Law and the Medieval Village Community: Reinvigorating Historical Jurisprudence
Location:
Zoom
Date/time
Mon 24 April 2023
17:00 - 18:30 (GMT)
This paper will present some of the findings from an upcoming book: Law and the Medieval Village Community: Reinvigorating Historical Jurisprudence (Routledge 2023).
Historical jurisprudence was initially developed into a methodology by late Victorian scholars who were particularly interested in medieval English law. This paper will consider some of the ways they used historical jurisprudence, in which they combined influences from the German Historical School, the Scottish Enlightenment, and English political preoccupations. The approach to the village community in the work of Sir Henry Maine, Frederick W Maitland, and Sir Paul Vinogradoff used this novel method to generate new questions in medieval English law, and in the theoretical understanding of legal personality, individualism, and communalism. This paper will explore some of the research questions they pursued which have enduring interest in modern scholarship.
Further information about the book can be found here
About the speaker
Lorren Eldridge is an Early Career Fellow in Legal History at the University of Edinburgh. She is a lawyer and legal historian whose research focuses on the relationship between legal history and legal theory. She is particularly interested in English land law, both medieval and more recent, and in the legal philosophical approach and method known as historical jurisprudence.