Abstract
The devil is a famous figure in the medieval discourse on justice and is notoriously reliable in legal actions. Thus he occurs in a story-type which presents the devil as seizing lawyers or judges. In several examples dating from the early the 13th century onward, this story-type seems to discuss the difficult relationship between legal rationality and narrative values. From these stories emerges a small but complete model of law and literature. Their structures reveal a common primary concern: whether judgement on a case solely derived according to the logic of legal rules can also be just (billig) without the influence of narrative patterns. If so, legal thinking would lack a higher tropological sense of what is true. At the very least, the story-type demonstrates what performativity in justice means: to pass a judgment on someone is shown as a speech act similar to praying or cursing. This implies not only that the narration can also become a kind of verdict, but also that the story-type itself has to be judged in a space between law and literature.
Published Version
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