"Great Christian Jurists and Legal Collections in the First Millennium is a systematic collection of essays describing how Christian leaders and scholars of the first millennium in the West contributed to law and jurisprudence and used written norms and corrective practices to maintain social order and to guide people from this life into the next. With chapters on topics such as Roman and post-Roman law, church councils, the papacy, and the relationship between royal and ecclesiastical authority, as well as on individual authors such as Lactantius, Ambrosiaster, Augustine, Leo I, Gelasius I, and Gregory the Great, this book invites a more holistic and realistic appreciation of early-medieval contributions to the history of law and jurisprudence for entry-level students and scholars alike. Great Christian Jurists and Legal Collections in the First Millennium provides a fresh look, from a new perspective, enabling readers to see these familiar authors in a fresh light"--

Great Christian Jurists and Legal Collections in the First Millennium is a systematic collection of essays describing how Christian leaders and scholars of the first millennium in the West contributed to law and jurisprudence and used written norms and corrective practices to maintain social order and to guide people from this life into the next. With chapters on topics such as Roman and post-Roman law, church councils, the papacy, and the relationship between royal and ecclesiastical authority, as well as on individual authors such as Lactantius, Ambrosiaster, Augustine, Leo I, Gelasius I, and Gregory the Great, this book invites a more holistic and realistic appreciation of early-medieval contributions to the history of law and jurisprudence for entry-level students and scholars alike. Great Christian Jurists and Legal Collections in the First Millennium provides a fresh look, from a new perspective, enabling readers to see these familiar authors in a fresh light.

This volume is part of a 50-volume series on "Great Christian Jurists," presenting the interaction of law and Christianity through the biographies of 1000 legal figures of the past two millennia. This volume presents 26 major German legal scholars from Albert the Great and Eike von Repgow in the Middle Ages to Konrad Adenauer and Stephan Kuttner in the twentieth century. Each chapter analyzes the influence of Christianity on their lives and legal work and sketches their enduring influence on the laws of church and state. Featuring freshly written chapters, this is the first overview in English of the relationship of Christianity and German law in the second millennium. Included are studies of both famous and long forgotten Catholics and Protestants, and both martyrs and collaborators with Nazism and earlier forms of state autocracy. Authoritative, accessible, and engaging, this study is a vital scholarly resource and classroom text.

This book introduces the Age of Justinian, the last Roman century and the first flowering of Byzantine culture. Dominated by the policies and personality of emperor Justinian I (527–565), this period of grand achievements and far-reaching failures witnessed the transformation of the Mediterranean world. In this volume, twenty specialists explore the most important aspects of the age including the mechanics and theory of empire, warfare, urbanism, and economy. It also discusses the impact of the great plague, the codification of Roman law, and the many religious upheavals taking place at the time. Consideration is given to imperial relations with the papacy, northern barbarians, the Persians, and other eastern peoples, shedding new light on a dramatic and highly significant historical period.

French legal culture, from the Middle Ages to the present day, has had an impressive influence on legal norms and institutions that have emerged in Europe and the Americas, as well as in Asian and African countries. This volume examines the lives of twenty-seven key legal thinkers in French history, with a focus on how their Christian faith and ideals were a factor in framing the evolution of French jurisprudence. Professors Olivier Descamps and Rafael Domingo bring together this diverse group of distinguished legal scholars and historians to provide a unique comparative study of law and religion that will be of value to scholars, lawyers, and students. The collaboration among French and non-French scholars, and the diversity of international and methodological perspectives, gives this volume its own unique character and value to add to this fascinating series.

What impact has Christianity had on law and policies in the Lowlands from the eleventh century through the end of the twentieth century? Taking the gradual 'secularization' of European legal culture as a framework, this volume explores the lives and times of twenty legal scholars and professionals to study the historical impact of the Christian faith on legal and political life in the Low Countries. The process whereby Christian belief systems gradually lost their impact on the regulation of secular affairs passed through several stages, not in the least the Protestant Reformation, which led to the separation of the Low Countries in a Protestant North and a Catholic South in the first place. The contributions take up general issues such as the relationship between justice and mercy, Christianity and politics as well as more technical topics of state-church law, criminal law and social policy.

This book reflects the wide range of current scholarship on Roman law, covering private, criminal and public law.

In the midst of intense religious conflict in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, theological and political concepts converged in remarkable ways. Incited by the slaughter of French Protestants in the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, Reformed theologians and lawyers began to marshal arguments for political resistance. These theological arguments were grounded in uniquely religious conceptions of the covenant, community, and popular sovereignty. While other works of historical scholarship have focused on the political and legal sources of this strain of early modern resistance literature, The Immortal Commonwealth examines the frequently overlooked theological sources of these writings. It reveals how Reformed thinkers such as Heinrich Bullinger, John Calvin, Theodore Beza, and Johannes Althusius used traditional theological conceptions of covenant and community for surprisingly radical political ends.

Leading legal scholar John Witte, Jr. explores the role religion played in the development of rights in the Western legal tradition and traces the complex interplay between human rights and religious freedom norms in modern domestic and international law. He examines how US courts are moving towards greater religious freedom, while recent decisions of the pan-European courts in Strasbourg and Luxembourg have harmed new religious minorities and threatened old religious traditions in Europe. Witte argues that the robust promotion and protection of religious freedom is the best way to protect many other fundamental rights today, even though religious freedom and other fundamental rights sometimes clash and need judicious balancing. He also responds to various modern critics who see human rights as a betrayal of Christianity and religious freedom as a betrayal of human rights.

"The present volume wants to reveal the impact of Christianity on the development of law and societal policies in the Low Countries over a period of ten centuries. It starts with the seminal contribution to the medieval ius commune by the canonist Alger de Liège (ca. 1060-1132) at the end of the eleventh century and ends with Josse Mertens de Wilmars's (1912-2002) protagonist role as a judge in the creation of a European ius commune in the second half of the twentieth century. The impact of Christianity on thinking and making the law is shown through essays on twenty Christian legal scholars and legal practitioners from the Low Countries. Historically speaking, the Low Countries cover a region which, today, is more or less corresponding to Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and parts of Northern France. Through these biographies from jurists from the Southern and Northern Netherlands, developments that are more general in nature can be recognised and established, about the changing roles of Christianity and law in Western societies more general. As a matter of fact, the gradual "secularization" of legal culture in the Low Countries is used as a framework to describe the general evolution of the impact of Christianity on the lives and writings of the twenty selected jurists"--