Editor’s Introduction to “Legal Encounters on the Medieval Globe”

Summary

THE SEVEN ARTICLES gathered in this thematic issue analyze a variety of legal encounters ranging from South Asia to South and Central America, via the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. According to its founding manifesto, connectivity is one of The Medieval Globe's core foci: “the means by which peoples, things, and ideas came into contact with one another” during this era. As a system of ideas embodied in people and enacted on bodies—and also as a material, textual, and sensory “thing”—law has been a primary locus and vehicle of contact across human history. Our choice of the term “encounter” further underlines the human components of these contacts: it is defined variously as “a meeting face to face” or “the fact of meeting with a person or thing.” Honing in on acts of encounter has encouraged our authors to reflect on the people behind and within legal systems, and on human encounters with various material expressions of law.

As a scholar of the “non-West” by training, my special aim was to ensure that work on European legal worlds would be placed alongside the varied and vibrant research on regions elsewhere on the medieval globe. (Future issues could, of course, broaden this lens still further, through contributions on legal encounters in Southeast Asia and the Far East, as well as across Austronesia, Oceania, or North America.) Of necessity, the period explored here is a “long medieval.” Contributors engage with sources covering more than a millennium, from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries, and we have all written in full awareness of the complex and contested nature of periodizing categories and labels. Until quite recently, for example, Americanists have not embraced the term “medieval” as a descriptor for pre-contact or early colonial eras. For South Asia, the term has often framed by literal or metaphorical “scare quotes,” and the same has been true for sub-Saharan Africa.

The articles gathered here do not ignore this problem; indeed, Patricia Skinner's essay provides a particularly detailed survey of the term's loose chronological application in recent South Asian historiography and sets it against more common European usages. But on the whole, we have chosen not to see this as a barrier to scholarly dialogue.