In the Early Modern period governments wielded much more power than allowed later on by the division of legislative, executive and judicial powers. Hence access to the resolutions of a governing body in Early Modern Europe gains in importance for historians of this period. On December 9, 2024 the Huygens Institute of the Royal Dutch Acsfrmy of Sciences launched the portal Goetgevonden [Approved] for the resolutions of the Staten-Generaal [States General] between 1576 and 1786. The English version of this portal has yet to be published, a good reason to restrict myself here to first impressions ..read more

The history of criminal law deserves more attention here. However, dealing with witchcraft makes me uneasy in view of the prejudices coming into view and the need to correct the bias of popular views of witches and sorcerers. A few days after spotting a newly digitized archival series with acts concerning witchcraft trials in Early Modern Switzerland I saw an installment of a National Geographic tv series on witchcraft which convinced me a sober but telling representation of this subject is indeed possible. Coping with biases and prejudices is perhaps inevitable fpr this subject! Studying the ..read more

When creating an article or even a blog post creating a mind map can be most helpful. Using maps to represent information about legal history or historic events and developments with a legal dimension can help you to see legal history iun a wider perspective. This month Klaus Graf kindly alerted me at Archivalia to a German project with legal maps, Rechtskarten, the fruit of a cooperation between nine legal historians at a numberof German universities. They aim at presenting an atlas touching on both legal and cultural history. Its current dimensions are still modest, but in my view thsi proje ..read more

Making lists and overviews is one of my typical habits. I am always glad to find online overviews of projects and websites or portals to an entire range of projects. Thus every now and then I used the portal European Historical Bibliographies (HistBib), hosted by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW). Only last week I saw this portal had been archived on January 14, 2021. It is clear I do not regularly use this portal, but having quick access to these historical bibliographies can be most useful. In this post I will report on my efforts to find a similar commented over ..read more

Medieval sources come in a variety of genres. Among sources for medieval legal history the Early Medieval formulae are in a class of its own. The kind of Latin is not as classical as you might like it to be, and the rather old standard edition has now too many defects to be useful. Creating a new edition will be a project requiring besides excellent knowledge of medieval Latin and among much more also stamina and financial support during many years. The Universität Hamburg has got the courage to start the edition project Formulae - Litterae - Chartae led by Philppe Depreux in coopera ..read more

Amidst the current situation around the COVID-19 virus worldwide commemorations take place of the end of the Second World War, 75 years ago. After two generations work continues on retracing objects of arts and other objects belong to a shared cultural heritage which were taken from Jewish people by the Nazi regime or stolen by others. The process of giving back such objects is often as difficult as retracing art objects at all, not in the least because legal matters impose themselves, too. In this post I will look at a number of relevant projects, in particular at a web portal with a central ..read more

Musing about a possible goal for a holiday this summer France is bound to enter my thoughts! Thus it made me really happy to find a new portal about French regional history with an European dimension. The portal Norécrit. Aus sources de la Normandie. Pratiques de l'écrit das la Normandie médiévale is a project at the Université de Caen bringing you a tripartite online corpus with sources for legal history, ecclesiastical administration and the history of medieval archives and libraries, in particular for the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel. In earlier posts I looked here at Norman customary law and ..read more

Even when you are interested in totally different subjects in medieval history emperors, kings and popes attract your attention. Their power and authority makes them a natural focus for research, also because the most powerful people and institutions leave a rich track in archival records and manuscripts. Upheavals such as wars, fires and revolutions destroyed parts of this legacy in parchment and paper, but a massive amount of information has survived five or more centuries. The papal curia is rightly seen as one of the earliest and most active medieval bureaucracies. In 2019 the Vatican arch ..read more

After the Second World War Europe had for decades no wars within its borders. The wars devastating the former Yugoslavia ended a period of peace, and after the war in Kosovo yet another peaceful period came which has now been broken. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has started an uncertain period. Assessing the facts about the war is difficult, because truth is the first victim of war. What can you find online about the history of Ukraine, Russia and Eastern Europe to study sources for the history and cultural heritage of peoples and nations involved and connected with them? In this post I wil ..read more

Archaeologists and historians in general do things differently. Archaeologists search and interpret material objects and traces of human history hidden from sight in the soil, and historians look at still existing documentary evidence, be they written documents or artefacts above ground level. Thus the title of the digital project The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (DALME) created at Harvard University is at least intriguing. The core and clue of this projects are written documents telling us about objects sometimes no longer existing which offer a glimpse of medieval househol ..read more