Retracing Suriname’s colonial history and remembering Natalie Zemon Davis

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

Remembering Natalie Zemon Davis

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

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

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

Approaching the history of Suriname

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

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

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

Finding digitized books on Suriname’s history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The powers of history

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

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

A postscript

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

Notarial records and Jewish history in Early Modern Venice, Bordeaux and Amsterdam

In December 2022 I first spotted SION-Digit, a research project aiming at using notarial acts from Venice, Bordeaux and Amsterdam to gain new insights into Early Modern Jewish history. Project leader Evelien Chayes received in 2022 media attention for her discovery during this project of a rare letter by Michel de Montaigne amidst records from a notary’s archive held at Bordeaux. Even with only a project blog I think SION-Digit deserves attention here for its goal of using legal records as a historical source showing much hidden things about the history of Jews in Early Modern Europe. One of the things to investigate is the role of digitized records for this project.

Notarial records, a rich resource

Three archival institutions have a pivotal role for the SION-Digit project, the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, the Archives départementales de la Gironde in Bordeaux and the Stadsarchief Amsterdam. The first section of this post will help to come quickly closer to some of the advantages or hindrances to study notarial acts at the three institutions.

The Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV) recently launched a nicely designed search engine, moreveneto for searching the many fondi. At first I was slightly disoriented, seeing on one side two collections for notai but also more than 1400 other collections. Using the term notarili brought me to twelve fondi in the 3500 Notarile record group. Fondo 3520 contains indici per parti contraenti per notai, without an indication about the period and only a general statement these indices being incomplete, and fondo 3550 with general chronological indices, however, only for the period 1801-1829. Another attempt at using the general search interface led me to fondo 003, Notarile. Testamenti. Indici with indices for wills from the period 1300-1802, with four subseries. Of course it will take you some time and effort to get used to any guide. Apart from the concise guidance in the section Patrimonio of moreveneto you can used the section Galleria, where I got 13 results for notarile and 8 results for notai, bringing you mostly digitized repertories, but also some notarial records.

At the website of the state archive in Venice you will note with me at Risorse in rete that two earlier online resources, including the digitization platform Progetto Divenire and an earlier online guide, are now part of moreveneto. However, it is not mentioned the ASV contributed also digitized materials to the platform Judaica Europeana, now maintained by the Jewish Heritage Network. The Brandeis University helped creating digital access to eighteenth-century pinkasim, community ledgers held at the ASV.

The website of the departmental archives for the Gironde region in Bordeaux brings you quickly – starting with Recherche and choosing Thèmes – to information about notarial records in their holdings. There is an online search form for the minutier des notaires, where you can search for names, places, and periods, and filter for some specific document genres or limit your search to either minutes or repertories. The AD Gironde holds now some 7 kilometer of notarial records. You will find also a digitized biographical register of notaries created by a group of volunteers between 1987 and 1998. The État général des fonds, too, leads you to this repertory for notaries.

Notarial acts from the Stadsarchief Amsterdam have been presented here already in a number of posts, for example in a post about Rembrandt’s life. In fact this resource genre received much attention from this institution recently. This has resulted in the creation of indices for a great number of acts, now integrated into the general search platform. You can limit your search to particular document genres. At the transcription platform Vele Handen [Many hands] two projects deal with notarial records from Amsterdam, Alle Amsterdamse Akten for creating indices, and Crowd leert computer lezen [Crowd helps computer learning to read] for creating a Transkribus base ground which led to two online public models for computerized transcription, the first for seventeenth-century notarial acts and the second one for the eighteenth century.

In a third project at Vele Handen together with other institutions the Stadsarchief Amsterdam let volunteers add tags to a number of transcribed notarial acts. The results can be found at the Transkribus subdomain Amsterdam City Archives. Interestingly, you can adjust the search mode for fuzzy results. By the way, at the portal Zoek in transcripties [Search in transcriptions] with the other tagged acts from the third project at Vele Handen you will find apart form VOC records as its core a nice selection of notarial records from Dutch provincial and regional archives.

The city archives of Amsterdam offer a concise online introduction to the indices for notarial records, and you can download the repertory of Early Modern notaries created by A.I. Bosma, Repertorium van notarissen residerende in Amsterdam Amstelland, ambachtsheerlijkheden en geannexeerde gemeenten 1524 – 1810 (1998) as a PDF.

Objects, texts and networks

The SION-Digit project has objects, texts and networks as its main focuses. By choosing three towns with a busy harbour the network side of things has surely a good foundation. The transport of people, objects, letters and ideas was very much helped from these towns. A principal aim of this project is to use the wealth of information in notarial acts for delving deeper into Early Modern Jewish history. The core of the project is using and creating digitized access to notarial deeds. At the project blog it is asserted until now state and town archives have not been used as much as the records held at specialised institutions for Jewish history.

The flat statement on the SION-Digit blog notarial acts in these three towns are hard to find or difficult to access is in dire need of some qualification. Luckily the French version of the project aims does not contain this lapidary statement. In view of the repertories for notarial registers at all three archives discussed here above it is simply not true one cannot find these registers or that there are severe blockades for finding them. At Venice there are indices for acts contained in notarial registers. In Bordeaux you can use the online search for the minutier and even find biographical information about individual notaries. The city archives of Amsterdam offer an online repertory of notaries, you can search directly for notarial registers in finding aid 5075, and there are online indices and digitized registers. For a fair number of registers you can even benefit from computerized transcriptions.

The problem for researching these Early Modern notarial acts is the degree of accessibility of individual acts. I guess the project description at the SION-Digit blog stems probably directly from a project proposal for funding, with alas a not uncommon exaggerated picture of gaps to be filled, hidden materials and great vistas awaiting at the completion. More to the point is the wish to combine materials from notarial records with existing projects for pinkasim, Early Modern Jewish community registers. In particular the Pinkasim project of the National Library of Israel is important in this respect. It offers an online repertory of this document genre and digitization of a number of registers stemming from several European Jewish communities. There is also a very extensive bibliography.

Instead of looking here somewhat closer at pinkasim I thought it would be more useful to look at notarial records about Jewish communities in Early Modern Europe. Gaining an overview of such records is helped by the existence of the European Jewish Archives Portal, created by the Yerusha network and the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe. The portal does list archival collections held at European archives, libraries, museums and documentation centers. There is both a simple search and an advanced search mode, and also an interactive map for finding locations. Very useful are the possibilities to use other spellings, translations and transliterationd of names and locations.

As with all portals and search machines aiming to give complete coverage of any particular subject the search results at Yerusha are subject to the primordial factor of relevant data being available and entered into them. A quick simple search at Yerusha for notaries and notarial records does bring you to descriptions at collection level of archival collections in many European countries, but currently not from France and the Netherlands. For Italy only notarial records at Mantua and Milan are presented. It will do no harm to note the current absence in the Yerusha portal of any information from French and Dutch institutions. The interactive map for holding institutions helps you to detect such gaps.

I will not try to fill in this post all such real or supposed gaps. Within the Italia Judaica portal of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspore Research Center, Tel Aviv University, there is a fine introduction for Venice (in Italian) with a bibliography and footnotes, but alas without any direct reference to notarial records. By the way, the city Venice offers a concise guide to comunal and other archives in Venice. The SIAR is a portal to archives in Venice and the Veneto region. I looked briefly at the website of the Commision Française des Archives Juives (CFAJ). Among the links the CFAJ mentions are the city archives of Bordeaux, and I might as well put here the current link to the Archives Bordeaux Métropole.

Any temptation to go further here with listing my own selection of either randomly or specifically found resources was checked to some extent by visiting the portal site Jewish Heritage Network, another initiative of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, with due attention to archival collections held by institutions for Jewish cultural heritage in Europe. However, it seems not amiss to start looking for notarial records at another central point, the Archives Portal Europe, and to benefit from the search facilities for Dutch notarial acts at the Archieven portal, because many Dutch archives have created indexes for this document genre. If you want to look further for Jewish archival collections, some of them even digitized, I can refer you to my own web page for digital archives with relevant links for a number of countries and periods.

As for notarial records in France it is good to note here the Minutier central des notaires de Paris. The Université de Tours has created the platform Renumar for searching late medieval and sixteenth-century notarial acts from Tours, Amboise, Bourges, Chartres and Chinon. With this project associated is LECTAUREP, an initiative for computerized use of notarial records. In Italy and Spain are several projects which focus on medieval notaries. You can quickly perform yourself a search for minutes notariales and related resources at the French portal FranceArchives to check where you can find them and to see where such records have been digitized.

SION-Digit in action

On October 25, 2023 SION-Digit organizes a symposium ‘Au-delà de l’assignation géographique: Portraits des juifs dans l’Europe prérevolutionnaire’, to be held at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme in Paris. Earlier on, in September 2022, the project team organized in Bordeaux a round table on Jewish testimonies in Early Modern France. This year SION-Digit received support from the Biblissima platform. On the central website of the Institut de Recherche d’Histoire des Textes (IRHT) there is no additional information about the contents of SION-Digit, sometimes also referred to as SION-Digit Sfarim.

The project blog brings you to more information about the newly found letter by Montaigne, for example an article in Dutch from the newspaper NRC Handelsblad on August 10, 2023 (PDF). Chayes wrote with Alain Legros, ‘Un brouillon inédit de Montaigne parmi des actes notariés’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 85/1 (2023) pp. 87-95. At the 2022 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America Evelien Chayes spoke about Letizia Nahmias, a remarkable woman in the seventeenth-century Venetian ghetto. It led to an interview by Esther Voet for the Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad 39 (July 8, 2022) pp. 24-25, ‘Een onafhankelijke vrouw in het ghetto’. Finding Letizia’s will was a key moment in understanding her life and actions which were for a long time overshadowed by her husband -also her nephew – who converted to Catholicism.

With SION-Digit we meet an international project on a vast scale developed and for some part to be executed single-handed by a scholar who is at home in the study of Early Modern literature, book history and library history. Her goal of bringing scarcely known aspects of Jewish lives and history into the limelight by using notarial acts should command respect. SION-Digit should invite and deserves support from those scholars better acquainted with notarial records in Italy, France and the Netherlands. The fact Evelien Chayes pinpoints women’s history as a key to detect networks is another stimulating aspect of this project. I wrote here at some length about SION-Digiti Sfarim exactly because Chayes wants to use sources too easily labelled as a territory of legal historians, local historians and genealogists. It is to the benefit of anyone who becomes fascinated by a particular source genre to meet others with their questions, approaches and tools, and to receive mutual support. Connecting scholarly research in various disciplines to gain insight into peoples and networks that tend to be overlooked is in my view a most valuable effort. Mazzeltov, good luck!

A postcript

For finding digital projects concerning Jewish history you can benefit from another international portal, #DHJewish: Jewish History and Digital Humanities, supported again by the Rothschild Foundation and maintained by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (“C²DH”). #DHJewish offers also an online bibliography at Zotero.

Tracing medieval women in documents and manuscripts

Manuscript with the trial of Jeanne d’Arc, 1431; written 15D/16A century – London, British Library, Egerton 984, f. 3r – image British Library

Some subjects deserve highlighting in general within historical research. On several occasions I therefore present here contributions on major themes in legal history such as justice and injustice, slavery and discrimination. Women’s history, too, should figure here more often. It took me some time to look carefully at the results of a special digitization project finished earlier this year by the British Library. In March 2023 an overview of some ninety manuscripts was presented in a PDF, and in May a further overview was added for more than 200 newly digitized charters and 25 rolls. Adding these archival records greatly strenghtens this project by bringing even more depth and width. Charters and rolls appear here almost every year. In fact I had to restrict myself severely and to choose only some subjects and items touching upon legal history to make this post worth some of your reading time, and wet your appetite for more. Earlier on in fact I wrote here about digitized legal manuscripts of the British Library, and about the project with the Bibliothèque nationale de France for digitizing manuscripts created in England and France from the period 800 to 1200.

Making women visible

The first thing to note about the two sections of this digitisation project is that the British Library (BL) included also manuscripts and documents from the Renaissance, enlarging the period covered to the year 1600. On three occasions the BL’s Medieval Manuscripts blog alerted to the completion of the two series. On March 25, 2023 the overview for the manuscrips was presented, with a notice work on charters and rolls was nearly finished. The second post (May 11, 2023) announced the completion of the work on the rolls and charters. In the third post (May 21, 2023) not only links to the two PDF’s are given, but also to versions in Excel. It goes without saying these posts contain marvellous images for the digitized manuscripts, charters and rolls. For some women figuring in this project the BL created separate pages presenting their lives and the newly digitized materials concerning them.

Let me start with admitting that although I found it really difficult and even unfair to select here just some examples showing the wealth of materials newly digitised within this project I could not help delving deeper into the background of two manuscripts about a rather famous woman from the fifteenth century. As a matter of fact I concluded one manuscript really deserves mentioning, because it is not mentioned at one of the main websites about her.

However, I would like to start to look here first more in general at the digitized manuscripts stemming from and concerning medieval women. Most interestingly, you will find in the manuscript section also manuscripts which are actually archival records. This fact makes it more natural for the BL to add charters and rolls as a second section to this project. In order not to focus only on individual women I will look here first at some documentary genres. For this project the BL has digitized in this section four cartularies, three of them of monastic institutions, from Stixwould Priory (Add. 46701), Wilton Abbey (Harley 436), and Coldstream Priory in Scotland (Harley 6670), The fourth cartulary stems from John de Vaux and his daughter and co-heiress Petronilla de Narford (Stowe 776). There is a manuscript containing a census from St Mary Magdalene’s Abbey in Cologne (Add. 21072), and from this institution comes also a manuscript with revenues and expenses (Add. 21177).

Very much in a royal lineage are two wardrobe accounts, the first for Eleanor of Castile for the years1289 and 1290 (Add. 35294), including expenses for her funeral, and for Thomas of Brotherton and Edmund of Woodstock, sons of Edward I and Margaret of France (Add. 37656), although the last manuscript is clearly concerned with two men expending sometimes money for women at court. The manuscript with patents granted by king Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn stems from her period as marquess of Pembroke (1532-1533) (Harley 303). Another manuscript contains the receipts and expenses for the expedition bringing queen Margaret of Anjou to England in 1444 and 1445 (Add. 23938). The manuscript Royal 17 B XXVIII, compiled between 1536 and 1581, is a book of expenses of Princess Mary, containing also an inventory of her jewels, and a catalogue of printed books in the Royal Library. A bit more personal perhaps is a letter written on a single leaf by Mary, Queen of Scots, to Jacques Bochetel de la Forest, the French ambassador to queen Elizabeth I from 1568 (Add. 89480), preserved with an engraving showing Mary. To end this royal section I would like to mention the manuscript Stowe 784 with a Complainte sur la mort d’Anne de Bretagne followed by a discours on the mariage of Anne de Foix with king Ladislas of Hungary in 1514.

We arrive straight into legal history with the last two manuscripts I want to mention here. With my selection of fifteen items with a content more or less relevant for legal historians from a total of ninety digitized manuscripts the British Library certainly serves legal historians. Actually these two last manuscripts are quite famous examples of records of trials dominated by the use of medieval canon law. It is fair to say these manuscripts play a major royal in our knowledge about and perception of an iconic trial.

Last page of the nullification trial with the notarial confirmation of the first notary; written 1455-1456- London, BL, Stowe 84, fol. 182r (detail) – image British Library

Those readers which read the caption under the first manuscript image in this post saw already the name Joan of Arc. The British Library digitized two manuscripts, Egerton 984, with the proceedings of the trial held in Rouen in 1431, written in the last quarter of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, and Stowe 84, an official copy of the proceedings of the rehabilitation trial in 1455-1456. At the portal Jeanne d’Arc the section on the trials tells you a lot about the manuscripts sources, editions and modern translations, but one of the manuscripts at the British Library, Egerton 984, once owned by Pierre Pithou, is somehow forgotten. It is tempting to provide you here with an overview of the manuscript tradition and modern editions, but this takes more space than I had expected. It is far more important to note the absence of any primary source for the interrogation held in Poitiers, the distance in time to the events of the manuscripts concerning the trial in 1431, and the closeness and official nature of the manuscripts concerning the second trial in 1455-1456, often called the rehabilitation or nullification trial. I created a PDF with an overview of the manuscripts and their digitized versions, and information about the most important editions.

Rolls and charters

The second section with digitized rolls and charters does bring you anyway a lot of legal documents featuring women in many capacities. The sheer number of some document genres prohibits their full selection here. There are for example 23 wills, 15 quitclaims (renunciations of right(s)), and nearly 90 grants. Eight rolls tell you about households, and nine chirographs have been digitized. Eight documents tell us about expenses for households. Seventeen documents concern medieval and sixteenth-century queens, and 27 documents mention a countess. It is definitively a challenge to show here women not only doing things they very obviously regularly could do and did, but also showing more exceptional cases, not forgetting to give a balanced view of social status and the origin of these archival records. With 200 charters and 25 rolls you are sure to find something touching your own personal or professional interests.

Sale of an enslaved woman, 1450 – BL, Add. Ch 15340 (upper half) – image British Library

Many documents concern land transactions, but another attraction caught my attention. Add, Ch. 15340 is a notarial act recording the sale in 1450 by two Venetian men of an enslaved Russian woman named Marta to Angelo Gadi from Florence. Alas the act contains few details in the lines 7 to 9 about this sclava, who was 22 years old and healthy of body and mind.

There is a huge difference between this woman treated as an object for sale, a victim of slavery, and women founding institutions. Between 1237 and 1241 Ela, countess of Salisbury, founded Lacock Abbey (Add, Ch. 75578). Empress Matilda founded Bordesley Abbey between 1141-1142, overruling the original founder Waleran, count of Meulan who acted as a witness in this charter (Add. Ch. 75724). In a further charter from 1141 she confirmed a grant of lamds to this abbey (Add. Ch. 20420). Matilda was also a benefactor of Reading Abbey (Add. Ch. 19576, 19577, 19578 and 17579). Margery de Crek founded Flixton Priory in Suffolk in the years 1258-1259 (Stowe Ch. 291). Confirmations of her foundation followed quickly (Stowe Ch. 292, 293 and 294; LFC Ch. V 15) as did even a royal gift of land (Stowe Ch. 296), interestingly for having a warren, a terrain with rabbits. The more remarkable charter about Flixton Priory is the confirmation by a widow of receiving lands in 1263 for her dowry from the prioress of this institution (Stowe 305). Among the Stowe documents are eleven records with transactions concerning three monasteries in Brescia. Not as a founder, but as protector to a university acted queen Juana de Castile who put her seal to a charter establishing her in this role in 1510 for the university of Alcalà de Henares (Egerton Ch. 127).

Even when I will not unduly focus here on queens and countesses you can find glimpses from their surroundings as well. There is a successful petition by a nurse serving king Henry VI to double her yearly salary in 1424 from £ 20 to £ 40 (Stowe Ch. 643). A very different petition was sent to pope Calixtus III (1455-1458) by Vaggia, widow of Bernardo de Bardi from Florence, to gain permission for herself and her two daughters to have their confessor celebrate mass with a portable altar during an interdict and similar ecclesiastical measures (Add. Ch. 67089). By the way, the description in the overview of this document mentions pope Celestine III, but the description in the online catalogue notes the right pope. A third petition in 1455 comes from queen Margaret of Anjou to her husband, king Henry VI, about sums to be given to her through the Exchequer (Cotton Ch. XVI 72). Another document shows Margaret of Anjou in another role. She was taken prisoner in 1471 and delivered safely to king Louis XI of France in 1476 after he had paid a ransom of 50,000 crowns (Add, Ch. 13932). Margaret had been kept in custody by Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk, formerly her lady-in-waiting. This is of course also an example of a woman figuring in both series of specially digitized documents.

One particular category of documents deserves here a bit more attention, even if it leads to inevitably arbitrary choices. I myself frowned when realizing the fifteen quitclaims contain renunciations of a right or rights. In what cases did women cede rights, and to whom did they renounce a particular right or some rights? The overview mentions almost always cases concerning rights to land ceded to either men or religious institutions. The term quitclaim is indeed reserved to cases concerning rights on lands or rents. One case involves a renunciation by Gonorra in the mid-thirteenth century of half a rent owned on lands given to a hospital in Southwark by her late husband William Bannastre (Add. Ch 23674). To this charter her seal is affixed, a reminder to look for seals of women and the way women are depicted on seals. Seven documents mention a rent or rents.

Let’s end an admittedly restricted choice of items in the second series with some documents which are in my view truly exceptional in the selection made by the British Library. Stowe Ch. XXXII 13 is a chirograph from 1355 with an arbitration by Thomas of Hampstead between Lady Katherine and her son John Latimer about her right to access the chapel at Braybrooke Castle. Another arbitration is found in Add. Ch. 28654. In 1352 an agreement was made about the access for the canons of Sankt Maria im Kapitol, Cologne, to the monastery led by abbess Elizabeth von Katzenellnbogen at this institution when they had to visit the chapter house. The arbiters confirmed in Latin an earlier verdict given in German included in this charter. Add. Ch. 27703 contains a covenant from 1380 between Joan, dowager of Wales, widow of Edward known as the Black Prince, and the community of Beverley in Yorkshire to pay to her an annual rent granted earlier to a kinswoman.

Finally it is sensible to note the only lawsuit among the newly digitized documents, a roll from the last decade of the fourteenth century with documents from of a case heard at Salisbury Cathedral between the abbess and convent of Canonsleigh Priory and parishioners of Morden, Dorset (Add. Ms. 52913). In 1392 the vicar-general of Salisbury judged in favor of the parishioners who had claimed the convent had failed to do an annual payment to the poor, forbidden them to cut woods in the cemetery, and the convent had diverted fruits from the parish church contrary to canon law to a layman.

Women in many roles

I did not write here about the four documents in the second series touching in some way on Flanders, and I have also skipped the manuscripts with rules and statutes. I did spot manuscripts from the Northern Netherlands, but these do not have a legal content. I could have delved into the many wills and grants, and looked in detail for the various motives formulated in these documents. I am afraid no one can present in a single blog post everything that makes this project so interesting! The British Library has made a fine selection of manuscripts and documents enriching our knowledge and helping us to ask questions about medieval women and their lives. Connecting some of the manuscripts with archival records and vice versa is just one of the possible routes to follow. Some archival records could equally be prized possessions of the National Archives, Kew or other record offices in the United Kingdom and even abroad.

It is only logical I could not open every window offered here, but I urge anyone to look at length and with lots of questions to the two overviews and the special web pages for some women to gain new insights into medieval lives and afterlife, not in the least to the legal sides of women’s lives to be found in these manuscripts and archival records. Any selection has its limits, but I think this project of the British Library is truly a gem.

Swiss sermons around executions

The execution of convicted crime suspects attracted the attention of the general public in Early Modern Europe. Authorities saw the public administering of punishments as a key element of criminal law. For a lot of cases we know about the last words people said before their execution, and authors reckoned even on the particular interest of their public to record such words. Less attention has been given to another genre, sermons spoken just before or after public execution. The Universität Zürich has now digitized such sermons, Standreden, based on the materials of the late Urs Herzog, a Swiss philologist. What was said in these sermons from the eighteenth and nineteenth century? What was the purpose of the preachers and the effect of the sermons on their public? In this contribution I will look at the digital collection, its background and at some questions surrounding these sermons.

It is not the first time that a post appears here after an alert or message at Archivalia, the blog of Klaus Graf (@Archivalia_kg). It is up to any visitor of his blog to pursue the paths he indicates or to heed his warnings. Anyway, Switzerland has seldom been the subject in my posts.

A wide range of materials

The website of this joint project of the department for German language and literature and the center for legal history of the Universität Zürich starts with pointing out how these sermons serve as a focus of attention and as a genre in which the law and Christian teaching came together. Urs Herzog (1942-2015) taught German literature at Zürich. He became a specialist in the field of Early Modern sermons (Barockpredigte), but his interests were much wider. The Standreden are a form of the much more common Leichpredigte, death sermons. As a professor emeritus he did research on the history of criminal justice, moral theology and the spiritual and psychic care for prisoners. In the project only a selection of his materials has been digitized. One of the purposes of the project is to present the sheer scope and range of Herzog’s materials and to invite other scholars to use them for their research.

The image on the start screen shows the execution of a woman in 1851. Below the text the explication mentions an often quoted verse from the letter to the Romans (13,4): “For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (King James Version). In the verse immediately preceding this quote it is clear he refers to rulers. This quote was used as an argument to confirm the right and duty of authorities to execute justice in a most literal way, by applying even the death sentence.

The digital project has a page on further sources (Quellen) with a scholarly bibliography. Apart from the nearly 140 digitized sermons Herzog traced nearly 400 other sermons in Swiss libraries. A glossary helps you to understand numerous terms with a very specific meaning. The questionnaire contains at present only three fairly obvious questions you can ask about these sermons. The page for research (Forschung) gives you access to articles written by Urs Herzog and a few other scholarly publications about the Standreden.

Preaching a good end

The nearly 140 sermons in the digital collection date from 1601 to 1867. In an Excel sheet you can find bibliographic details. However, there is just one sermon from the seventeenth century. 21 sermons stem from the eighteenth century, and some 120 sermons were held during the nineteenth century. The bibliographical information is concise but most useful. Herzog noted the religion of the preacher, the gender of the executed persons, and he even gives his verdict on the nature of the texts. In thirty cases women were executed. Some texts were not really a Standrede. Most sermons were printed, but he traced some sermons in manuscript. Herzog found the majority of the printed sermons, in a way pamphlets, in the holdings of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich. It is a bit mystifying he does not mention where he found the other publications. The digital collection has been created using digitized black-and-white photocopies made by or for Herzog himself.

In the digital collection each sermon has been given a code for the year, and often the name of the preacher, the executed person and the location of the execution are also included. A small number of sermons was not held in Swiss towns, but in Dresden (1601), Stuttgart (1738), Wernigerode (1747), Ludwigsburg and Heidelberg, the latter two both in 1812. In the Excel sheet you can query for dates and places, names of the convicted and the preacher, the kind of crime and the way of execution, the location where the sermon was held, its public (the delinquent, the beholders or a parish), the location of publication and the publisher, and for the facts I mentioned already in the paragraph here above. Some sermons were addressed directly to the criminal, others only to the public that had watched the execution. Of course I feel tempted to use here one or more sermons, preferably very different ones. A sermon in 1843 was held in a case in which the felon was pardoned. The Jesuit priest Matthias Heimbach held three sermons in 1716, a prime case for comparison. Nine sermons date from 1827.

All the strengths of this project do not hide one particular point. It is understandable to use first of all Herzog’s research material, but in the case of the sermons themselves it is rather remarkable his own photocopies have been digitized, and not the original editions. In view of the more than 35,000 thousand titles from the Zentralbibliothek Zürich digitized for the Swiss portal e-rara, conveniently grouped in one set, it is feasible to search for digitized execution sermons. I suppose one had rather seen a simple list of those items or a notice on the presence or absence of items within e-rara. As a matter of fact I searched for Standreden in e-rara, with two results, only one of them an execution sermon by Alois Diogg, a Capucin friar, Standrede, gesprochen auf der Blutstätte in Schwyz bei der Hinrichtung des Raubmörders Hieronymus Kessler von Galgenen (Schwyz, s.a. (1839); online, e-rara). Using the joint catalogue of the university library and the Zentralbibliothek Zürich you will realize quickly the word Standrede was used for any kind of Leichenpredigt.

You might pause for a thought how it took Herzog years to bring his resources together even with the assistance of online catalogues, but luckily he could at least partially build on research concerning death sermons. Since many years the Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur in Mainz is home to the Forschungsstelle für Personalschriften. An important section of its website is devoted to Leichenpredigten. You will find a database and links to projects with digitized German death sermons. Legal historians might want to look in particular at the legal dimensions of these execution sermons, but they can equally be treated as a subspecies of death sermons.

The presentation of these research materials, the digitization of (photocopies) of resources and not in the least the cooperation between two scholarly disciplines is to be welcomed. This Swiss project does homage to the legacy of a scholar with wide interests who found an intersection of theology, literature and legal history. My frowns about some elements should not stop you from investigating the project website and these digitized Swiss execution sermons.

Women and law in medieval letters

How can you correct some of the deceptive perspectives, or even worse, outright biases, without surrendering your own powers of comprehension? What is humanly possible to change your mind? I think we should embrace every sincere invitation to let us listen better to voices easily overlooked in our regular research practice and use of sources. In the project under discussion in this post I will as usually try to look first of all for its qualities, and not only for things to be repaired or bettered. Epistolae: Medieval Women’s Latin Letters is a project created by Joan Ferrante, a professor of English literature at Columbia University, New York. Its core is a corpus of nearly 2,400 medieval letters, both in English translation and in the original languages. What does this substantial collection contain, and what not? How easy can you use its contents? What is in these letters for legal historians?

Spanning a continent and a millennium

The letters in the Epistolae project are written in Latin. They date from the fourth to the thirteenth century, and thus there are texts from Late Antiquity up to the century which often has been seen as the apogee of the Middle Ages. The collection contains both letters sent by women and letters they received. Apart from browsing the entire collection you can search the letters using separate search fields for the title of a letters, senders and recipients, and there is also a global search field. The first three fields automatically generate suggestions for items containing a part of your search which you can select for quicker searching. By clicking on the title of a column in the results view you can change its sorting order. There is a basic bibliography for the resources used for this project, with in many cases only the title of publications and their presence in Columbia’s university library. In the second section of the project you will find biographies about the women figuring in the project.

One of the things I quickly noticed is probably one of the historian’s idols, the absence of years or a period of years in a number of search results. In some cases a global date can be added easily because we know the years in which the sender or recipient lived. Historians prefer to know from which period or year, or when necessary even from which date a source stems. Temporal precision helps you to avoid generalisations for a period like the European Middle Ages which span a continent during a millennium. However, the thing clearly most important here is showing the existence of letters written by women or received by women in a language mostly associated with men and male education.

However large the number of more than 2,300 letters may seem, you will probably want to see as many letters written by women as possible, and in a second set letters written to women, and you might want to have also easy access to letters sent among women, but I do not see here the possibility to create this subset quickly. With this in mind I was rather amazed that you will find for Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) only three letters dictated by her and three sent to her. Her correspondence is good for three volumes in the modern scholarly edition, Hildegardis Bingensis, Epistolarium, Lieven Van Acker and Monika Klaes-Hachmoller (eds.) (Turnhout, 1991-2001; Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis, 91, 91a and 91b), commonly seen as one of the largest collections of letters written by a medieval woman. Hildegard is justly famed for the wide variety of people she wrote to and writing to her. The examples given here are restricted to letters to Elisabeth von Schonau, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Bernard of Clairvaux, and letters by Bernard of Clairvaux and Elisabeth von Schonau. The entrance for Hildegard of Bingen mentions the English translation [The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman (Oxford etc., 1994, 1998, 2004)]. I did not find a statement on the website for this severely restricted choice, but it might be a matter of creating a balance between well-known and lesser known women.

A Dutch and Flemish view

You could bet I would look in the database of Epistolae for Dutch women, and this is indeed fruitful and revealing. There are 127 search results for a global search with the term Holland, and 208 results when you search for Flanders. However, something else becomes also visible. Each letter with more than one sender or recipient is recorded as many times as there are senders and recipients. Let’s look for example at the two charters of count William of Holland addressed to Margaret of Constantinople, countess of Flanders, written both May 19, 1250 in Brussels. I could not help spotting that William is according to the first charter only count of Holland, and in the second charter he figures as king of Romans. Ashleigh Imus provided English translations of these charters. I checked the text also in the source mentioned at Epistolae, the Oorkondenboek van Holland en Zeeland tot 1299 (OHZ), A.C.F. Koch, J.G. Kruisheer en E.C. Dijkhof (eds.) (5 vol., The Hague 1970-2006) digitized by the Huygens Institute / Institute for Dutch History.

The first charter, no. 851 in the OHZ, reads clearly “Willelmus Dei gratia Romanorum rex semper augustus, comes Hollandie,” both king and count, with for Margaret, “Margareta Flandrie et Hainonie comitissa”, yet another county, Hainault. In the second charter (OHZ, no. 856) William is called only king of Romans, “Willelmus Dei gratia Romanorum rex semper augustus”. When you check the OHZ you will see Margaret figures in more charters dated May 19, 1250. In no. 858 her name is abbreviated. No. 701 of December 16, 1246 is present in the Epistolae database, but this charter was not addressed to the abbot and monastery of Doesburg. Thosan is the Flemish monastery at Ter Doest.

In yet another letter, this time addressing pope Gregory IX in 1242, Ashleigh Imus rightly corrected a misprinted location in an old Italian edition. The charter mentions indeed Veurne (Furnes) in Flanders. There is a summary of this charter in the registers of pope Innocent IV [Les Registres d’Innocent IV (1243-1254) I, Elie Berger (ed.) (Paris 1884; online at Gallica), p. 52, no. 290], dated “Datum Lateranensi VI Idus Decembris”, December 8, 1243, and not on “III Nonas Decembris”, December 3, and edited from the papal register Reg. Avon. I 289, f. 47. I could not find this charter at the Belgian portal Diplomatica Belgica. Ferrante mentions the conflict about Hainault in her very interesting short biography of Margaret of Constantinople (1202-1280), without however caring to give the date of her birth and death.

You can check the charters of the only Dutch king of the Holy Roman Empire also in Die Urkunden Heinrich Raspes und Wilhelms von Holland, Dieter Hägermann and Jaap Kruisheer (eds.) (Hannover 1989; Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Diplomata), available online at dMGH, the digital platform of the MGH in Munich. The two charters nicely shows the difficulties of recording in a database the presence of multiple people involved with one item, and in this case even two persons with two roles in the first charter. Things are clearly not entirely correct when you cannot find Margaret when you use a global search for Hainault. You have to be very much aware of the fact that only 800 letters have been entered into the Epistolae database, even though 2000 letters have been collected and await further treatment.

If you want to follow the trail of charters in the Low Countries you can consult online several modern editions. For Guelders you have the Oorkondenboek van Gelre en Zutphen tot 1326, for the diocese Utrecht Oorkondenboek van het Sticht Utrecht tot 1301, S. Muller Fz. et alii (eds.) (5 vol., Utrecht 1920-‘s-Gravenhage 1959). For Brabant the Digitaal Oorkondenboek van Noord-Brabant brings you even more than the printed editions. Older editions for Frisia, Groningen and Drenthe can be consulted and searched at the Cartago platform.

Letters and charters

My probings in the Epistolae database point in the direction of a conclusion which is not entirely surprising. It seems a good thing to put in both real letters and charters into one database on the same footing, but alas charters need to be treated in a very distinct way in order to become usable for research. The projects for Holland, Utrecht and Guelders give you a searchable database and both OCR-scanned texts and images of the original edition. Of course you want to use all possible relevant sources about particular women, but putting them into a database and creating a reliable scholarly resource is not an easy thing, regardless of the subject you want to investigate. In the Epistolae database you cannot search directly for letters by women sent to other women, a thing many people will want to look for. In many charters women, in particular those of high rank in medieval society, do all kinds of things, in particular actions with legal consequences. It is perfectly understandable that you would like to have as many sources as possible in a single online resource, but one has to accept some consequences. To the philological skills needed to study medieval letters you will have to add the skills of the classic historical auxiliary sciences such as diplomatics, the study of charters, and palaeography.

Joan Ferrante wisely choose to rely on printed editions for her enterprise. Her knowledge of medieval literature and approaches of this vast subject has led her to launching a database that has its strength primarily in the letters given both in Latin and English. Realizing the idea of wanting to show both writing letters and using the pen for legal matters in charters is not unthinkable, but it will be a tour de force. Finding the voices of medieval women is a quest in itself, but you cannot afford to lose sight of all tools needed and existing.

Another thing that needs stressing is attention to the epistolary genre with its own particularities. You can get an idea of a further mixture of matters relevant to legal history by looking for example at a recent volume concerning the papacy and letters, Kuriale Briefkultur im späteren Mittelalter. Gestaltung – Überlieferung – Rezeption, Tanja Broser, Andreas Fischer and Matthias Thumser (eds.) (Cologne-Weimar Vienna, 2015; Regesta Imperii Beihefte, 37), available online at the website of the Regesta Imperii. In his contribution in this volume, ‘Letter-Collections in the Middle Ages’ (pp. 35-50), Giles Constable explains medieval letters are most often transmitted within collections. A real letter could be expanded and refined to serve as a literary text. He stresses the double nature of letters and charters which can have both a personal and businesslike character. Constable urges scholars to look carefully at each individual letter, and not to conclude things hastily because it is preserved in a particular collection. Wise words from not just one of the best known medievalists, but from a doyen in the field of medieval letters. His volume on Letters and letter-collections (Turnhout 1976; Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental, 17) has been digitized by the MGH. You can learn basic things about medieval letters also in the chapter ‘Epistolography’ by Julian Heseldine in Medieval latin: An introduction and bibliographical guide, Frank Mantello and Arthur Rigg (eds.) (Washington, D.C., 1997) 650-658. On the resources page of Epistolae this guide is mentioned without a reference to this chapter.

Speaking of the MGH, it is now possible to find at their dMGH platform also editions of letters in the Epistolae series, in particular the volumes of the Epistolae saeculi XIII e regestis pontificum Romanorum selectae, Karl Rodenberg (ed.) (3 vol., Berlin 1883-1897; MGH Epp. saec. XIII) in which you will find both real letters and more official correspondence. A letter to Joan of Constantinople, countess of Flanders and Hainault, sent by pope Gregory IX on November 5, 1235 (I, 563, no. 666) can be added in the Epistolae database. Among the latest publications of the MGH is the Codex Udalrici, Klaus Nass (ed.) (Wiesbaden 2017; MGH, Die Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit, 10) with early twelfth-century letters around the investiture conflict compiled by a cleric at Bamberg.

Visible and invisible filters

When finishing this post I could look also at the remarks about medieval letters in the first edition in Dutch from 1962 of the famous Guide to the sources of medieval history (Oxford 1995), also translated and updated as Introduction aux sources de l’histoire médiévale: typologie, histoire de l’érudition médiévale, grandes collections, sciences auxiliaires, bibliographie (Turnhout 1997) by Raoul van Caenegem and François Ganshof, to mention only the latest versions. Both authors mentioned in 1962 already everything I summarized here from later introductions to a rewarding genre which you cannot approach as if you can read everything at face value.

The most paradoxical thing about the project of Joan Ferrante is her apparent neglect as a professor of medieval literature of a thing which any student would know and duly acknowledge. It is one thing to set out to correct the bias filtering medieval women out of view, another thing to tackle the apparent biases in two distinct kinds of sources, medieval letters and charters. Both genres share a mixture of objective matters and personal touches. I am convinced of the need to use gender perspectives, but perhaps I am also too much a medievalist to forget about the challenges medieval sources pose for any kind of research. What can and has been done in research about medieval women can be traced in the online bibliography at Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index. You should not miss the bibliographies at Queens in the Middle Ages, too. A portal such as Monastic Matrix concerning medieval women’s religious communities is a model of its kind. The presence of English translations and accompanying biographies is surely most valuable for the Epistolae project, but the mélange of letters and charters has resulted in a rather unexpected mixture. It would be wonderful to use both genres together in one database, but one has to overcome some very real problems before you are able to hear the true voices of medieval women. In my opinion this database deserves a remix, an update with the 1200 letters waiting to be entered, and some tuning of the biographies and search interface to become fully operational as a search tool which can fulfill many needs.

Hide and seek: Finding “hidden” collections

Once upon a time you made good wishes for every new year. You promised yourself to set one or more substantial goals to pursue with all your talents and capacities in order to obtain results that often would led to higher self-esteem and other lofty qualities. Wisdom teaches us real changes come in small steps, not with giant leaps. In this post I will look not just at one project, but at a foundation supporting many projects. The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), based at Washington, D.C., has a fine record of supporting all kinds of projects for libraries, archives and documentation centers. One of their latest projects is the CLIR Hidden Collections Registry. If this truly works, it would perform a most welcome service. What does this registry contain? How can you search in it for particular collections, themes or periods? Does it fulfill its purpose and promise? Knowing about the support of CLIR for projects which are of interest for legal historians prompted me to test the new registry website. Apart from the findings about the registry I intend to report on some incidental catch as well.

A serious quest

You might be slightly surprised by the jolly title “Hide and seek”, but there is here indeed an element of play. The very title Hidden Collections Registry contains a joke: How can you bring together and register what is described as hidden? If you have found a hidden thing, it is discovered once and forever, provided you share your discovery. CLIR aims here at bringing together information about collections that led a more or less hidden life. Thanks to CLIR funding they have become more visible and accessible to the public.

Some members of the public do equate accessibility with online access. I work at Het Utrechts Archief, an archive with more than 1,300 collections, good for some 32 kilometers on our stacks. It will take herculean efforts to digitize everything, even if you succeed in making every year one million scans. We try to put every finding aid online. Sometimes we can only offer a list of the boxes in a collection in anticipation of fuller treatment. Every year some collections will be digitized entirely, but for some important series we can add only ten or twenty digitized years per annum. Funding can be most helpful to tip the balance between only offering digital finding aids and some small digital collections on one side, and on the other side creating large digital collections or dealing with fragile and very special collections not fit for the normal digital road.

CLIR succeeds indeed in supporting a wide variety of projects. The latest CLIR overview published on January 4, 2018 is no exception. Among unexpected things is for example the very first item, a project of The Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, PA, Archiving Antigua: A Digital Record of Pre- and Post-Emancipation Antigua, 1760-1948. The Moravian Brethren are a protestant missionary organization which has been active first in Europe, but rather quickly in the Americas. At Het Utrechts Archief are some thirty archival collections concerning a number of settlements, branches and even factories of the Moravian Brethren; when searching for “Evangelische Broeders” and “Broedergemeente” you will find them. I checked quickly for more Moravian stuff in the Hidden Collections Registry. The newly funded collection should be added to the three very different projects concerning the Moravian Brethren included in the CLIR registry thus far, a music collection, the first hundred years of the Pennsylvania settlement, and a collection documenting several German spiritual movements.

For each item the CLIR registry gives a concise overview and indications of the period involved and the geographic scope. It is useful, too, to have not only the name of the institution but also the name of a person to contact. To every item in the registry tags are added concerning the formats of materials. You can search for themes and periods, for projects funded by CLIR – a total of 162 – and for projects in a particular year, starting with 2008.

CLIR and legal history

You can imagine how eager I am to look for projects before 2017, because the newest projects have not yet been included. I started searching with the words legal history and this resulted in 37 results, a nice percentage of the nearly one thousand projects funded until now. Let’s look at some results. The colonial library of Jasper Yeates was to be digitized in a 2012 project. The city and state of LancasterHistory in Lancaster, PA are not indicated in the registry entry. A second project from 2008 concerned the political and governmental history of Alabama from 1799 to 1948; no institution is specified. The third project dealt in 2014 with Massachusetts petitions on women’s rights between 1619 and 1925, a project of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. With some surprise I saw among these results a project at UCLA for its palaeontological collections, funded by the CLIR in 2010. It seems the separate appearance of the words legal and history was enough for inclusion, as is the case for the project concerning Midwest organic tools. Adding a real field for tags will help much to solve this problem.

It is truly difficult to choose among the 37 results concerning legal history more examples, because many projects are really interesting, from Illinois Circuit Court records to the well-known project to digitize 30,000 French pamphlets at Chicago’s Newberry Library, and from the legacy of slavery in the Maryland State Archives to the papers of civil rights activist Margaret Bush Wilson (Washington University, St. Louis, MO), entered in the registry for 2011 and 2012, a project for native American petitions in Massachusetts (Yale Indian Papers Project), and the digitization of the M. Watt Espy papers concerning the history of the death penalty in the United States since 1608 (SUNY, Albany). Legal history is clearly not out of view within the CLIR collections program.

Faithful readers of my posts are used to the proliferation of links in my posts which usually lead you directly to a particular website or project. If you find something interesting and want to leave my blog, you should indeed use these links immediately. It is the very purpose of the links to bring you to particular addresses! However, it is embarrassing to give you in the first half of this post only links to the CLIR registry, and not as usual links to the websites with these projects. The CLIR Hidden Collections Registry does not contain links to the websites of institutions with a particular project nor the links to the results of projects. Not mentioning links, not even only for the CLIR funded projects, is not what you expect in any registry or list of funded digitization projects. In its current state the registry lives not up to reasonable expectations. It is a shame in particular, because the organization proposing this tool without links is the very Council on Library and Information Resources, an organization which aims at helping institutions to communicate better. In its current state the CLIR Hidden Collections Registry succeeds to a certain extent in hiding collections.

Finding the missing links

As for now teachers should not hesitate to test the digital abilities of their students and pupils, and ask them to find the URL’s of complete projects! In some cases you will not find the results at the website, subdomains or portal of an institution. I will not completely spoil this game, but a few examples might be instructive. The Newberry Library in Chicago has uploaded 30,000 digitized French pamphlets to the Internet Archive. At least one resource mentioned here does reach into the twenty-first century, and gains in value from the long period covered. In fact the very project that made me want to use the CLIR Registry is the project concerning the death penalty in the United States, a resource not only of interest for historians. The M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives at SUNY, Albany, is home to the National Death Penalty Archive, with as its jewel the M. Watt Espy Papers. You can find the results until now at the Espy Project page. As for now, data are being processed in a GitHub project. You can find some examples of notes in these papers on a news page of the libraries of the State University of New York at Albany. The links section for this project in the CLIR registry will have to be substantial. The Yale Indian Papers Project (YIPP) has only an announcement about the funding by CLIR, but you can already find some digitized petitions, maybe from other institutions not touched by the grant, or on the other hand the first results. I am aware that in a number of cases there is not yet a URL for a project. In such cases you will need even more the web address of the relevant institution.

The Hidden Collections program of CLIR aims at the realisation of the potential of collections, by helping with funds for either the preservation and cataloging of one or more collections, or by giving grants which make digitization and online open access possible. It is only logical to show the successes of this program. Dozens of projects in the CLIR registry are concerned with civil rights, women’s history, slavery and Afro-American history, even if you got to acknowledge that some entries look very much like an all-compassing grant apply. It would be logical to filter results by adding the category Funded, but alas this is not yet possible.

With a little help…

Before turning our back on the major and minor shortcomings of the registry project it is only fait to look at some CLIR projects which deserve applause. In Recordings at Risk CLIR invites institutions to apply for grants in order to safeguard endangered audiovisual recordings. CLIR supports the Digital Library Federation with for example a guide for digitizing special formats. Among CLIR’s own projects I would like to single out the project for a Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME), a project with partners such as Stanford University Libraries and the Qatar National Library. The DLME will be developed to contain not just digitized printed books, but also digitized archival collections, manuscripts and artefacts documenting the cultural heritage of countries in the Middle East. This project will join the ranks of project such as Patrimoines partagés of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, launched a few months ago, Menalib, the Middle East Virtual Library of the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle, and – closer to CRIL – the Oman Digital Library of the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. In the project of the BnF the Middle East is just one section among eight sections covering various regions and countries. CLIR rightly mentions the Endangered Archives Project led by the British Library, a project which deserved a post here. CLIR provides also fellowship grants.

Everybody writing a grant application knows he or she has to fulfill several demands. The CLIR calls them core values. For the Hidden Collections program openness is one of these values, and I quote approvingly: “The program ensures that digitized content will be made available to the public as easily and completely as possible, given ethical and legal constraints.” It would be a sign of respect to all those scholars, staff members and institutions benefiting from or sponsoring the work of CLIR when the Hidden Collections Registry, too, does operate accordingly. In my view supplying the missing links is a necessary gesture. Some tuning would be welcome, too. When you look at all good things supported by CLIR the present state of this registry is hopefully only a temporary exception.

A postscript

Part of my concern about the CLIR registry stems from the situation around the IMLS Digital Collections and Content: U.S. History Resources from Libraries, Museums and Archives, a portal created at the Grainger Engineering Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After technical changes and a move to a new web address this potentially very rich resource does not function anymore. Ironically it is the version with the penultimate layout saved in the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive which you can still browse, for example in the version of January 2012. You can easily retrieve the URL’s of digital collections at the end of the archived web addresses in the links of the old IMLS portal.

Another example: Some of the firms selling digital collection systems had their own overview. One firm even used its own system for a database in which you could find almost 1,000 projects, the Collection of Collections, but alas this database has been removed, too; you can only browse the latest capture from January 2017 at the Internet Archive.

The many sides of Belgium’s legal history

In the ocean of legal websites you encounter very different sites. There are relatively few attempts at creating portals. When I saw the Digithemis portal for Belgian legal history and discovered its qualities it was only a matter of time before I would write about it here. Digithemis has been created by the Centre d’Histoire du Droit et de la Justice, Université Catholique Louvain-la-Neuve. Currently there is no portal site for Dutch legal history, and thus there is every reason, not only for Dutchmen, to look at this website. It might well inspire scholars in other countries, too.

Simple layout and rich contents

One of the powerful aspects of this website is its simple layout, with an implicit promise you will not get lost here. The subtitle Système numérique d’information historique sur la Justice is best translated as “digital system for historical information about justice”. Under the first heading Applications three databases are presented. The first, Belgian Magistrates, is concerned with officials in the Belgian judicial system. The database contains personal information, details about nominations, jurisdictions and institutions. Cubes, the second database, gives you judicial statistics, information about the number of cases and given verdicts in Belgian courts of justice. As a matter of fact I was hunting for websites with historical statistics when I ran into Digithemis. The third section brings us a bibliographical database for Belgium’s legal history. The database is the fruit of cooperation between the CHDJ at Louvain-la-Neuve and the project BeJust 2.0 – Justice et Populations.

In the second section, Ressources documentaires, you will find four subjects: legislation, doctrine, jurisprudence, and surprisingly again judicial statistics. Under Legislation you can find the French versions of the various codes of Belgian law, bulletins of the Ministry of Justice (circulaires), legislation concerning the judicial structure of Belgium, and a similar section for Congo during the colonial period. For doctrine you can look at a number of legal journals, at mercuriales, discourses pronounced at the start of the judicial season by the attorneys general, and there is a bibliographical database for criminology with some 8,500 entries. The corner with jurisprudence seemed at first straightforward: for arrêts of the Cour de cassation between 1832 and 1936 you can consult the Pasicrisie, alas currently not available, and for the period 1937-2011 there is a similar site, but here I can see only verdicts between 2002 and 2015. A very much contested period in Belgium’s history comes up with the online version of La jurisprudence belge depuis le 10 mai 1940. The section for judicial statistics is enhanced by a historical overview and a concise bibliography.

The section Expositions virtuelles contains two virtual exhibits. The first, Classified, looks at Belgian military intelligence forces. The second one, Mots de la Justice [Words of Justice] is concerned with images and imagery of law and justice. The accompanying congress in Bruges earlier this year has figured on this blog at the time the bilingual catalogue was published.

The next stop of this tour are the contributions, As for now there are only two scholarly articles. The Lignes de temps interactives show interactive timelines for three subjects, women and legal professions, the Belgian judicial organisation, and the jury d’assises. In particular the timeline for women in the legal profession is telling. Ten short videos with presentations in French and Dutch about recent research are the last element of this section.

Finally the links section of this website confirms its claim to be a portal for legal history. The concise choise of links concerns Belgium, France, digital resources, and some Transatlantic websites and projects. In the right sidebar you can browse for interesting items in a RSS feed. This portal does build on other major projects in Belgium, starting with BeJust 2.0. Other portals often have an events calendar, but it seems Françoise Muller and Xavier Rousseaux wisely have built a compact portal with space for future extensions. The footer of the portal mentions the 2016 prize of the Fonds Wernaers awarded by the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) for the best scientific website.

More statistics

I found the attention to statistics a strong feature of this portal. I could not help noticing that it might be useful to add a more general website for Belgian statistics to this portal. The University Ghent has created the Lokstat project, an abbreviation of Lokale statistieken, local statistics. This project currently offers local statistics taken from the 1900 census in Belgium, with additionally an agricultural census from 1895 and an industry census from 1896, this one accompanied with maps. It would be interesting to combine these data with judicial statistics.

As a Dutchman admiring these efforts of a neighbour country I have not yet found similar Dutch judicial statistics at a special platform. The Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS) has made a fine website for Dutch Censuses 1795-1971, accessible in Dutch and English. At CBS Historische Collectie you can consult digitized reports from almost two centuries. For the field of law and justice there are mainly reports from the second half of the twentieth century, for example prison statistics (1950-2000), crimes between 1950 and 1981, juvenile criminality (1974-1981) and crime victims (1980-1984). A quick look at general publications since 1813 in this digital collection shows judicial statistics were part and parcel of the yearly overviews. For four Dutch provinces there are yearbooks since the 1840’s (Provinciale verslagen).

It is not because you find everything at particular websites, but because they help you to look further, to value information, to think about problems you want to study or to contact scholars or read their work, that portals such as Digithemis deserve a warm welcome and attentive followers. Digithemis should serve as an invitation for the creation of similar portals for other countries and regions, too.

Legal rhetorics and reality in Early Modern France: The factums

Arrest memorable du Parlement de Tolose (…) – edition Lyon: Antoine Vincent, 1565 – copy Université de Toulouse

How can we be sure to view things as they really were in the historical sources we use for our research in the field of legal history? It is by all means wise to look as closely as possible at relevant sources, preferably close to the events and problems we want to study. In particular Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge have made us aware of the importance of narrative sources to deepen our understanding of French legal history in the Early Modern period. Davis gave us in Fiction in the archives. Pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century France (Cambridge-Stanford, CA, 1987) both the true and the fictional stories, just as she had done earlier for Martin Guerre [The return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA-London, 1983)]. Thanks to Davis the lettres de remission have become a well-known resource, used also for other periods, lately for example by Walter Prevenier and Peter Arnade, Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble. Pardon Letters in the Burgundian Low Countries (Ithaca, NY, 2015). Arlette Farge, too, alerted scholars to the way narratives, rhetorics and expectations shape perceptions of reality in judicial resources, in particular in her essay Le goût de l’archive (Paris 1987).

In this post I want to expand on some notes about another very interesting source, the factums or mémoires judiciaires, a term perhaps to be translated as legal briefs, which I mentioned in passing in one of my recent posts concerning the French Revolution. However, this particular source does already appear in the late sixteenth century and lives on well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The possibility to compare the development of a genre over a number of centuries is most appealing, and therefore I would like to introduce the factums. I owe here much to a short notice published in 2014 by Léo Mabmacien at his blog BiblioMab: Le monde autour des livres anciens et des bibliothèques. A post in July at his blog rekindled my interest. The existence of new digital collections with factums is a further prompt to share my thoughts about this resource which merit attention not only in the Anglophone but also in the Francophone world. For French readers one of the main points of attention should be here to look beyond the central institutions and a France centered around Paris.

Getting a fuller picture

Léo Mabmacien’s post about factums is a real treat. In crisp and clear French he succeeded in creating a nutshell guide to the subject which leaves little to desire. In fact the idea to give here only a translation crossed my mind, but I am happy to rely here heavily on his account. The term factum stems from the Latin. In medieval legal consilia, pieces of juridical advice for courts, the exposition of a case is often introduced with the words “Factum est tale”, the case is such and so. A factum or mémoire judiciaire contains both a description of the case, the faits, and also moyens (literally the “means”), arguments to be used to argue the outcome of the case. The length of a factum can be anything between a few and many hundred pages in cases where as appendices pieces of evidences and other materials were included. Most factums do not have a title page.

The existence of factums is most interesting given the fact that French criminal court proceedings were in principle secret, as stated in the Ordonnance criminelle of 1670. Each step of a case at court proceeded by producing written statements. The final verdict, too, was presented in writing only. Oral pleading was introduced in the eighteenth century for civil law cases. Factums offer a window on French legal history like few other sources can do. A blog post in 2010 on factums of the Bibliothèque nationale de France had the evocative title ‘Factum, vous-avez dit factum ? Qu’es aquo ?’, “Did you say factum? Whatever is that supposed to be?”, and cites Robert Darnton who wrote in an article for Le Monde in 1995 there are media under the Ancien Régime we have forgotten about: the rumor in public, the factums of lawyers, the messages in your hand, the newsletters, the improvised songs on existing melodies… Darnton took up this theme in his 1999 presidential address for the American Historical Association.

Under the Ancien Régime the word factum was used also for violent pieces of writing in which someone asserted his views with forceful arguments. The juridical factums, too, do not only give legal arguments, but all kinds of motivation to ascertain the offensive or defensive position of a party. An ordinance of the Parlement de Paris from 1708 demanded that each factum be signed by a lawyer, and contained also the name of the printer, without any other formality. Thus factums escaped the vigilance of French censors, and could indeed become a kind of platform for any kind of opinion, provided they were signed by a barrister, yet another feature making this genre attractive for historians. Mabmacien concluded his post with references to the vast collection of factums held in Paris at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), and to a virtual exhibition on factums created by the municipal library of Clermont-Ferrand.

A new generation of scholars

Some of the research cited by Mabmacien stems from the eighties and nineties of the last century, but in fact a lot of work started before 1900. Augustin Corda began at the BnF with the Catalogue des factums et d’autres documents judiciaires antérieurs à 1790 (10 vol., Paris 1890-1936). Volume 7 is a supplement, the volumes 8 to 10 contain registers. You can consult the volumes 1 to 8 in the Hathi Trust Digital Library. Charles Patey had published a few years earlier a succinct overview of some 200 factums in the BnF related to Normandy [Factums normands conservés à la Bibliothèque nationale (Caen 1888; online in Gallica)]. Apart from the factums mentioned in Corda there are at the BnF two massive card box catalogues for a total of nearly 86,000 items. The main study used by Mabmacien is an article by Sarah Maza who studied with Robert Darnton. Her article ‘Le tribunal de la nation : les mémoires judiciaires et l’opinion publique à la fin de l’Ancien Régime’, Annales ESC 42/1 (1987) 73-90 is available online at the Persée portal. In 1997 appeared the French translation – Vies privées, affaires publiques. Les causes célèbres de la France prérévolutionnaire (Paris 1997) – of her monograph Private lives and public affairs: the causes célèbres of prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, etc,, 1993).

There is more scholarly literature in French available online, and I had in mind giving here a judicious amount of links. However, when I encountered at Theses, the portal for French Ph.D. theses, the very recently defended thesis of Géraldine Ther, La représentation des femmes dans les factums, 1770-1789. Jeux de rôles et de pouvoirs (Ph.D. thesis, Université de Dijon, 2015) with its rich bibliography I decided to restrict myself to a few recent publications. Ther investigated an intriguing theme, the representation of women, a theme emerging with force during the French Revolution, but with rather different relations between these events and the preceding period than you would expect. The acts of a symposium held in 2012 at the École de Droit of the Université d’Auvergne (Clermont-Ferrand) can be consulted online in a special issue of La Revue Centre Michel le Hôpital 3 (April 2013) [Découverte et valorisation d’une source juridique méconnue : le factum ou mémoire judiciaire (PDF)]. The contributors discuss factums as a source for legal history, look at a number of libraries with large collections, and staff members of these libraries discuss the current projects for cataloguing and digitization. A third recent online publication with attention for factums has as its focus lawyers in Marseille and transcends the supposed and real chronological watersheds of the French Revolution [Ugo Bellagamba, Les avocats à Marseille. Practiciens du droit et acteurs politiques (XVIIIe et XIXe siècles) (Aix-en-Provence 2015) – online at OpenEdition]. A number of relevant online publications is also included in the section on sources and bibliography of the virtual exhibition in Clermont-Ferrand.

Thanks to the hard work of librarians and scholars you can now get online access to a substantial variety of factums. Let’s start with the collection I first encountered, Tolosana, la bibliothèque virtuelle des fonds anciens, a collection of digitized books at the Université de Toulouse, with a substantial number of legal works between 1500 and 1850, among them 300 factums from the sixteenth century – just three items – to the nineteenth century (82 items). Looking back it is most fitting I bumped into these mémoires judiciaires in the context of the Calas affaire, but effectively it is the other way around that explains definitely also part of the impact of the publications around this cause célèbre. In particular you can find here some 300 factums and mémoires judiciaires. Interestingly, here, too, the Early Modern period does not end at 1789.

The second collection is La Coutume et le droit en Auvergne, Patrimoine de Bibliothèque de Clermont, a digital collection of the Overnia portal with a great variety of legal resources on customary law, especially more than six hundred mémoires judiciaires in the section for sources procédurales. The tree structure of Overnia enables you to filter for a number major legal topics with temporal subdivisions; the general search function can assist you, too.

A similar large but technically very simple collection is Droit en Provence et en outre-mer (Aix et Marseille Universités) which brings us a great variety of sources, in particular a number of digitized factums; this collection is held at Aix-en-Provence. The digital items are only available as PDF’s. It is a pity that only few of the announced items from the nineteenth century have already been digitized, but at least there is an overview of them. Some of the items are recueils, collections with sometimes scores of factums. With the fourth collection we return to Paris. The Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève has created a digital collection concerning droit (law) in the Internet Archive with nearly one thousand publications. Some 860 of them are factums et mémoires judiciaires.

The first image in this post shows in black and white the title page of an early edition of a famous arrêt of the Parlement de Toulouse from 1560. This is a copy of the edition digitized for Tolosana. The book of Jean de Coras, a French legal humanist, contains his report on the very case of Martin Guerre. Nowadays it is easy to find a digital version of earlier – and later – editions using the Karlsruher Virtual Catalogue, and I will leave it to you to find them quickly. I did check in vain for this book in the Bibliothèque Virtuelle des Humanistes (Université de Tours) which figured here earlier in a post on legal humanism. However, you can trace this book and its sixteenth-century editions and other works by Coras using the Universal Short Title Catalogue. Even if in this case Coras’ book uses a verdict of the case, and thus does not exactly present a mémoire judiciaire, its character is sufficiently close to factums to merit explicit mention here. It opens with a summary of the facts of the case, the factum, and then Coras comments the arrêt, sometimes word for word. Did I already say Tolosana does merit your attention by all means, and not just for two famous cases, Martin Guerre and the affaire Calas?

“Consultations pour MM. Onslow puinés contre M. Georges Onslow”, 1832 – BM Clermont-Ferrand, no. A 10850 1 – image: Overnia

When looking for another image of a mémoire judiciaire I decided to look at the collection created at Clermont-Ferrand. By sheer luck I found very quickly something which can serve as a reminder not to look only at French legal history in isolation. The Overnia portal contains several sources documenting the life and works of Georges Onslow (1784-1853), a composer born at Clermont-Ferrand from an English family. After many successes as a composer of chamber music ill health forced him around 1830 to return to his native Auvergne. Other matters, too, clearly brought him trouble. In six factums written in 1830-1832 (nos. A 10850) the question of his right to inherit goods in England is discussed. Both French and English law figure in the arguments used by the respective lawyers. These sources can form a perfect starting point for yet another contribution about law and music in history, a theme figuring here lately, but anyone interested in comparative legal history might have a good look at them, too. You can easily compare these six documents with other mémoires in the section on successions of the Overnia portal.

At Clermont-Ferrand the university library has started the digitization of the 1100 factums in 40 volumes of the Cour d’Appel at Riom. As for now you can consult already nearly 100 factums collected by Jacques Godemel, and also one hundred factums collected by Jean-Baptiste Marie which cover the period from 1792 to 1812.

Searching more collections

In fact it is really important to keep in mind the wide coverage of subjects in this genre. This becomes clearer when you look for factums in French archives. Scholars using historical sources in French archives can usually rely on the strict order of archival collections. Often you can restrict yourself to one particular série marked with a letter or combination of letters. The Archives nationales de France have created for the série U a useful PDF which mentions a lot of factums and mémoires judiciaires. A search for factums in the holdings of the French national archives yields an impressive result showing multiple séries with factums, not just within the séries B (Cours et jurisdictions de l’Ancien Régime) or U (Justice).

In this post Robert Darnton’s name appeared already three times. In The business of enlightenment. A publishing history of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800 (Cambridge, MA-London, 1979) Darnton mentioned just one factum without much explication about the nature of this source (p. 48). Anyway, he inspired some of his students to do research on and with factums. A few years ago Darnton put on his personal website 500 eighteenth-century police reports on authors written between 1748 and 1753 [Paris, BnF, ms. Nouv. acq. fr. 10781-10783]. It would be interesting to check for authors of factums published in the mid-eighteenth century in these police reports. We can be sure at least a few of them only pretended to be barristers. In the manuscripts section of Gallica you can now look at digitized records of the Archives de la Bastille, yet another resource where you might find among the prisoners and people under surveillance of the Parisian police force authors of pamphlets and factums. Add to them the data and maps available at the web site of the project The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (University of Leeds and Western Sydney University) which focuses – as Darnton alrady did – on Neuchâtel, and you will be quite busy for some time with following all these avenues.

At the end of this post you might be tempted to conclude that factums only in Southern France and in Paris. At my website Rechtshistorie I have brought together commented lists of digital libraries for many countries, and France is particularly rich in digital collections. I checked for factums in a number of digital collections which feature works on customary law or are located in one of the French regions where the droit coutumier was important, and I looked at the towns which were once seats of the parlements, for example Bordeaux, Toulouse, Grenoble and Dijon. Only for Grenoble in the small collection Droit dauphinois of the Université de Grenoble 2 et 3 I found a few plaidoiries (pleas) and one single factum.

Why should one take the trouble of looking outside the main French online resources? Alas at the portal Patrimoine numérique I found only the digitized factums at Aix-en-Provence. At Fontes Historiae Iuris, the very useful digital library for French legal history created by the Centre d’Histoire Judiciaire (Université Lille-II) you can find in the section Consultations ou plaidoyers d’avocats for three parlements some collections of pleas and mémoires (Toulouse, Paris and Lille (Parlement de Flandre)). There are links to digitized recueils d’arrêts, collections of verdicts, for seven parlements. Even if factums are a remarkable source on its own, it is their judicial context which can make them even more special, and thus it is a small service to point at least to some courts and their printed verdicts. At Gallica’s Essentiels du droit you can benefit – mainly for the nineteenth century – from the digitized Recueil Dalloz and other series in the section Sources jurisprudentielles. The section Histoire du droit with a number of classic works on French law (Domat, Loisel, Pothier) and droit pénal, too, can be most useful. The webmaster of the Portail Numérique d’Histoire du Droit told me last year he would like to add more links to relevant digital collections in France, but he has few moments to fulfill this wish.

In the very week the World Wide Web exists 25 years you might indeed reflect a few moments on the long way the virtual world has gone since 1991. The proliferation of digital resources for many fields of culture and society is both a marvel and something really difficult to grasp and use. As for scholarly work on factums I am as surprised as anyone by the meagre results in the Bibliographie d’histoire de la justice Française (1789-2011) at the Criminicorpus portal. Using the advanced search mode of the Bibliographie d’histoire de droit en langue française (Université de Lorraine, Nancy) brings you only to a small number of additional relevant titles, but Géraldine Ther shows there is certainly more to be found.

A search for catalogues of collections of mémoire judiciaires yields currently apart from the two catalogues for the BnF a work by Jacques Droin for collections held in Geneva, the Catalogue des factums judiciaires genevois sous l’Ancien régime (Paris-Genève 1988). You might want to read the article by Michel Porret, ‘L’éloge du factum : autour des mémoires judiciaires genevois’, Revue Suisse d’Histoire 42/1 (1992) 94-99 [online, e-Periodica]. A quick search among digital collections of some Swiss towns, in particular Geneva and Neuchâtel, did not bring me yet to more digitized mémoires judiciaires. Factums and briefs appear in contemporary law, too, for example in Canada, but here we arrive of the end of my post. At the brink of the rentrée, the start of all activities in France after the summer holidays, I hope to have awakened your curiosity for a fascinating source and to have given you some guidance for your own investigations.

This article is part of a series of posts on French legal history, starting with ‘Laws and the French Revolution’, published in February 2015. The second article came in June 2015, ‘Some notes on the history of tolerance’. A third post was published in March 2016, ‘Images and the road to the French Revolution’. The most recent post appeared here in January 2022, ‘French laws between 1785 and 1789’. Among earlier posts you might still like to look at ‘Rousseau at 300 years: nature and law’ (2012).

A postscript

How can one search quickly for French scholarly publications when some online bibliographies seem currently not as helpful as you would like them to be? At Isidore, a French research portal, I could find more literature about factums and even links to digitized items. Some other libraries I did not mention here contain also some digital copies of factums, but they are not part of a mass digitization project. The digital portal Mémoire vive of the town Besançon is an example with some twenty digitized factums. A second thing worth noticing is the policy at Gallica, the digital library of the BnF, to harvest also digital materials from partner libraries. Thus factums at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Toulouse and Clermont-Ferrand can be found at Gallica as a part fo the Essentiels du droit. More surprisingly it becomes clear that the BnF, too, has digitized possibly many hundred factums, but alas the exact number is not established easily, because the filter function does not contain a filter for descriptions of factums from the vast collection of factums at the BnF in which the word Factum has been put at the very beginning of each description.

Eric Panthou alerted me to the additions to the digital collection at Clermont-Ferrand for the Cour d’Appel de Riom. It contains now nearly 900 factums in four collections. The Bibliothèque Clermont Université will organize a one-day symposium concerning factums on June 19, 2017, Valorisation d’une source historique originale : la numérisation des factums de la Cour d’Appel de Riom.

At a few turns I have complained in the past about the lack of attention to sources for French customary law in Gallica. For some years the section Essentiels du droit dealt only with law at the national level. The new subsection Sources du droit coutumier et local fills this evident gap. The only snag is that you cannot click on the images of the title pages on the starting page, you will have to use the menu on the left. At the portal Fontes Historiae Iuris (Université Lille-2) you can find not only editions of French customary law but also treatises about them.

A second postscript

On his blog Religieuses et factums Paul Landron published in June 2022 a fine post on the extensive collections of factums at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, ‘Se réperer dans les factums de la BnF: rémarques générales’. Just looking for “factum” in the general catalog will not suffice to find all relevant items. Other documents appear among the factums as well. Landron proposes a search approach, and he looks briefly also at collections elsewhere in France.

The power of words: Some thoughts about Umberto Eco

Umbert Eco – photographer unknown – source: Wikimedia Commons

The death of Umberto Eco (1932-2016) makes the world mourn a most versatile author. In fact you might do him justice by seeing him almost as a true uomo universale. In his writings, both his scholarly work and his novels, the thing resonating within you long afterwards was and is the encounter with a mind full of curiosity about the world, culture and life at large. As a small contribution in remembrance of a great intellectual I will look here at a few aspects of a period close to his heart, the Middle Ages. With The Name of the Rose Eco did not only write a great detective novel and a philosophical treatise about visions of reality and truth, but he returned in a way to the territory where his career started. This novel is marked by elements of law and justice, reason enough to have a look at it here.

A story in black and white

Eco’s great story, set in the early fourteenth century, has not just one central narrative thread, the quest of William of Baskerville and his assistant Adso of Melk to solve crimes and the mysteries surrounding them. The Name of the Rose is also a book about confrontations between old and new ways of thinking and action, and of strife even between people at both sides. The Franciscan William of Baskerville meets a formidable opponent when the Dominican friar and inquisitor Bernard Gui arrives on the scene of the monastery in Northern Italy. Both religious orders came into existence shortly after 1200. They almost fought each other to receive able men into their ranks. The different ways of living and preaching inspired them to outshine each other. Now Bernard Gui (around 1262-1331) was a historical figure. Interestingly he was not only the most famous inquisitor of his time, but also a very active historian of his order, see A.-M. Lamarrigue, Bernard Gui. Un historien et sa méthode (Paris, 2000).

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, start of II-I; England, circa 1320-1340 – Cambridge, UL, ms. Ff 3.18, fol. 1r – image: Cambridge University Library

800 years ago the Dominican order was founded. Part of the worldwide jubilee celebrations is the virtual exhibition A pipeline from heaven: eight centuries of Dominican books created by Cambridge University Library. Among the manuscripts shown in the online gallery you can find the Summa Theologiae, the major work produced by Thomas Aquinas. I searched in this exhibit in vain for the inquisition and Bernard Gui, but let’s first remember how Eco started as a scholar with writing about Thomas Aquinas. Eco’s Ph.D. thesis dealt with the views on art of this Dominican philosopher and theologian. Aquinas wrote many of his works using the scholastic method of distinctions using questions and answers. Argument after argument is dissected in a seemingly cool and calm way. Personal views or involvement seldom surface. Eco succeeded in pinpointing Aquinas’ views of art in his discussions of perception, contrary to the opinions of eminent scholars such as Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain. Once you realize this, it is easier to see how this discovery influenced Eco’s later scholarly and literary works.

When William of Baskerville reads and explains the telling signs which contain clues to unravel what happened at the Benedictine monastery infected by crime, Eco knowingly plays with scholarly views of medieval and modern philosophy. Using and focusing on signs was for some time the very heart of the vogue for microhistory. The Italian word connected with the microhistory paradigm is spie, traces. Eco was virtually the founder – together with Roland Barthes – of semiotics, the theory of signs, their meanings and relations. In the thirteenth century a number of Dominican friars set out to write both manuals and encyclopedias covering all kinds of knowledge. Very soon the papacy realized that their deep theological knowledge made these friars fit to become inquisitors. Bernard Gui himself wrote a manual for inquisitors, edited by Michel Mollat, Bernard Gui. Manuel de l’inquisiteur (Paris 1926, reprint 1964; Les classiques de l’histoire de France au moyen âge, 8-9). Gui made notes and instructions and carefully documented his activity in the Languedoc in another manuscript [Le livre des sentences de l’inquisiteur Bernard Gui (1308-1323), Annette Pales-Gobillard (ed.) (Paris 2002)]. David Burr (Virginia Tech) has translated a number of the texts in this edition, in particular Gui’s views on detecting heresy. Gui mentions among other heretical matters the views on poverty of the Franciscan writer Petrus Olivi which figure in Eco’s novel, too.

As part of the Dutch jubilee celebrations of the Dominican order the journal Tijdschrift voor Geestelijk Leven [Journal for Spiritual Life] published a special about Dominican history [Het hart op de tong. 800 jaar dominicaanse verkondiging (TGL 72/1 (2016)] with an article by legal historian and theologian Daniela Müller (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen) on Bernard Gui (pp. 27-35), summarizing in Dutch at the same time a part of her recent research about medieval heresy and the position of women. Müller writes Gui served his order also as a procurator generalis at the papal court in Avignon, and even became involved in the canonisation of Thomas Aquinas. He also acted as a papal nuntius. Müller’s recent research about Gui’s protest against the decision of pope Clement V compelling bishops and inquisitors to work together is real news (see her article ‘Der Bischof und der Inquisitor’, in: Ketzer und Kirche. Betrachtungen aus zwei Jahrtausenden, Daniela Müller (ed.) (Münster 2014) 237-262).

For Bernard Gui words and views did not stand independent of beliefs and practices. You might say he read the views of people as signs of religious convictions and adherence. He outright connected particular expressions with heretical views, even if he had not yet asked specifically about the latter. Eco succeeded most powerfully in showing one of the major faults of the inquisitorial procedure, the combination of the function of persecuting officer and judge in one person. Is it a play on his own name – Eco means echo in Italian – that the other main character in The Name of the Rose, Jorge of Burgos, the monk killing so many of his brethren, also acted as a staunch persecutor of new views and a terrible self-appointed judge? Eco would have spoilt his novel by placing the motto Only connect used by Virginia Woolf at the start of his first novel, but surely this is the most concise clue to his book.

The joy of writing and sharing knowledge

Eco involved himself in Italian life and culture with his own column for a newspaper and regular appearances on television. In a number of his books, for example about the history of beauty, he left behind him his familiar territories of medieval history and current philosophy, and reached out to a much larger audience. Among these books I personally most like his work touching on the history of language research, La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea (1993), translated into nearly twenty languages, as you can check in the Index Translationum of UNESCO. The history of the search for the perfect language brought Eco in many cases to authors expressing their own theory about the original language of humanity. Even Dutch was in the seventeenth century sometimes presented as the language spoken in Paradise! Having started with studying the world where Latin was the lingua franca this subject certainly made Eco smile. His command of European languages made him the ideal author for this theme.

I first read The Name of the Rose as a student of medieval history. Although I did find at first his proliferation of extracts from medieval authors close to going through an overturned card file I had no doubt whatsoever of his skills as a great story-teller. The joy of writing and sharing is visible everywhere in his writings. Since I first read this book I have reread it several times, and my admiration for it has grown. While writing this post I noticed how many tags I can use for classifying my musings about Eco. We are lucky to see in Umberto Eco someone defying normal classifications. He was a great scholar, and even his faults and flaws have turned into art. Few scholars have been as candid and full of humour as Eco about his own mistakes. Nobody is perfect, but Eco’s legacy will continue to help us perceiving signs, detecting hidden perceptions and connections. He makes you transcend the world of books and marvel at the Book of the World.

A fortress of social history

More than once I have expressed here my concern to connect legal history with major issues, but preferably without breathlessly following the daily news. When discussing here this summer The History Manifesto I singled out legal history as a discipline particularly equipped to study and analyze for example slavery, inequality, racism and the unfair distribution of wealth, because laws and regulations, legal institutions and their policies, and the ideas and visions of those people trained in legal matters do touch these issues into their very heart. Add violence and immigration to these issues and you have covered major issues in contemporary society. Last week I saw the announcements of four upcoming conferences and symposia confronting these issues, all of them organized this month by or created in close cooperation with the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam.

Earlier this year the IISH reached already headlines with its digitization of the papers of Karl Marx. For me the four scholarly events form only the last push to write here an entire contribution about this marvellous institution, its holdings and importance for historians. In the process of writing it turned out to be rewarding to devote a second section to a number of similar institutions in Europe. Hopefully this comparison makes the strenghts and opportunities of the IISH clearer for you.

Four events

On December 9, 2015, the IISH organizes with the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences and its Academy of Arts a symposium about science and the immigration crisis. The speakers will be introduced by IISH research director Leo Lucassen, a specialist in the field of migration history who actively participates in the current public debates concerning the impact of immigration into Europe, not in the least with tweets – in Dutch – as @LeoLucassen.

The attack of Auguste Vaillant on the French Chambre des Deputés, December 9, 1893 – image IISH, Amsterdam

Since 1979 the IISH is one of the research institutes of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences, and thus it is only naturally to find them cooperating also on December 10, 2015, for a one-day symposium Utopie en geweld [Utopia and violence]. Utopianism is one the branches within the socialist movements for which the IISH has important holdings from numerous countries. In fact it is the very presence at the IISH of a great variety of collections, from personal papers to party archives coming from all over the world that gives this institution its prominent position. This event is almost too close to current world news, but there is also attention for utopian visions within capitalism.

In Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania) the IISH brings from December 10 to 12, 2015, the authors together of the project for The General Labour History of Africa. This project has a number of aims, for example bringing Africa’s history into focus, supporting African scholars, creating new perspectives on the history of slavery and its impact, and contributing to the centenary in 2019 of the International Labour Organization.

From December 14 to 16, 2015, the first conference of the European Labour History Network [ELHN] will take place at Turin. The ELHN was founded in Amsterdam in 2013. One of the recent initiatives of the IISH and sister institutions is the Social History Portal, hosted at a server of the IISH, but there is evidently space needed for similar cooperation in the field of labour history. At this conference the business of working groups will be the main activity, and their range is impressive.

Multiple constellations

Anyone trying to do justice to the IISH, the history of its holdings and initiatives faces the challenge of striking a balance between its apparent core activities and actual main business, and this balance is not found so easily. Around the IISH are a number of institutions, and you cannot properly assess its doings without looking also at sister organizations, partners in international projects, and the offsprings of the IISH. Let’s have a brief look at the origin and history of the IISH. The historian N.W. Posthumus (1880-1960), the principal founder of the IISH, had already founded in 1914 the Nederlands Economisch Historisch Archief (NEHA). The collections of the NEHA can to a large extent be searched using the online catalogues of the IISH. Important donations for Posthumus’ new project came from Nehemia de Lieme (1882-1940), the director of a labourers’ insurance and banking company with close relations to the Dutch social-democratic party. In 1934 De Lieme helped acquiring the archives of the Jewish Bund, an association of Jewish workers in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, and a year later he joined the board of directors of the newly founded institute. Soon afterwards the IISH acquired the archives of the German socialist party. Librarian Annie Adama van Scheltema-Kleefstra succeeded in smuggling the manuscripts of Bakunin out of Vienna just before the Anschluss, and the IISH got the archives of Marx and Engels in its possession. Posthumus had set up branch offices of the IISH in Paris and in Britain. In the face of all threats during the Second World War the losses in materials were surprisingly low. A part of the collections resurfaced only in 1991 in a secret archive in Moscow.

The history of the socialist movement in all its diversity during the nineteenth and twentieth century can safely be dubbed the original heart of the IISH, but adjacent branches of history, in particular labour history and economic history were always near. Today Dutch social and economic history are surely not neglected, and the international dimensions have grown far beyond the homelands of European socialism. In its current form the IISH truly aims at covering the history of work, labour and labour relations in the fullest possible sense. Writing this I feel forced to show here at least some of the IISH activities, but it is quite a feat to write concisely about the IISH. For my First World War blog Digital 1418 I wrote in 2014 about the IISH and its collections concerning this war. There is not only a special research guide for this period dealing with some twenty collections, but also a similar guide for the war and peace movements. At the Social History Portal the IISH contributed to the online exhibition about the 1917 Stockholm Peace Conference, and the IISH shows relevant digitized items at the portal Europeana 1914-1918.

In 2011 I could point my readers already to the Virtual Library Women’s History and ViVa Women’s History, an online current bibliography of women’s and gender history, both maintained by the IISH. In the field of Big Data the IISH offers you a lot of data hubs, for example Historical Prices and Wages and a database on strikes in the Netherlands from 1372 to 2008. Among digitized works are the editions of two economic enquêtes from late medieval Holland, the Enqueste from 1494 and the Informacie from 1514, with a bibliography on both documents. If you search images of economic activities you might benefit from the History of Work Information System with occupational titles from five centuries accompanied by contemporary images. The eleven online exhibitions also show the sheer width and variety of the IISH’s holdings. Where else can you find together online exhibits on posters from China, Cuba and the Soviet Union, the images of a rare seventeenth-century tulip manuscript illustrating the tulipomania, the history of censorship, Red-Haired Barbarians, the Japanese expression for Europeans in Japan between 1800 and 1865, and Rebels with a cause, the 75 year jubilee exhibit about the major figures of the socialist movements and parties?

Lately the IISH has made great progress in digitizing some of its most important collections. By now you might conclude more easily with me that it is wise to start your visit of the IISH website with some of the nearly twenty online research guides. Those who think British scholars can find everything in London either at the British Library or the London School of Economics might want to visit Amsterdam for the Kashnor collection in the IISH library, where legal historians, too, can find materials ranging from laws ordered by Oliver Cromwell to the Corn Laws and Indian colonial history. The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences is creating an online version of the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe) of which you can now consult online a number of economical writings, including Das Kapital. The IISH has digitized the original papers of Marx and Engels from the archive of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands in their holdings. By the way, this year’s publication of a new Dutch translation of Das Kapital would be another reason to contemplate writing about Marx. There is a useful overview of the main socialist collections and their finding aids at the IISH website, but for quick access it is wise to look also at the general overview of the IISH socialist archival collections. The IISH does provide you online with a general introduction to its archives. Using the guide by Jaap Haag and Atie van der Horst (eds), Guide to the International Archives and Collections at the IISH, Amsterdam (Amsterdam 1999) is a must. Looking at the spectacular time-table of the socialist collections did exceed even my expectations.

I will not hide from you the Dutch connections of Karl Marx. He often visited in Zaltbommel Lion Philips, the grandfather of Anton and Gerard Philips, the two founders of the Philips multinational firm. Lion Philips actually sponsored Marx who constantly needed money. Marx worked often in the reading room of the British Museum, but large parts of Das Kapital were written in Zaltbommel. Marx’ father’s stepfather was a rabbi at Amsterdam, and Henriette Presburg, Karl’s mother, came from Nijmegen. Last year the Dutch television series De IJzeren Eeuw [The Iron Century] about the Netherlands in the nineteenth century devoted time to this period of Marx’ life. Jan Gielkens edited a number of family documents and letters in ‘Was ik maar weer in Bommel’ . Karl Marx en zijn Nederlandse verwanten. Een familiegeschiedenis in documenten (Amsterdam 1997) and Karl Marx und seine niederländischen Verwandten. Eine kommentierte Quellenedition (Trier 1999).

Violence and its history

Alas we must leave the peaceful surroundings of Zaltbommel on the Waal river and return to the start of this post, the history of violence and other contemporary issues which sometimes seem to move to the background but are never totally absent. We had best look at the rather brief introduction to the IISH anarchism collection guide and use the relevant parts of the online exhibit Rebels with a cause to get a taste of what follows. The following sections on archives, literature and highlights redeem its conciseness. Among the many anarchist archives Michael Bakunin, the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, the Provo movement in Amsterdam and the May-June’ 68 revolt in Paris are just the familiar landmarks. Having access in the IISH library to really rare collections of relevant literature, including the magazines and journals of movements, personal photographs, and perhaps best of all, access to the collections of people such as Max Nettau and Augustin Hamon documenting the history of anarchism, is the thing that you will search for in vain at other major institutions in the field of social and economic history.

It needs perhaps stressing that anarchism historically was not just a movement choosing to use violence as its exclusive means, but an attempt to rethink and reshape politics and the use of power and the role of authority, and of course anarchism was marked by its great diversity in thought, aims and actions. I confess to a slight passing bias in the direction of violence because of my admiration for a current television series about the history and role of Dutch socialism with the suggestive title De Strijd [The struggle].

Have I fallen victim to a misplaced belief that the IISH is really outstanding and almost unique, or do I have to correct my views? For a start it will help to look at the Social History Portal mentioned above. In the news section is a notice about yet another scholarly event at the IISH where at December 4 and 5, 2015 a two-day conference was held on Global Capitalism and Commodity Frontiers: A Research Agenda. Last week the IISH awarded a prize for a M.Litt thesis about the Amna Suraka torture museum in Irak. Let’s compare this with some upcoming and recent activities of sister institutions listed in the news section of the Social History Portal. This year the library of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn organized meetings around books documenting right-wing populist movements in Germany. The Open Society Archives and Museum in Budapest has on December 8, 2015 a symposium around an exhibition concerning privacy in an open society. The Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv in Zürich has acquired the archives of a movement fighting against human trafficking. The BDIC at Paris-Nanterre organized a two-day conference about the deportation of women in France during the Second World War.

The resources section of the Social History Portal does much to redress the balance. Here all partner institutions contribute to at least one and often more online exhibits. When you look finally at the digital collections section of this portal, and check for instance the number of collections from the various institutions, you will find the IISH with eleven collections. Six other institutions show more digital collections, the institute at Budapest even 46 collections and the archive at Zürich with 45 collections. The Press Museum at Amsterdam, a sister institute of the IISH, is present with one collection, the early twentieth-century caricatures of Albert Hahn depicting Dutch political life and events in a very powerful way, sometimes as aggressively as some of today’s cartoonists. Disappointingly the IISH and the Press Museum have to bow in front of recent claims about image right to keep them out of view, which makes the inclusion of this collection at this moment rather futile. Behind the Social History Portal is the Heritage of People’s Europe network which brings digitized materials also to the Europeana portal.

Comparing institutions

When looking somewhat longer at the major European research institutions which share the fields and interests of the IISH in Amsterdam it is in particular the Bibliothèque de Documentation et Information Contemporaine (BDIC) in Paris-Nanterre which has a similar wide scope in time and space as the IISH. The department and collections dealing with the First World War are a world in itself. If you think that the BDIC’s website was not easy to navigate the new design does make things easier, although the English version has not yet been completed. There is a separate digital library, L’Argonnaute. The IISH is still in transition between its old URL and the present incarnation of its bilingual website, and every now and then you will encounter dead links. The list of themes and countries are helpful, but I do miss dearly the old site map. A separate entrance or portal for the IISH’s digital collections might be helpful in creating rapid access to the riches of the collections.

The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) in Bonn has several institutions under its aegis or collections amounting to separate institutions, including for example the Karl-Marx-Haus in Trier. Instead of trying to fit everything into one portal the institute at Trier can be reached online through the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie. This archive is in particular home to the Portal zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, a portal for the history of German labour movements with much choice in materials and databases. The library of the FES has it own digital library. In view of the number of themes presented by the FES there is a clear case for having not just one website but several platforms, though this hampers gaining a unified overview.

Last but not least in this rapid European tour is an institution conspicuously absent at the Social History Portal. Does the London School of Economics and Political Science create its own virtual presence with sufficient character, scope, depth and width to stand alone? Being a research institution of world renown the LSE nicely gives you part of an answer by pointing to its own history of pioneering and leading scholars in a number of related fields. The LSE is celebrating 120 years of LSE, with for example also a number of virtual exhibitions. The library of the LSE is home to some 1,500 archival collections accessible through a special catalogue, a better solution than the time-consuming approach at the IISH. You are sure to find something of interest in the subject guides and topic guides; among the topics are Africa, India, Latin America and the Middle East. The last topic guide amounts to an extensive research guide of its kind which will kindle interest in the intricacies of the Middle East. One of its many virtues is leading you to collections and libraries elsewhere in London.

In the LSE’s library the Women’s Library accounts for a separate unit. You might almost describe the LSE’s digital library as a jewel in the crown. There is much attention for the Fabian society with the original Fabian Tracts and the modern Young Fabian Tracts, the digitized diaries of Beatrice Webb, notes concerning the Bretton Woods agreement, and more than 1,000 recordings of LSE public lectures between 1990 and 2006. However, the number of virtual exhibitions is with four distinctly low, even when one includes the fine but small fifth exhibition World War 1 at LSE: a common cause. The LSE could contribute to research for European social history by creating better access to for example its Russian collections. When you visit the websites of the LSE and the IISH you might find the former more rigorously organized, covering more disciplines and easier to use, the latter more inviting but sometimes more difficult to navigate, but leading you always to social and economic history. Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating, when you contact them, ask your questions, develop your projects or do actual research with or helped by their vast resources.

At the end of this post I realize much more can be said about the role within contemporary society of institutions with such rich collections in the fields of economic and social history. The comparison of four institutions might have helped me to create here yet another long post, but I think it has been rewarding to enlarge this post with the IISH at its centre into a tour bringing you to these important institutions. Their wealth in archival collections and massive libraries on many subjects, themes, countries and regions do merit the attention of lawyers and historians. Their interactions with the public and their role in today’s world can offer a mirror for scholars in the humanities and other disciplines.