scholarly journals Tradition, Innovation, Re-enactment: Hans Talhoffer’s Unusual Weapons

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25
Author(s):  
Ariella Elema
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Court Records ◽  
German Regions ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Multiple Regions ◽  
Over Time

Abstract Multiple manuscripts of Hans Talhoffer’s fifteenth-century Fechtbuch depict duels between combatants wielding faceted clubs and tall shields, as well as combatants in tight-fitting grey clothing, and duels between a man and a woman. Legal ordinances and court records from Talhoffer’s time and before him provide context for these scenarios and this equipment. Customary law regarding judicial duels varied significantly between German regions. It also changed over time, shaped by influences that sometimes originated well outside German-speaking lands. Talhoffer’s work and the Fechtbücher that followed him reflect a practice that spanned multiple regions, preserving fading traditions while embracing new innovations.

Bad Customs, Civic Ordinances, and “Customary Time” in Medieval and Early Modern English Urban Law

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
Esther Liberman Cuenca
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Local Law ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Legal Force

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.

Traveling Sets and Ritual Performance

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherry D. Fowler
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Over Time

Two wooden sculpture sets of Six Kannon, the thirteenth-century set from Daihōonji in Kyoto attributed to the artist Higō Jōkei and the fourteenth-century set from Tōmyōji in the Minami Yamashiro district of Kyoto, are well-documented sets that show the history, modifications, and movement of the cult. Copious inscriptions inside images in the respective sets reveal diverse sponsorship, from an elite female patron in the former to a huge group of patrons from a variety of backgrounds in the latter. Extant thirteenth- to fifteenth-century written records on ritual procedures, such as Roku Kannon gōgyōki, which focused on Six Kannon, contribute to the knowledge of how the rituals related to Six Kannon were performed as well as how the Six Kannon functioned in response to different needs, such as assisting with the six paths, protecting the dharma, or bolstering sectarian heritage, throughout their changing circumstances and movement over time.

Family Provision in New Zealand and Australia

2020 ◽  
pp. 450-476
Author(s):  
Nicola Peart ◽  
Prue Vines
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Sex Partners ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Reproductive Techniques ◽  
The Common ◽  
Over Time

New Zealand and Australia are named in that order in the title because New Zealand was the first to develop the discretionary family provision jurisdiction, in 1900, that now applies in New Zealand, Australia, and much of the common law world. This allows courts to make awards to family members from the estate of the deceased. Originally benefitting only the surviving spouse and children, family provision has extended the rules of eligibility in line with changes in the meaning of ‘family’. So as well as spouses, claims can also, in many of the Australasian jurisdictions, be made by civil partners, cohabitants, and same-sex partners. Most jurisdictions have also broadened the class of eligible children to include grandchildren and stepchildren who were being maintained by the deceased as well as children born of new reproductive techniques. Both New Zealand and Australia have significant indigenous populations and their eligibility to claim family provision is modified to accord with their customary law. Over time, the courts have adopted a much broader view of a deceased’s ‘moral duty’ to his or her family, particularly in regard to claims by adult children. The size of awards has increased correspondingly. The chapter discusses this development, as well as the increasing relevance of Indigenous customary law and how the courts deal with disentitling conduct. In view of the greatly expanded scope of family provision in New Zealand and Australia, testamentary freedom may be only an illusion in these jurisdictions.

Navigating Diffuse Jurisdictions

2019 ◽  
pp. 98-120
Author(s):  
Helen Quane
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Legal Pluralism ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
State Law ◽  
System P ◽  
The Status ◽  
Over Time

This chapter studies the jurisdictional boundaries between state and non-state law with specific reference to religious, or customary, law. The determination of these regulatory forms as state law depends on the extent to which they perform prescriptive, adjudicative, or enforcement functions. Indeed, the boundaries between state and non-state law are not as stable as they may appear, as they are liable to shift according to circumstances and over time. The chapter then argues that the issue of classification acquires resonance in cases where legal pluralism occurs as the character and scope of a state’s exercise of jurisdiction becomes far more ambiguous in such situations. This can create uncertainty about the jurisdiction of the respective systems, the status of norms from one system that are given effect in another, and how these norms should be interpreted and applied given their concurrent existence within more than one legal system.

Legal History and Historiography in Colonial Sub-Saharan Africa

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Waller
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Distribution Of Power ◽  
Judicial Procedures ◽  
Criminal Matters

Increasingly, the study of law in colonial Africa has moved out of the domain of legal scholarship per se, where it had its origins in the 1940s, and into that of social and cultural history; it has also shifted from a rules-based approach, primarily concerned with legal codes and judicial institutions, to one that focuses on process and explores the complex relationship between law and culture. As the field has expanded, it has divided into sub-branches. Some remain within the scope of legal history, defined as the study of how legal codes and judicial procedures have developed and changed and of the issues of principle that arose; others are more concerned with the social impact of law, how the establishment of colonial legal regimes, including customary law and the courts where cases could be heard, presented new dilemmas and opportunities and altered the distribution of power in African communities. Beyond this, historians have also used legal records, especially court records, as social documents without being directly concerned with their particular legal and judicial contexts. Once their limitations and the difficulties of interpretation that they present have been understood, such records offer potentially rich insights into family and household affairs as well as into more obviously civil or criminal matters.

Toward a Theory of Medieval Manorial Adjudication: The Nature of Communal Judgments in a System of Customary Law

1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Beckerman
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Dispute Resolution ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Behavioral Norms ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Legal Rules ◽  
Local Courts

Historical inquiry into the character of local dispute resolution and the operation of customary law in medieval England begins in manorial courts, since it is from those local courts that the most abundant documentation survives. Were the judgments of these courts “principled” in the sense of being rooted in substantive legal rules that courts ordinarily followed, or were they ad hoc determinations based on factual circumstances invisible to the modern reader? Can historians extrapolate behavioral norms and shared cultural values from the manor court records that survive in increasing profusion from the second quarter of the thirteenth century?

scholarly journals French Law and its Expansion in the Early Modern Period

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serge Dauchy
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
French Law ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of

The history of French law in the early modern period is characterized by gradual unification, rationalization, and centralization. From the fifteenth century, the central authorities started the official registration of customary law, seeking to implement more legal uniformity and security. The homologation process resulted in the publication of doctrinal treatises, in particular about the custom of Paris, which later became the chief legal basis of the 1804 Code civil. Case law also contributed to the consolidation of private law. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are marked by the political commitment of the monarchy to codify law in order to achieve legal and procedural unification, assert royal legislation as the main source of law, and contribute to France’s commercial and colonial policy. The great ordinances of Louis XIV and the custom of Paris were indeed transplanted to Canada and Louisiana and therefore became the main expressions of France’s legal expansion.

scholarly journals Visualizing the Fight Book Tradition: Collected Martial Knowledge in the Thun-Hohenstein Album

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-45
Author(s):  
Chassica Kirchhoff
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Analyses ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Late Fifteenth

Abstract The Thun-Hohenstein album, long-known as the Thun’sche Skizzenbuch, is a bound collection of 112 drawings that visualize armoured figures at rest and in combat, as well as empty armours arrayed in pieces. The collection gathers drawings that span the period from the 1470s to around 1590. While most of the images were executed in Augsburg during the 1540s, the album’s three oldest drawings date to the late-fifteenth century. Two of these works, which form a codicological interlude between the first and second quires, find parallels in the illustrations of contemporaneous martial treatises. This article traces the pictorial lineages of these atextual images through comparative analyses of fight books produced in the German-speaking lands, and considers how the representational strategies deployed in martial treatises inflected the ways that book painters and their audiences visualized the armoured body. This exploration situates a manuscript from which one of the drawings derives, Peter Falkner’s Art of Knightly Defense, now in Vienna, within the Augsburg book painters’ workshops that would later give rise to the Thun album. Finally, this study considers how the transmission and representation of martial knowledge in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Augsburg contributed to the later depictions of armoured bodies that populate the album.

On Westphalian Woodworms and Rhenish Missionaries: The Soest Conductus Fragments and Their Afterlife

2020 ◽  
Vol 101 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-237
Author(s):  
Eva M Maschke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Original Music ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Respective Host ◽  
Music Manuscript

Abstract Examining the Soest conductus fragments, of which five single leaves have so far been rediscovered, this article analyses the different layers of use and reuse that can be deduced. First, a detailed account of the circumstances under which these manuscript fragments travelled with (or without) their respective host volumes is given. The music manuscript must have been discarded by the fifteenth century, as a bookbinder from the Dominican convent of Soest in Westphalia reused various leaves of it in a series of autographs written by Jacob of Soest, who died in 1438. After the dissolution of the convent’s library in the course of nineteenth-century secularization, further contexts of reuse and dismemberment pertaining to the fragments can be demonstrated. Secondly, the remnants of the original music manuscript are analysed. The use of the two-part conductus O crux ave spes unica (H4) as the opening piece of a fascicle can be connected to the dedication of the Soest Dominican house to the Holy Cross. In comparison to other fragmentary sources that made their way to the German-speaking area, as well as the long-known codices F, W1, and W2, the Soest music manuscript seems closest to W2. While, however, these two codices show significant parallels in terms of mise-en-page and copying process, the choice of repertory might have deliberately differed. This points to production in the same workshop, but for different commissioners.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document