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Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France

Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France

Author: Ada Maria Kuskowski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781009217880

Published In: August 2024
Format: Paperback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only
Hardback Edition ISBN: 9781009217897

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Custom was fundamental to medieval legal practice. Whether in a property dispute or a trial for murder, the aggrieved and accused would go to lay court where cases were resolved according to custom. What custom meant, however, went through a radical shift in the medieval period. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, custom went from being a largely oral and performed practice to one that was also conceptualized in writing. Based on French lawbooks known as coutumiers, Ada Maria Kuskowski traces the repercussions this transformation – in the form of custom from unwritten to written and in the language of law from elite Latin to common vernacular – had on the cultural world of law.

Vernacular Law offers a new understanding of the formation of a new field of knowledge: authors combined ideas, experience and critical thought to write lawbooks that made disparate customs into the field known as customary law.

Introduction: vernacular writing and the transformation of customary law in Medieval France

Part I. Written Custom and the Formation of Vernacular Law:

1. What is custom? Concept and literary practice

2. Composing customary law as a vernacular law

3. Writing a 'ius non scriptum': writtenness, memory and change

Part II. Political and Intellectual Tensions:

4. Uneasy jurisdictions: lay and ecclesiastical law

5. Roman law, authority and creative citation

Part III. Implications:

6. Custom in lawbooks and records of legal practice

7. Dynamic text: dialectic, manuscript culture and customary law

8. Implications of circulating text: crafting a French common law