Chapter 11 focuses on ancient ‘contracts’, with specific reference to commerce, property and other economic activities for which there is relevant evidence. The chapter begins with urbanization in southern Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium bce, bringing together archaeological, material and written evidence in order to introduce a broad working idea of ‘contracts’. The next section moves on to a discussion of technical ancient terms and concepts, noting the ‘considerable terminological instability in the common English translations of the original terms’. The following section turns to ‘contracts’ between states, whilst the next develops a comparative analysis of ‘oaths in interpersonal agreements’. The following two sections analyse specific questions surrounding the use of writing and ’the contract of sale’, noting that there is surviving evidence for the use of (different forms of) contacts of sale across every ancient legal system. The chapter concludes by drawing together a set of generalized conceptions of ‘contract’ and briefly suggesting that long-distance trade - among other factors - may lie behind some of the similarities - for example the use of seals - evident across the extant ancient evidence.

This chapter surveys forms of status by which legal systems assign rights, obligations and capacities to various categories of person. Though such discussions have tended to restrict themselves to statuses recognized in Roman law (the hierarchical birth-based statuses that Maine contrasted with the contractualism of later Western systems), cross-cultural comparison requires a wider lens. Hence, the chapter covers status within the polity, official or military status, unfree or servile status, putatively ‘natural’ statuses, status in the family and status as member of a voluntary or professional association. Special attention is given to the mechanisms involved in change of status, and to status as a factor in legal penalties. It is proposed that, in systems of religious law (which often operate parallel to civil law in a legal-pluralist context and across borders), status within the ‘ecclesial’ polity is comparable to civil status (citizen, resident alien, etc.) within a territorially defined polity.

Chapter 1 provides essential orientation for the rest of the volume’s contents. It begins by introducing some key issues including recent attempts to define ‘law’ and the challenges of undertaking a comparative history of ancient law (past and present). The next section moves on to introducing the different types of source material covered in the volume, introducing seven ‘rough categories’ of evidence: normative texts; commentaries; documentary records; ‘reports’ or ‘records’ of ‘cases’; portrayals of legal processes, and model forensic speeches; ritual forms; and ‘law’ in other forms of text. The final part of the chapter gives an overview of the major features and specific historical contexts for the principal legal traditions, intended as both introduction and information to be referred back to when consulting the volume as a whole.

This chapter deals with all manner of state-derived prohibitions. Ancient states prohibited a broad variety of behaviours, threatening punishment for those who would transgress boundaries. The logic of prohibition was wide-ranging: from the marking of spaces, objects and officials as somehow distinct from the rest of ‘society’, leading factions within ancient states sought to preserve and protect their individual prerogatives. They also sought to reinforce their claims to leadership by incentivizing subjects to settle their disputes in state-sanctioned venues. The evidence for such prohibitions is extensive, but did they add up to something that we might legitimately call ‘social control’? Did ancient states succeed at inducing subject populations to accept their claims to rule? If so, how? This chapter suggests that the logic of prohibition was a site of contestation for both statecraft and subject-craft.

Chapter 10 surveys the history, the concepts and the institutions of property in premodern India, China, the Near East, Egypt, Greece and Rome. Formal rules of ownership and inheritance formed the basis of all premodern legal regimes and undergirded economic performance (for instance, growth), as has been frequently stressed by New Institutional Economists. The enforcement of property rights reveals a good deal about the diverse economies, environments and cultures of premodern societies. The chapter summarizes the sources for property rights, which are rich and varied; and the control and use of resources occupy a considerable part of private legal documentation in all premodern systems that have yielded written material.

In this chapter we treat law as inextricably connected to a text. We examine the ways in which laws and other elements of the legal process, including documents, procedural records, and judicial opinions and commentaries, are produced, preserved, transmitted and communicated to various audiences in ancient Greece and Rome, the ancient Near East and Egypt, ancient India and ancient China. We include discussions of when and how texts first emerged in these societies, the materials on which they were written and preserved, and other special features of their written texts, such as language, syntax, degree of precision, and organization and codification. We also examine these aspects of secondary legal texts, including historical accounts and reports, literature, philosophical, religious and other intellectual works, non-legal documents, instructional materials and visual ‘texts’, to see how these contributed to the understanding of law as text.

Chapter 4 surveys a wide range of friendly and hostile interstate relations in ancient societies, where war was often the normal state of affairs. Notwithstanding the numerous conflicts, polities tried in the end, through alliances and diplomatic relations, to establish peaceful relations in view of political stability and economic prosperity. The chapter analyses hospitality rules regarding foreigners, treaties between polities and the establishment of diplomatic relations, which emerged as an international system in the ancient Near East during the mid-fourteenth century bce. An alternative to diplomacy in conflict management, typical of the Greek world, was arbitration and mediation with the help of a third party. In a final section, the chapter outlines how states, when diplomacy failed, started a war procedurally. In conclusion, the chapter argues that, in the absence of an international court, the enforcement of diplomatic rules and treaties was in many ancient societies ensured by the supranational authority of the gods.

Chapter 12 concludes the Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law by drawing out a set of fundamental comparisons, both differences and similarities, from the volume’s previous chapters, in addition to offering further reflections on the field of ‘ancient law’ itself. The chapter opens by comparing and contrasting the Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law to earlier historiography, underscoring its unique contribution to existing scholarship: developed through collaborative work and drawing upon numerous specialist traditions and technical expertise, across a pan-Eurasian research field. The chapter then moves on to a broader discussion of ‘Mapping the Ancient Legal Cosmos’ and ‘Ordering Ancient Associations’, pinpointing the specific connections between ethics, law and statecraft that can be observed across the ancient source material. The chapter concludes by suggesting several answers to a provocative, but fundamental, question: What is ‘Ancient’ about ‘Ancient Law’?.

Authorship

This is an extract from a letter by Jehan Lefèvre de Saint-Remy – otherwise known as ‘Golden-Fleece’, King of Arms of the Burgundian order of chivalry, the Order of the Toison d’Or – written to Jacques's father following the young knight's dramatic death, of which more anon. It is a letter of surprising length, full of heartfelt admiration – and, one senses, affection – for Jacques, and contains detailed, eyewitness accounts of many of his most memorable exploits. Given Lefèvre's status and reputation for integrity, it leaves little reason to doubt that Jacques de Lalaing was a genuinely exceptional knight, fit to be memorialised as an object of outstanding pride for Burgundy, and indeed a model of ideal knighthood. Moreover, the letter gives such clear indications of how The Book of the Deeds of Jacques de Lalaing came to be written that it is more than a little strange that there should have been for a long while doubts and confusion about its authorship.

In short, the first (17th-century) edition attributed The Book of the Deeds to the Burgundian chronicler Georges Chastellain, on the flimsiest of bases that the writer's name which appears at the very end – in the last line of the verse epitaph for Jacques – is ‘Jorge’.

The Book of the Deeds of Jacques de Lalaing has survived in thirteen manuscripts. This is a translation of the text as it appears in the earliest complete copy, dating from the late 1470s or early 1480s: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr. 16830. Beautifully illuminated – though less sophisticated in style than the magnificent manuscript of c. 1530, now in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles – and copied with great care, it has few obvious errors or accidental omissions; on the rare occasions when these occur (all indicated in footnotes), I have referred to the text of Lettenhove's edition (Volume VIII of his Oeuvres de Chastellain, Brussels, 1866), which was based on a late 15th century manuscript belonging to the comte de Lalaing and another from the late 15th or early 16th century: Valenciennes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 665. The Paris MS 16830 is accessible on line: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10537591f/f11.item. Chastellain's edition is also accessible on line: https://archive.org/details/oeuvrespubparleb08chasuoft/page/n5/mode/2up.

This contribution brings racial affect theory to bear on the literary representation of Roman manumission, in the process developing new critical tools for the history of Roman slavery as a mechanism for racialization. Through a close reading of the freed man Hermeros’ diatribe in the Cena Trimalchionis, I argue for the centrality of racial melancholy to the discursive and social forms by which manumission came to be experienced and figured. The operation of this racial melancholy in Petronius’ text is decomposable into two distinct, but complementary, sentimental performances: paranoia on the one hand, and compulsion into (evasive) autobiographical confession on the other. The interlinking of these performances within Hermeros’ speech generates a melancholic affect, which I conceptualize as a disposition for managing and negotiating the grief of enslavement and manumission. In formulating and grounding this claim, I hope to clear a space for mutually enriching exchange among historians of Roman slavery, historians of premodern race, and those literary critics and cultural theorists who have been influential in setting the terms for the “affective turn.”