In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CONCLUSION T o adopt the perspective of the user of the courts oflaw in late medieval Europe is to see aspects of the medieval practice of law that one normally does not see. The role of emotions in records of civil litigation and criminal prosecution from late medieval Marseille is a case in point. On the whole, procedural manuals and other normative legal sources such as law codes and statutes have little to say about the emotions, and the normal bureaucratic practice ofeliding emotions from all types ofrecords more or less ensures that emotions can be recovered only with considerable effort. Many of the arguments made in this book have been based on an attempt to recover the emotional states or scripts of men and women who took legal action. Records of criminal trials and especially civil suits reveal how late medieval European society was characterized by enracinated structures of love and hatred that played a large role in motivating both denunciations and lawsuits. Not all civil suits were motivated by strong emotions, obviously, but certainly most suits of any length show signs of emotional complexity. Love and hatred, referred to often in the surviving records, are prominently visible, as are their pendants, such as anger, rage, malevolence, affection, and friendship. Other emotions or moral sentiments, such as envy and the desire to aggravate or humiliate, are not referred to explicitly in the records but reveal themselves indirectly. It is easy to object to a history that tries to say something about states ofmind, and those who work in the history of the emotions are aware of the methodological problems. But I would say that most historians of law invariably, though implicitly, make assumptions about human psychology or human states of mind. It is better to bring such theories and assumptions out into the open. [ 242] It is hardly novel to argue that law engages the emotions. Contemporary lawyers could tell plenty of stories about the role of emotions in suits and trials, and a considerable amount of work is being done these days on law from the perspective of evolutionary biology and neurophysiology. The arguments made in this book go beyond the trivial observation that there are emotions to be found in the records of the law courts of late medieval Marseille . First, growing use of the courts using professional law was a product of consumer desire, not just the desire of princes and states. Second, what consumers wanted was to achieve and to publicize some form of emotional satisfaction, regardless ofthe outcome oftheir suits. Caseloads grew because state-sponsored courts of law proved to be a reasonably effective device for fulfilling the desire ofsome to achieve vengeance and to aggravate their adversaries on a public stage. Most histories of law assume that the decline of self-help and customary vengeance in medieval and early modern Europe was a function of the growing power of states and their law courts. Consideration ofthe emotions shows that the practice of customary vengeance declined as consumers, largely uncoerced by the state, found law courts increasingly attractive as venues for the pursuit of emotional satisfaction. Emotions can have few legal, political, or social consequences if they remain unexpressed. The law courts were successful as a marketplace for the transaction ofemotions, I have argued, because they provided a public stage on which to advertise and publicize hatreds, humiliations, and social sanctions . Litigation was a performance designed to convey a message to an audience . The court was a theater. A latent argument here is that the growing demographic size and complexity of medieval cities hampered the circulation of news, thus pushing consumers to develop new ways to shape the public talk. Courts served this role admirably. Put differently, the public stage of legal proceedings served to advertise and perform emotional transactions quite efficiently-in some cases more efficiently and certainly more safely than acts of customary vengeance and retaliation. The major source of evidence used in this book has been the proceedings of secular courts of civil law using Roman-canon trial procedure. Proceedings of this sort are abundant in Mediterranean jurisdictions but have received comparatively little attention from legal and social historians. No source is better suited for studying the role of emotions in the evolution of law. States invested heavily in criminal courts and profited from this investment both financially and symbolically. Civil courts were a different matter, for although the state's symbolic profits were significant the investment was largely a consumer...

Share