François Hotman: Antitribonian


Book Description

Written c. 1567 (though unpublished until 1603), this is the work of an extraordinary scholar, a radical and polemicist, rival of many of the leading intellectual and political figures of his day. According to François Hotman’s distinguished biographer Donald Kelley the Antitribonian ‘is, or should be, a landmark in the history of social and historical thought’. It is also a landmark in the history of legal thought. The present edition is the first to evaluate Hotman’s text in the context of the history of Roman law from the time of the sixth-century Byzantine Emperor Justinian I to the Germany of the Enlightenment.




The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700


Book Description

This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. Scholars of early modern English literature and history have increasingly found that an understanding of how people in the past thought about and used the law is key to understanding early modern familial and social relations as well as important aspects of the political revolution and the emergence of capitalism. Judicial or forensic rhetoric has been shown to foster new habits of literary composition (poetry and drama) and new processes of fact-finding and evidence evaluation. In addition, the post-Reformation jurisdictional dominance of the common law produced new ways of drawing the boundaries between private conscience and public accountability. Accordingly, historians, critics, and legal historians come together in this Handbook to develop accounts of the past that are attentive to the legally purposeful or fictional shaping of events in the historical archive. They also contribute to a transformation of our understanding of the place of forensic modes of inquiry in the creation of imaginative fiction and drama. Chapters in the Handbook approach, from a diversity of perspectives, topics including forensic rhetoric, humanist and legal education, Inns of Court revels, drama, poetry, emblem books, marriage and divorce, witchcraft, contract, property, imagination, oaths, evidence, community, local government, legal reform, libel, censorship, authorship, torture, slavery, liberty, due process, the nation state, colonialism, and empire.




Francois Hotman


Book Description

The lifetime of Francois Hotman (1524-1590) was one of the most tumultuous periods in European history. Donald R. Kelley shows how this protégé of Calvin and agent of many of the great Protestant princes became involved in ecclesiastical politics, Huguenot diplomacy, and conspiracy. One of the first modern revolutionaries, Hotman rebelled not only against his family and its faith, but against the laws and eventually the government of his country. As an embittered exile lie produced a voluminous body of propaganda aimed at recovering a lost political and religious innocence on which to found a new community. At the same time he was one of the greatest and most versatile scholars of his age, achieving distinction as a jurist, teacher, classical scholar, dialectician, theologian, and historian. His Franco-Giallia and Anti-Tribonian have fascinated generations of political theorists, and his letters, reports, and anonymous works are of inestimable value to historians. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




Great Christian Jurists in French History


Book Description

French legal culture, from the Middle Ages to the present day, has had an impressive influence on legal norms and institutions that have emerged in Europe and the Americas, as well as in Asian and African countries. This volume examines the lives of twenty-seven key legal thinkers in French history, with a focus on how their Christian faith and ideals were a factor in framing the evolution of French jurisprudence. Professors Olivier Descamps and Rafael Domingo bring together this diverse group of distinguished legal scholars and historians to provide a unique comparative study of law and religion that will be of value to scholars, lawyers, and students. The collaboration among French and non-French scholars, and the diversity of international and methodological perspectives, gives this volume its own unique character and value to add to this fascinating series.




Eunuchs and Castrati


Book Description

Eunuchs and Castrati examines the enduring fascination among historians, literary critics, musicologists, and other scholars around the figure of the castrate. Specifically, the book asks what influence such fascination had on the development and delineation of modern ideas around sexuality and physical impairment. Ranging from Greco-Roman times to the twenty-first century, Katherine Crawford brings together travel accounts, diplomatic records, and fictional sources, as well as existing scholarship, to demonstrate how early modern interlocutors reacted to and depicted castrates. She reveals how medicine and law operated to maintain the privileges of bodily integrity and created and extended prejudice against those without it. In consequence, castrates were constructed as gender deviant, disabled social subjects and demarcated as inferior. Early modern cultural loci then reinforced these perceptions, encouraging an othering of castrates in public contexts. These extensive, almost obsessive accounts of appearance, social propensities, and gender characteristics of castrated men reveal the historical lineages of sexual stigma and hostility towards gender non-normative and physically impaired persons. For Crawford, they are the roots of sexual and physical prejudices that remain embedded in the western experience today.




Law in the Courts of Love


Book Description

In the wake of current criticisms of the legal profession, Peter Goodrich presents us with a radical alternative vision of the law. He examines past legal systems offering up the possibility of a more humane system.




Custom, Law, and Monarchy


Book Description

Custom, Law, and Monarchy explores how law evolved in early modern France, from an amalgam of customs, Roman and canon law, royal edicts, and judicial decisions, to the unified Civil Code of 1804. In exploring the history of this codification of law, Marie Seong-Hak Kim lays out a new way of understanding French history.




Donations, Inheritance and Property in the Nordic and Western World from Late Antiquity until Today


Book Description

Donations, Inheritance and Property in the Nordic and Western World from Late Antiquity until Today presents an examination of Nordic donation and gift-giving practices in the Nordic and Western world, beginning in late Antiquity and extending through to the present day. Through chapters contributed by leading international researchers, this book explores the changing legal, social and religious frameworks that shape how donations and gifts are given. In addition to donations to ecclesiastical, charitable and cultural institutions, this books also highlights the sociolegal challenges and the tensions that can occur as a result of transferring property, including answering key questions such as who has a right to what. It also presents, for the first time, an insight into the dynamics of donations and the interplay between individual motivations, strategic behaviour and the legal setting of inheritance law. Offering a broad chronological and European perspective and including a wide range of illuminating case studies Donations, Inheritance and Property in the Nordic and Western World from Late Antiquity until Today is ideal for students of Nordic and European legal and social history.