Scripting Justice in Late Medieval Europe Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- List of figures, maps, plans and timelines
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Profiles: Three late medieval law courts
- 2 Legal space
- 3 The rituality of court practice
- 4 Legal text and social context
- 5 Court and society: The production and consumption of justice
- General conclusion
- Appendix 1 Utrecht
- Appendix 2 York
- Appendix 3 Paris
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Legal text and social context
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- List of figures, maps, plans and timelines
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Profiles: Three late medieval law courts
- 2 Legal space
- 3 The rituality of court practice
- 4 Legal text and social context
- 5 Court and society: The production and consumption of justice
- General conclusion
- Appendix 1 Utrecht
- Appendix 2 York
- Appendix 3 Paris
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Records of court practice constitute some of the richest and most numerous written sources for the later Middle Ages, echoing the broader documentary revolution of this period. Using these documents as historical sources, however, one needs to take into account their role as text-objects produced and used within the multimedial communicative context of late medieval courts. By prescribing, describing or performing legal practice, these documents translated a, mainly oral, social world into textualized legal discourse. Such discourses, and the documents containing them, were subsequently communicated back to various audiences, in an attempt to reinforce specific scripts of justice as envisioned by the court. Rather than unproblematic reflections of social practices, court records are the physical remains of a socio-legal negotiation over their interpretation.
Keywords: medieval law courts, medieval court records, textuality, orality, legal discourse
He who wants to get to know the peasant of ancient and very ancient regimes lacks no grand syntheses – regional, national, occidental. […] What is wanting, however, is the direct gaze: the testimony, without an intermediary, that the peasant provides about himself. […] Fortunately for us, yet unfortunately for them, a man, during the fourteenth-century demographic growth, has given speech to a group of villagers, and even to a whole village for that matter.
With these words Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie opened what has become one of the most widely acclaimed studies in social history in our time. He presented what was and still is a very familiar frustration for many historians: the lack of direct and reliable voices from many of the individuals from the past societies that interest us so much. For, prior to the modern era, the majority of texts were produced by, for and about a small social elite, leading to a strong evidential bias. For Le Roy Ladurie a solution to this problem came in the form of the records of the inquisitorial court of Jacques Fournier, the bishop of Pamiers, who organized a vigorous persecution of heresy in his diocese at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Basing himself on the extensive confessions and witness testimonies recorded by this court, Le Roy Ladurie wrote his famous microhistory of the small French village of Montaillou.
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- Scripting Justice in Late Medieval EuropeLegal Practice and Communication in the Law Courts of Utrecht, York and Paris, pp. 147 - 202Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022