they contributed. The rather special time period, 1847 to 1943, has its own explanation. In 1847 the first ranking of catedráticos (professorships) was established, and in 1943 the regime of general Franco issued the Ley de Ordenación Universitaria which led to the expulsion of some seventy law professors, here found under the heading Depurados. The methods followed for creating this biographical dictionary and the main sources used are explained under Metodologia. You can easily go to the lists of professors for sixteen universities.

The overview of subjects (Materias) shows fifteen main subjects, but for example for Historia del derecho, legal history, you will find also the specific names of variant titles and adjacent subjects. Among the subjects I saw Oratoria forense, “legal rhetorics”. Perhaps French students did not need lessons to speak eloquently, or is there indeed a connection with views about the rational and scientific against a more theatrical way to present facts? Apart from the expelled professors there is also a section on professors who went into exile (Exilio) at other moments and for other reasons.

The main difference between the French and the Spanish project is the fact that Spirojuris has a searchable database. Of course the pages for a particular professor have great similarities. Instead of tabs for different aspects the Spanish website has made anchors enabling you to jump immediately to the things you want to know. For many professors the Spanish project provides also a portrait photo. The Spanish project is far more detailed than its French counterpart. The French project clearly aims at providing information with a standard format, something surely necessary when you want to create an effective database. The section Documentación gives a chronological list of recent publications around the project or concerning a particular law faculty, a scholarly field or a school of thought and its impact.

Beyond France and Spain

The overview of resources at the Héloïse platform is the natural place to start when you look for other projects with similar aims for other countries. In the overview at Héloïse  the Repertorium Academicum Germanicum (RAG) for graduated scholars in the Holy Roman Empire between 1250 and 1550 comes closest to the two projects discussed here above, but this resource offers you not only professors, let alone only law professors. The links section of the RAG is rich and varied, but it does not contain something akin to Spirojuris and the Diccionario. For France you will certainly want to know about the databases in the Pool Corpus of the Institut Nationale Universitaire Jean-François Champollion, but the university databases deal either with individual universities (Paris, Caen, Toulouse) or with foreign students in Early Modern France.

A few years ago I looked here in other posts at legal portraits, at medieval prosopography and at medieval tombstones. I hoped to find something among the links in these posts, but alas they do not bring me further for today’s subject. I thought there was a similar resource for Belgium at the Belgian Digithemis platform, but you will find there a database for Belgian magistrates. The links section of Digithemis brought me to another French project, also concerning magistrates, the Annuaire rétrospectif de la magistrature, XIXe-XXe siècles (Jean-Claude Farcy and Rosine Fry, Université de Bourgogne),

For Italy I checked the links section of the Centro interuniversitario per la storia della Università italiane (CISUI, Bologna), but you will find apart from a project on the arts and medicine faculties and a project for medieval Siena and Perugia only projects for individual universities. CISUI strangely does not mention the bilingual project at Bologna with the colourful title Amore scientiae facti sunt exules (ASFE), “Love for science made them exiles”, with databases giving for the Early Modern period the names of students at Bologna (Onomasticon Studii Bononiensis), for all Italian universities doctoral degrees conferred (Italici Doctores), and Iter Italicum, the presence of foreign students at Italian universities between 1500 and 1800.

However, there is one resource for German-speaking countries indeed worth mentioning. Using a very simple web design Gerhard Koebler (Innsbruck) succeeds in publishing a legal history portal with many sides. A major feature is the section for the biographies of contemporary jurists, Wer ist wer im deutschen Recht, and a similar section Wer war wer im deutschen Recht for deceased German lawyers. Koebler brings us succinct standardized biographies, without sacrificing important details. For twentieth-century lawyers he is keen on noting their whereabouts and role(s) during the Third Reich. Koebler does not restrict himself to law professors, but includes also persons with other roles in the legal world of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Koebler helps with references to biographical publications, too.

I suppose you should see my notes on Italy and Germany as an embellishment of a post focusing on France and Spain, but making comparisons is after all the theme of this post. The two projects have different qualities, and it is interesting to see how the French and the Spanish team approached their goals, set limits and designed a structure for the online presentation. Both projects made me curious to look at other countries. Hopefully you enjoy looking in these resources as much as I do. If you know about other projects well worth presenting here, do not hesitate to contact me about them!

Love and natural law

Sometimes a title can be very evocative or curious. When I read about an upcoming conference about Love as the principle of natural law. The natural law of Johann Gottlieb Heineccius and its context at Halle on November 24 to 26, 2016, I simply wanted to know more about this event. What is the connection between love and law? What is the role of love in or for natural law? In this post I would like to make a foray into the history of natural law, an important movement in the European legal history of the Early Modern period. The event at Halle is organized by the platform Natural Law 1625-1850, an international research project led by scholars at Erfurt, Halle and Bayreuth – see the postscript for the 2021 URL.

Love is the word

The project Natural Law 1625-1850 aims at studying natural law as a phenomenon which connects law with other disciplines, such as philosophy, political thought, theology and the arts. Natural law as a concept or a set of ideas gained importance not only in Western Europe but also in North and South America. To help achieving this aim the project website will eventually contain digitized sources, a scholarly bibliography and a biographical database, all surrounded by a scholarly network with accompanying events.

Portrait of Heineccius by Christian Fritzsch in his “Opera posthuma” (1744) – Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel / Porträtdatenbank Franckesche Stiftungen, Halle

The conference in Halle has as its objective getting Heineccius out of the shadows cast by his much more famous colleague Christian Wolff (1679-1754). In fact the main venue of the conference, the Christian-Wolff-Haus at Halle, is the very house where Johann Gottlieb Heineccius (1681-1741) lived for some years, too. Heineccius’ major book concerning natural law, his Elementa iuris naturae et gentium (1737) was certainly as influential as any of Wolff’s publications. Before you start arguing that the scope of this conference is rather small, it is good to be aware of a second conference organized by the platform around the theme Sacred Polities, Natural Law and the Law of Nations in the 16th-17th Centuries (Budapest-Olomouc, November 10-12, 2016). Exactly the impact of natural law across the borders of Northern and Southern Europe, continental and common law, and the exchanges between Protestant and Catholic Europe will be discussed at this event.

One of the reasons to focus on Heineccius is the simple fact that although his works both in the field of Roman and natural law are famous enough, his own life and career and the development of his views is still a field to be discovered. Luckily there is at least one modern biography by Patricia Wardemann, Johann Gottlieb Heineccius (1681-1741). Leben und Werk (Frankfurt am Main, 2007). In the first edition of Michael Stolleis’ Juristen. Ein biographisches Lexikon. Von der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Munich 1995) Klaus Luig did not mention at all in his contribution Heineccius was first trained as a theologian before he started studying philosophy and law. In this respect the concise article by Rolf Lieberwirth for the Neue Deutsche Biographie 8 (1969) 296-297 is better. The online version of this article at the portal Deutsche Biographie has as great assets direct links to various online projects in which persons appear. The conference program has a judicious mixture of contributions focusing on the person of Heineccius on one side, and on the other side papers discussing in particular his impact in various European countries. Alas only the introductory lecture by Knut Haakonsen and Frank Grunert, with Diethelm Klippel founders of the platform, will address directly the theme of love as a principle of natural law. Here Klaus Luig’s short biographic article is helpful with a terse note that Heineccius meant love as a command of God. Natural law tends to be viewed as an attempt to build a legal system without massive reliance on Christian religion or at the best a decidedly Protestant legal order. Luig adds that precisely this religious character made Heineccius’ views also interesting for lawyers in Catholic countries.

Heineccius published his work in Latin whereas Wolff became famous for his use of German in his learned publications. He gained even praise for his excellent grasp of Latin. Interestingly, there is a modern German translation of Heineccius’ Elementa iuris naturae et gentium by Peter Mortzfeld, Grundlagen des Natur- und Völkerrechts, Christoph Bergfeld (ed.) (Frankfurt am Main, 1994). One of the things that merit attention when looking at natural law is the interplay between theology, philosophy and law. Maybe natural law deserves our attention exactly because it forces you to see legal history in a wider context.

Searching for portraits of Heineccius luckily brought me to the English translation by George Turnbull (1741, 1763) of Heineccius’ Elementa iuris naturae et gentium, now available online in the Online Library of Liberty. The modern introduction to this translation offers a welcome sketch in English of Heineccius’ views and the role of love as a guiding principle. It becomes clear he saw love not as an infatuation, an affinity or an Affekt, but as “the desire for good”, working in our relations to God, ourselves and other people.

Natural law has its attractions as offering a supranational foundation beyond existing legal systems, but in reality either religious influences or Roman law became their actual source. In this respect attempts to create a system for natural law are flawed, but they offer for historians fascinating views as a kind of projection screen for the vision of the lawyers working in this direction. For me it is also the changing character of nature itself that has made me cautious about natural law and its supposed independence of existing forms of law and justice.

A Frisian connection

Another reason for me to look at Heineccius is the period he spent at the university of Franeker between 1723 and 1727. The university of Franker existed from 1585 to 1811. Heineccius quickly came into contact with for example Cornelis van Bijnkershoek. He wrote a preface to Van Bijnkershoek’s Observationes iuris Romani in the edition Frankfurt and Leipzig: ex officina Krugiana, 1738. In the licensed database of the Corpus Epistolarum Neerlandicarum (Royal Library, The Hague and Picarta) I could find just one letter to Heineccius written by Tiberius Hemsterhuis (Leiden, UB, BPL 3100). Using the search portal for Dutch archives I could find Heineccius as one of the people mentioned in the correspondence now part of the StadhouderlijkerArchief kept at Tresoar, the combined Frisian archive and provincial library at Leeuwarden.

Alas I checked in vain for Heineccius in several online projects dealing with Early Modern correspondence and networks. The project Cultures of Knowledge give you a selection of relevant links. Only the Kalliope Verbund has records for a few letters to and by Heineccius in the holdings of German libraries. The Archivportal Deutschland mentions a portrait of Heineccius and a letter of king Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia from 1737 who did not allow Heineccius to become a professor at Leiden. Just like the university of Harderwijk Franeker was for a considerable number of professors only a stop to go to either Utrecht or Leiden. The letter at the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Munich [BayHStA, Gesandtschaft Haag 2532] is also traceable through the portal of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, but there is no access to a digitized version of this document. By the way, the Bibliografie van hoogleraren in de rechten aan de Universiteiten van Groningen en Harderwijk tot 1811, B.S. Hempenius-Van Dijk et alii (eds.) (Amsterdam 2013) can be downloaded as a PDF, as is the case, too, with the volume Bibliografie van hoogleraren in de rechten aan de Utrechtse Universiteit tot 1811, edited by Margreet Ahsmann, Robert Feenstra and Corjo Jansen (Amsterdam, etc., 1993). You will spot several professors who climbed from minor universities to the most famous! It has to be said that these volumes do not offer complete bibliographies in the sense librarians and book historians use this term. They should be seen as extensive finding lists with descriptions of copies of the works of these professors found in major libraries around the world. Robert Feenstra wrote an extensive bibliographical article about Heineccius in the Low Countries, ‘Heineccius in den alten Niederlanden : Ein bibliographischer Beitrag’, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 72 (2004) 297-326, and Klaus Luig, too, should be mentioned again, now with his article ‘Heineccius, ein deutscher Jurist in Franeker’, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 77 (2011) 219-227.

Heineccius in context

If you want to delve into Frisian history the website of Martin Engels contains lots of transcriptions of documents on many subjects, including the history of the university in Franeker. In the corner Iuridica of his colourful website Engels presents things of more general interest for legal historians. He has created a webpage with the contents of the Practisijns woordenboekje by Franciscus Lievens Kersteman (Dordrecht 1785), a concise glossary of Dutch legal terms. There is a page about the Soevereine Raad or Hof van Gelre in Roermond, a court in the province Guelders. For Frisian legal history Engels made extracts for a glossary of Frisian law in the Early Modern period from S.J. Fockema Andreae, Proeve van een woordenlijst der aan Friesland (onder de Republiek) eigene bestuurs- en rechtstermen (Leeuwarden 1967). The very core of his website are pages about the copy at Leeuwarden of a sixteenth-century collection of legal treatises, the Oceanus iuris, meaning the Tractatus universi iuris or Tractatus illustrium (…) iurisconsultorum (Venetiis 1584-1586), originally donated in the early seventeenth century to the university of Franeker. Engels scanned and indexed the lists of authors in the Oceanus iuris. I wrote here about this massive legal collection and its forerunners in an earlier post. When studying publications by lawyers from Franeker it is useful to look at the Bibliografie van hoogleraren in de rechten aan de Franeker universiteit tot 1811, Robert Feenstra, Theo Veen and Margreet Ahsmann (eds.) (Amsterdam 2003). Personal reasons forced Heineccius to return to Germany. The website on the history of the Franeker Universiteit contains concise but interesting information centered around the Museum Martena in the historical buildings of the Martenastins, a stately mansion in Franeker from 1506. I did not spot Heineccius among the selection of portraits of professors on this website. A search in the rich online databases of the Dutch Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie in The Hague yielded no results for Heineccius.

In the team of scholars leading the project on the history of natural law between 1625 and 1850 Frank Grunert (Halle) is clearly the one closest to the German luminaries of the eighteenth century. At the Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung of the Universität Halle he leads the projects for the modern critical edition of selected works of Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) and his correspondence. Eventually the volumes of the edition of Thomasius’ letters will be put online. The website of the IZEA can be visited in German, English and French. There is also a digitized version of a current bibliography for Thomasius [Bibliographie der Thomasius-Literatur 1945-2008 (Halle 2009); PDF], and you might also want to use Gerhard Biller, Wolff nach Kant. Eine Bibliographie (2nd edition, Halle 2009). Among the recent publications of the IZEA the Handbuch Europäische Aufklärung: Begriffe, Konzepte, Wirkung, Heinz Thoma (ed.) (Stuttgart 2015) stands out, a volume with fifty contributions about central concepts, ideas and the impact of the Enlightenment.

The IZEA is located in the former Rote Schule, the building of the girls school on the grounds of the famous Franckesche Stiftungen zu Halle, the institution which supported the influential pietist movement started by August Hermann Francke (1663-1727), becoming eventually a major phenomenon in German culture. Its buildings survived the DDR period, but it is still chilling to see the highway above street level directly opposite the beautiful grounds and buildings. The Franckesche Stiftungen have created a fine portrait database in which you can find images of many German people. In the digital library of the Franckesche Stiftungen I did notice the Epistolar Franckes, a project for digitizing Francke’s correspondence, but currently there is no trace of Heineccius. Let’s not forget to mention that the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt in Halle is one of the libraries participating in the project VD18, the overview of eighteenth-century German imprints. Its digital library contains a number of Heineccius’ works. The Repertorium Alba Amicorum contains records for the entries in 1719 of Heineccius, Wolff and Francke himself in the album of Immanuel Petrus Geier [Halle, Frankesche Stiftungen, Archiv: AFSt/H D 133].

Within the project Natural Law 1625-1850 four scholars look at German universities (Frank Grunert, Diethelm Klippel, Heiner Lück and Gerhard Lingelbach); Wilhelm Brauneder will focus on universities in Austria. For other countries individual scholars come into action. I would have expected more information on the project website in the very month two scholarly events take place, but perhaps the energy of the organizers was focused for good reasons on these events! Hopefully the attention to the European context of the great figures in the history of natural law and their interest in and connections with other disciplines will lead to interesting results.

A postscript

The eternal plague of webmasters and anyone interested in projects older than one or two years are changing web addresses. Only seldom redirects are created by those in charge of moving sites and databases on servers… You can find project information now both in Erfurt and at the IZEA in Halle, the database is hosted in Jena.

Serving the history of medieval law

The medieval relation between Roman and canon law can in a way be summarized by the expression utrumque ius, “both laws”. Medieval lawyers working in the field of the learned law saw both legal systems as twins. One of the major stumble blocks in understanding the nature and medieval development of either system is exactly the stubborn way in which modern scholars often refuse to look in the garden of their neighbours. Sadly, these days a scholar who had the courage and all qualities to avoid this false separation and to bridge supposed and real gaps is no longer with us. This week the electronic news bulletin Rechtshistorisch Nieuws of our colleagues in Ghent contained a short obituary on Frank Soetermeer (February 7, 1949-January 6, 2016). Instead of focusing solely on his scholarly work I would like to honour him with some personal memories.

The first time I really met Frank Soetermeer was at the Gravensteen in Leiden in 1990. For many years the legal historians of Leiden had their offices in the old county prison. During a coffee break I saw a poster with an announcement about the International School of Ius Commune at Erice. Just when I had finished reading its text Frank Soetermeer showed up and told me he would be one of the scholars teaching that year. On arrival in Sicily I realized that apart from the poster and the encouraging words of Frank Soetermeer I did know hardly anything else about this event for graduate students! Soetermeer gave his audience a very fine lecture about the production of legal manuscripts at medieval universities. He spoke about his research with natural authority in calm but fluent French, and I shared the admiration for him with the other graduate students attending. That same year he gave me a copy of his dissertation, De pecia in juridische handschriften (diss. Leiden; Utrecht 1990).

Originally Frank Soetermeer came from Rotterdam, but he lived for many years in Utrecht and taught at Amsterdam. He visited Leiden regularly for the famous Friday afternoon seminar about medieval legal manuscripts held every winter and spring. A few years after the Second World War legal historian E.M. Meijers and palaeographer Gerard Lieftinck founded this seminar. Legal historians from several Dutch universities, be they versed in Old Dutch law or papyrology or just a young curious student, and a palaeographer of world renown, Peter Gumbert, met at the Gravensteen to read together the often tiny handwriting of remarkable manuscripts. In a year with river floods threatening the town of Culemborg we were fortunate to have in Leiden a medieval legal manuscript normally kept at the municipal archives of the former town. Few of us could possibly have seen as many manuscripts as Frank had, and we felt lucky with his presence. As on the photograph shown here a smile was never far from his face, but as often his eyes showed question marks signalling questions and points to be investigated. I remember Frank arriving at the Gravensteen almost always wearing a hat, a tradition he clearly enjoyed.

Few Dutch dissertations have been translated both into Italian and German. Soetermeer’s outstanding Ph.D thesis was translated as Utrumque ius in peciis: aspetti della produzione libraria a Bologna fra due e trecento, Giancarlo Errico (trad.) (Milan 1997) and Utrumque ius in peciis: Die Produktion juristischer Bücher an italienischen und französischen Universitäten des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts, Gisela Hillner (trad.) (Frankfurt am Main 2002). Frank discussed earlier research into the pecia system which had focused mainly on the field of medieval theology and on book production in Paris, and looked systematically at its use at the law faculties of medieval Europe. Fourteen articles have been reprinted with English summaries, additional information, corrections and useful indices in the volume Livres et juristes au Moyen Âge (Goldbach 1999). A very useful introduction in English to his studies of the pecia system is to be found in his article ‘Between Codicology and Legal History: Pecia Manuscripts of Legal Texts’, Manuscripta 49/2 (2005) 247-267. His article about Hostiensis (Henricus de Segusio) in Ius Commune 26 (1999) has been digitized in Frankfurt am Main. A quick look at his writings as included in the database with scholarly literature of the Regesta Imperii project at Mainz reveals he contributed nearly thirty biographical articles to the Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, often abbreviated as BBKL or the “Bautz”. A fair number of his articles can be accessed in their original form or as preprints at Academia.

Only a few of Frank’s articles focused on medieval canon law, in particular ‘The origin of Ms. d’Ablaing 14 and the transmissio of the Clementines to the universities’, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 54 (1986) 101-112, and ‘La proportion entre civilistes et canonistes à l’Université de Bologna vers 1270’, in: El Dret Comú i Catalunya: actes del IIIer Simposi Internacional, Barcelona, 5-7 de novembre de 1992, Aquilino José Iglesia Ferreirós (ed.) (Barcelona 1993) 151-166, but particular his contributions to the BBKL show his affinity and deep knowledge about canon law and major canon lawyers such as Guillaume Durand, Bernhard de Montmirat (Abbas antiquus), Oldradus de Ponte, Guido de Baysio (Archidiaconus) and Petrus de Sampsone.

On rare occasions I saw Frank in my home town Utrecht. The few times this did happen we both looked slightly bewildered, because Frank did travel much and we just did not expect to see each other in Utrecht. One of the happiest memories of briefly meeting Frank in Utrecht was when I saw him with Nella Lonza and their child. The happiness of Frank, of this couple with their child, is indeed a memory to treasure. It is with disbelief that I have to use the past tense in writing about him. If I had to single out any of his articles it would have to be ‘La carcerazione del copista nel pensiero dei giuristi bolognesi’, in: Gli ultramontani. Studi belgi e olandesi per il IX centenario dell’Alma Mater bolognese (Bologna 1990) 121-139, also in the Rivista Internazionale di Diritto Comune 6 (1995) 153-189. Masters in Bologna and elsewehere argued about the way one could compel a scribe to finish writing a legal manuscript, including the small initials, see his study ‘Un problème quotidien de la librairie à Bologne: «Minora» manquants’, in: Excerptiones iuris. Studies in Honor of André Gouron, B. Durand and L. Mayali (eds.), (Berkeley 2000) 693-716. Frank Soetermeer showed how you cannot confine the study of law at the medieval universities to just one discipline. In his work he traced with patience and precision the impact of the learned law in medieval Europe, an impact beyond the pages of the manuscripts concerning legal doctrine. With the death of Frank Soetermeer we have lost a fine scholar, a true gentleman, a loving father and a steadfast companion of his beloved, a man to be remembered.