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

A new understanding of the transformative effect of vernacular writing on customary law in medieval France.

Ada Maria Kuskowski (Author)

9781009217897, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 November 2022

429 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 3 cm, 0.79 kg

'This study is a revelation. Early French customary law emerges from it as the dynamic creation of sophisticated juridical thinkers, who worked not to record local traditions, but to shape and teach a distinct form of legal practice and thinking for secular courts across thirteenth-century France. By studying the first coutumiers as a coherent whole, with a focus on language and manuscripts and an eye toward recent scholarship in legal history generally, Kuskowski defines a subject every bit as complex, interesting, and influential as the medieval Roman and canon laws that overshadow it in the historiography.' Adam Kosto, Columbia University

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
Conclusion: lasting model and professional community
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], European history [HBJD]