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Jeffrey
A. Bowman.
Shifting
Landmarks: Property, Proof, and Dispute in Catalonia around the Year
1000.
Cornell
U.P.,
2004.
Series: Conjunctions
of Religion and Power in the Medieval Past.
ISBN
0801439906.
Hardback.
304pp.
Publisher's
recommended price $42.50
In a
major contribution
to the debate among medievalists about the nature of social and
political
change in Europe around the turn of the millennium, Jeffrey A. Bowman
explores
how people contended over property during the tenth and eleventh
centuries
in the province of Narbonne. He examines the system of courts and
judges
that weighed property disputes and shows how disputants and judges
gradually
adapted, modified, and reshaped legal traditions.
The
region (which
comprised Catalonia and parts of Mediterranean France) possessed a
distinctive
legal culture, characterized by the prominent role of professional
judges,
a high level of procedural sophistication, and an intense attachment to
written law, particularly the Visigothic Code. At the same time,
disputants
relied on a range of strategies (including custom, curses, and judicial
ordeals) to resolve conflicts. Chronic tensions stemmed from
conflicting
understandings of property rights rather than from pervasive violence;
the changes Bowman tracks are less signs of a world convulsed in
struggle
than of a world coursing with vitality.
In Shifting
Landmarks, property disputes serve as a bridge between the author's
inquiry into learned ideas about justice, land, and the law and his
close
examination of the rough-and-tumble practice of daily life. Throughout,
Bowman finds intimate connections among ink and parchment, sweat and
earth.
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