BOOK: Ada Maria KUSKOWSKI, Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 429 pp., ISBN 9781009217897, £95

 

(image source: Cambridge University Press)

Book description: 

Custom was fundamental to medieval legal practice. Whether in a property dispute or a trial for murder, the aggrieved and accused would go to lay court where cases were resolved according to custom. What custom meant, however, went through a radical shift in the medieval period. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, custom went from being a largely oral and performed practice to one that was also conceptualized in writing. Based on French lawbooks known as coutumiers, Ada Maria Kuskowski traces the repercussions this transformation – in the form of custom from unwritten to written and in the language of law from elite Latin to common vernacular – had on the cultural world of law. Vernacular Law offers a new understanding of the formation of a new field of knowledge: authors combined ideas, experience and critical thought to write lawbooks that made disparate customs into the field known as customary law.

Table of contents: 

Introduction: vernacular writing and the transformation of customary law in Medieval France
Part I. Written Custom and the Formation of Vernacular Law:
1. What is custom? Concept and literary practice
2. Composing customary law as a vernacular law
3. Writing a 'ius non scriptum': writtenness, memory and change
Part II. Political and Intellectual Tensions:
4. Uneasy jurisdictions: lay and ecclesiastical law
5. Roman law, authority and creative citation
Part III. Implications:
6. Custom in lawbooks and records of legal practice
7. Dynamic text: dialectic, manuscript culture and customary law
8. Implications of circulating text: crafting a French common law
Conclusion: lasting model and professional community
Bibliography
Index

About the author: 

Ada Maria Kuskowski is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her interdisciplinary approach weaves together history, law and literary approaches to understand how legal cultures developed in Europe. This is her first book.

More information can be found here.  

 

JOURNAL: Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques [Special Issue Bad Custom/Mala Consuetudo]

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Articles:

Bad Custom. The Meanings and Uses of a Legal Concept in Premodern Europe (Anthony Perron)
DOI 10.3167/hrrh.2021.470301 (OPEN ACCESS)
Abstract:

The place and function of custom as a species of law—distinguished from custom as simply polite manners or cherished cultural traditions—has long been a source of research and debate among legal theorists and historians. One school of thought, reflecting the authority of written statute in modern jurisprudence, has relegated custom in a juridical sense to “primitive” societies, whereas proper law belongs to a world of state sovereignty. Other scholars have revisited the continuing validity of custom, including a trenchant body of work on the use (and manipulation) of custom in modern colonial regimes. At the same time, some have seen benefits in the acknowledgment of custom as a source of norms. A 2006 collection of articles, for instance, explored ways in which customary law might serve as a better foundation for the sustainable development of natural resources. As David Bederman has written, “Custom can be a signal strength for any legal system—preliterate or literate, primitive or modern.”

Mala consuetudo. Un excursus romain autour d'une expression médiévale (Soazick Kerneis)
DOI 10.3167/hrrh.2021.470302
Abstract:

The concept of custom is a creation of Western lawyers allowing for the conversion of indigenous uses into the terms of the dominant legal order. If the State’s constraint is ultimately decisive in the formulation of custom, does that mean in Europe too it was essentially a State creation, with the peoples hardly participating in its existence? The mala consuetudo is a matter of power relations, so that it is necessary to emphasize the impact of practices, of popular action on the shaping of customs. This article considers the content of the medieval expression as a category of thought and transposes it to Roman antiquity in order to reconsider the development of consuetudines. If the Roman consuetudo was indeed a creation of power, the communities to which it applied managed to contain its perimeter. Its durability is probably due in part to the fact that it was perceived as a community privilege.

Scandal of the Church, Prison of the Soul. The Problem of Bad Custom in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Canon Law and Practice (Anthony Perron)
DOI 10.3167/hrrh.2021.470303
Abstract:

This article explores “bad custom” (prava consuetudo) in Latin-Christian church law of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Drawing chiefly on papal decretal letters and the statutes of local and regional synods, it discusses the theoretical debates over bad custom, how customs came to be regarded as evil, and what prava consuetudo meant in practice. While many usages were labeled “bad,” especially troubling were those that threatened clerical status by implying lay claims to authority in the church, blurring the distinction between laity and clergy, or humiliating the professed religious. The article also asks whether legal concerns over such collective behavior that brought scandal upon the church may have been provoked by a moral discourse over prava consuetudo as sinful conduct endangering the individual soul.

Bad Customs, Civic Ordinances, and “Customary Time” in Medieval and Early Modern English Urban Law (Esther Liberman Cuenca)
DOI 10.3167/hrrh.2021.470304
Abstract:

This article examines 45 preambles in collections of urban customary law (called custumals) from 32 premodern towns in England between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Urban custom was the local law of English towns, and constituted traditions and privileges that gained legal force over time. How lawmakers conceived of “bad” custom—that is, the desuetude or corruption of custom—was crucial to the intellectual framework of urban law. Evidence from preambles shows that lawmakers rooted the legitimacy of their laws in “customary time,” which was the period from the supposed origins of their customs to their formalization in text. Lawmakers’ efforts to reinforce, ratify, and revise urban customs by making new custumals and passing ordinances were attempts to broaden their autonomy and respond to the possibility of “bad” custom.

The Opposite of Custom. Fashion, Sumptuary Law, and Consuetudo in Fifteenth-Century Northern Italy (M. Christina Bruno)
DOI /10.3167/hrrh.2021.470304
Abstract:

Fifteenth-century Italian urban and ecclesiastical authorities sought to regulate the laity’s conspicuous consumption of dress, sometimes resulting in canon law petitions for exemption on the grounds of custom. By exploiting an ambivalent definition of custom according to status, wealthy men and especially women successfully sidestepped regulation. Critics of luxury such as the Franciscan Observants, who encountered similar arguments in confession, countered this permissive understanding of custom with alternate criteria for determining proper dress tied to the morality of the economic behavior that made luxurious dress possible. Overlapping definitions of custom drawn from canon law and moral theology thus provided both fashionable people and their confessors a way to negotiate and contest their status.

Competing Selves in Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Montpensier and the Nouvelle Historique (Nupur Patel)
DOI 10.3167/hrrh.2021.012002
Abstract:

This article analyzes the different selves operating in Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Montpensier. Contrary to scholarship, which tends to position the text as a mere precursor of La Princesse de Clèves, it is in La Princesse de Montpensier where one first locates the interior. Lafayette presented a princess coming to terms with her identity, debating with different selves against a backdrop of social, historical, and political ideals. The nouvelle historique was central to the development of selves; it was an important medium through which Lafayette could perceive, explore, and contest a woman’s identity in relation to society. The genre also enabled writers to examine themselves. Lafayette used it to test out her own authorial self and locate her place in the literary sphere.

Apprenticeship and Learning by Doing The Role of Privileged Enclaves in Early Modern French Cities (Jeff Horn)
DOI 10.3167/hrrh.2021.012001
Abstract:

In France, formal guild training was not as ubiquitous a means of socializing young people into a trade as it has been portrayed by scholars. Guilds were limited geographically, and in many French cities privileged enclaves controlled by clerical or noble seigneurs curbed the sway of corporate structures, or even created their own. Eighteenth-century Bordeaux provides an extreme example of how limited guild training was in France’s fastest-growing city. The clerical reserves of Saint-Seurin and Saint-André that housed much of the region’s industrial production had quasi-corporate structures with far more open access and fewer training requirements. In Bordeaux, journeymen contested masters’ control over labor and masters trained almost no apprentices themselves. Formal apprenticeship mattered exceptionally little when it came to training people to perform a trade in Bordeaux.

Read more with Berghahn. 

BOOK: Adrien WYSSBROD, De la coutume au code. Résistances à la codification du droit civil à Neuchâtel sous l'Ancien Régime (Neuchâtel: Université de Neuchâtel, 2019), 363 p. ISBN 978-1792722660, € 17,5

Book abstract:

Le droit civil dans la principauté de Neuchâtel reste coutumier durant tout l'Ancien Régime. Malgré une volonté en apparence affirmée de codifier, les princes de Neuchâtel successifs ne parviennent pas à faire rédiger cette coutume. Leurs rêves de codifications s'inscrivent parfaitement dans les idées des Lumières et les souverains sont soutenus par les philosophes. Pourquoi, dans une petite principauté telle que celle de Neuchâtel, régie par de puissants souverains comme Frédéric II, la mise par écrit du droit se révèle-t-elle impossible ? Quelles résistances un tel projet rencontre-t-il, qui en sont les acteurs et comment agissent-ils ? Les réponses à ces questions ne peuvent être données qu'à la suite d'une analyse minutieuse de l'imposante masse de documents concernant la codification. Une fois ce phénomène éclairci, la comparaison du modèle neuchâtelois avec d'autres exemples de résistances à la codification permet de faire apparaître des constantes et des particularités dans ces oppositions. Ces informations, replacée dans le contexte de la fin de l'Ancien Régime permet d'observer et de mieux comprendre ces sociétés à un tournant de la modernité. La conception même de la souveraineté, de la domination et du pouvoir peuvent être interrogés au moyen de ces entreprises de codification qui ne parviennent que difficilement à aboutir, ou échouent simplement. Les résistances à la codification ne doivent être observées ni comme un phénomène anecdotique et provincial ni comme un mal à surmonter pour parvenir au code. Elles sont interrogées comme le miroir d'une société que rejette de manière parfaitement légitime une transformation du système juridique aujourd'hui faussement considérée comme une évolution forcément bénéfique. Quant à la réaction des princes face à cette opposition, elle témoigne du choix complexe et détermine la figure du pouvoir qu'ils souhaitent incarner.

More information on the author's website or on amazon.