The Medieval History Journal

In this essay the author argues that it was through liturgical tradition that medieval clerics were able to claim a distinctive sphere of canonical rights. By the late eleventh century 'liturgy opened a way towards a medieval speci ficity, the attention paid to procedure, to the formal conditions required for a valid legal process'. In his study of the case of William of Saint-Calais, Bishop of Durham who was accused of treason against King William II Rufus in 1088, the author points out that the discovery of procedure by means of liturgical expressions was 'not only the consequence of a lack of a written body of procedural formulas; it derived from a monastic culture; shared by William and his opponents.

The author directs attention to the very element of arbitrariness which the inquisitional procedure implied. Besides the given fact that the French King Philip 'le Bel' had political as well as material reasons to urge the papacy to act against the Order of the Templars, she suggests that the church institutions had sufficient cause to investigate what appeared to be a serious case and hold hearings. Thus this essay studies two hearings (Abruzzi; Cyprus) which so far have escaped the scrutiny of historians. Although the trials in general were held with enormous personal expenditures and by obviously careful observation of procedural rules, the 'system did not really work'; it was undermined by the dynamics of a legal instrument (that is, torture), which in the end was based on the use of violence.

Encompassing one of the richest programmes of illumination in a customary law code, the manuscript Vidal Mayor is a thirteenth-century compilation of Aragonese law. Its illumination programme, which includes numerous court scenes, is a perfect laboratory for a serial analysis. This essay explains the structure of the image space and its function. It also analyses the represen tation of the miniatures' main characters: the providers of justice.

The essay argues that the communicative functions of the German sermons of Berthold von Regensburg cannot be limited to the central aspect of spiritual welfare. These sermons also fulfil an important role in establishing legal maxims: behind their theological form, the texts mediate social and legal norms to be followed in everyday life.

This essay analyses some medieval images representing the Biblical story of Judas'suicide. From a historian's point of view, those images must be seen in the context of a scholastic discourse on mortal sins and human responsibility. Miniatures and sculptures of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries mark a high point in the developement of pictorial representations of that theme. They render Judas in the shape of an anti-image: with deformed physiognomic characteristics, vile gestures and the attributes of vices. A central aspect of my argument will focus on the hanging-tree. A number of pictures indicate a significant transformation of this motif The former tree is replaced by a representation of gallows. I will argue that this development reflects a corres ponding revaluation of Judas' death within the scholastic discourse. Since in early-medieval literature, death at the hanging-tree is recognised as a refer ence to a denigrating death, without mourning and the presence of relatives, that is, the absence of memoria, the motif of the hanging Judas at the gallows now underscored that hanging itself, the most shameful of acts, and was a sort of penance for Judas' betrayal. During the later Middle Ages, perhaps as a result of the canonisation of the iconography of the passion, the motif of suicide appeared to lose its popularity without the wide application of this rhetoric of denigration.

In medieval Danish wall paintings during the period 1100-1600, the evi dence for depictions of jurisdiction which refer directly to the laws and juridical institutions of the past society is rare. Instead, the paintings contain a large number of scenes representing jurisdiction with reference to Biblical stories. It is a tradition in medieval imagery that Biblical persons are de picted in some kind of antique clothing and settings. Consequently, the pri mary sign function—the denotative level—performed by these motifs is not one of bringing information about jurisdiction within society. Yet their ex tended sign function—'la signification' (Barthes) or the connotative level- does inform us of the notion of how justice could 'seem to be done'.

This essay examines a corpus of material including defamatory letters and pictures that comprised one of the peculiarities of socio-legal systems in late medieval Germany. Drawing upon anthropological insights, the argument posits that in a society whose workings were determined to a large extent by unwritten laws and personal ties, the intended effect of such 'out of court' defamatory sanctions-and of medieval legal measures in general-was not so much the need to punish, but instead the restitution of social equilibrium. After tracing the legal and social background of the German practice of using injurious letters and images, the essay proceeds to characterise the mechanisms through which such materials, asserting their claims to legality in specific ways, functioned as media of social exclusion.

The present essay on 'Court-house iconography of the laterMiddleAges' pleads for a rather wide relation between text and image to provide a more differ entiated understanding of allegories like those of justice or of power. City-hall iconography should be interpreted without making extensive use of the para digm of republicanism. Medieval citizens were always proud to integrate heroes, saints, nobles, emperors and kings into their history and to turn them into citizens. City-hall iconography was not an expression of medieval re publicanism. Its motifs and programmes rather document the attempt to incorporate the city into medieval theology and into the theory of good rule.