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Now available in paperback for the first time, this book examines trials, civil and criminal, ecclesiastical and secular, in England and Europe between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Chapters consider the judges and juries and the amateur and professional advisers involved in legal processes as well as the offenders brought before the courts, with the reasons for prosecuting them and the defences they put forward. The cases examined range from a fourteenth century cause-célèbre, the attempted trial of Pope Boniface VIII for heresy, to investigations of obscure people for sexual and religious offences in the city states of Geneva and Venice.
Technical terms have been cut to a minimum to ensure accessibility and appeal to lawyers, social, political and legal historians, undergraduate and postgraduates as well as general readers interested in the development of the trial through time.
An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.
'A number of excellent, first-rate contributions have been assembled for this volume.'
Dr Paul Brand, All Souls College, Oxford
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Notes on contributors
Introduction
1. What is a trial? – Joseph Jaconelli
2. The role of amateur and professional judges in the royal courts of medieval England – Anthony Musson
3. Was the jury ever self-informing? – Daniel Klerman
4. Trials in manorial courts in late medieval England – Maureen Mulholland
5. Judges and trials in the English ecclesiastical courts – R. H. Helmholz
6. The attempted trial of Boniface VIII for heresy – Jeffrey Denton
7. Reasonable doubt: Defences advanced in early modern sodomy trials in Geneva – William G. Naphy
8. Testifying to the self: nuns’ narratives in early modern Venice – Mary Laven
9. The Trial of Giorgio Moreto before the Inquisition in Venice, 1589 – Brian Pullan
Index