Law Beyond the Legal Renaissance: Rethinking Jurisdiction in the European central Middle Ages (Danica Summerlin & Alice Taylor) (OPEN ACCESS)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2025.2456287
Abstract:
The introduction to this special issue lays out its approach to the phenomenon of jurisdiction during the European central Middle Ages. Rethinking jurisdiction, we argue, is key to understanding the profound change the period underwent in terms of its law and legal culture. We explain, first, why ‘legal pluralism’ has not offered a meaningful structure to understand the creativity inherent in law-making (in all its senses) in this period. Second, by adopting an ‘actor-centric’ approach to jurisdiction, we then set out how the essays in this collection address how and why jurisdictional boundaries were created, maintained and subverted not only in legal disputes themselves but in the minds of people who were, in different ways, all involved in the making of law.
‘The Laws of England, Which had Hitherto Been Used and Approved’: Jurisdictional Understandings in the Thirteenth Century (Thomas J. McSweeney & Atria A. Larson)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2025.2456280
Abstract:
In 1236, at the Council of Merton, England’s bishops tried to persuade the king’s courts to adopt canon law’s rule of subsequent legitimation, which held that a child born out of wedlock whose parents subsequently married became legitimate. England’s barons are said to have responded that ‘they did not wish to change the laws of England which had hitherto been used and approved.’ At first glance, this appears to be a straightforward case of jurisdictional conflict. This paper will examine the discussion of the council in the Bracton treatise, which was largely written by one of the major players in the debates of 1236, William of Raleigh. Rather than presenting this as a conflict between the secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, Raleigh worked to demonstrate that, according to the canon law’s own terms, it was acceptable for the king’s courts to have their own law of legitimacy.
Jurisdiction over Infangthief in England: The Case of John Milksop (Kenneth F. Duggan)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2025.2456268
Abstract:
This paper uses a dispute over the franchise of infangthief between the abbot of Tewkesbury and the earl of Gloucester to shed light on jurisdictional claims over the right to try and hang hand-having thieves in thirteenth-century England. In doing so, it demonstrates the significance of performance and precedent established through the actions of legal actors as opposed to written records for identifying what constituted proof of right when there were competing jurisdictional claims over infangthief.
Defining Jurisdictional Boundaries in Thirteenth-Century Danish and Norwegian Town Law (Miriam Tveit & Helle Vogt)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2025.2456267
Abstract:
The paper examines jurisdictional boundaries in late thirteenth-century town laws from Denmark and Norway, and the agents defining them. Danish towns were distinctly delineated physically and legally, while Norwegian towns had more flexible boundaries, with blurred physical demarcations. The border between burghers and other groups remained porous. Town laws, often overlooked, are analysed as normative frameworks within overlapping systems. The study nuances conventional jurisdictional narratives, highlighting the interaction of territory and people in shaping legal boundaries. By comparing urban jurisdiction in Denmark and Norway, variations in definition and administration are identified. The focus on legal actors illuminates distinctions within urban populations and complexities within towns. The study underscores the dynamic and performative nature of territorial jurisdiction, suggesting divergences may stem from legal actors’ interests, geographical disparities, and population patterns rather than differing legal ideologies or royal power.
The Bishop’s Jurisdictional Boundaries: Proceedings, Legal Actors and Strategies from a Local Church Court (Pistoia, 1287–1301) (Arnaud Fossier)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2025.2456286
Abstract:
This article focuses on the records of an Italian Church court from the late thirteenth century. This material allows us to know not only the daily working of a pre-modern Church court but also the nature of the litigants' legal skills and strategies. The first part of the article examines the pre-existing boundaries of this Church court jurisdiction and the matters with which it was dealing. Whereas the Church claimed jurisdiction over various ‘spiritual' matters, such as marriage, priests' offences and ecclesiastical benefices, its jurisdiction sometimes overlapped with the competencies of secular courts. In the second part, the article focuses on the judicial proceedings themselves and thus on the interactions between judges, plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses. As with many other courts at that time, this court systematically sought witnesses’ own definitions of the offences or accusations they testified about and the relevant fama. In sum, by drawing on three different caseloads, this article explains why fama played such a key role in ecclesiastical trials and how; therefore, norms other than strictly legal ones were key to the functioning of ecclesiastical courts, and should, therefore, be understood as key in the appeal to ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
The Custom of Conquest: Twelfth-Century Tortosa and the Frontiers of Iberian Law (Rodrigo García-Velasco) (OPEN ACCESS)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2025.2456284
Abstract:
Medieval frontiers are often perceived as a zones of legal informality and lawlessness, and as such sit uncomfortably in standard accounts of legal change. Focusing on the concept of jurisdiction can provide a different perspective of how law operated during the twelfth century outside of conventional state-centric models of legal development. The following article discusses the history of the frontier town of Tortosa, in eastern Iberia, and of the local statutes of customary law produced in the aftermath of the Catalan conquest in November 1148. It examines the law produced during and after the transition from Islamic to Christian rule, to trace how norms were claimed and used in jurisdictional negotiations out of the presence of consolidated forms of state-centred ‘power’. Through Tortosa’s early history under Catalan rule, this article demonstrates that medieval frontiers could sometimes characterized by an abundance of rules and jurisdictions rather than the absence of them.
Recognizing Jurisdictions within the Church before the Liber Extra (Danica Summerlin) (OPEN ACCESS)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2025.2456285
Abstract:
This paper investigates how local and papal jurisdictions were interpreted in the later-twelfth century church and its growing body of novel law. Focussing on the period before 1234, it uses a letter sent by Pope Alexander III in the 1160s to the bishop of Lincoln over a relatively minor matter as a case study. The letter responded to an issue of illicit ordination in the diocese but tangentially touched on questions of hierarchy and jurisdiction in the church, particularly the relationship between the ever-strengthening papal law and local episcopal jurisdictions. By tracing the route through which this letter became ‘law’ in the 1234 Liber Extra, this paper will once again emphasize the importance of local legal actors in shaping canon law in the period between 1140 and 1234, but look to how even tangential matters can put forward subtle arguments around the recognition of different jurisdictions within the church at the time by legal actors both at and away from the papal curia.
What Rights for Criminals Condemned to Death? Jurisdictional Dialogue and Clash Between Religious and Secular Authorities, c.1250–1320 (Lidia Luisa Zanetti Domingues) (OPEN ACCESS)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2025.2456271
Abstract:
Between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a variety of legal actors became involved in disputes regarding the right of criminals condemned to death to access religious comforts such as sacraments, Christian burial, and the possibility to make bequests pro anima. These debates centred around important questions such as: which authorities held the right to grant or deny spiritual assistance to executed criminals? What normative bases could be invoked to support these claims? This paper argues that, in the period c.1250–1320, lay and religious authorities reiterated norms deriving from a multiplicity of pre-existing systems (canon law, Roman law, theological principles) to answer these questions. The underlying agenda of these debates, however, was a struggle for power regarding whose ultimate authority it was to decide who could be considered a member of the community and to what extent. In time, this struggle contributed to a gradual separation between the political community and a previously all-encompassing Ecclesia.
Politics from Law or Law as Politics? Hugh of Poitiers’s Chronica and the Politics of ius in the Mid-twelfth Century (Alice Taylor) (OPEN ACCESS)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2025.2456283
Abstract:
This paper considers the relationship between the modern concepts of law and politics and the twelfth-century concept of ius (‘law, right’) in a chronicle written by a monk, Hugh of Poitiers, between the 1140s and 1160s. This chronicle documented the conflict over Vézelay Abbey, which involved some of the major ecclesiastical, monastic, royal and comital players of Western Europe. The paper argues that, by focussing on the chronicler's use of the concept of ius, this legal conflict is best understood, in our terms, as a political one, in that it involved arguments about how a just society should be ordered, rather than by the determination of the correct jurisprudential norms at stake in the process of litigation. Jurisdiction therefore involved contemporary legal actors setting out clear but competing understandings of that right order. This forces us to rethink any automatic separation between legal aims and political aims in our analyses of jurisdictional conflict in the mid-twelfth century.
Cosmopolitan Local Law in the Medieval Latin West (Ada Kuskowski)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2025.2456266
Abstract:
Medieval lay law, especially customary law, is known as a quintessential form of ‘local knowledge’. It serves in legal history as the inward-looking and parochial foil to the ‘common laws’ (ius commune) of the medieval Latin West: the Roman law of universities and the canon law of the church. These conventional notions of common and particular have overdetermined how we think of medieval law. This article argues that John of Ibelin’s Assises de Jerusalem (c.1264), a lawbook written for the Kingdom of Jerusalem and Cyprus, shows that the jurisdiction and authority of lay customary law did not have to be based on changelessness or on the cohesive identity of a homogenous community but could also be based on constant updating and cosmopolitanism. John imagined this, not accidentally, in the context of conquest and Christian mission. His vision offers crucial insight into the universalizing potential of ‘local’ law and, as such, reconfigures our understanding of medieval law broadly.
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