If you could ask a person who has read too much about late medieval and early modern law in the kingdom of Bohemia (that would be me) questions, what would you ask?
What would you like to know about law, the history of law, legal systems, legal practices, legal thinking, legal concepts, etc., in the eastern parts of late medieval and early modern Europe?
Please, leave a comment, send me an email, or send me a DM. No question is silly, though I reserve the right to ask questions back for clarifications.
I have an ulterior motive, naturally, in asking for your input. I have to write a few articles, you know, as “products” of my sabbatical, and I’d like at least one to be aimed at a wider, more general audience than my usual narrow audience of approximately dozen people worldwide who might read my research. I know the questions and issues, the alleys and ruts, that we historians keep circulating and getting stuck in; they’re interesting questions to me, but I’d like to try to see the topic and my research from a new perspective. In other words, I’d like to take my blinders off (to borrow a metaphor from A Good Spot) and you can help me.
As payment, please accept this picture of Ande, showing off her nibble teeth.
What legal subjects were stable and which changed in your period. Did definitions of criminality expand or contract? In English common law, all felonies were punishable by hanging with no distinction among burglars, rapists, arsonists or thieves. The tendency over years was to add criteria that avoided treating different grades of criminal similarly. Inheritance and land tenure—stable or volatile? Market regulation, even if only like engrossing, forestalling and regrating. What private agreements were enforceable, and which not? How did judges draw on positive law and precedent?
Should I write an article about the different types of law that existed in the Czech kingdom and how they related to each other? Or should I focus on the fifteenth century and Hussitism's impact on the law?