Economic and Social History : The Quest for Social Production As a result, in the course of the 1970s they became more frequently associated with economic and social historians 10. This new breed of legal historian has particularly found expression in the history of Medieval and Early Modern penal law. Young jurists, especially those oriented towards the social sciences such as criminologists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and legal historians, have all settled down to the task of reexamining legal phenomena as they are rooted in social systems. Crises in state law, the multiplicity of norms and sources when it comes to law, and the realisation of the ponderousness of legal practices and the hypocrisy of procedures and strategies have pounded gaping holes in the very foundations of law. For any jurist with critical acumen, doubt has become the norm. It is precisely such views that have been brought to question in the past thirty years. This resulted in a history of law that was difficult to integrate into general history because it was too close to a widely-held triumphalist view of the law and legality. Jurists conceived such histories with the matrix of contemporary law in mind, guided by the presumption of the uniformity of state law and the primacy of norms over practices, and of legal forms over strategies. The history of law, on the other hand, has mainly concentrated on pre-19th century periods and has followed the same pattern : national readings with research into the original character of « popular » law. Institutional and Legal History : Looking for the StateĦStudies in institutional history have often been limited to statistical and genealogical research, focusing on the origins of institutions and their competences. The history of crime and criminal justice can in fact be credited to a number of different « fathers » : crime history is not only directly related to institutional and legal history, but also to economic and social history, to anthropological and cultural history, and to political history. These limitations are the direct consequence of both the intellectual openness and the high quality of research carried out so far in this field. In many countries, university courses exploring the history of crime are on the increase but doctorates are far less numerous, thus delaying the emergence of solidly-documented and intellectually sound studies and handicapping the institutionalisation of research in this area in universities and other scientific institutions.
#PHYSICUS MEANS WHAT IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE FULL#
Moreover, the history of crime has not yet achieved full integration within general history.ĥIf comprehensive analyses have been slow to appear, this is doubtless linked to the number of theses devoted to the subject. As for international efforts, the oft-cited work of Weisser remains inadequate 9. Emsley, which might serve as models for future work. On a national level England is exceptional, with the respective volumes of J. A good indication of this problem is the current low number of scientific studies, as recently pointed out by L. They also began publishing a Newsletter in 1972, subsequently called the Bulletin 5.ĤNevertheless, many specialists in the social sciences still consider crime as a marginal or temporary subject of research, and this has sometimes impeded growth in the area. Between 19, the association organised a number of « intercontinental » conferences and about twenty thematic colloquia, which mainly took place, most appropriately, at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris. Following on from these, the International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice was established as became the first regular meeting point of researchers who until then had been dispersed in various branches of history - as well as combining institutional and legal, economic and social, political, anthropological and cultural, with the practices of other researchers in the social sciences (jurists, criminologists, sociologists, anthropologists). The group organised two international meetings in 1977 in Amsterdam and Leiden devoted to the history of crime 3, and another at the Economic and Social History Conference in Edinburgh in 1978 4.
2The first organised study group to appear in the area was the Nederlandse Werkgroep Strafrechtgeschiedenis, founded in 1973 notably by Herman Diederiks.