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.

About the Author

Jeffrey A. Bowman is John B. McCoy-Bank One Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at Kenyon College.

Reviews

Bowman is very good at breaking down the distinctions between oral and documentary forms of evidence and between supposedly private and public elements in the administration of justice.

-- Roger Collins * History *

Bowman's chapters dedicated to the careers of Catalan judges and the day-to-day practice of law and adjudication will prove extremely interesting for both legal and institutional historians of the early Middle Ages.... From a close study of the prologues of many different types of contemporary legal documents,... Bowman fashions a clear portrait of Catalan judges who, unlike their counterparts from many other parts of Carolingian Francia, were well-trained, well-respected, and well-compensated.

-- Warren Brown, California Institute of Technology * American Historical Review *


Awards
Winner of Winner of the 2004 Premio del Rey given (American.



Book Information
ISBN 9780801439902
Author Jeffrey A. Bowman
Format Hardback
Page Count 304
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 155mm * 24mm