Person:

Smail, Daniel

Based on a case study of Marseille in the fourteenth century, this article argues that a foundational metaphor of medieval legal culture was publicity, even in the late medieval world where the written norms of Roman law would seem to dominate. In behaving in an open and public way, men and women managed to inscribe knowledge of basic legal facts, such as age, parentage, title, marital status, and date of death, in the public archives of memory, in an age before written archives consistently recorded such basic facts. The openness and ceremonial nature of such behavior validated and lent authority to the knowledge thereby created. In court cases, as a result, litigants sought to show not only that certain facts favored their position, but also that the facts were part of the "public voice and knowledge." To do so, they frequently recruited witnesses from a broad social spectrum, and the composition of the witness group served to illustrate how widely spread the relevant facts were. According to this argument, the most profound change in European legal culture took place not with the shift from oral and customary law to written law, but with a later shift from easily accessible and public archives of knowledge to the increasingly private, state-controlled archives of the early modern era.

This study uses an extensive body of archival evidence from Latin-Christian sources to explore economic and social interactions between Provençal Jews and Christians. Evidence discussed in section one indicates that the city’s Jewish and Christian communities interacted to a significant degree, and not just in the domain of moneylending. Data derived from a network analysis suggests that Jews were prominent in providing brokerage services. In the second section, analysis of a small sample of Jewish estate inventories indicates that the material profiles of Jewish and Christian families were very similar. In the third section, an analysis of a register of debt collection shows that Jews were involved in credit relations at a rate that was proportional to their population. Jewish moneylenders filled an economic niche by providing Christians with the liquidity to pay off structural debts generated by the political economy of rents and taxes.

The Better Angels of Our Nature makes a bold contribution to the deep history of human violence. By laying out a framework for understanding this history, Steven Pinker has provided an important point of departure for all future scholarship in this area. Pinker’s depiction of violence in medieval Europe, however, includes serious misrepresentations of the historical reality of this period; his handling of the scholarship on medieval Europe raises doubts about his treatment of other periods. This article also offers a brief review of recent psychological literature that suggests that subjective well-being is historically invariant. In light of this review, I argue that Better Angels is best understood not as a work of history but as a study in moral and historical theology, and recommend that the history of violence should feature the cognitive experiences of victims rather than aggressors.