Bibliographical Essay

I concentrate here on key works from the 1980s onwards, simply because of the overwhelming quantity of material. These more recent works provide seminal insights, as well as orientation for those wishing to explore the legal scholarship of the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries.

The history of crime and law in medieval Europe needs to address first the reception of Roman law in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Roman empire. For this, excellent insights are provided in Caroline Humfress, ‘Law in Practice', in P. Rousseau (ed.), A Companion to Late Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 377-91. Early medieval law receives provocative and seminal treatment in Patrick Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West: Law as Text, Image and Experience (London: Hambledon Continuum, 1999). Readers should also engage with the important approach outlined in W. Davies and P. Fouracre (eds.), The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Recent developments are highlighted by Alice Rio, ‘Introduction', in A. Rio (ed.), Law, Custom, and Justice in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2008 Byzantine Colloquium (London: King's College, 2011). With the revivification of Roman law from the twelfth century, the ius commune became increasingly prominent. For the implications of this, see Susan Reynolds, ‘The Emergence of Professional Law in the Long Twelfth Century', Law and History Review 21.2 (2003), 347-66. A nuanced and comparative view of the different ways in which Roman and customary law interacted in the twelfth century, and were cannily used by litigants, is Chris Wickham, Courts and Conflict in Twelfth-Century Tuscany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). For a case which challenges the idea of English exceptionalism in this respect, see Paul Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

A detailed treatment of the emergence of English common law is provided by Paul Brand, The Making of the Common Law (London: Hambledon Press, 1992). Historiographically, scholars of the later Middle Ages have been interested in the connections between law and developing polities in the period. An excellent overview is provided by J. Watts, The Making of Polities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Less well known but highly insightful is F. Cheyette, ‘Suum cuique tribuere', French Historical Studies 6 (1969), 287-99. On specific countries, see, for example, on France, Claude Gauvard, De grace especial: crime, etat et societe en France à la fin du Moyen Age, 2 vols. (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1991) and E. Cohen, The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France (Leiden: Brill, 1993); on Germany, F. R. H. Du Boulay, ‘Law Enforcement in Medieval Germany', History 63.209 (1978), 345-55; on Italy, Andrea Zorzi, ‘Pluralismo giudiziario e documentazione: il caso di Firenze in età comunale', in Andrea Zorzi, Jacques Chiffoleau and Claude Gauvard, Pratiques sociales et politiques judiciaires dans les villes de l'occident à la fin du Moyen Age (Rome: Ecole Franpaise de Rome, 2007), pp. 125-87.

On canon law, which often relates at least tangentially to violence, the best overviews are those of James Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (London: Longman, 1995) and Richard Helmholz, Canon Law and English Common Law (London: Selden Society, 1983), the latter examining ways in which canon law interacted with secular law.

Finally, readers should also turn to several important collections of essays which range widely across medieval law and violence and provide important insights regarding the nature oflaw and its relationship to other normative frameworks: John Bossy (ed.), The Moral World of the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); R. Mazo Karras, J. Kaye and E. Ann Matter (eds.), Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

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Source: Gordon Matthew, Kaeuper Richard, Zurndorfer Harriet (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 2: AD 500-AD 1500. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 696 p.. 2020

Bibliographical Essay

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