Charles Donahue

The Canon Law On the Formation of Marriage and Social Practice in the Later Middle Ages

The legal rules concerning the formation of marriage adopted by Pope Alexander III (1159-1181) gave considerable freedom to marriage partners to form a marriage without the consent of their parents or lords. A preliminary survey of the surviving records from the medieval church courts in both England and France suggests that there were substantial differences in the types of marriage-formation cases being heard in the two countries. The difference in types of cases, in turn, suggests that by the end of the Middle Ages, French parents were having more success than English in controlling the marriage choices of their children.

Biology and the Origins of the English Jury

The history of institutions is plagued by the biological analogy. We speak so frequently of the life and death , the birth, growth, maturity , and decline , of institutions that we forget that these words are being used metaphorically. Of course, the human beings who create and use the institutions have a birth and a death, but human institutions have only a start and a stop (frequently a far less precise one than those words might imply), and there is no reason why the periods between the start and stop need parallel those of living organisms.

Philologia ancilla historiae: An emendation to Lex Burgundionum, 42,2

Zusammenfassung: Die moderne Interpretation der Lex Burgundionum 42,2 behauptet, dass eine Witwe, wenn sie innerhalb eines Jahrs nach dem Tod ihres Mannes heiratet, den Anteil an der Erbschaft ihres ersten Mannes verliert, den sie sonst bekommen hätte� Wenn sie mit dem nächsten Eheschluss aber ein Jahr oder länger zuwartet, verliert sie sowohl den Erbanteil als auch das wittimon/pretium aus der zweiten Ehe� Ihre Vermögenseinbuße ist also größer, als wenn sie schneller wieder geheiratet hätte� Der Anreiz innerhalb eines Jahres zu heiraten scheint seltsam, denn es widerspricht römischen und christlichen Regeln, die ein tempus luctus von mindestens einem Jahr nach dem Tod des Ehemannes festlegten� Die Autoren behaupten, dass dieser Widerspruch keine Besonderheit des Gesetzes ist, sondern auf fehlerhafter textlicher Überlieferung beruht� Eine umsichtige Emendation kann den ursprünglichen Wortlaut wiederherstellen�

The Court Book of Mende and the Secular Lordship of the Bishop: Recollecting the Past in Thirteenth-Century Gévaudan (review)

The oldest register of an “ecclesiastical court” yet found in France is the register of the episcopal court of Mende housed in the departmental archives in the remote, mountainous city of the same name (1268–72, A[rchives] d[épartementales de la] L[ozère] G963). The quotation marks are necessary because the exact nature of the jurisdiction reflected in the book is the subject of Bulman’s study. To place the register in context, she tells the story of the jurisdictional claims of the bishops of Mende from the earlier Middle Ages with particular focus of Aldebert III (bishop of Mende, 1151–87) and later to Guillaume Durand (nephew of the famous canonist and bishop of Mende, 1296–1330). Early in Guillaume’s pontificate (1307) and in settlement of litigation in the parlement of Paris that began in 1269, Guillaume and Philip (IV) the Fair agreed to a paréage whereby at least the secular jurisdiction in the county of Gévaudan, which was coterminous with the diocese of Mende, was to be exercised by a single court controlled jointly and roughly equally by the bishop and the king. This arrangement seems to have continued, not without tensions, at least into the fifteenth century.