Bram van Hofstraeten

Recording Customs in Early Modern Antwerp, a Commercial Metropolis

This article questions whether early modern compilations of customary law retained their customary nature after being recorded in the Low Countries by learned jurists and within the framework of a procedure designed and controlled by a central authority. By means of a quantitative analysis of the seventeenth-century recorded customs of the commercial metropolis of Antwerp, as well as their legal origins, it will become apparent that such collections of recorded customs can no longer be typified as unadulterated customary law. Despite a considerable proportion of authentic customary elements, these »customary« compilations contained numerous articles that sprouted from non-customary legal sources like Roman law, local as well as foreign legislation, foreign compilations of customary law and the achievements of European jurisprudence.

Frankfurt und Hamburg vor dem Reichskammergericht. Zwei Handels- und Handwerkszentren im Vergleich

(383). In practice, then, the real relationship between secular and religious judicial authorities differed from one territory to another and from case to case. Insisting upon the complexity of legal practice, the author has bravely resisted any attempt at making sweeping generalizations, even if this renders his work very difficult to access for non-specialists. The reader remains left with only a couple of general inferences from the many complex court cases that have been meticulously described and analysed in the book under review. A rather obvious finding is that the delimitation of judicial competence was as futile in early-modern times as it had been in the late Middle Ages (717), but the complexity of the matter is further amplified by the fact that the definition of secular and spiritual affairs, respectively, remained unclear as well (718). More concrete is the observation that the highest courts in the Holy Roman Empire, namely the Imperial Chamber Court and the Aulic Council (Reichshofrat) resisted appeals with Papal representatives or the Rota Romana, the supreme court of the Catholic Church (722). This is one of the limited yet interesting examples of conclusions about the struggle for judicial sovereignty in the early-modern German area which could serve as a starting point for comparative legal historical scholarship.