The Crossroads of Justice

The book is an analysis of the cultural and social functions of law, legal processes and legal rituals in late medieval Northern France. It is centered around a time and a place in which European law underwent some major transformations, from a plethora of local oral customs to a fairly coherent system of national, written customary law. In this process, law and legal procedures came to reflect a great variety of cultural traditions, ranging from popular perceptions of animals and the human body to learned ideas of Roman jurisprudence. Drawing upon wide-ranging sources: judicial, legal, literary and historical, Cohen analyzes the various influences upon the shaping of law as a cultural manifestation and its application as an actual system of justice.