Courts and Communities: Local Justice, Culture, and Society in Early Modern France

FAIN: FT-57170-09

Michael P. Breen
Reed College (Portland, OR 97202-8138)

This monograph analyzes four local French courts during one late seventeenth century decade. Courts and Communities moves away from earlier studies of institutions and criminal justice, taking a comparative, micro-historical approach to the social and cultural interactions between law courts and their users. Through an intensive description of the bailliage of Bourg-en-Bresse in the east; the senechausee of Angers in the west; the senechaussee of Montmeliar in the southern region that adhered to Roman law; and the colonial prevote of Quebec, this project examines the structural similarities and common facets of local justice while calling attention to the ways local conditions, traditions, and practices mediated the experience of royal authority. Courts and Communities provides a more detailed and complex analysis of how justice functioned in practice, thereby improving our understanding of how law courts shaped and transformed early modern French culture and society.

Associated Products

“Law, Society, and the State in Early Modern France” (Article)
Title: “Law, Society, and the State in Early Modern France”
Author: Michael P. Breen
Abstract: Extended synthetic review essay on recent scholarship about legal institutions, legal professionals, and the social history of law in early modern France.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659209
Primary URL Description: JSTOR
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Modern History
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

"'An Uncertain, Useless, and Disgraceful Means of Proof': Marriage, Law, and Authority in the épreuve du congrès," (Article)
Title: "'An Uncertain, Useless, and Disgraceful Means of Proof': Marriage, Law, and Authority in the épreuve du congrès,"
Author: Michael P. Breen
Abstract: An examination of the legal and medical controversies surrounding the "épreuve du congrès," a procedure employed by French ecclesiastical courts to adjudicate suits to annul marriages on the basis of the husband's alleged impotence. The article examines how divided jurists, judges, and medical experts attempted to reconcile the need to establish proof in such a difficult matter with widespread concerns that wives were using the procedure to undermine male authority within the conjugal household.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.jstor.org.proxy.library.reed.edu/stable/10.1086/683598
Primary URL Description: JSTOR
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Modern History
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

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