Shifting Landmarks : : Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia around the Year 1000 / / Jeffrey A. Bowman.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Bowman, Jeffrey A.,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2018]; ©2004
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Series: Conjunctions of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (304 p.) :; 2 maps, 2 halftones

In a major contribution to the debate among medievalists about the nature of social and political change in Europe around the turn of the millennium, Jeffrey A. Bowman explores how people contended over property during the tenth and eleventh centuries in the province of Narbonne. He examines the system of courts and judges that weighed property disputes and shows how disputants and judges gradually adapted, modified, and reshaped legal traditions. The region (which comprised Catalonia and parts of Mediterranean France) possessed a distinctive legal culture, characterized by the prominent role of professional judges, a high level of procedural sophistication, and an intense attachment to written law, particularly the Visigothic Code. At the same time, disputants relied on a range of strategies (including custom, curses, and judicial ordeals) to resolve conflicts. Chronic tensions stemmed from conflicting understandings of property rights rather than from pervasive violence; the changes Bowman tracks are less signs of a world convulsed in struggle than of a world coursing with vitality. In Shifting Landmarks, property disputes serve as a bridge between the author's inquiry into learned ideas about justice, land, and the law and his close examination of the rough-and-tumble practice of daily life. Throughout, Bowman finds intimate connections among ink and parchment, sweat and earth.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE -- ABBREVIATIONS -- INTRODUCTION -- PART I. COURTS AND CODES -- CHAPTER ONE. SICUT LEX EDOCET: REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING THE WRITTEN LAW -- CHAPTER TWO. DO NEO-ROMANS CURSE? LAND, LAW, AND RITUAL -- CHAPTER THREE. DILIGITE IUSTITIAM QJJI IUDICATIS TERRAM: JUDGES IN COURT AND SOCIETY -- CHAPTER FOUR. COURTS AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE -- PART II: PROOFS AND STRATEGIES -- CHAPTER FIVE. COLD CAULDRONS AND THE SMOLDERING HAND: THE JUDICIAL ORDEAL -- CHAPTER SIX. FIGHTING WITH WRITTEN RECORDS -- CHAPTER SEVEN. COMMUNITY, MEMORY, AND PROOF: THE PLACE OF WITNESS TESTIMONY -- PART III. ENDINGS AND CONTEXTS -- CHAPTER EIGHT. WINNING, LOSING, AND RESISTING: HOW DISPUTES ENDED -- CHAPTER NINE. JUSTICE AND VIOLENCE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE -- INDEX