Teachers surely encounter calculating students in secondary schools, maybe even university students or exceptionally in primary education. Today I saw the announcement of a serious question about a lawyer who is not supposed to calculate. The adagium ïudex non calculat", a judge does not calculate, sounds familiar, but what is its earliest source? Is it indeed already known in classical Roman law? Hanjo Hamann of the Law School of the European Business School (EBS) in Wiesbaden challenges you to find the earliest possible reference to this proverb ..read more

Several scholarly projects have created online access, in repertories or digital versions, to Early Modern letters, in particular for a number of famous writers and scholars. Less attention seems to go to mail delivery in Early Modern Europe. Lately I encountered the research blog of Eric Vanzieleghem (Brussels) who charted French legislation on postal services from the fourteenth century onwards, focusing in particular on postal services during the Enlightenment. By chance I also spotted the website of a research project about Early Modern itineraries and travel guide books aiming at gaining ..read more

When creating an artcile or even a blog post creating a mind map can be most helpful. Using maps to represent information about legal history or historic vents 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 projec ..read more

Finding sources can be a hard task. The efforts of scholars who start creating any kind of repertory face many challenges. For tracing manuscripts concerning the medieval ius commune some online repertories already exist. In IVS Commune online, a new project at the Università di Torino, not just manuscripts will be presented, but also early printed editions of the works of late medieval lawyers and other legal texts. The project will cover the period 1350-1650. In 2021 the start of work on this project was announced, and now the first results can be searched online. What are the core aims and ..read more

This year I somehow evaded or skipped the remembrance activities and publications around the end of slavery in the former Dutch Suriname in 1863. Frankly, I even thought we had already had manifestations about the act of emancipation a few years ago, in 2013! To me it seemed not entirely just to neglect the continuation of slavery in other parts of the Dutch colonial empire after 1863. The death of Natalie Zemon Davis on October 21, 2023 helped me to remember she did research, too, on the history of colonization and slavery in Suriname. In this post I would like to bring some strands of though ..read more

In December 2022 I first spotted SION-Digit, a research project aiming at using notarial acts from Venice, Bordeaux and Amsterdam to gain new insights into Early Modern Jewish history. Project leader Evelien Chayes received in 2022 media attention for her discovery during this project of a rare letter by Michel de Montaigne amidst records from a notary's archive held at Bordeaux. Even with only a project blog I think SION-Digit deserves attention here for its goal of using legal records as a historical source showing much hidden things about the history of Jews in Early Modern Europe ..read more

Some subjects deserve highlighting in general within historical research. On several occasions I therefore present here contributions on major themes in legal history such as justice and injustice, slavery and discrimination. Women's history, too, should figure here more often. It took me some time to look carefully at the results of a special digitization project finished earlier this year by the British Library. In March an overview of some ninety manuscripts was presented in a PDF, and in May a further overview was added for more than 200 newly digitized charters and 25 rolls. Adding these ..read more

Approaching a subject in legal history can often start from very different points of departure. You might look at Frisian law as a typical branch of Dutch legal history, but it is equally possible to consider it a part of Scandinavian law. A new edition and English translation of an important text for Frisian medieval law, the Freeska Landriucht has recently been edited by Han Nijdam, Jan Hallebeek,and Hylkje de Jong [Frisian land law: A critical edition and translation of the Freeska Landriucht (Leiden-Boston, 2023]. This book in the series Medieval law and its practice (volume 33) is even av ..read more

In summer there is hopefully more time to look leisurely at new or augmented online resources. One of them came unexpectedly into view for me. The Borthwick Institute for Archives of the University of York alerted to its newly digitized archival collection with four ecclesiastical visitations court books accessible at JSTOR. Soon it became clear this platform for scholarly publications - with already some subdomains for digital collections - has added a whole section for such collections, with a substantial number of them in open access. What has JSTOR in store for legal historians among these ..read more

In 2022 a celebration around the Bibliotheca Thysiana in Leiden could not take place as scheduled. Only now a volume of essays appeared celebrating the rich diversity of the collections in this remarkable public library from the seventeenth century, Tot publijcque dienst der studie. Boeken uit de Bibliotheca Thysiana, edited by Wim van Anrooij en Paul Hoftijzer (Hilversum 2022). Johannes Thysius (1622-1653), a young Dutch lawyer from a rich Flemish family, succeeded in buying during his short life a remarkable collection of books and pamphlets. Luckily his last will contained provisions to mai ..read more