Micro­lit­er­a­tures: In the Margins of the Law

Some mar­ginal writings do happen in the margins of the book, while others happen in the margins of soci­eties, public spheres, or accepted dis­course. This intro­ductory session will deal with this the­o­retical purpose from the per­spective of three dis­courses on peace by medieval authors Christine de Pizan, and Diego de Valera, and one con­tem­porary author, Murad Idris. We will focus on the concept of peace because of its own central mar­gin­ality: a practice impos­sible to achieve, and entirely mar­ginal to the actual exis­tence in history and the present, it is, nev­er­theless, one central concept of pol­itics, morality, and political theologies.

Are lawyers allowed to perform the inter­pre­tation of the law and to find the truth with the help of non-legal dis­ci­plines? In this session we will deal with how legal scholars and thinkers faced the question of reading and inter­preting the Law in front of other dis­ci­plines and textual arts.

In this session we will be asking about micro­lit­er­a­tures in the pro­duction of maps, and the inter­action of micro­bi­og­raphy and car­tog­raphy. We will be reading Opicino of Can­istris, as well as the so-called Catalan Atlas, pro­duced in Majorca by car­tog­ra­phers Cresques Abraham and Jafuda Cresques.

The margins of the body of Roman Law were pop­u­lated with an ele­vated number of layered com­men­taries, expla­na­tions, alle­ga­tions, con­cor­dances, cases, and the­o­retical con­sid­er­a­tions. We will get acquainted with the Corpus Iuris Civilis as it was pub­lished from mid 13th century onwards, under the edi­torship of Francesco Accursio in Bologna.

We will read the arguably exper­i­mental man­u­scripts of an exiled Por­tuguese prince who had to write in a new lan­guage (Castilian), and ended up con­ducting admin­is­trative work in Catalan and was elected King of Aragon before being, allegedly, assas­si­nated. He might have also been in love with his sister.

In this session we will be reading the works of Leonor López de Córdoba and Teresa de Cartagena, and their struggle to make their voices heard in a world of male power.

Christine of Pizan —who, in her own words, had to become a man and so she did— com­posed a number of works in which she sum­moned up women from many his­torical times and places to speak about pol­itics, ethics, and lit­er­ature. She also invented a goddess of Pru­dence (Othéa) to teach chivalry to the most mas­culine of knightly heroes, Hector. 

Con­ducted by Matthias Gille-Levenson (École Normale Supérieure, Lyon), this workshop will address the­ories and prac­tices of open-access digital edi­tions of medieval texts, with the example of Gilles of Rome’s De regimine prin­cipum trans­lated in Castilian in the 14th and 15th centuries.

This will be the occasion for stu­dents to present their term-long research.