BOOK: Charles Edward SMITH, Colonial Massachusetts Laws and Liberties and the English Commonwealth State Formation, the Rule of Law, and the People’s Welfare (Leiden: Brill, 2024). ISBN: 978-90-04-70633-0, € 172.78

(Source: Brill)

ABOUT THE BOOK

On July 4, 1653, the Nominate or Barebones Parliament convened with a minority of committed radicals (Levellers and religious extremists) and a conservative majority of Cromwell’s allies. During acrimonious debates on law reform, the radicals demanded a condensed law book similar to the one adopted in Colonial Massachusetts.
These mostly overlooked events reveal a radical wing of Puritanism determined to found a self-governing state, fully cognizant of the real possibility that England would interdict such attempts by force of arms. This work investigates the motives for such a hazardous undertaking, and the possible influences these events had on the colony’s posterity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charles Edward Smith, Ph.D. (1998), University of Chicago, has recently retired from the US Dept. of Defense, where he served as the Director of Legislative Operations in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part 1
The English Commonwealth and the Protestant Reformation
1 Massachusetts Capital Laws of 1642
2 Education and Radical Religiosity

Part 2
Creating a Legal Authority in the “New World”
3 No Taxation without Representation
4 The Negative Voice
5 The Standing Council

Part 3
Publishing Massachusetts Laws and Liberties
6 The Body of Liberties of 1641
7 Divine Magistracy vs. a Rule of Law
8 The Laws and Liberties of 1648

Part 4
Transatlantic Legal Reform and Popular Sovereignty
9 Penal Laws, Debt, and Early Modern Markets
10 Ship Money, Rex v. Hampden, and Matters of State
11 Popular Sovereignty: Salus Populi Suprema Lex

Part 5
Imperial Ambitions
12 An Arbitrary, Absolute, and Unlimited Power
13 Sovereignty of the Law

Conclusion

Works Cited

Index

More information with the publisher.

BOOK: Spike Gibbs, Lordship, State Formation and Local Authority in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). ISBN: 9781009311830

(Image source: Cambridge University Press)

ABOUT THE BOOK

Providing a new narrative of how local authority and social structures adapted in response to the decline of lordship and the process of state formation, Spike Gibbs uses manorial officeholding – where officials were chosen from among tenants to help run the lord's manorial estate – as a prism through which to examine political and social change in the late medieval and early modern English village. Drawing on micro-studies of previously untapped archival records, the book spans the medieval/early modern divide to examine changes between 1300 and 1650. In doing so, Gibbs demonstrates the vitality of manorial structures across the medieval and early modern era, the active and willing participation of tenants in these frameworks, and the way this created inequalities within communities

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Spike Gibbs is Junior Professor for the Economic History of the Middle Ages at the University of Mannheim. His writing on manorial officials, felony forfeiture and managing stray animals has been published in journals such as the Journal of British Studies and the English Historical Review. This is his first book.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

1. The changing role of manorial officers and manor courts

2. Manorial officeholding and selection processes: participation or restriction?

3. Manorial officeholding and unfreedom

4. Manorial officeholding and village governance: misconduct and landscape control

5. State formation I: the parish

6. State formation II: vills, quarter sessions and constables

Conclusion

Appendix 1: Categorising presentments

Appendix 2: Identifying individuals

Appendix 3: Population estimates.

More information can be found here.

BOOK: Deborah BOUCOYANNIS, Kings as Judges: Power, Justice, and the Origins of Parliaments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). ISBN 9781107162792, £ 29.99

 

(Source: CUP)

Cambridge University Press has recently published  Kings as Judges: Power, Justice, and the Origins of Parliaments

ABOUT THE BOOK

How did representative institutions become the central organs of governance in Western Europe? What enabled this distinctive form of political organization and collective action that has proved so durable and influential? The answer has typically been sought either in the realm of ideas, in the Western tradition of individual rights, or in material change, especially the complex interaction of war, taxes, and economic growth. Common to these strands is the belief that representation resulted from weak ruling powers needing to concede rights to powerful social groups. Boucoyannis argues instead that representative institutions were a product of state strength, specifically the capacity to deliver justice across social groups. Enduring and inclusive representative parliaments formed when rulers could exercise power over the most powerful actors in the land and compel them to serve and, especially, to tax them. The language of rights deemed distinctive to the West emerged in response to more effectively imposed collective obligations, especially on those with most power.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Deborah Boucoyannis, George Washington University, Washington DC

Deborah Boucoyannis teaches Comparative Politics at George Washington University. This book is based on a dissertation that received the American Political Science Association's Ernst Haas Best Dissertation Award in European Politics and the Seymour Martin Lipset Best Dissertation Award from the Society for Comparative Research. She has published in Perspectives on Politics, Politics and Society, and other journals.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface and acknowledgments
Part I. The origins of Representative Institutions: Power, Land, and Courts:
1. Introduction
2. A theory of institutional emergence: regularity, functional fusion, and the origins of parliament
3. Explaining institutional layering and functional fusion: the role of power
Part II. Origins of Representative Rractice: Power, Obligation, and Taxation:
4. Taxation and representative practice: bargaining vs compellence
5. Variations in representative practice: 'absolutist' France and Castile
6. No taxation of elites, no representative institutions
Part III. Trade, Towns, and the Political Economy of Representation:
7. Courts, institutions, and cities: Low Countries and Italy
8. Courts, institutions, and territory: Catalonia
9. The endogeneity of trade: the English wool trade and the Castilian mesta
Part IV. Land, Conditionality, and Property Rights:
10. Power, land, and second-best constitutionalism: Central and Northern Europe
11. Conditional land law, property rights, and 'Sultanism': premodern English and Ottoman land regimes
12. Land, tenure, and assemblies: Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Part V. Why Representation in the West: Petitions, Collective Responsibility, and Supra-Local Organization:
13. Petitions, collective responsibility, and representative practice: England, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

 

More info here

CONFERENCE: "Avant l’État. Droit international et pluralisme politico-juridique en Europe, XIIe -XVIIe siècle" - 18-19 May 2022, Lille & Kortrijk

(Source: KU Leuven)

Alors que l’État national souverain a longtemps été considéré comme l’acteur exclusif des relations internationales, ce projet a l’ambition de nouer un dialogue entre historiens et historiens du droit pour s’interroger sur le droit international conçu comme le cadre multi-normatif qui régit les relations entre une grande variété d’acteurs. Cette notion nous paraît mieux s’adapter aux traits spécifiques de la constellation politique médiévale et pré-moderne, qui était caractérisée par l’entrelacement de différentes juridictions, fondées sur des liens de dépendance personnelle et sur des relations de sujétion territoriale, par la coexistence d’une pluralité de centres de pouvoir au statut variable et par la répartition de l’autorité politique à différents niveaux. Les thèmes abordés dans les deux rencontres (la première à Rome le 20 septembre 2021 et la deuxième à Lille et Courtrai les 18-19 mai 2022) incluent la guerre, les représailles, la diplomatie, les relations féodales, le droit de la mer, le commerce ou encore les relations avec les juifs et les « infidèles », notre ambition générale étant de faire porter la réflexion sur trois questions transversales : celle des acteurs du droit international ; celle des sources du droit international, qui ne constituait pas à l’époque prémoderne une branche autonome de la science juridique ; celle enfin de la gestion des conflits, en particulier à travers la négociation, la médiation et l’arbitrage.

Duration of each presentation: 20 minutes

The programme is available here.

Those who wish to follow the event remotely are invited to write to dante.fedele@univ-lille.fr

Illustration: Paul Klee, “Polyphon gefasstes Weiss”, 1930

BOOK: Gianluca RUSSO. Governare castigando: le origine dello stato territoriale fiorentino nelle trasformazioni del penale (1378-1478). (Minalo: Giuffrè, 2021). ISBN 9788828838722. € 42

 

(Source: https://shop.giuffre.it/024215159-governare-castigando-le-origini-dello-stato-territoriale-fiorentino-nelle-trasformazioni-del-penale-1378-1478-.html)

PARTE PRIMA LA COSTRUZIONE DEL DOMINIO SOTTO IL REGIME ALBIZZESCO(1378-1434) 

CAPITOLO PRIMO L’ORDINE PUBBLICO COME TUTELA DELL’ORDINE POLITICO. L’EMERGENZA REPRESSIVA

CAPITOLO SECONDO PROFILI EGEMONICI DEL PENALE NEGLI STATUTI FIORENTINI DEL PRIMO QUATTROCENTO

CAPITOLO TERZO IL CONTROLLO DEL CORPO SOCIALE. L’OFFENSIVA MORALIZZATRICE

CAPITOLO QUARTO STRATEGIE PENALI A « CONSERVATIONE E AUGUMENTO » DEL DOMINIO TERRITORIALE

PARTE SECONDA IL CONSOLIDAMENTO DEL DOMINIO SOTTO IL REGIME MEDICEO(1434-1478) 

CAPITOLO QUINTO GLI OTTO. DA CACCIATORI DI RIBELLI A GIUDICI CRIMINALI

CAPITOLO SESTO « IURIS ORDINE NON SERVATO ». OLTRE GLI STATUTI

CAPITOLO SETTIMO ESERCITARE RIGORE E CLEMENZA. LA VICENDA DI VOLTERRA RIBELLE

CAPITOLO OTTAVO « IL CASO DE’ PAZZI ». LO SPETTRO DEL CRIMEN MAIESTATIS

CONCLUSIONE QUATTROCENTO FIORENTINO E STATO MODERNO. SUL CRINALE TRA REPUBBLICA E PRINCIPATO

More information: https://shop.giuffre.it/024215159-governare-castigando-le-origini-dello-stato-territoriale-fiorentino-nelle-trasformazioni-del-penale-1378-1478-.html  

JOB: Vacancy for a fulltime historian, project LORDSHIP - Lordship and State Formation in the County of Flanders, 15th - 18th Century (Ghent University/Belgian State Archives, DEADLINE 5 FEB 2020)

(source: Rijksarchief)

The Belgian State Archives recruit a fulltime historian for the BRAIN-be 2.0-project LORD (Lordship and State Formation in the County of Flanders, 15th - 18th C.), under the direction of professors Frederik Buylaert and Thijs Lambrecht (UGent, Department of History).

The application should be drafted in Dutch.

Link to the full vacancy here.