Great Christian Jurists in Spanish History ed. by Rafael Domingo and Javier Martínez–Torrón (review)

This volume is part of the Cambridge Studies in Law and Christianity's 'Great Christian Jurists' series. It aims to provide an overview of national and regional approaches to 'Christian Jurists', a designation that aims to:

illustrate the rich and enduring interactions between Christianity and law by examining the contributions that outstanding thinkers and practitioners have made over the centuries to legal ideals, institutions, and practice (p.1).

As a whole, the volume only treats those scholars that worked in Spain, rather broadly defined, in biographical (and sometimes bio-bibliographical. sketches, but has space for only twenty such portraits in the volume. While the reader of the BMCL might, on face, only find a few of the chapters especially useful for research and teaching purposes. The broad reach of the volume as a whole makes it important for students of Spanish law, its connected political and philosophical studies, and the historical impact of thinkers on these fields as an excellent reference contribution, especially given the relative infrequency with which Anglophone scholarship treats these developments, compared to French or English historical developments in the same periods.

The volume has twenty full studies between its covers, but they span some fifteen centuries. The Introduction lays out a broad overview of Spanish history—occasionally expanding beyond the bounds of the modern nation-state of Spain to include its administered territories—with a special focus on the legal and institutional developments that characterized their ages. Only six of these would fall into most medievalist's chronology for 'medieval', but the Introduction does pay proportionate attention to the divergent and overlapping legal traditions in the Christian Kingdoms of Iberia in a manner that provides the appropriate background. The early modern and modern periods of Iberian history are given more detail and more elaborate context, but this is to be expected, given the relative balance of the volume at large. The Introduction lays out six major claims at its conclusion to sketch 'the most salient Spanish contributions to Western legal culture': 1. 'consolidation of European legal culture after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire', 2. 'Expansion of Western legal culture to Latin America', 3. 'Consolidation and development of canon law', 4. 'Interaction between theology, philosophy and law', 5. 'Development of the idea of the law of nations', 6. 'Pioneering the human rights movement' (26-28). While the level of impact that the thinkers under study might be debated with respect to these six fronts, the work of this edited tome is commendable, and, even where the themes are further from the reader's grasp in individual chapters, the overall impression that the text makes is that Spanish legal history, especially with respect to the development of lines of explicitly Christian thought, was a major influence on the development of law and legal thought generally.

The full rosters of the scholars examined in the volume is as complex and valuable as the roster of scholars that pen them. The first set of biographies offer a kind of appetizing sample of medieval Iberian legal history, but the scope of the volume places greater emphasis on later eras. Although they are excellent in their own rights, there is no chapter between Reynolds's piece on Isidore of Seville and Viejo-Ximénez's chapter on Raymond of Penyafort. While it seems completely fair to concede something of a lacuna, say from the eighth through the tenth centuries, because of the tumultuous political and military fortunes of the Christian kingdoms in the north, the gap is made all the more apparent to a medievalist reader. Regrettably, this absence is entirely understandable, given the macro-focus of the volume on biographies, the geographical scope of the volume, and the alignment of the subjects on a positive impact; these might exclude, respectively, Bernard of Sedirac (as a nebulous but pivotal force for Toledo's...