The Formation of a Medieval Legal Profession: Jurists, Jurisprudence, and Notaries in Montpellier, c. 1204-1390
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Freedman, Paul
Abstract
The focus of this dissertation is the rise and development of the legal profession in the city of Montpellier during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Central to this project is the matter of professionalization: its usefulness as a concept, the nature of this process for the field of law in the Middle Ages, and its consequence for a particular medieval city. Rather than examine, as past scholars have done, the professionalization of law as a phenomenon in medieval society writ large, this dissertation magnifies one location to emphasize the contingency of context. Most importantly, it relies on thousands of notarial acts and on prosopographical data derived from those acts to analyze the lives, careers, kinship networks, and labor of jurists in Montpellier. This permits us to produce a more complete picture of what it meant to be an expert in Roman law in a city that valued this expertise in matters of government, justice, commerce, debt, real estate, inheritance, and marriage, among many other aspects of daily life. A primary contention of this dissertation is that, contrary to scholarship that emphasizes the importance (or, in some interpretations, the necessity) of university licensing for the rise of a legal profession in the Middle Ages, a professional legal identity in Montpellier did not depend upon academic credentials. Rather, it emanated partly from discursive interactions between the professional community and the society beyond it, including, for example, political agents with the power to regulate the legal vocation, clients who relied upon the legal experts for certain services, and notaries who routinized professional labels for these jurists. Of special interest are the legal experts designated by the label “jurisperitus,” which appears more than any academic title throughout the thousands of notarial documents from this period and denoted a legal expert without a university degree. Despite this lack of license, these jurisperiti reached the same heights as their academic counterparts in the city’s judicial system and appear in a range of critical positions for quotidian legal matters. The social and political identity of the legal professional resulted partly from a dialectical process involving Montpellier’s powerful commercial class, which dominated the city’s consular government and sought to limit, at least in theory, the encroachment of Roman law on the privileges and prerogatives afforded to them by the city’s consuetudines. Nevertheless, experts in Roman law performed vital services for these same consuls, both in matters of politics and in personal affairs. This paradoxical status, along with the increasing importance of jurists during this period for the routine business of the city’s inhabitants, gave rise to a discernible legal professional class that, along with the city’s prominent notarial tradition, formed the foundation of an expanding legal industry in medieval Montpellier.
Recommended Citation
Khalifian, Shahrouz, "The Formation of a Medieval Legal Profession: Jurists, Jurisprudence, and Notaries in Montpellier, c. 1204-1390" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1493.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1493
