In Order in the Court, Brasington translates and comments upon the earliest medieval treatises on ecclesiastical legal procedure. Beginning with the eleventh-century "Marturi Case," the first citation of the Digest in court since late antiquity and the jurist Bulgarus' letter to Haimeric, the papal chancellor, we witness the evolution of Roman-law procedure in Italy. The study then focusses on Anglo-Norman works, all from the second half of the twelfth century. The De edendo, the Practica legum of Bishop William of Longchamp, and the Ordo Bambergensis blend...

In Making Manslaughter, Susanne Pohl-Zucker offers parallel studies that trace the legal settlement of homicide in the duchy of Wurttemberg and the imperial city of Zurich between 1376 and 1700. Killings committed by men during disputes were frequently resolved by extrajudicial agreements during the late Middle Ages. Around 1500, customary strategies of dispute settlement were integrated and modified within contexts of increasing legal centralization and, in Wurttemberg, negotiated with the growing influence of the ius commune. Legal practice was characterized by indeterminacy and...

Contributions to this Festschrift for the renowned American legal and literary scholar William Ian Miller reflect the extraordinary intellectual range of the honorand, who is equally at home discussing legal history, Icelandic sagas, English literature, anger and violence, and contemporary popular culture. Professor Miller's colleagues and former students, including distinguished academic lawyers, historians, and literary scholars from the United States, Canada, and Europe, break important new ground by bringing little-known sources to a wider audience and by shedding new light on familiar...

The volume Planning for Death: Wills and Death-Related Property Arrangements in Europe, 1200-1600 analyses death-related property transfers in several European regions (England, Poland, Italy, South Tirol, and Sweden). Laws and customary practice provided a legal framework for all post-mortem property devolution. However, personal preference and varied succession strategies meant that individuals could plan for death by various legal means. These individual legal acts could include matrimonial property arrangements (marriage contracts, morning gifts) and legal means of altering heirship by...

Law and Language in the Middle Ages investigates the encounter between law and legal practice from the linguistic perspective. The essays explore how legal language expresses and advances power relations, along with the ways in which the language of law legitimates power. The wide geographical and chronological scope showcases how power, legitimacy and language interact, moving the discussion beyond traditional issues of identity or the formation of nation-states and their institutions. What emerges are different strategies reflective of the diverse and pluralistic political, legal, and...

The Use of Canon Law in Ecclesiastical Administration, 1000–1234 explores the integration of canon law within administration and society in the central Middle Ages. Grounded in the careers of ecclesiastical administrators, each essay serves as a case study that couples law with social, political or intellectual developments. Together, the essays seek to integrate the textual analysis necessary to understand the evolution and transmission of the legal tradition into the broader study of twelfth century ecclesiastical government and practice. The essays therefore both place law into the wider...

New Discourses in Medieval Canon Law Research offers a new narrative for medieval canon law history which avoids the pitfall of teleological explanations by taking seriously the multiplicity of legal development in the Middle Ages and the divergent interests of the actors involved. The contributors address the still dominant ‘master narrative’, mainly developed by Paul Fournier and enshrined in his magisterial Histoire de collections canoniques. They present new research on pre-Gratian canon collection, Gratian’s Decretum, decretal collections, but also hagiography, theology, and...

In A Raven’s Battle-cry Charlene M. Eska presents a critical edition and translation of the previously unpublished medieval Irish legal tract Anfuigell. Although the Old Irish text itself is fragmentary, the copious accompanying commentaries provide a wealth of legal, historical, and linguistic information not found elsewhere in the medieval Irish legal corpus. Anfuigell contains a wide range of topics relating to the role of the judge in deciding difficult cases, including kingship, raiding, poets, shipwreck, marriage, fosterage, divorce, and contracts relating to land and livestock.

Gerd Althoff´s new book collects fifteen of his more recent contributions, most of them previously published in German, which elucidate the functioning of prestate societies. Examples from the Frankish and later German realm (800-1200) are used to clarify how rules and political rituals governed behavior in the power games between kings, churchmen and nobles. Such rules (Spielregeln) and rituals guided public and private behavior despite the fact that they existed only as unwritten customs. The long-overlooked significance of this way of establishing order has sparked a vivid and...

In this volume, Maciej Mikuła analyses the extant texts of the Ius municipale Magdeburgense, the most important collection of Magdeburg Law in late medieval Poland. He discusses the different translation traditions of the collection; the application of Magdeburg Law in cities; how differences between the versions could affect the application of the rights; and how the invention of printing influenced the principle of legal certainty. Mikuła ultimately shows that the differences between the texts not only influenced legal practice, but also bear out how complex the process was of the...