The Crossroads of Justice: Law and Culture in Late Medieval France

An analysis of the cultural and social functions of law, legal processes and legal rituals in late medieval Northern France. It is centred around a time and a place in which European law underwent major transformations, from a plethora of local oral systems to a fairly coherent systems of national written customary law. In this process, law and legal procedures came to reflect a variety of cultural traditions, ranging from popular perceptions of animals and the human body to learned ideas of Roman jurisprudence. Drawing on a range of sources, including judical, legal, literary and historical, Cohen analyzes the various influences on the shaping of law as a cultural manifestation and its application as an actual system of justice.