TY - JOUR
AU1 - Tabuteau, Emily Zack
AB - BOOK REVIEWS R. Howard Bloch, Medieval French Literature and Law. Berkeley, Califor­ nia. University of California Press, 1977. xii, 267 pp. $15.75. Professor Bloch's book is a work of literary criticism, concerned with the medieval French genres of epic, courtly romance and lyric. Its interest to legal historians lies in its thesis: that these genres not only explicitly incorporate examples of the dominant legal procedures of their day but also implicitly reflect many of the characteristics of those procedures and, espe­ cially, that parallel transitions occurred in both areas: ~ ~ ... the distinction between epic and courtly literature shows numerous and important similarities to the development of medieval judicial models. In particular, the poetic types which emerged in southern France in the early 1100s and in the north around the middle of the century demonstrate a tendency to indi­ vidualize, to render abstract, and to verbalize the struggle which in the chansons de geste remains collective and concrete" (p. 141), as the inquest is a more individualized, abstract and verbal type of procedure than the judicial duel and other forms of ordeal. The relationship is not directly causal; "rather, the contemporaneous and parallel development of literary and legal 
TI - Medieval French Literature and Law
JF - American Journal of Legal History
DO - 10.2307/845251
DA - 1981-07-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/medieval-french-literature-and-law-pWdLA0LwhY
SP - 249
EP - 251
VL - 25
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -