Li livres de jostice et de plet(z) ("The Book of Justice and of Pleas") is an Old French legal treatise compiled by the postglossators of the school of Orléans in the mid-thirteenth century (c. 1260). It was influenced by canon law (especially the decretals of Gregory IX), Roman law (especially the Digest ), the customary law of the Orléanais, and the legislation of the Capetian Kings of France. It does not have the sense of a finished work, possesses lacunae , and is somewhat disorganised, being possibly the work of a student of the University of Orléans. [1]
The first book of the Livres is a free translation of the first three paragraphs of the Digest. It is not a coutoumier (compilation of customary law) and most of the customary law it cites is limited to Orléans. Among the royal acts it reproduces is one of Saint Louis from 1254, in which the king depicted as judge declares himself the guardian of the peace and rest of his subjects: nos deserrens de la dete de la real poesté la pez et le respous de nos sojeiz. The Livres may have influenced the later legislation of Philip the Fair.
With regards to the law of fiefs, the Livres states that dukes, counts, viscounts, and barons could all hold their land from one another. [2] The Livres also states that la bone devise de droit des persones, des gens, est tele que tot homes ou il sont franc ou serf: "the good division of the law of persons is that all men are either free or servile." [3] This law is based on the Digest but the meaning of the word servi that the medieval author translates "serf" meant "slave".
The Livres, by defining treason (traïson) as férir, et l'en ne voie pas le cop venir (to wound [someone], and when the blow could not be seen coming), declared all crossbowmen to be traitors, since nobody could see their blows coming.
The Livres has provided scholars with unique insight into medieval legal attitudes to sexual crimes. It does not lay out punishment for prostitutes, preferring to reintegrate them into society in accordance with canon law. It does, however, prescribe the banishment and confiscation of property of the maquerel des femmes (procurer) and the owner of a brothel (bordelerie). [4] It also describes penalties for male homosexuality and is the first known work to describe penalties for lesbianism as well. On the first offence the male sodomite was to be castrated, on the second dismembered, and on the third burned alive. The lesbian offender was to be dismembered on the first two offences (although exactly what two "members" were to be cut off is uncertain) and burned alive on the third. All their goods accrued to the crown. [5]
Christine de Pizan or Pisan, born Cristina da Pizzano, was an Italian-born French poet and court writer for King Charles VI of France and several French dukes.
Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was the combination of the legal, economic, military, cultural and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour. Although it is derived from the Latin word feodum or feudum (fief), which was used during the Medieval period, the term feudalism and the system which it describes were not conceived of as a formal political system by the people who lived during the Middle Ages. The classic definition, by François Louis Ganshof (1944), describes a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations which existed among the warrior nobility and revolved around the three key concepts of lords, vassals, and fiefs.
The following is the timeline of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) history.
Under the French Ancien Régime, a parlement was a provincial appellate court of the Kingdom of France. In 1789, France had 13 parlements, the oldest and most important of which was the Parlement of Paris. While both the modern French term parlement and the English word parliament derive from this French term, the Ancien Régime parlements were not legislative bodies and the modern and ancient terminology are not interchangeable.
"Etteilla", the pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Alliette, was the French occultist and tarot-researcher, who was the first to develop an interpretation concept for the tarot cards and made a significant contribution to the esoteric development of the tarot cards to a wide audience, and therefore the first professional tarot occultist known to history who made his living by card divination. Etteilla also influenced the French divination professional Marie Anne Lenormand. In the years 1783–1785 Etteilla published his work Manière de se récréer avec le jeu de cartes nommées tarots, which is still considered the standard reference work of Tarot cartomancy. Etteilla published his ideas of the correspondences between the tarot, astrology, and the four classical elements and four humors, and in 1789 he published his own tarot deck, which, however, differed significantly from the classic tarots such as the Tarot de Marseille in terms of structure and card designations.
LGBT history dates back to the first recorded instances of same-sex love and sexuality of ancient civilizations, involving the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) peoples and cultures around the world. What survives after many centuries of persecution—resulting in shame, suppression, and secrecy—has only in more recent decades been pursued and interwoven into more mainstream historical narratives.
The Assizes of Jerusalem are a collection of numerous medieval legal treatises written in Old French containing the law of the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and Kingdom of Cyprus. They were compiled in the thirteenth century, and are the largest collection of surviving medieval laws.
Michel Chion is a French film theorist and composer of experimental music.
Baroness Suzanne Lilar was a Flemish Belgian essayist, novelist, and playwright writing in French. She was the wife of the Belgian Minister of Justice Albert Lilar and mother of the writer Françoise Mallet-Joris and the art historian Marie Fredericq-Lilar.
Louis of Savoy, Count of Geneva from 1460, became King of Cyprus in 1459 upon his second marriage to Charlotte of Cyprus, reigning together with and in the right of his wife until 1464. He was the second son and namesake of Louis, Duke of Savoy and his wife, Anne of Lusignan, daughter of King Janus of Cyprus.
Pierre-Jean Grosley was a French man of letters, local historian, travel writer and observer of social mores in the Age of Enlightenment and a contributor to the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers.
Jean-Claude Milner is a linguist, philosopher and essayist. His specialist fields of endeavour are linguistics and psychoanalysis. In 1971, Milner was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he translated Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax into French. His work helped to establish the terminology of theory of syntax in the French school of generative grammar. Milner is now a professor at the University Paris Diderot and lives in Paris.
Émile Moselly was a French novelist.
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In medieval Europe, attitudes toward homosexuality varied from region to region, determined by religious culture; the Catholic Church, which dominated the religious landscape, considered, and still considers, sodomy as a mortal sin and a "crime against nature". By the 11th century Sodomy was increasingly viewed as a serious moral crime and punishable by mutilation or death. Medieval records reflect this growing concern. The emergence of heretical groups, such as the Cathars and Waldensians, witnesses a rise in allegations of unnatural sexual conduct against such heretics as part of the war against heresy in Christendom. Accusations of Sodomy and unnatural acts were levelled against the Order of the Knights Templar in 1307 as part of Philip IV of France's attempt to suppress the order. These allegations have been dismissed by some scholars.
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Paul-Alexis Mellet is a French early modern historian and expert in the political and religious ideas from early modernity. He is a professor at the University of Geneva and a member of the Institute of Reformation History. Formerly, he was a professor at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, and at the University of Tours.
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