Cornell medieval historian Paul Hyams and I are organizing a panel called Law as Culture: Lordship, Profit, and Rationality at the 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, which will take place May 13-16, 2010. The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2009. Instructions for submission are here. Here’s the call for papers:
Both economic and legal argument draws deeply on notions of reason and logic. These are found among ordinary men and women far from the schools. As economic historians document, medieval people (prudent peasants, as McCloskey puts it) were perfectly capable of responding to economic incentives. Moreover, law played a crucial role in shaping those incentives. We welcome proposals for papers that explicitly link legal history with economic history in explaining the dynamics of medieval life and culture.
Here are some examples of possible topics:
- The canon law generated regulations concerning Usury, the Just price etc. during the “long” Twelfth Century. Meanwhile, secular laws sought to regulate markets (through laws on forestalling, regrating, engrossing, Assize of Bread and Ale etc.) and boosted those on coining offenses. This sustained attempt to restrain economic activity through law must be largely explicable from the context of economic change against which it was made. How might the Legal Revolution (the whole or any part) and the rising “Profit Economy” (Lester Little) be causally linked?
- Why did England