Salic Law Research Articles

Regulation of civil legal relations according to the Salic truth

The presented article is devoted to the analysis of the norms of the Salic Law which regulated civil legal relations of the Frankish society. The article notes that the Salic Law is a collection that was primarily devoted to the rules of criminal law and criminal procedure. Less attention was paid to the norms of civil law. This was due to the fact that the agricultural economy was not organized on a contractual basis. However, despite this, it contained rules that regulated property rights, obligations, marriage and family law, and inheritance law. The author has established that the Salic Law does not have a clear definition of property. The Franks retained communal ownership of land for a long time, as the rural neighborhood community, the marka, continued to exist despite the formation of the state. It is noted that at the end of the sixth century, the Franks formed a «full allod» – freely alienable land property, which was allowed to be freely given, transferred and bequeathed, including to women. A movable property was owned by families or individuals and could also be freely alienated and inherited. Based on the analysis of the norms of the Salic Law, the author found that the law of obligations was the least developed. There were such types of contracts as sale and purchase, exchange, gift, and loan. For a contract to be valid, in addition to the consent of the parties, it was necessary to observe various rites. As for marriage and family law, the article states that a legal marriage could be concluded between an adult free man and an adult free woman (no minimum age was set), subject to the consent of their relatives and provided that both parties were not bound by prohibited ties of kinship. Marriage was concluded through the purchase of a wife, i.e. power over her, from the person who had previously exercised this power over her. The grounds for invalidating a marriage were also defined. The author also analyzes the order of inheritance according to the Salic Law. It is established that the heirs in descending order were: children (and their descendants); mother and father; brothers and sisters; father’s sisters; mother’s sisters; father’s relatives (up to the sixth generation). Allodial land was а family land, it could not be inherited by females.

The Salic Law and the law of hereditary succession

The Salic Law and the law of hereditary succession

Judgment and Trial in Lex Ripuaria

The article is devoted to the analysis of the provisions of one of the most important sources of early medieval European law, but little studied in Russian historiography – Ripuarian Law, namely, aspects of judicial proceedings. The aim of the study was to identify both the general features of the judicial process that were perceived by the Ripuarian Franks from the legislation of the Salic Franks, in particular, the Salic Law, and the features that reflect aspects of the socio-economic development of Ripuaria. In the course of the study, firstly, the provisions of the Ripuarian Law were identified, which correspond to the existing ideas about the legal proceedings of the Franks – about the procedure for summoning to court, about the types of evidence, etc.; Secondly, in accordance with the purpose of the study, deviations from the practice of legal proceedings adopted by the Salic Franks were identified, which are characteristic of the Ripuarian Franks and are subject to study in conjunction with them (in particular, a certain simplification of judicial procedures, attention to certain types of evidence, etc.).

Преступления и наказания по Салической и Рипуарской правдам

The article presents the results of the analysis of the Frankish criminal law main provisions in the Early Middle Ages, namely, the aspects of the application of punishments for the main types of crimes. This analysis was based on the norms of two sources: the Salic Law, which is deservedly considered to be one of the most important barbarian laws, and the Ripuarian Law, which is less studied in domestic historiography, which consolidated the customary law of the Ripuarian Franks. The aim of the study was a comparative analysis of the Salic and Ripuarian laws, aimed at identifying both common characteristics of criminal law for both documents, and features that reflect various aspects of the Salic and Ripuarian Franks social and economic development. In the course of the conducted research, the qualification of the main criminal offenses according to the Ripuarian and Salic Laws was determined, the characteristic features of the criminal legislation fixed by both sources were identified (class status, the predominance of material penalties, etc.). Based on the comparison of the norms of both Laws, the author also concludes that the historical value of the Ripuarian Law is higher than it is commonly believed: while repeating the norms of the Salic Law in some parts, neverthelessб it does not duplicate it, but complements and expands the characteristics of a legal institutions number.

Violent queens. Gender and war in French royal iconography in the 17th century

In 17th-century France, the warlike dimension of violence became one of the fundamental iconographic attributes of royalty. Although at the outset they were excluded from managing affairs of state on account of Salic law, the queens Marie de’ Medici and Anne of Austria nonetheless sought to wear the costume of the chief of command in their portraits, in particular when they were placed at the head of the government in the position of regent. To achieve this, however, they did not employ a single formula but each developed personal strategies that varied in their means, objectives and results, borrowing in turn from mythological portraiture and historical representation to define their role in the management of conflicts, and ultimately of royal power.

Compulsive Masculinity: Hercules and Early Italian-Style Opera in Paris

ABSTRACT This essay investigates the rise of Italian-style opera in Paris through the lens of Ercole amante, an opera composed by Francesco Cavalli to a libretto by Francesco Buti for the wedding of the future French king Louis XIV and the Spanish infanta Maria Teresa in 1660. In the libretto Buti explores the blend of two distinct, and yet intertwined, preoccupations: the investment in the rise of operatic poetics as a new literary genre and the anxiety about the potential vulnerability of the aristocratic body in a time of rising absolutism. Translated after Cardinal Mazarin’s death into French as Hercule amoureux, Ercole amante imagines the French king in the form of the mythological figure of Hercules. Through the lens of the mythological figure, Buti charts the dual strands of genre and gender as a single enterprise while engaging with questions such as male filiation in the context of the French Salic Law.

‘Neither Completely Guilty nor Completely Innocent’: Representing Injustice in Jean Racine’s Phèdre

The eponymous protagonist of Phèdre emerges as a true tragic heroine by exercising her own free will to commit wrong instead of being a mere victim of fate. Criticism focusing on injustice has tended to shine light on Thésée, denying Phèdre royal sovereignty just as French Salic law did to queens. By shifting the spotlight from Thésée to Phèdre, and from the idea of judgment as a means of redressing injustice to injustice resulting from the challenges of governance and self–governance in royal leaders, we will see that Phèdre's gender has tended to obscure the important connection between injustice and the exercise of monarchical power. The gender of the eponymous heroine of the play operates as a cover: by associating wrongdoing with a female monarch, a literal impossibility in France, Racine is able to delve into particularly controversial aspects of unjust governance as experienced in his day and age.

La Ley Sálica: la forja de un mito nacional

It is a purpose of the article to analyze the origin and evolution of the Males Law, known incorrectly as Salic Law. This law was an important succession principle of the French monarchy that appeared during the Middle Age and continued existing during the Modernity. The goal of the article is to identify the reasons why the term Salic Law is used wrongly. Furthermore, it is studied the transcendence and importance of that successional principle to the birth of the French national state.

Shaping The Legacy Of Louise De Savoie: A New Reading Of The Heptaméron

Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron has attracted attention in recent years for its analysis of sexual violence, its narrative structure, and the insights it may offer into its author's theology and her views on empire. This essay argues that Marguerite de Navarre also uses the stories in this collection to shape the legacy of her mother, Louise de Savoie, as regent of France, embedding in them reminders of Louise de Savoie's legitimacy in this role and illustrating her effective administration of domestic and foreign affairs, her skill as a negotiator, and her dedication to peace and reconciliation. With her portrayal of Louise de Savoie as an exemplary regent in the Heptaméron, Marguerite de Navarre preempts and defuses misogynist critiques of powerful women as emotionally volatile and manipulative, and she thus contributes to the legitimization of women's political authority in France, where a spurious Salic Law was used to forbid female succession to the throne. The lively and memorable tales in the Heptaméron offer subtle but firm advocacy of women's authority and ability to rule, and they bear witness to the power of storytelling to redraw the contours of the worlds in which we live.

Celos, amor y venganza, o no hay mal que por bien no venga by Luis Vélez de Guevara

Reviewed by: Celos, amor y venganza, o no hay mal que por bien no venga by Luis Vélez de Guevara Xabier Granja Ibarreche Vélez de Guevara, Luis. Celos, amor y venganza, o no hay mal que por bien no venga. Edited by William R. Manson & C. George Peale, Juan de la Cuesta, 2018. 197 pp. ISBN: 987-1-58871-321-6. In this critical edition, Manson and Peale bring Vélez's lesser-studied Celos, amor y venganza, o no hay mal que por bien no venga to the limelight. The analytical approaches to this work are still in early stages throughout the critical field, as more attention has been given to other plays among the more than four hundred that Vélez authored. Manson and Peale aim to fill the void of this play's research with a fresh perspective on its implications for the literary canon. The volume is divided into three main sections. The first one is an introductory study by Paul Michael Johnson, who provides a detailed analysis about several aspects of the play. An earlier brief analysis of Celos conducted by Emilio Cotarelo y Mori considered it "más bien obra de Lope de Vega" (11). Johnson does not deem Mori's qualification a questioning of Vélez's authorship, but rather an atypical appreciation of the utmost quality of the play, as a justification of why it deserves further study. What Ignacio Arellano considers "comedias serias, de ambiente palaciego" (11) and Miguel Zugasti calls a "comedia palatina" (11) are brought together [End Page 180] in Peale's proposition of a "Comedia Siciliana" (12) subgenre: works that deal with the complications of the Salic law—at least collaterally. While Celos presents a different tone in its lyrical style, Vélez's typical dramatism in offenses, treachery, strategical marriages, and other narrative resources are all present. Johnson's preliminary study offers an outstanding contextualization of the book's subsequent sections. He begins by exploring the use of emotions in early modern Spanish works, from Aristotle's description of catharsis to A. A. Parker's conceptual pyramid that subordinates characters to dramatic action, action to plot, and plot to the 'moraleja' of the story. Johnson presents the emotionality of passions in theatrical spectacle as the "verdaderos motores de la acción dramática de Celos" (20), which he emphasizes in his approach to the play. Besides emotions, Johnson's preliminary study contextualizes the play's use of accidental actions as they are related to good or bad fortune, astutely relating 'accident' and 'emotion' to provide a perspective on the gendered discourse present in Celos. Queen Rosaura, following traditional patterns of feminine instability in the face of the sentimental realm—and unlike masculine dominion of it—is shown to let her passions get the best of her. However, in direct opposition to this statement, women in Celos also stand out for their bravery and rationality. Johnson uses this apparently contradictory representation of gender to pique readers' interest, which undeniably endows the play with a complexity that should interest critical researchers. Johnson's final commentary on the physical setup of the play offers further insight into how different actions and requirements of the plot were manifested visually in subtle ways. The second section consists of a bibliometric study by C. George Peale, in which he contextualizes the rationales employed in the editors' transcription of the play. The final product is an effort in linguistic regularization that forms what Peale calls a "transcripción… moderadamente ecléctica" (44) which nonetheless maintains a respectful treatment of the "deslices y peculiaridades" (46) inherent to the text. This segment also includes an exhaustive summary of metric resources present throughout the play. Analytic minds will find this a useful exploration of the structure and form of Vélez's language in Celos, thanks to Peale's quantification of the frequency with which redondillas, romances, tercetos, sonetos, octavas, quintillas, and other forms occur. The third section gives way to the play itself, one that would certainly not be out of place next to other well-known political works like Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna, Calderón de la Barca's La vida es...

Robert Persons’s Conference and the Salic Law debate in France, 1584–1594

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the French debate of the 1580s over the status of the Salic Law and its influence upon an important text in English political thought, Robert Persons’s Conference about the next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland. Polemicists on both sides of the conflict between Henri of Navarre and the Catholic League, from Pierre de Belloy to the pseudonymous ‘Rossaeus’, sought to explain the French royal succession using a concept of custom drawn from Roman law. Custom offered these thinkers a way to explain the Salic Law’s peculiar limitation of the succession to males descended agnatically, but it could also be taken to imply that the people, from whom it originated, were in some way superior to the king. The concept was exploited most effectively by Rossaeus, who translated what had been a legal discourse into a freer language of political naturalism. Rossaeus’s interpretation of custom was adapted and exploited by Robert Persons in the Conference about the next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland. While, then, much of the Conference’s contemporary influence derived from how its argument mapped onto English constitutional geography, it originated as a continuation of League political thought.

Portraying The Royal Self: Maurice-Quentin De La Tour’s 1761 Portrait Of Marie-Josèphe Of Saxony And Her Son

My analysis of Maurice-Quentin de La Tour’s Portrait of Marie-Josèphe of Saxony and Her Son (1761) in the context of Salic Law and eighteenth-century French gender politics suggests the future queen’s negotiation of her own identity in royal portraiture. While the dauphine’s representation adheres to rigidly structured codes of queenship in French art, I argue that Marie-Josèphe paradoxically sought to assert her selfhood amidst the depicted glory of the Bourbon dynasty. Likely to be the portrait’s direct patron instead of the King’s Household, Marie-Josèphe adopted sartorial and ideological elements from Jean-Marc Nattier’s more private portrayal of Queen Marie Leszczinska (1748) to construct her image, suggesting a visual fellowship between royal women as they confronted gender constraints within French absolutism in art. Also, unlike most official portraits that formally represented royal sitters in oils, La Tour’s more personal approach to painting through the intimacy of the pastel medium undermines the principles of royal portraiture to indicate a degree of the dauphine’s agency. With imagery that falls in-between what was typical for official and private portraits of royalty, La Tour’s pastel painting alludes to mounting ambiguities in representations of queenship in eighteenth-century France.

Writing, Reading, Grieving: Essays in Memory of Suzanne Dow ed. by Ruth Cruickshank, Adam Watt

Reviews 229 qu’il pourrait aussi intéresser les historiens de la Première Guerre mondiale ou de la presse française. Case Western Reserve University (OH) Christine M. Cano Cruickshank, Ruth, and Adam Watt, eds. Writing, Reading, Grieving: Essays in Memory of Suzanne Dow. Nottingham French Studies 53.1 (Spring 2014). Pp. 114. $82.50. Inspired by a 2012 conference held in memory of Dow, this issue illustrates “central facets of her work, from female experience and madness to the insights of psychoanalysis”(vii). Perhaps best known for her monograph, Madness in TwentiethCentury French Women’s Writing: Leduc, Duras, Beauvoir, Cardinal, Hyvrard (Peter Lang, 2009), Dow died in 2011, before she could complete a book on Beckett. In brief prefatory remarks, the editors set the tone for this collection by expressing admiration for her “open-armed embracing of the challenging, the complex, the downright difficult” (viii). Appropriately, the first contribution is a transcription by Edmund Chambers of a paper Dow gave in 2010 in which she meticulously documents the overlooked impact of Beckett’s work on Lacan. In similar fashion, Katherine Shingler shows how punning structures in Apollinaire’s Calligrammes convey more generally the play of “the unfettered, irrational or pre-rational mind” (20). For Lucy O’Meara, Georges Perec’s La disparition and Anne Garréta’s La décomposition engage Oulipian restrictions and generic expectations of crime fiction to raise fundamental questions about how we come to terms with the past. The influence of Dow’s manner is apparent as well in the analysis by Katie Jones of Nina Yargekov’s novel, Tuer Catherine, in which the complex interaction of narrative levels and multiple voices suggests the underlying presence of madness. For Helen Vassallo, Le jour où Nina Simone a cessé de chanter, by actress and author Darina Al-Joundi, stages the challenges faced by Lebanese women in their effort to negotiate geographical, social, and ideological constraints in search of an elusive sense of freedom. Co-editor Cruickshank rereads Les belles images, not just as Beauvoir’s depiction of intra-family drama, but “as a strikingly prescient (if unintentional) reflection of French co-implication in the global politics of consumption ” (88). The final two contributions, by Thomas Baldwin and co-editor Watt, deal with Proustian texts, albeit in very different fashion. Baldwin’s examination of a scene between the Proustian narrator and Charlus in Le côté de Guermantes is weighed down by numerous, substantial footnotes to writings by Barthes and Deleuze.Watt, intrigued by the similarity of very close mother-son relationships for both Proust and Barthes, traces in Journal de deuil, published posthumously, “the intimate interweave of Barthes’s relation to his mother and his relation to Proust, considered at once as bereaved son and tutelary writer”(112). The range and diverse nature of the offerings in this commemorative issue pay fitting tribute to Dow’s inspiring scholarship and do indeed, as the editors hoped,“mark the enduring resonance of her work and life”(vii). University of Kansas John T. Booker Delogu, Daisy. Allegorical Bodies: Power and Gender in Late Medieval France. Toronto: UP of Toronto, 2015. ISBN 978-1-4426-4187-7. Pp. viii + 273. $75. This volume takes as its point of departure a seeming paradox in late medieval French cultural history: the same historical moment that witnessed the formalization of Salic law, which excluded women from royal succession, also favored the emergence of female allegorical figures as personifications of France. Daisy Delogu’s innovative study of late medieval political allegory vividly outlines what was at stake during the troubled reign of Charles VI (1380–1422). As a response to the king’s periodic fits of madness and the problems of succession that continued to destabilize the realm, authors such as Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, Jean Gerson, and Jean de Montreuil began to imagine the body politic in new ways. Delogu traces the critical move from metaphors of the kingdom as a human body to gendered allegorical representations that depicted France as a courtly object of desire, a damsel in distress, and a beloved mother. Such conceptual frameworks allowed writers to fashion powerful images of national identity in order to influence real...

Liberté, lien des guerriers, livre de droit. La lex salica entre coutume barbare et loi romaine

Salic Law, the most famous of the so-called barbarian leges, was both barbarian and roman. It was made during the 4th century for the Frankish military dependants (dediticii) and their families settled in the Extrema Galliae, the Far Gaul. Its main goal was to eradicate the feud system, unacceptable in the Roman army. It did not succeed in the long run but it gave the Franks the cohesion which allowed them to conquer Gaul, the text turning ultimately into an element of national identity down to the French revolution.

The Travels of Law: Indian Ocean Itineraries

I believe that no country ever stood so much in need of a code of laws as India; and I believe also that there never was a country in which the want might so easily be supplied. I said that there were many points of analogy between the state of that country after the fall of the Mogul power, and the state of Europe after the fall of the Roman empire. In one respect the analogy is very striking.As there were in Europe then, so there are in India now, several systems of law widely differing from each other, but coexisting and coequal. The indigenous population has its own laws. Each of the successive races of conquerors has brought with it its own peculiar jurisprudence: the Mussulman his Koran and the innumerable commentators on the Koran; the Englishman his Statute Book and his Term Reports. As there were established in Italy, at one and the same time, the Roman Law, the Lombard law, the Ripuarian law, the Bavarian law, and the Salic law, so we have now in our Eastern empire Hindoo law, Mahometan law, Parsee law, English law, perpetually mingling with each other and disturbing each other, varying with the person, varying with the place.–Thomas Babington MacaulayOn July 10 1833, in his lengthy and famous speech on the “Government of India” delivered to the House of Commons, Thomas Babington Macaulay offered a brief but fascinating spatial-temporal assessment of the exigencies confronting British legal reform in India. As his above-cited remarks suggest, Macaulay was well acquainted with the subcontinent's rich landscape of multiple legalities and was particularly attuned to the challenges this legal plurality posed to British rule. At the same time, his observations serve as an astute testament to law's travels. Macaulay's speech addressed a range of politically charged issues, including allegations of scandal and corruption surrounding the East India Company's administration. By the end, however, he turned from justifying and defending Company pursuits to persuading an attentive Parliament about the necessity and merits of legal codification. Given Macaulay's unwavering belief in the superiority of Britain (and Europe)—most clearly articulated in his developmentalist analogy between “Europe then” and “India now”—the most plausible itinerary of law's movements was a unidirectional one: law originated in metropolitan London and moved outward to India and elsewhere. However, in advancing his case for codification, Macaulay inadvertently exposed many other laws and their respective circuits of travel. India was difficult to govern precisely because it was a terrain of legal mobility; the residues of other people, places, and times produced a polyglot existence of “Hindoo law, Mahometan law, Parsee law, English law, perpetually mingling with each other and disturbing each other.” What India needed most, Macaulay urged, was a systematized, standardized, and codified rule of law that was to be introduced and imposed by the British: “A code is almost the only blessing, perhaps it is the only blessing, which absolute governments are better fitted to confer on a nation than popular governments.”

The Fiction of Enlightenment: Women of Reason in the French Eighteenth Century by Heidi Bostic

BOSTIC, HEIDI. The Fiction of Enlightenment: Women of Reason in the French Eighteenth Century. Newark: UP of Delaware, 2010. ISBN 978-0-87413-074-4. Pp. 270. $59.50. Heidi Bostic provides a refreshing examination of how current understandings of eighteenth-century reason have excluded women’s contributions to the phenomenon called the Enlightenment. Indeed, the “fiction” of her title refers to what she terms the “caricaturist tendency” of some current scholarship to reduce Enlightenment to a unified body of thought that champions reason as the way to knowledge, over feeling, when in fact the philosophers “espoused empiricism and embraced the passions” (46). Likewise, what she calls the “apologist tendency” of current scholarship offers a traditional understanding of the period that defines Enlightenment as an exclusively male intellectual endeavor. Thus our understanding of the Enlightenment, Bostic claims, enshrines fictionalized versions of Enlightenment thought which necessarily exclude women. In her introductory chapter “Women, Enlightenment and the Salic Law of Reason,” Bostic provides an extremely informative overview of eighteenthcentury views on women and reason. By historicizing the multiple meanings of “reason” for women and men during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Bostic suggests ways of conceptualizing reason that will allow contemporary scholars to see women’s intellectual contributions as adding to the project of Enlightenment . Moreover, Bostic looks at contemporary critiques of Enlightenment by feminist scholars who, while finding ways to recuperate Enlightenment ideals for feminism, nonetheless fail to seriously consider women writers as Enlightenment thinkers. In chapters 2, 3, and 4, Bostic analyses the writings of three women authors, the first two of which were bestselling authors in their day—Françoise de Graffigny, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, and Isabelle de Charrière—who engaged in public discourse about reason, most often through fiction, and who addressed reason’s implications for women. Bostic explores her topic in a wide variety of literary genres: in the plays La réunion du bon sens et de l’esprit and Phaza by Graffigny, in the journal L’abeille and the novels Histoire de M. le Marquis de Cressy and Lettres de Mylord Rivers by Riccoboni, and in the literary self-portrait, Portrait de Zélide, the comedy Élise ou l’université, and the essay Des auteurs des livres by Charrière. Each analysis revolves around a motif: Graffigny’s use of the mask to explore gender identity, Riccoboni’s incorporation of the teacup to promote reason as women’s remedy to their lack of self-determination, and Charrière’s focus on the book as the key to women’s literacy in the public sphere. Bostic’s examination of these “under-read” texts—ones not traditionally considered “philosophical”—is engaging. More importantly, she provides new ways of reading these women’s texts within the framework of philosophy and contemporary discussions on Enlightenment. The Fiction of Enlightenment convincingly demonstrates that eighteenth-century women’s writing, in its many genres, can and should inform our understanding of Enlightenment philosophy. Just like their male counterparts, these writers “explore [d] differences, challenge[d] assumptions, and re[thought] traditions” (218). Indeed, Bostic shows us how Graffigny, Riccoboni, and Charrière, following Lawrence E. Klein’s definition of Enlightenment intellectuals, were “engaged conversers rather than detached observers” of their world (214). Heidi Bostic’s work makes an important contribution to the current debate on the legacy of the Enlightenment. It will certainly inspire contemporary scholars to re-evaluate Reviews 165 women’s texts as part of the dynamic public dialogue about reason that took place during the Enlightenment and its implications for women. This is a welcome contribution to eighteenth-century scholarship. California State University, San Bernardino Aurora Wolfgang BRIX, MICHEL. L’Attila du roman: Flaubert et les origines de la modernité littéraire. Paris: Champion, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7453-2021-6. Pp. 203. 19 a. D’après ce pamphlet, la littérature ne se serait jamais remise de l’ouragan “Gustave”. Se basant sur les textes présentés par Phillipot dans son Flaubert de 2006, Brix s’engage à nous démontrer que la “décadence” de la littérature fran- çaise est due à la “révolution” flaubertienne, “contre-nature” (11). Dans l’esprit du dix-neuvième...

What Is in a Name?: “Our French Law”

Sarah Hanley, professor of history and law, University of Iowa, studies legal his tory in early modern France . Her books and articles on constitutional history include Lit de Justice of the Kings of France: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual, and Discourse (Princeton University Press, 1983; French ed., Aubier, 1991) and Les Femmes dans I'histoire: loi sal ique (Indigo, 1994). She has written many articles on French law and litigation, and three of them, Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern French Historical Studies (1989; French trans., Politix: Revue des Sciences Sociales du Politique Sorbonne (1995); Sites of Political Practice in France: Lawsuits, Civil and the Separation of Powers in Domestic and State Government, 1500-1800, American Historical Review (1997), and The Jurisprudence of the Arrets: Marital Union Civil Society, and State Formation in France, 1550-1650, Law and History Review (2003), have won prizes across disciplinary lines from the Society for French Historical Studies (Koren Prize 1990), the American Political Science Association (Mary Parker Follett Award 1998), and the American Society for Legal History (William Surrency Prize 2004). She recently published The Family, the State, and the Law in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century France: Political Ideology of Male Right versus an Early Theory of Natural Rights, Journal of Modern History (2006), and in a fifth edition, her opening chapter, La Loi Salique, appears in Nouvelle Encyclopedic Politique et Historique des Femmes (Les Belles Lettres, 2010; 1st and 2nd French ed., Presses Universitaires de France 1997; English ed., Routledge, 2003; Spanish ed., Akal, 2010). Currently she is at work on two books, one on constitutional issues, King's One Body: From the Fraudulent Salic Law to the Political Theory of Male Right in France, 1400-1700, the other treating law and litigation, Social Sites of Political Practice in France: Law, Litigation, and Local Knowledge, 1500-1800.

Hanover and Göttingen,1837

1837, the death of King William IV brought the personal union between the United Kingdom and Hanover (1714-1837) to an end. The practice of one dynasty ruling over two separate states was not uncommon in medieval and early modern European history, and eighteenth-century Great Britain was no exception, as it established personal unions with Ireland ( 17071801 ) and with Hanover, following the accession of George I to the British throne in 1 7 14. Following Salic law and its requirement of male rulership, however, Guelph dynastic custom barred Queen Victoria from ascending to Hanover's throne, thus concluding the 123 -year monarchical link between the two kingdoms. The impact of this complex relationship remains understudied. Whether examining Britain's relations with continental powers, its alignments during the Years War, its strategy in the Napoleonic wars, or its policies toward Metternichian Germany, Britain's personal union with a central European kingdom (situated in the larger political framework of the Holy Roman Empire and the German Confederation) complicated its geopolitical strategies. A superb recent reassessment of the dimension in British political life should reconfigure current discussions about Britain's empire, national identity, and political culture.1 But one might equally ask how the personal union an institutional and cultural instance of British rule beyond its shores affected Hanover and the political world of the German Confederation, within which Hanoverian politics operated. Given its status as an outpost of English civilization, how did Hanover's personal union with the United Kingdom affect its public affairs (Biskup 128)? To examine this large question, this brief essay examines the last years of the union. In particular, it examines the political crisis surrounding King William IV's constitution of 1833. When his successor, King Ernst August, dissolved the constitution four years later, seven professors of University protested the king's decision and refused to take a new oath. In response, Ernst August dismissed them from their university posts, an action that became a political sensation. In 1837, the cause celebre of the Gottingen Seven unleashed a four-year constitutional crisis in Hanover, strengthened Germany's public sphere as an autonomous force in civil society, and constituted a signal moment in forming moderate constitutional liberalism as an oppositional front in German politics. In 1833, King William IV, the last of the Hanoverian line, promulgated a new constitution in the Kingdom of Hanover, replacing a royal patent from 1819 that allowed an anti-constitutional aristocratic party to govern through provincial diets and an absentee foreign chancellery in London (Huber, Deutsche 86). By contrast, the constitution of 1833 provided the kingdom with a bicameral

Entre réforme du royaume et enjeux dynastiques

On the 7th of January 1589, the Faculty of Theology of Paris became guarantor of the “constitutionality” of the Catholic League, releasing the king’s subjects from their allegiance. The Faculty considered Henry III’s implication in the assassinations of members of the Guise family a breach of the “contract” contained in the Edict of Union which it had actively promoted. Nevertheless, when in 1591 the radical fringe group of les Seize was eliminated, this contributed to the reduction of the influence of the League’s theologians, who had little influence on the outcome of the Estates-General of 1593. But their ultimate failure was largely due to the isolation of the Monarchomach and theocratic positions, which, contrary to the official resolutions of the Sorbonne, opposed the Salic Law. This denial of one of the fundamental laws of the kingdom constituted an attack on a powerful founding myth of the University of Paris, the translatio studii, and brought discredit upon the entire University.

Le Pactus Legis Salicae, règlement militaire romain ou code de lois compilé sous Clovis ?

The origin and development of the Salic law, long-debated, are still controversial subjects. The first version (known as Pactus legis Salicae or the 65-title version) is generally thought to date from the end of Clovis’ reign, between 507 and 511. Ian Wood, however, places it earlier ; HermannNehlsen thinks most of the existing text far more recent ; Jean-Pierre Poly dates the earliest compilation to the mid-fourth century. After critically surveying previous historiography, this article analyses the text of the law and its manuscript tradition in order to establish the different stages of its composition, taking into account the ethnogenesis of the Salian Franks. The analysis suggests that most of the Pactus was written shortly before Clovis’ accession in 481/ 482, although it may have been started as early as 430.