Medieval Law

As part of the historical landscape of the Transylvanian voivodat, the medieval road system benefits of scattered details and general information that scholars can use when attempting at its reconstruction. While the overall situation regarding major trade routes and public roads has been looked into based on archival data alone (due to their occurrence in late medieval charters and travel accounts or reports) almost no enquiry has been conducted with the aim of retrieving accurate details about the material aspects of the presumed routes. This paper is aiming at outlining the sources available for the study of the actual road tracks, by highlighting the importance of written, archaeological and cartographic evidence when it comes to identifying and rendering these particular landscape features. Despite the general impression of neglecting the development of engineered roads, late medieval local communities, individuals and even official authorities have sometimes addressed traffic problems by developing road segments, or by commanding maintenance work for already existing ones, including some special features found along the route ways, such as bridges. Apart from general archival information on the maintenance of bridges, ferries, fords and other facilities near toll-collection points, there are also examples as concerns the construction of new road segments, the reopening of dilapidated or blocked ones, as well as dugout road lanes, engineered access roads and paved roads. However, not all of these data can be obtained from written sources, thus, compelling one to have a look at the evidence found on the field and retrieved by archaeological and cartographic research.

In his Lex Castrensis, the twelfth-century Danish writer Sven Aggesen tells the story of the creation of a law that he attributes to Knútr inn ríki (Cnut the Great) as a means of governing his substantial military following of retainers, known as the hirð. As unlikely as it is for Sven to claim that he preserves the law exactly as it was in Knútr's own time, the text's focus on process and punishment raises an intriguing question: can evidence be seen for shifting punitive attitudes and legal exchange in the late Viking-Age period of intense contact, interaction, and accommodation between Scandinavia and the British Isles? This chapter will offer a first step in considering the possibility for the exchange of legal practices and concepts in this context, and present a newly refined picture of England and its Scandinavian neighbours – one which points to sophisticated legal interchange happening much earlier than usually thought.

Testaments in Lübeck Law. Exemplified with the practice of Elbing from the 15th to the early 16th c.

The article presents the practice of making testaments in towns governed by the Lübeck Law, illustrated with the mediaeval Elbląg (Elbing). The research was based on 145 surviving testaments of burghers from the 15th–early 16th c., five of them from the New Town and the rest form the Old Town of Elbing. On the basis of those documents, the author describes the practice of making and authenticating last wills, including also their physical shape, the circumstances (time and place) and the official form.
The analysis has revealed that testaments made in Elbing usually followed the same twopart scheme. The first part concerned pious bequests (ad pias causas), while the second — bequests to distant relatives and friends. The article also discusses the issue of choosing testament executors and witnesses. The analysis has shown that the 145 known last will from Elbing mention 327 executors in total. In 1/5 of them at least one of the executors was an alderman. Only some of the aldermen of that period were witnesses, some of them many times. 45 aldermen were noted only once as witnesses, 20 were noted twice and 10 — three times. The same persons acted as witnesses for many years, holding various offices in the municipality. Those observations may be influenced by the particular body of documents that have survived.
The analysis indicates that the making and executing of last wills in Elbing in the researched period was largely controlled by the municipal council. The practice, including the custom of writing last wills by clerks, developed over time, resulting in similar forms and arrangements of contents, which in turn led to a certain conventionalization of dispositions. This, however, did not fully erase the individual character of testators’ dispositions.

This is an attempt to make sense of my thoughts so far on the nature of customary law. It is very much a draft and I would, as always, be grateful for comments and advice. I have left out footnotes and bibliography, but can supply references upon request.

The pontificate of Innocent III has often been presented as a turning point in the history of the rise of medieval anti-Judaism: through his virulent anti-Jewish rhetoric and his attempts to restrict Christian-Jewish contact, the pope ushered in an age of growing interreligious tension.  This paper reexamines the anti-Jewish policies and rhetoric of Innocent III through a close analysis of three bulls sent to France between 1205 and 1208.  Through these missives, the pope seeks to enforce the proper hierarchy of Christian superiority over Jews and limit what he sees as the results of Jewish “insolence”: the widespread practice of usury, the employ of Christian servants in Jewish homes, the selling to Christians of products (in particular meat, milk and wine) which Jews deem of insufficient quality for their own use.  Through these three bulls we perceive the first expressions of a fear which will become widespread in the later Middle Ages: contact with Jews (their food, their wine, their milk) represents a danger of pollution or impurity.

In the first decades of the fifteenth century, Alonso of Cartagena assumed the task of translating quite a few works written by or attributed to Seneca. One of them is the so-called Copilación, which is a romance version of a selection of texts extracted from Dominican friar Luca Mannelli’s Tabulatio et expositio Senecae, in its turn a fourteenth-century anthology of Seneca’s quotations (both authentic and spurious). Alonso of Cartagena, though, includes the translation of several fragments from Seneca the Elder’s Controversiae, which did not appear in Mannelli’s original. This paper proposes an explanation of one of the factors that might have made Cartagena take such a decision: the coincidences between ancient declamatory texts and the genre of ‘fazaña’ included in many legal texts of Medieval Castile.

Alonso de Cartagena abordó en las primeras décadas del siglo XV la traducción de un buen número de obras de Séneca o a él atribuidas. Entre ellas se cuenta la llamada Copilación, que es en realidad el romanceamiento de una selección de textos extraídos de la Tabulatio et expositio Senecae, a su vez una antología de citas de Séneca (y apócrifas) elaborada en el siglo XIV por el dominico Luca Mannelli. En su Copilación inserta Cartagena, sin embargo, la traducción de varios fragmentos de las Controversiae de Séneca el Viejo que no aparecen en el original de Mannelli: en este trabajo ofrecemos una explicación al menos parcial de la decisión de Cartagena, examinando ciertas coincidencias entre los textos declamatorios antiguos y algunas ‘fazañas’ incluidas en los textos legales de la Castilla medieval.

Cette communication propose de revenir sur le terme « viking » en analysant la notion de piraterie dans les sources norroises. Si les historiens sont familiers des témoignages des victimes de ces pirates du Nord, les sources norroises demeurent encore trop méconnues hors de Scandinavie. Les sagas, chroniques rédigées essentiellement au XIIIe siècle, sont des récits provenant des descendants de ces fameux Vikings et jouissant depuis ces vingt dernières années d’un regain d’intérêt de la part des historiens. 
Le mouvement de piraterie des Vikings, daté approximativement du VIIIe au XIe siècle, marqua profondément le Moyen Âge. De la route de l’ouest (vestrvegr) à la route de l’est (austrvegr), l’œkoumène des Vikings s’étendait de Terre-Neuve à Constantinople et de l’Islande au Maghreb. Ces pirates furent à l’origine de changements dans l’ensemble du monde médiéval : création d’États et de dynasties, consolidation du pouvoir, transfert des richesses, imposition de tributs aux peuples vaincus, explorations, mercenariat, etc. 
Devant la foule de problèmes soulevés par l’étude des Vikings, nous proposons ici de revenir à la notion de piraterie au sein des sources norroises. Nous tenterons tout d’abord de revenir sur la sémantique du mot víkingr et du champ lexical qui lui est associé. Puis à travers divers témoignages issus des sources norroises, nous essayerons de définir les enjeux et modalités de la piraterie vue par les Scandinaves.

Mots-clés : Vikings, piraterie, sagas, histoire maritime.

Temaet for denne artikkelen er historiske lovbestemmelser knyttet til funn av verdisaker, og hvordan disse danner bakgrunn for dagens lovregulerte finnerlønnsordning for funn av løse kulturminner. Finnerlønn handler om eierskap til gjenstander som blir funnet og om omstendighetene rundt funnet. Disse faktorene er avgjørende for den rettslige stillingen både til finneren og til det som blir funnet. Dette gir noen nokså komplekse problemstillinger, for eksempel hvorvidt funnet ble gjort uforvarende og tilfeldig, eller som et resultat av målrettet leting, og hvorvidt slik leting foregår i et beskyttet område eller på andres eiendom. Eksempler fra historiske rettskilder tyder på at dette er problemstillinger som
jurister har balt med i noen tusen år.

The nutritional, economic and politícal importance of hunting in medieval Aragón is revealed by the development of a legal framework to legislate this activity and its survival until the middle of the 20th century. Our research on hunting in the kingdom of Aragón in the lih-15th centuries is based on the information provided by two groups of legal texts: those for local or regional areas (local charters, town letters, royal privileges, municipal statutes) and those that were applied to all the kingdom after the 13ili centory (general charters passed in the Courts). Comparative studies and the information provided by iconography, archaeology, notarial documentation and literature have permitted us to contrast, clarify and complete the development of our analysis, based on various points: 1) hunting as a natural resource whose exploitation is regulated and controlled by local and state powers; 2) hunting as an activity done from very different perspectives and with plural purposes, methods and valuations, closely related to the position of each person in the hierarchised medieval society; 3) hunting as a method of social control for sorne and of rebelliousness against the established order for poachers; and 4) the supplying and consumption of game as an indicator of diverse food cultures and systems that coexist in the same chronological and spatial framework.

El de Las Hurdes ha sido, desde sus primeras apariciones documentales, un territorio en disputa. Bajo la jurisdicción feudal de la vecina villa salmantina de La Alberca, los hurdanos se han visto sometidos a un largo proceso de dominación política y violencia física legitimadas por diversos artefactos culturales: legislativos, en el caso de las Ordenanzas del título, o literarios, cuyo hito fundacional no es otro que Las Batuecas del duque de Alba de Lope de Vega. Esta breve Historia de la violencia simbólica ejercida sobre la comarca cacereña de Las Hurdes culmina con el famoso documental de Luis Buñuel, Las Hurdes. Tierra sin pan, rodado y estrenado en 1933. Un muy extenso arco cronológico de la opresión que el presente artículo pretende analizar con las herramientas que le presta la geografía cultural y otras derivaciones de los spatial studies, último paradigma del estudio de las literaturas comparadas.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Law and Literature addresses the need for an authoritative guide  through the bewildering maze of medieval law as well as the need for concise examples of how the law infiltrated literary texts. The Companion combines accessible essays written by leading specialists in legal history with essays exploring literary conversations with the law in the works of later medieval authors
from Chaucer to Malory. The first half of this book contains detailed introductions to legal concepts, practices, and institutions in medieval England. In the second half, experts cover a number of texts and authors from across the later medieval period whose verse and prose can be understood as engaging with the law. In this way, the Cambridge Companion to Medieval Law and Literature forms the basis for students wishing to explore this rich area or for scholars to familiarise themselves with literary uses of the law.

ISBN: 9781316632345

From Winston Black in The Medieval Review 15.06.24...

'In the concluding essay, "The Bright Side of the Knife: Dismemberment in Medieval Europe and the Modern Imagination," Lila Yawn clearly takes the most chances and has the most fun in exploring the topic of medieval wounds and wounding. After a review of graphic and supposedly "medieval" dismemberments in modern movies and literature, such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, or Pulp Fiction, Yawn poses the simple question of "how medieval cutting up living bodies really was" (218). In response, she gives a whirlwind tour of nearly two millennia of images and descriptions of amputation, dismemberment, fragmentation, and mutilation from Cicero to Thomas Jefferson. In so doing she demonstrates, as many medieval apologists have already noted, that there is no greater amount or degree of dismemberment in the Middle Ages than before or after, but what leads moderns to equate "medieval" with "dismemberment" is the medieval tendency to celebrate dismemberment and put severed body parts on display, be they of the criminal or of the saint.'

The Medieval Review 15.06.24
Kirkham, Anne, and Cordelia Warr, eds. Wounds in the Middle Ages. The History of Medicine in Context. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. pp. xvi, 254. $124.95 (hardback). ISBN: 9781409465690 (hardback).
Reviewed by: Winston Black, Assumption College. black@assumption.edu
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr/article/view/19219/25339

This paper gives an account of the Medieval legal theories on coinage and money in the Glossators' era, and especially of the role played by a brocard of the jurist Azo (12th-13th century) in the elaboration of this theories. The matter is not unknown to the scholarship, but the scope of the legal contribution to a monetary thought has been underestimated so far. This article seeks to re-evaluate the Glossators' contribution on coinage starting from the textual reconstruction and the edition of Azo's brocard, then stressing its importance to the developing of a legal monetary thought.

Dans les Statuts de Salon en 1293, les statuts IX & X régissent le port d’armes, le IX Nullus projiciat cum balista vel archu infra Sallonem, spécifiant une arme particulière, le bodoquerium, dont la signification exacte avait été perdue jusqu’à présent.

Notre enquête nous conduira du Pont-Euxin jusqu’au Nouveau Monde, en faisant ainsi se rejoindre les Deux Indes.

Published in "Fourteenth Century England", vol. VII, ed. M. Ormrod (2012).
This is about the lawyer from Toulouse Ramon Durand who served the king of England-duke of Aquitaine Edward II as lawyer, then as seneschal of Périgord and lieutenant of the seneschal of Gascony. He is more famous as seneschal of the Landes and has been one of the most important support of the king of England in Gascony. In this position he became knight and attempted to buy a lordship in the Basque Country. Sadly, he lost it to a cadet of the Albret family and was killed in the assault of a small town of the Landes in 1333.

Toward 1270, a noblewoman wrote to Thomas Aquinas, John Peckham, and an anonymous jurist, seeking their counsel concerning the good government of her subjects and of Jews. Whether the correspondent was a duchess of Brabant or the countess of Flanders has long been a matter of contention, as has the dating of the three replies and the relationship between them. Comparing anew all three texts, this article argues that the correspondent was not seeking advice on how best to govern Jews already dwelling within her lands, but was instead grappling with the possibility of welcoming new Jewish settlement. This rereading firmly establishes the identity of the correspondent as Margaret of Constantinople, Countess of Flanders, and sheds new light on the politics surrounding the Jewish presence in northwestern Europe in the closing decades of the thirteenth century.

The overt mercantilism of The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye has overshadowed important questions surrounding the poem’s purpose and literary form. As the work attempts to justify economic protectionism, its preoccupation with legal and bureaucratic practices breaks new ground for the hybrid genre of bill-poems. This article associates The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye with civilian bills, or libelli, and re-evaluates the immediate historical context surrounding the poem’s composition. The wealth and accuracy of economic, political, and legal information that is contained in the poem points to the poet’s intimate familiarity with the highest functions of the King’s writing offices at Westminster. I argue that The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye must have been composed from within the closest circle of Henry VI’s senior administrators. The poem, I shall contend, formed part of the Privy Seal’s strategy to identify the adolescent monarch, who had only just begun to exercise the royal privilege of granting petitions, with a defence of Calais and an ideological pursuit of peace. Central to this process were William Lyndwood, Keeper of the Privy Seal, and Walter Hungerford, the poem’s sponsor. In additionto historical and circumstantial evidence, Lyndwood’s association with The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye is supported by the centrality the poem assigns to seals and documentary validity, its legal mode as a libellus, and its programmatic emphasis on peace and unity, which Lyndwood had championed in a parliamentary sermon of 1431.

The subject of this article is the trial of reconstrution of the local law proclamation history during  the  1st Polish  Republic.  The  proclamation  of  local  acts  is  important  competence  of  the local self government organs that determines its position and role in contemporary state. Local govenment  is  decentralized  form  of  the  public  administration  and  according  to  legal instruments  was  provided  with  administrative  power,  which means  the  capability  to  execute public  tasks  manifested  in  ability  to  proclaim  law  acts,  regulating  many  different  spheres  of social life. Besides the fact that the local self government as a law term came into being after the  fall  down  of  feudal  state  and  after  the  creation  of  citizen  community,  author  detects  its origins  in  the  medieval  local  governance.  Political  form  and  medieval  and  medieval  cities organization,  according  to  author,  was  a  first  stage  of  that,  what  in  present  days  assumed a  form  of  local  self  government.  Parrallel  to  cities  development  in  1st Polish  Republic,  the legislative  power  of their  organs  formed  its  shaped.  Many aspects  of  daily  life were  managed by  obigatory  common  law  which  was  valid  only  the  territory  of the  city  and  its  suburbs. Legislative  activity  of  medieval  cities  organs  contributed  to  the  development  of  local  selfgovernment  institutions  in  later  times.

Le Costitutiones Melphitanae rappresentano un corpo organico di leggi promulgato per ordine dell’Imperatore Federico II nell’anno 1231. Uno dei manoscritti più antichi di questo importante corpus legislativo medievale è stato recentemente trovato nel comune di Fossacesia (Abruzzo). Il frammento manoscritto, risale al secolo XIII ed è uno dei più preziosi e affascinanti testi federiciani scoperti negli ultimi decenni: esso, come il codice del Vaticano ( Codice Vat. Lat 6770), contiene il cosiddetto apparatus antiquus e, in quanto tale, trasmette, oltre alla chiose di Andrea Bonello, anche quelle di G', indicato però, a differenza degli altri codici glossati ad oggi conosciuti, anche con il nome esteso: Guisando!

In the judicial duel, procedure and ceremony collapsed into one another in a way that had powerful resonances for the later Capetians kings of France. What bothered King Louis IX and his grandson Philip IV about duel was its violent and vengeful aspects. What allowed Philip IV and his son Philip V to reconsider was duel’s discrete and formal practice. It was this that allowed their governments to decouple judicial duel from seigneurial (private) war. Although war was similar to duel in being an avenue for the violent pursuit of one’s rights, it differed in its wider scope and therefore essentially uncontrollable nature. Duel’s dual nature as ritual and procedure thus ensured its survival in the courts of later medieval France. Duel’s formalism also meant that it could serve to express chivalric values like honour, bravery, and luxury. These aspects may help to explain duel’s renewed efflorescence in the early modern period, in which duelling became an avenue for the vindication of aristocratic honour. The development of an elaborate, aristocratic ceremonial practice, however, happened much later than has been previously understood. Indeed, chivalric spectacle is only one aspect of the later medieval history of duel, a subject that requires fuller study.

Steven Pinker’s view of the Middle Ages as an era of hyperviolence, in which governments engaged in democide and civilians lived in terror, is not supported by the evidence. By analyzing Pinker’s sources for the medieval period and providing a clearer understanding of the difficulties involved in extracting statistical data from medieval England’s criminal justice system, this article hopes to demonstrate that Pinker’s thesis about the civilizing process is not tenable. While the medieval world was violent, we cannot definitively say just how violent it actually was, and whether it was any more or less violent than we are today.

Norman legal sources are scarce; we should examine these sources to see if they are reliable instead of taking them for granted and singling out only those topics we want to discuss. The Leges are our most wide-ranging source from the period, and far from being the least reliable of the Anglo-Norman sources, they might be our best reflection of legal realities. Examining the use of source material in the Leges reveals the author’s changes to Anglo-Saxon principles, which gives us reason to conclude that the treatise is a trustworthy reflection of twelfth-century English legal practice. Pursuing this line of inquiry can give us greater confidence in the reliability of the Leges Henrici Primi as a source, assuring us of its relevance to twelfth-century legal situations.

Accusations of Maleficium and Veneficium in the Várad Register

In Hungary – like all over Europe – people believed in the effectiveness of ordeals. However, in the Várad Register the number of those who were convicted by ordeal was low. To explain this, Peter Brown’s theory might help: according to him, ordeals were either only an act on the community's part and behind the scenes they had already decided the outcome of the litigation, or the purpose of the whole ceremony was to make the parties come to an agreement so they would not stir up the social order.
The maleficium and the veneficium – in most of the cases – were directed against women. In several cases these women were elderly and/or widows, thus more defenceless. Moreover, most of the litigants were neighbours or knew each other well. This suggests that they might have wanted to acquire the respondent’s estate through the ordeal. On many occasions the reason behind the lawsuit was the land. This was caused by the economic transformation of the 13th century which also resulted in social change. The most common motivation of the accusations was envy. In Hungary, there were ordeals even after 1215 (when the legislation started to take measures against them), but the number of ordeals was significantly reduced after the social changes caused by the Golden Bull.

A draft translation of the 'Edictum de beneficiis regni italici' (Edict on the Benefices of the Kingdom of Italy), also known as the 'Constitutio de feudis' (Constitution or Ordinance on Fiefs) issued by Emperor Conrad II (r.1024-1039) on 28th May 1037. The Edict confirmed and consolidated the hereditary quality of Lombard benefices, and also regulated other issues, such as the right to trial by peers, and had a far-reaching impact on property regulations in the kingdom of Italy.

Anglo-Saxon authorities often punished lawbreakers with harsh corporal penalties, such as execution, mutilation and imprisonment. Despite their severity, however, these penalties were not arbitrary exercises of power. Rather, they were informed by nuanced philosophies of punishment which sought to resolve conflict, keep the peace and enforce Christian morality. The ten essays in this volume engage legal, literary, historical, and archaeological evidence to investigate the role of punishment in Anglo-Saxon society.

CONTENTS
1  Introduction: Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England.
Nicole Marafioti and Jay Paul Gates

2  When Compensation Costs an Arm and a Leg
Valerie Allen

3  Beginnings and Legitimation of Punishment in Early Anglo-Saxon Legislation From the Seventh to the Ninth Century
Daniela Fruscione

4  Genital Mutilation in Medieval Germanic Law
Lisi Oliver

5  'Sick-Maintenance' and Earlier English Law
Stefan Jurasinski

6  Incarceration as Judicial Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England
Daniel Thomas

7  Earthly Justice and Spiritual Consequences: Judging and Punishing in the Old English Consolation of Philosophy
Nicole Marafioti

8  Osteological Evidence of Corporal and Capital Punishment in Later Anglo-Saxon England
Jo Buckberry

9  Mutilation and Spectacle in Anglo-Saxon Legislation
Daniel O'Gorman

10  The 'Worcester' Historians and Eadric Streona's Execution
Jay Paul Gates

11  Capital Punishment and the Anglo-Saxon Judicial Apparatus: A Maximum View?
Andrew Rabin

There is not substantial reserve that in entire medieval epoch captured warriors and abducted non-combatants have been used as means of extracting the military, political and economic benefits. It is well acknowledged that practices concerning prisoners of war depend on the selected goals as well as the course of the conflict and attitude towards own warriors and subjects captured by the rival power. The fate of early medieval war-captives caught up in enemy's hands during the clashes between Bulgaria and Byzantium makes no exeption. Along with this, it looks as if there are enough things to add. For example, the exchange of prisoners of war is one of the most important features which need further specification and analyses. The impact of such a practice on the Byzantino-Bulgarian relations still is unstudied enough. Even scarce and almost totally ignored is the attention to the legal status of Byzantine subjects who were taken into captivity by Bulga-rians. In this sense, the scientific interest within the scope of me-tioned topics is an inseparable part of the efforts to give more density and depth of knowledge for the early medieval past of the Balkans.

The paper aims to show the Romanistic foundations of the Spanish insolvency reform de mecanismo de segunda oportunidad (Rdl 1/2015, de 27 de febrero y Ley 25/2015, de 28 de julio), starting from the link, explicitly identified by the Spanish legislator, between this legislation and Ley 3a, Título XV, Partida V, Ley de las Siete Partidas, about the beneficio de exoneración del pasivo insatisfecho. Then, the paper focuses on the relationship between Ley 3a and its Roman ancestors, in the context of the Justinian discipline of cessio bonorum, finally, it moves on to discover the implicit historical foundations of the other pivotal institution of the Spanish ‘second chance’ reform, named acuerdo extrajudicial de pagos.

The Fechtbuch (Fight-Book) from 1459 AD by Hans Talhoffer is truly an uncanny work. In this edition of his work, the fight-master opens a window for us to his world. He shares knowledge from his own field of expertise – the martial arts of Renaissance Europe. Yet he also presents works from masters of the same and other fields – Zwaintzig Ussrichtung (Twenty Directives) by fight-master Johann Liechtenauer; Bellifortis (Battle Force) by military engineer Conrad Kyeser; and Hie Lert (Here Teaches) by astrologer-physiologist Jud Ebreesch. By text and by pictures, numerous diverse and lively scenes are shown that are sometimes quite bizarre – vigorous fighting lessons, for judicial dueling and for battle; war-machines, strange inventions and secret formulas; and treatises upon cosmology and physiology.

In this rich personal edition of his work, Talhoffer deals with a wide variety of things, from the lofty to the earthy. He has something to offer everyone – whether fighter, artist, botanist, philologist, herbalist, chemist, metalsmith, carpenter, jurist, kinesiologist, astronomer, culinarian, theologian, costumer, physician or otherwise.

Although fighting-arts are the focus of Talhoffer’s book, it is really something of a kaleidoscopic view of the interests and pursuits of the Renaissance German warrior, inclusive of manifold things meaningful to his life. However atavistic or unreal his world may be deemed now, it did truly exist and held wonder and honour worthy of our admiration.

The diversity of this book stands witness to Hans Talhoffer as one of the dynamic personalities of his generation – one whom we must deem was a true Renaissance Man.

All imagery herein is from the 1459-Thott edition, courtesy of the original 15th Century manuscript held by sterwardship of Det Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen Denmark. I made this PDF to present that work here for the free learning of all sincerely interested persons. It may be viewed via personal computer, saved onto CDR and/or printed into hard-copy, allowing complete archiving of the document in whatever quality format one may choose – with the understanding that it is meant for noncommercial and nonprofit educational usage. The imagery herein is colour-corrected; and where needed in four folios, the action of the artwork is conceptually restored. The original uncorrected DKB facsimile still exists online. DKB is found in the Web at this URL: http://www.kb.dk

So first is the facsimile of the original book itself, which lets you see the words and pictures for yourself. Next are my transcription of its German and my translation of that into English – the transcription gives you direct comprehensible reference to the original German wording, while the translation gives you the first and only rendering of that wording into English. Lastly is my interpretive commentary, which helps you better understand many aspects of the words and pictures.

Discovering that the Supreme Court of the United States of America, now dominated by an ultra conservative majority of chiefly white men, is planning to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973) was not as unexpected as one might imagine. At least, for any woman who has been living in this country for the past decade it was something we could see coming. For those who work at religious institutions or in conscientiously-Christian businesses, the ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) already took away our right to use our health plans to pay for birth control.[1] (This happened to me when I worked at Loyola University New Orleans, a Catholic university). Access to a legal abortion did seem like the next logical provision to disappear.