Abstract

Late medieval Europe saw the spread and popularization of a particular form of institutionalized socio-legal practice and logic: the law court. While generally understood in legal or institutional terms, this book presents this ‘rise of the court’ as a socio-cultural history of communicative interactions between producers and consumers of justice. In a world with many alternatives for resolving conflicts and countering perceived threats to social order, courts presented people with specific – and in hindsight highly successful – scripts to perform and define justice, entailing spaces, acts, texts, oral pronouncements and more. By comparing three different types of courts from different regions, this book traces their shared and individual development as scriptwriters of justice, impacting both their contemporaries and modern historians.

Keywords: medieval law courts, medieval legal practice, medieval court records, comparative history, legal communication, performativity

Justice can be an ambiguous concept. That much was clear to the Parisian poet François Villon (b. 1431) from his encounter with law courts. In 1462 the provost of Paris had sentenced him to death, following his involvement in a street brawl. Fighting the latter's decision in an appeal to the supreme royal court, the Parlement, Villon managed to obtain a reprieve from this harsh punishment. Yet, while granting the poet his life, the Parlement also decided to exile him from his home town, effectively sentencing him to a social death instead. In the poem ‘Ode to the Court’, Villon underscored the irony of his situation. While his poem begins as a laudatory exposition on the goodness of the Parlement, by the third stanza the underlying critique becomes discernable: