We recently acquired 18 pamphlets, many of them illustrated, on the 1820 trial of Queen Caroline of England, one of the most sensational events of Regency England. Her husband, the unpopular King George IV, put her on trial for adultery in the House of Lords, in an effort to dissolve their marriage.

While serving as Regent during the incapacity of his father George III, "Mad King George", the future king acquired a reputation as a spendthrift, a drunk, and a womanizer. His arranged marriage to Caroline, a German princess, was never a happy one, and they separated soon after the birth of their only child, Princess Charlotte. Caroline departed for Europe and rumors later circulated that the head of her household, the Italian courtier Bartolomeo Bergami, was her lover.

Upon the death of George III in 1820, Caroline's husband took the throne as George IV, and Caroline returned to England to claim her place as the queen consort. He retaliated by introducing the Pains and Penalties Bill in Parliament, declaring Caroline guilty of adultery and granting him a divorce. By this time George was intensely unpopular with the British public, who took the Queen's side. The reform movement adopted Caroline as their figurehead.

The trial generated a huge amount of press coverage, pamphlets and broadsides, such as the example shown here: The R--l Fowls, or, The Old Black Cock's Attempt to Crow over His Illustrious Mate (7th ed.; London: Printed for Effingham Wilson, 1820). They are forerunners of the tabloid press and the satire of Monty Python.

Our newest Flickr gallery, The Trial of Queen Caroline, displays all our holdings on the trial, including over twenty pamphlets and six multi-volume accounts of the trial, most of them copiously illustrated. As a whole, they can support research on the press, gender issues, divorce, popular illustrators, the British monarchy, and many other topics.

For more on the trial, see the Wikipedia article, "Pains and Penalties Bill 1820"; the online article by Carolyn Harris, "The Trial of Queen Caroline in 1820 and the Birth of British Tabloid Coverage of Royalty"; and the book by Jane Robins, Rebel Queen: The Trial of Caroline (Simon & Schuster, 2006).

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

The news of Pope Benedict XVI's resignation brings to mind an image from our rare book collection that illustrates a previous papal resignation, that of Pope Celestine V. Celestine appears together with his successor, Boniface VIII, in an image at the opening of a 1514 edition of the Liber Sextus: Sextus decretalium liber a Bonifacio. viij. in concilio Lugdunensi editus (Venice: Luca Antonio Giunta, 1514). The Liber Sextus formed part of the Corpus Juris Canonici ("The Body of Canon  Law") that served as the foundation of canon law in the Catholic Church from the Middle Ages until 1917. 

It is unsurprising to find images of Boniface VIII at the opening of the Liber Sextus, since he is the pope who ordered its compilation. It is surprising to find such unflattering images. The woodcut depicts two scenes from Boniface's life.

In the foreground, Boniface embraces a fox who pulls the papal tiara from the head of his predecessor, Celestine V. A dove over Celestine's head symbolizes the Holy Spirit conferring its blessing upon Celestine. In essence, the image repeats the accusation that Boniface tricked the saintly Celestine into resigning.

Celestine V had been a monk renowned for his piety and asceticism, who founded a strict branch of the Benedictines. A divided College of Cardinals elected him in July 1294 after having failed for over two years to elect one of their own. The new pope accepted his election reluctantly, and soon concluded that he was unfit and unwilling to continue to serve as pope. Some sources say Celestine's decision to resign was his alone, while others say Cardinal Benedetto Gaetani, the future Boniface VIII, goaded and tricked him into resigning. All agree that Boniface drafted the papal constitution authorizing a pope's resignation. Boniface was elected pope immediately afterward, in December 1294. Celestine tried to return to a hermit's life, but he died as Boniface's prisoner in 1296. Celestine was canonized in 1313.

Interestingly, Pope Benedict XVI visited Celestine's remains in 2009, after they had survived the L'Aquila earthquake (see photos here). He proclaimed the Celestine Year from 28 August 2009 to 28 August 2010, to mark the 800th anniversary of Celestine's birth.

On the right of the image shown here is a scene from the end of Boniface VIII's papacy, in 1303. He was taken prisoner by the powerful Colonna clan of Rome, with whom Boniface carried on a bitter and bloody feud. The Colonnas and their ally, King Philip IV of France, demanded Boniface's resignation, to which Boniface replied that he would "sooner die." His wish was granted a few days later. It was Philip IV who later nominated Celestine V for sainthood.

Both Boniface and Celestine make appearances in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. Dante places Boniface in the eighth circle of Hell, reserved for those guilty of simony. Dante's exile from Florence was a direct result of Boniface VIII's political machinations, and Boniface was "Dante's most reviled theological, political, and personal enemy" (Danteworlds website, University of Texas at Austin). Celestine V is believed to be the coward beside the gate of Hell who made "the great refusal" by abdicating the papacy and paving the way for Boniface's election as pope.

For citations to scholarly writings on papal resignations in the Middle Ages, see "The first papal abdication since six centuries", a posting in the excellent Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog, "Legal history with a Dutch view." The Wikipedia articles on Celestine V and Boniface VIII provide additional details and links to additional sources.

-- MIKE WIDENER, Rare Book Librarian

My colleague at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Raymond Clemens, recently asked me for a list of the Law Library's medieval manuscripts in vernacular languages. The list is in three parts: (1) complete manuscripts, (2) facsimiles, and (3) binding fragments. You can view images from each of the items in a gallery on our Flickr site, "Medieval manuscripts in vernacular."

PART 1: COMPLETE MANUSCRIPTS

All of our complete medieval manuscripts are in Law French, the dialect used in English legal literature and common law pleading until the early 18th century. The image at right is from one of these manuscripts, a collection of case reports from the reign of Edward III known as the Liber Assisarum. Our collection has a number of manuscripts of Italian city statutes in the vernacular, but none of them are from the medieval era.

• (Law French) Britton. 13th century.
  
  
• (Law French) Novae narrationes. Late 14th century.
  
  
• (Law French) Liber assisarum: 20-45 Edward III (1345-1377) and two cases from 7 and 8 Henry IV (1405-1407). Ca. 1450.
  
  
• (Law French) England. Statuta Angliae nova. Ca. 1444-1483/1484. In Law French and Latin.
  
  
• (Law French) Index statutorum Edw. III - Hen. VI [bound with] De natura brevium. Ca. 1490-1550?

PART 2: FACSIMILES

The outstanding examples here are the four facsimiles of the medieval Saxon law code known as the Sachsenspiegel. These manuscripts are known collectively as the codices picturati (illustrated codices) because they are heavily illustrated with images designed to help the reader understand and navigate the code.

• (Church Slavic) Merilo pravednoe po rukopisi XIV veka. Moskva: Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1961.
  
  
• (German) Vollständige Faksimile-Ausgabe im Originalformat des Dresdner Sachsenspiegels. 4 vols. Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 2002-2011.
  
  
• (German) Der Sachsenspiegel: die Heidelberger Bilderhandschrift Cod. Pal. Germ. 164. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1989.
  
  
• (German) Der Oldenburger Sachsenspiegel: Codex picturatus Oldenburgensis CIM I 410 der Landesbibliothek Oldenburg. 2 vols. Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 2006.
  
  
• (German) Sachsenspiegel: die Wolfenbütteler Bilderhandschrift Cod. Guelf. 3.1 Aug. 2̊. 3 vols. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993.
  
  
• (Irish) Ancient laws of Ireland: Senchas mar, facsimile of the oldest fragments from ms. H.2.15 in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. Dublin: Stationery Office of Saorstát Éireann, 1931.
  
  
• (Old Norse) Fragment AM 315 E of the older Gulathing law: from an old Norwegian codex of the XIIIth century with facsimile and introduction. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1928.
  
  
• (Portuguese & Spanish) Portugal. Tratados de Tordesillas. Madrid: Testimonio, 1986-1990.
  
  
• (Swedish) Wästgotha lagben. [Stockholm: s.n., 1889]. Facsimile of MS. B 59 in Kungliga biblioteket, Stockholm.
  
  
• (Welsh) Facsimile of the Chirk codex of the Welsh laws. Llanbedrog, N. Wales: [s.n.], 1909.

PART 3: BINDING FRAGMENTS

These fragments were recycled as binding materials. Several of them were featured in our Spring 2010 exhibit, "Reused, Rebound, Recovered: Medieval Manuscript Fragments in Law Book Bindings." We have two Flickr galleries devoted to manuscript binding fragments: "Medieval binding fragments," with 189 images, and a subset of these, "Medieval binding fragments - legal texts," with 33 images.

• (French) Fragment: French, perhaps a deed of sale for a piece of property, ca. 1475-1525; used as a wrapper. Medieval Manuscripts in Law Book Bindings, no. 20.  Found in: Giovanni Battista Caccialupi, De pensionibus (Rome, 1531).
  
  
• (German) Fragment: Cover is half stamped leather and half manuscript fragment, from a 13th-14th century manuscript of the Sachsenspiegel, marked with red initials. Found in: Angelo Gambiglioni, De maleficiis (Lyon, 1551).
  
  
• (Hebrew) Fragment: Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah / Vidal of Tolosa’s Maggid Mishne, ca. 1300-1500. Medieval Manuscripts in Law Book Bindings, no. 19.  Found in: Milan (Duchy), Constitutiones dominii mediolanensis (Novara, 1567).
  
  
• (Hebrew) Fragment: Mahzor, c. 1300-1500. Medieval Manuscripts in Law Book Bindings, no. 9.  Found in: Robert Parsons, Elizabethae reginae Angliae edictum promulgatum Londini 29. Nouemb. anni M.D. XCI. (Rome?, 1593).

-- MIKE WIDENER, Rare Book Librarian

Best wishes

for a HAPPY HOLIDAY SEASON

and a Prosperous 2013!

 MIKE WIDENER, Rare Book Librarian

Tree of consanguinity from a 15th-century Austrian manuscript of
Giovanni d'Andrea's Super arboribus consanguinitatis et affinitatis.

La justice à petits pas / Maud Hoestlandt; illustrations de Nicolas Hubesch (Paris: Actes Sud Junior, 2004).

This guide to the French legal system for young readers is part of our Juvenile Jurisprudence Collection. The author, Maud Hoestlandt, is a lawyer in Paris.

"Laughing at Law Codes: A French Tradition," curated by Mike Widener, is on display through Dec. 20, 2012, in Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Le code pénal / illustrations de Jean Dratz (Bruxelles: Isy Brachot Fils, 1950). Acquired with the Gary and Brian Bookman Literature and Arts Fund.

This 1950 edition of the Belgian Penal Code is illustrated by Jean Dratz (1903-1967), who studied law in the university before turning to a career as an artist. He contributed to humor magazines and comics, but was also known for somber paintings of Belgian landscapes.

"Laughing at Law Codes: A French Tradition," curated by Mike Widener, is on display through Dec. 20, 2012, in Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Circulez! texte officiel du Code de la route / illustré de 50 dessins humoristiques de Pecqueriaux; avec une pré-farce de Cami (Paris: Éditions Denoël et Steele, 1930).

This edition of the French traffic code is graced with illustrations of disaster on French highways. The Law Library’s copy is inscribed by the illustrator and editor to the French prime minister, André Tardieu.

"Laughing at Law Codes: A French Tradition," curated by Mike Widener, is on display through Dec. 20, 2012, in Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

 Albert Dubout (1905-1976) was a successful French illustrator whose work appeared in dozens of books, magazines, advertisements, record sleeves, and movie posters. He was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1953. Among the French law books he illustrated with humorous cartoons were the Traffic Code, Tourism Code, and Tax Code. For more information, visit the official Albert Dubout website and the Wikipedia article on Dubout, or consult Albert Dubout: le fou dessinant (Paris, 2006), the catalogue of a 2006 exhibit on Dubout at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Code de la route: texte officiel et complet / illustrations en couleurs de Dubout (Paris: Maurice Gonon, 1956). Acquired with the Gary and Brian Bookman Literature and Arts Fund.

Code du voyage et du tourisme: textes législatifs officiels / illustrations de Dubout (Paris: M. Gonon, 1960). Acquired with the Gary and Brian Bookman Literature and Arts Fund.

Code général des impôts: texte officiel / illustrations en coleurs de Dubout (Paris: M. Déchaux, 1958?). Acquired with the Gary and Brian Bookman Literature and Arts Fund.

"Laughing at Law Codes: A French Tradition," curated by Mike Widener, is on display through Dec. 20, 2012, in Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Code Napoléon mis en vers Francais / par B.-M. Decomberousse; orné de plus de 60 bois originaux de Pierre Noël; preface de Maurice Garçon (Paris: Editions d'Art de l'Intermediaire du Bibliophile, 1932-1933). Acquired with the Gary and Brian Bookman Literature and Arts Fund. The versified text of the French Code Civil (or Code Napoleon) was first published in 1811. The illustrations in this edition are by Louis Vergniaud Pierre- Noël, a Haitian artist and postage stamp designer who was married to Lois Mailou Jones, an important artist in the Harlem Renaissance.

"Laughing at Law Codes: A French Tradition," curated by Mike Widener, is on display through Dec. 20, 2012, in Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

La Constitution  en vaudeville / oeuvre posthume d'un homme qui n'est pas mort, publiée par lui-même, et dédiée a Madame Buonaparte (Paris: Impr. de la Constitution, 1799). This protest against Napoleon’s new constitution shows his consort, the Empress Josephine, carrying the new constitution as she tramples the older ones.

Le Code civil / commenté par Cham; ouvrage destiné aux personnes qui dérsirent avoir des démêlés avec la justice (Paris: Martinet, 185-?). These are the earliest illustrations for the Code Civil. "Cham" was the pseudonym of Charles Amédée de Noé (1818-1879), a noted French caricaturist. there is a French blog devoted to Cham, as well as a Wikipedia article with some basic biographical facts.

Detail: "Objection to a marriage."

"Laughing at Law Codes: A French Tradition," curated by Mike Widener, is on display through Dec. 20, 2012, in Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Joseph Hémard was the leader in adding humorous illustrations to French law codes. However, he was not the only one, or even the first. The tradition began with the French Revolution and continues to the present. The Lillian Goldman Law Library has a number of examples in its Rare Book Collection. In some of them, the legal text has been converted into verse. Many others follow Hémard's lead in juxtaposing hilarious visual commentary with the dry-as-dust legal text.

This exhibit is on display in conjunction with the Rare Book Collection's main exhibit for Fall 2012, "'And then I drew for books': The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard."

Code de la route: texte officiel et complet / illustrations en couleurs de Dubout (Paris: Maurice Gonon, 1956). Acquired with the Gary and Brian Bookman Literature and Arts Fund.

"Laughing at Law Codes: A French Tradition," curated by Mike Widener, is on display through Dec. 20, 2012, in Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The newest gallery in the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site is "Portraits: legal authors." At present it contains the portraits of 30 authors, with more being added as opportunity allows. All the portraits come from printed books in the Law Library's rare book collection

The star of the gallery is the portrait at right, of Paolo Attavanti (1445?-1499),  generally considered to be the very first author portrait to ever appear in a printed book. The woodcut appears in a summary of canon law that Attavanti authored, Breviarium totius juris canonici (Milan: Leonhard Pachel and Ulrich Scinzenzeler, 28 Aug. 1479). As such, it is the granddaddy of the author photos on today's dust jackets.

Attavanti was a monk of the Servite Order and a well known Florentine theologian. His Lenten sermons, inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, were published by Pachel and Scinzenzeler a few weeks after the Brevarium with the same portrait.

The "Portraits: legal authors" gallery joins three other portrait galleries in the Flickr site: portraits of Hugo Grotius, portraits of Modena jurists published in Dottori Modonesi (Modena, 1665), and portraits of Italian jurists in Illustrium iureconsultorum (Rome, 1566?).

For a guide to finding legal portraits online, you can do no better than "The telling image: searching for portraits of lawyers", a recent post on the Rechtsgeschiedenis Blog by my friend and colleague Otto Vervaart. In his typically thorough and informative fashion, Vervaart reviews portrait collections on both sides of the Atlantic and gives helpful suggestions on search strategies.

-- MIKE WIDENER, Rare Book Librarian

Joseph Hémard was one of the most prolific book illustrators of the 20th century, and certainly one of the funniest, yet he remains virtually unknown outside of his native France. Farley P. Katz, a San Antonio tax lawyer and a leading collector of Hémard’s works, is working to change this. Katz will speak on “The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard” on October 5 at the Yale Law School.

The talk is in conjunction with an exhibition at Yale’s Lillian Goldman Law Library, curated by Katz and Mike Widener, the library’s Rare Book Librarian. The exhibition features items from Katz’s collection and books that he donated to the Law Library.

What sets  Hémard apart from other illustrators are the books that one would not normally associate with illustrations. Chief among these are French law codes. Alongside the dry legalese of French tax law are Hémard’s hilarious visual puns and lampoons of tax collectors and government officials.

Katz will deliver his illustrated talk on Hémard at 1:00 p.m. on October 5, in Room 128 of the Yale Law School (127 Wall Street, New Haven, CT). The talk is free and open to the public.

The exhibit, “‘And then I drew for books’: The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard,” is on display until December 15 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery of the Lillian Goldman Law Library (Level L2 in the Yale Law School). It displays two dozen of Hémard’s works. An online version of the exhibit will appear in the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

For more information, contact Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian, at (203) 432-4494 or mike.widener[at]yale.edu.

 A Joseph Hémard illustration from Code général des impôts directs et taxes assimilées (Paris: Editions Littéraires et Artistiques; Librairie "Le Triptyque", 1944), page 218.

It would take a genius to illustrate one of the most boring books imaginable, a code of tax laws, and create a comic tour-de-force. That genius was Joseph Hémard (1880-1961), who in his lifetime was probably France's most prolific book illustrator. His illustrations are the focus of the latest exhibit in the Yale Law Library, "'And then I drew for books': The Comic Art of Joseph Hémard."

The exhibit, on display until December 15, is curated by Farley P. Katz and Michael Widener. Katz, a tax attorney from San Antonio, has built one of the world's finest collections of Hémard's works. Widener is the Rare Book Librarian at the Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Hémard's illustrations have a distinctly French character, usually comic, and often mildly erotic. Many of his illustrations were executed in pochoir, a hand stenciling process producing intense, gorgeous colors still vibrant after three-quarters of a century.

The exhibit showcases eight of the 183 illustrations in Hémard's Tax Code, donated to the Yale Law Library by Katz, along with two of the other three law books on display from the library's Rare Book Collection.

The other 19 titles on view are all from Katz's personal collection. They include children's books and some of the many classics of French literature that Hémard illustrated, such as works by Balzac and Anatole France. Items on war include Hémard's own pictorial account of his time as a German prisoner in World War I, and a set of anti-Hitler postcards. Hémard even illustrated a pharmacy manual and a pamphlet on the prostate.

The exhibition's title comes from Hémard's tongue-in-cheek autobiography. Following a long, rambling description of supposed ancestors, he devotes two paragraphs to his early life, and finishes with: "And then I drew for books."

The exhibit is open to the public, 9am-10pm daily, September 15 - December 15, 2012 in the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. It will also go online here in the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

On October 5, Katz will give an exhibit talk at 1:00 p.m. in Room 128 of the Yale Law School. The talk is also open to the public.

-- MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

The poster illustration is from the cover of Code penal: commentaires imagés de Joseph Hémard (Paris: Editions Littéraires de France, ca. 1940), Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

We are always delighted when our resources find their way into published works. The latest example is the new book by Professor James Epstein of Vanderbilt University, Scandal of Colonial Rule: Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic During the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012). As described by the publisher:

"In 1806 General Thomas Picton, Britain's first governor of Trinidad, was brought to trial for the torture of a free mulatto named Louisa Calderon and for overseeing a regime of terror over the island's slave population. James Epstein offers a fascinating account of the unfolding of this colonial drama. He shows the ways in which the trial and its investigation brought empire 'home' and exposed the disjuncture between a national self-image of humane governance and the brutal realities of colonial rule."

 One of the illustrations in Scandal of Colonial Rule comes from our Rare Book Collection, specifically from The trial of Governor T. Picton: for inflicting the Torture on Louisa Calderon, a free mulatto, and one of His Britannic Majesty's subjects in the island of Trinidad (London: B. Crosby and Co., 1806). It reproduces an image introduced as evidence in the trial; something of an innovation for the time. It shows Louisa Calderon on the picquet, a British military punishment. The judge, Lord Ellenborough, strongly objected to its introduction and only allowed it with the consent of the defense. Reproductions of the image inflamed public opinion against Col. Picton.

-- MIKE WIDENER, Rare Book Librarian

One of my spare-time projects is trolling the Rare Books stacks looking for law  books with illustrations, and also bookplates (you can see the most recent finds in our Flickr photostream). That's how I discovered the allegorical frontispiece to the Vita Iustiniani M. atque Theodorae (1731) by Johann Peter von Ludewig, shown below.

For many years this book was the standard biography of the Roman emperor Justinian (483?-565) and his consort Theodora. Edward Gibbon quoted from it frequently in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ludewig (1668-1743), one of the leading jurists of his time, was a professor of history and chancellor of the University of Halle.

The upper portion of the allegorical frontispiece celebrates Justinian's achievements in law, architecture, and warfare. At center, Justinian and Theodora sit on their throne. To their right is Tribonian, the jurist who drafted the Corpus Juris Civilis, the reworking of Roman law that still forms the foundation of most western legal systems. Next to Tribonian is an architectural plan for the great Hagia Sophia cathedral. At left is Justinian's famous military commander Belisarius.

It was the bottom of the image, however, that caught my attention. In the lower left are some demonic-looking beasts and a pile of disordered books with the label "Furiae Procopii". This is a reference to the Secret History of Procopius. A courtier of Justinian, Procopius wrote two works praising the emperor's accomplishments, The Wars of Justinian and The Buildings of Justinian, that circulated widely in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. However, many centuries later a manuscript of his Secret History surfaced in the Vatican Library, and was published in 1623. This tell-all exposé depicts Justinian as cruel and corrupt, and Theodora as a lascivious tyrant. The frontispiece thus announces that Ludewig's book will defend the imperial couple against the scandalous accusations of the Secret History.

There is more to be gleaned from this image, such as the male Medusa-like figure at bottom, and Justinian's depiction.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian 

Frontispiece, Johann Peter von Ludewig (1668-1743), Vita Iustiniani M. atque Theodorae, augustorum nec non Triboniani: Iurisprudentiae iustinianae proscenium (Halae Salicae: impensis Orphanotrophei, 1731).

• Judith Resnik & Dennis Curtis, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). "By mapping the remarkable run of the icon of Justice, a woman with scales and sword, and by tracing the development of public spaces dedicated to justice—courthouses—the authors explore the evolution of adjudication into its modern form as well as the intimate relationship between the courts and democracy." In addition, the Representing Justice page, in the Lillian Goldman Law Library's Document Collection Center,  brings together image collections, articles, and videos relating to the book.
  
  
• Fondo Antico - Immagini della Giustizia, a website prepared by the library of the Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, is a well organized and thorough examination of how the image of Justice is employed in early printed books. It includes a lengthy bibliography.
  
  
• The Digital Collections page of the Rechtshistorie website includes annotated lists of useful links under the headings "Databases for legal iconography" and "Thematic image collections".
  
  
• Rechtshistorie's editor, Otto Vervaart, also writes a companion blog, Rechtsgeschiedenis. He has written several thoughtful and informative posts on the topic of legal iconography, dealing with their importance for legal history and the challenges in locating online resources. See, for example, "The face of justice" (Dec. 19, 2010) and click the Legal iconography tag to see the others.
  
  
• Justitia: Iconography of Justice is a Flickr gallery that as of September 2011 contained 133 images of Justice taken from volumes in the Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library. See also the related gallery, Justitia - headpieces. Headpieces are ornaments used as decoration at the head of a chapter or division of a book.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Thanks to the following individuals and institutions for their assistance in preparing this exhibit:

Kathryn James
Curator for Early Modern Books and Manuscripts,
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University

Nicholas Salazar
Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, Yale University

Shana Jackson
Lillian Goldman Law Library

Drew Adan
Lillian Goldman Law Library

Image:Frontispiece from Maximae juris celebriores, deductae ex jure canonico, civili, glossa (Tyrnaviae: Typis Academicis, S. Jesu, 1742). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

This glimpse at the imagery of Justice makes plain the richness of its history and signification. Didactic emblems addressed fears of corruption, of irrational authority, and an absence of even-handedness. Blindfolds, double-headed Justices, and handless judges captured some of these stresses.

Yet recall that Justice iconography was once far more varied. Within a century after Ripa, his seven Justices had been distilled into one stock figure identified by scales and sword. And Ripa's mention of a blindfold as a marker of the obligation that Justice not be "tempted away from using reason" came to be an expected accoutrement.

The images in this exhibit are a testament to the normative enterprise that built public courts of law and sought to elaborate the import and obligations of law. The movement away from public adjudication is a problem for democracies because adjudication has important contributions to make to democracy. Adjudication is itself a democratic process, which reconfigures power as it obliges disputants and judges to treat each other as equals. The scales, the attribute of Justice with the longest history (dating back to Babylonia and Egypt), evoke the evenhandedness to which judges aspire today.

Our excursion into Justice iconography aims to appreciate but not to romanticize the roots of the didactic practices surrounding adjudication. While old images remain legible, courts in today's democracies are new inventions -- benefits of political and social movements insistent on equality, dignity, and fairness for all. But these aspirations have yet to be realized, just as a visual vocabulary to match those ideas remains under-developed. Whether political will exists to support both the infrastructure of courts and access for all those now eligible to use courts is in question, and hence, the ability of courts to provide active sites of public exchange before independent judges cannot be taken for granted.

Image: Decorative headpiece from Johann Stephan Pütter, Patriotische Abbildung des heutigen Zustandes beyler höchsten Reichsgerichte (Frankfurt & Leipzig, 1756). Lillian Goldman Law Library (German Law Collection of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York).

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Dumont, Jean. Corps universel diplomatique du droit des gens (8 vols.; Amsterdam: P. Brunel [etc.], 1726-31), vol 1. Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Jean Dumont's Corps universel diplomatique du droit des gens (The Universal Diplomacy of the Laws of Men) is a compilation of European treaties beginning in the time of Charlemagne in the tenth century. The engraved frontispiece, entitled "Traitez de Paix" (Peace Treaties), is by Bernard Picart (1673-1733), who was considered a "magnificent engraver." In the background, the Virtues Justice and Peace (both clear-eyed half-naked women) embrace. They are seated on a pedestal and surrounded by other Virtues, all labeled and including Fortitude, Wisdom, Natural Law, and Truth.

The French text below the engraving explains that the two male figures at the center are kings "swearing an alliance" that is confirmed through a handshake above a chalice-shaped urn in which a fire burns. Each of the men bears a palm, symbolizing peace, and ministers and counselors surround each. At the bottom, War is enchaining Ambition, Discord, Fraud, and Impiety. At the top of the frame, the eye of Providence looks down from thundering clouds from which harpies emerge.

The picture of two persons clasping hands over a fire occurs often in diplomatic imagery of this era and signifies "bona fides" (good faith) or "pacta sunt servanda" (promises must be kept). The depiction's iconic weight resulted in variations being used in seventeenth-century wedding poems, with husband and wife clasping hands to symbolize their union.

A simplified version of the Picart image made its way into the logo of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, established in 1907 at the Hague. A facsimile of the logo used by the Court until 2007 shows the artistic borrowing.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

A clear-sighted Justice is at the center of the frontispiece to a 1788 German edition of Cesare Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishment, first published in 1764. Beccaria was an eighteenth-century Italian jurist, philosopher, and politician. His well-known treatise, condemning torture and the death penalty, remains a foundation for theories of punishment. Beccaria's premises of reason, utility, and deterrence resulted in his rejection of executions.

Depicted is a Justice turning her eyes away, with scales, entangled with tools used in farming and industry, dangling by her side. She refuses the offering of a severed head by an executioner. Her posture enacts the position adopted today by those seeking to abolish the death penalty. The illustration was based on a sketch drawn by Beccaria himself.

Beccaria, Cesare. Von Verbrechen und Strafen (Breslau: Johann Friedrich Korn, 1788). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The engraved title page of Bernard van Zutphen's Practycke der nederlansche rechten van de daghelijcksche soo civile als criminele (Dutch Law and Practice in Civil and Criminal Matters) depicts a crowded and lively courtroom scene. At the center, the presiding jurist is seated behind a table and beneath a small statue of Justice, who holds scales and a sword; her thin blindfold is dimly visible. The densely populated courtroom, with seats filled by men, includes some spectators focusing on the court proceedings and others chatting -- with dogs at their feet.

With minor variations, this same image can be found in several other volumes of that era, all illustrating how seventeenth-century town halls served as public gathering places, and court proceedings were ordinary events.

Zutphen, Bernhard van. Practycke der nederlansche rechten van de daghelijcksche soo civile als criminele questien (Leeuwarden: G. Sijbes, 1655). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

By the sixteenth century, the blindfold had come to be seen as a potentially positive constraint on earthly Justice, seen to be at risk of corruption or of misplaced passion. But Justices without blindfolds remained commonplace, as seen in the 1669 edition of the Republic of Genoa's criminal statutes. The engraving is by Giuseppe Maria Testana (d. 1679), a printmaker and engraver whose works included allegorical images and portraits of popes, cardinals, and other public figures.

Genoa (Republic). Criminalium iurium serenissimae reipublicae Genuensis, libri duo (Genoa: Giovanni Battista Tiboldi, 1669). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

A rare and intriguing portrayal of a two-faced Justice, titled "A Portrait of Worldly Justice," comes from a popular sixteenth-century guide to civil procedure by the Flemish jurist Joost de Damhoudere. One face is sighted and the other has blindfolded eyes. The face of the sighted Justice looks toward her large sword, held upright in her right hand, while the face of the blindfolded Justice turns toward tipped scales in her left hand.

The sighted face has the well-to-do on its side, while the blindfolded face is turned toward the side with more needy-looking individuals, children included. Those on the sighted side of Justice personify largely negative qualities, such as the two labeled Argentum (Money) and Favor (Favor). Blindfolded Justice faces figures labeled Despectus (Contempt), Miseria (Misery), and Paupertas (Poverty). The legend below suggests the children (one of whom is disabled) are Innocentia (Innocence) and Veritas (Truth).

This imagery is accompanied by more than a dozen explanatory pages, beginning with a quote from Cicero: "Justice is the virtue, by which is granted to each what is his own." Through this mélange of images and text, Damhoudere detailed his views on both divine and human justice. He explained that many turn to Justice, who is "repeatedly blind and deaf" to just causes." Justice is "two-faced" -- acting in a manner that appears even-handed but dissembling. Where she is "bound by a blindfold," her eyes are shut to "clemency." But the text has some ambiguity, for Damhoudere also commented that a "two-faced" Justice signified that she must "attend to each of the parties equally."

Damhoudere, Joost de. Practique iudiciaire et causes civiles (Antwerp: Iean Bellere, 1572). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Damhoudere, Joost de. Practycke in civile sacken (Rotterdam: Pieter van Waesberghe, 1660). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Alciati, Andrea. Opera omnia (4 vols.; Basel: Thomas Guarinus, 1582), vol. 4. Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Where might Ripa have gotten the blindfold? One possible source is Andrea Alciati, a professor of law. His friend Erasmus called Alciati a "shining light of Learning, not only the Law." Alciati's 1531 treatise, Emblemata, an anthology of moralizing epigrams to which his publisher added illustrations, was reproduced in some 150 editions. One of the "emblems" (a term he coined) is titled "The good Prince in his Council." The central figure is wearing a bandage obscuring part or all of his eyes, and his colleagues lack hands. The accompanying epigram reads:

These men without hands who are seated are those by whom justice is administered. They should have well-balanced sense; nothing is received from them in response to a bribe. Their prince, deprived of his sight, cannot see anybody, and he judges by due sentence according to what is said in his ear.

Both Ripa and Alciati likely knew the "Egyptian" allegory "transmitted by Plutarch and Diodorus Sicilus in which the chief justice was shown eyeless in order to illustrate his impartiality, while his colleagues had no hands with which to take bribes."

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

Two codifiers of Renaissance iconography, Cesare Ripa and Andrea Alciati, generated compendia of icons and emblems, replayed by didactic invocations in art and literature, in politics and theology, and in popular pastimes from tarot cards to the satirical press. Through these multiple forms, a host of Virtues and Vices became part of the common visual vocabulary in Europe.

Cesare Ripa's Iconologia marks the beginning of a shift in the meaning attributed to the blindfold. First published, without any pictures, in Rome in 1593, it was printed with images in 1603 and regularly thereafter, appearing in more than forty editions in eight languages.

Ripa detailed various kinds of Justice, each with her own set of attributes. One was Divine Justice ("Giustitia Divina") and the other six were variations on "Worldly" Justice. All were clear-sighted but one, and sight itself was specifically admired in the descriptions of various Justices. For example, Ripa's "Justice According to Aulus Gellius" -- from the Padua Ripa of 1625 -- is said to have "piercing eyes" and to wear a necklace where "an eye is portrayed" because "Plato said that Justice sees all and that, from ancient times, priests were called seers of all things." "Divine Justice" (from the 1698 Amsterdam edition), was similarly clear-sighted, with scale, sword, and a dove in a halo above her head to invoke the Holy Spirit.

The sole version Ripa described as blindfolded was called Justice (or sometimes Earthly Justice). As a 1611 edition explained:

This is the type of Justice that is exercised in the Tribunal of judges and secular executors. She is wearing white because judges should be without the stain of personal interest or of any other passion that might pervert Justice, and this is also why her eyes are bandaged -- and thus she cannot see anything that might cause her to judge in a manner that is against reason.

Ripa, Cesare. Iconologie (Paris: Mathieu Guillemot, 1644). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Ripa, Cesare. Iconologie (Amsterdam: Adrian Braakman, 1698). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Ripa, Cesare. Della novissima iconologia (Padua: Tozzi, 1625). Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

"The Fool Blindfolding Justice" was not the only image of that era deploying a blindfold as a warning against judicial error, as can be seen from the 1508 and 1580 editions of an illustrated volume, Die Bambergische Halsgerichtsordnung. The volume, setting forth the criminal law and municipal ordinances of the city of Bamberg, included some twenty woodcuts.

In the woodcut called "The Tribunal of Fools," a presiding judge (marked by his rod of office, the collar of his robe, and his place of honor on the throne) sits with his four colleagues. All are blindfolded and wear jesters' caps. The legend on the scroll above their heads reads: "Out of bad habit these blind fools spend their lives passing judgments contrary to what is right." Once again blindness is equated with error. Blindfolds could also be found on other readily recognized Renaissance icons -- Synagoga, representing the Old Testament, was bent and blindfolded (blind to the "light" of Christianity), while Ecclesia, standing ramrod straight and clear-eyed, embodied the New Testament. Similarly, Fortuna, and Eros were also shown blindfolded, exemplifying that the loss of sight leads one astray.

Bambergische Halssgerichts Ordenung (Metz: Johann Schöffer, 1508). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Bambergische peinliche Halszgerichtszordnung (Bamberg: Johann Wagner, 1580). Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The first image, known as "The Fool Blindfolding Justice" from Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools, comes from the 1497 Basel edition and is sometimes attributed to Albrecht Dürer. The 1509 London edition offers a close copy. The woodcut was one of a hundred illustrations for this popular book, subsequently printed in many languages.

The scene is one of the earliest known to show a Justice with covered eyes. The deployment is derisive, evident not only from the fool but from the chapter that the illustration accompanied, which was entitled "Quarreling and Going to Court." Brant, a noted lawyer and law professor, prefaced the book with a warning against "folly, blindness, error, and stupidity of all stations and kinds of men." The 1572 version is all the more insistently negative; in this rendition, the fool has pushed Justice off her throne as he covers her eyes.

Brant, Sebastian. Stultifera navis (Basel: Johann Bergmann, de Olpe, 1497). Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Brant, Sebastian. This present boke named the shyp of folys of the worlde (London: Richard Pynson, 1509). Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Brant, Sebastian. Stultifera navis mortalium (Basel: Sebastian Henricpetri, 1572). Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

The image of Justice, a remnant of the Renaissance, has had a remarkable run as a political icon. We can all "read" Justice because we have been taught to do so by political leaders of every stripe. Courthouse designers, artists, and cartoonists remain confident that a woman with scales and sword will be recognized as Justice, and not as a misplaced Roman deity or a warrior princess.

This exhibit, drawn from the Yale Law Library's Rare Book Collection, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (Yale University Press, 2011) by Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis, traces the roots of Justice iconography in books published in Europe between 1497 and 1788. Through these prints, we account for Justice's visual accessibility, making her image a part of today's popular knowledge when other European images of Virtues (and Vices), that were once as familiar as Justice, are lost to contemporary view.

The Justices depicted in Renaissance Europe had a diverse set of attributes -- cornucopias, fasces (or lictor rods), orbs and globes, books and tablets, and an odd lot of animals and birds, including dogs, snakes, ostriches, and cranes. Over time, as this exhibit documents, the depiction of Justice stabilized around a woman with scales and sword.

As this exhibit also details, pictorial representations aimed to denote something of the complex relationship between judgment, sight, knowledge, and wisdom. In the 1400s and 1500s, a blindfold on Justice signified her disability; today the blindfold is commonly valorized as both a sign of law's particular obligation to reason within confined parameters and of justice's impartiality and disinterest.

Image: Cesare Ripa, Iconologie (Paris: Mathieu Guillemot, 1644), Lillian Goldman Law Library.

"The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law" is curated by Judith Resnik, Dennis Curtis, Allison Tait, and Mike Widener, and is on display Sept. 19-Dec. 16, 2011, in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

How is it that the figure of a woman, draped, holding scales and sword, has been so widely recognized as a symbol of the law for more than 500 years?

This question is at the heart of the latest exhibit from the Yale Law Library's Rare Book Collection: "The Remarkable Run of a Political Icon: Justice as a Sign of the Law." Using images from books printed between 1497 and 1788, the exhibit traces the roots of the iconography of Justice, a remnant of the Renaissance, that remains legible today. The exhibit features eleven volumes from the Law Library's Rare Book Collection, along with four emblem books on loan from Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

The shifting attributes of Justice, displayed in the exhibit, reflect the complex relationships between judgment, sight, knowledge, and wisdom. In the 1400s and 1500s, a blindfold on Justice signified her disability; today the blindfold is commonly understood as a sign of justice's impartiality.

The exhibit is curated by Judith Resnik (Arthur Liman Professor of Law, Yale Law School), Dennis Curtis (Clinical Professor of Law Emeritus, Yale Law School), Allison Tait (Gender Equity & Policy Postdoctoral Associate, Yale Women Faculty Forum), and Mike Widener (Rare Book Librarian). The exhibit draws heavily on Resnik's & Curtis' new book, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (Yale University Press, 2011).

The exhibit is on display through December 16, 2011 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, located on Level L2 of the Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street. The exhibit is open to the public, 9am-10pm daily. The exhibit will also go online here in the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

A new book by José Cárdenas Bunsen, Escritura y Derecho Canónico en la obra de fray Bartolomé de las Casas (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2011), includes several illustrations taken from the Rare Book Collection, including those adorning the cover. The images come from the 1514 editions of the Liber Sextus of Boniface VIII and the Decretals of Gregory IX, issued by the Venetian printer Luca Antonio Giunta.

Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) is considered a pioneer in the campaign for human rights.He participated in the Spanish conquest of Cuba and was shocked by the atrocities that the Spaniards inflicted on the native inhabitants. He eventually entered the Dominican order, was later named Bishop of Chiapas, and spent the last fifty years of his life as an outspoken advocate for the rights of native peoples. See his biography in Wikipedia for a fuller account.

In his book, Cárdenas Bunsen argues that canon law played a decisive role in shaping the world view of de las Casas and the arguments he deployed in his writings, such as the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies). The book also includes a useful description of canon law studies at the University of Salamanca in the early 16th century.

Cárdenas Bunsen is now Assistant Professor of Spanish at Bucknell University, and was a frequent visitor to the Rare Book Room while researching his doctoral dissertation at Yale.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

There are two new sets in the Rare Book Collection's Flickr gallery...

Justitia - headpieces is part of my continuing pursuit of images of Lady Justice (or Justitia). This set contains images of Lady Justice found in headpieces, which are defined as "A type-ornament or vignette at the head of a chapter or division of the book" (ABC for Book Collectors). The example above comes from volume 1 of Capitularia regum Francorum (2 vols.; Paris, 1780).

Bambergensis 1580 contains all the illustrations from the 1580 edition of the Bambergische peinliche Halszgerichtszordnung. We acquired the volume in 2008 from Jeffrey D. Mancevice Rare Books, who described the book as "one of the most beautifully illustrated law books of the 16th century." Also known as the Bambergensis constitutio criminalis, this criminal code was compiled by Johann von Schwarzenberg (1463-1528). We also own the first edition, printed at Mainz in 1508. Mancevice continues: "The fine text woodcuts which first appeared in the 1507 edition are by Fritz Hammer after drawings by Hans Wolf Katzheimer (according to the NUC) with the exception of three which were recut for this edition. The woodcuts are also attributed to Wolf Traut (ca. 1486-1520). Among the fine full-page woodcuts [is] a charming woodcut of seven people at a meal, each with an emblem of punishment above their heads (two appear to be playing cards)"; this is the woodcut shown below.

With apologies for my extended absence...

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

The Law Librarians of New England are meeting today here at the Yale Law School. In honor of their visit, I've posted a new gallery in our Flickr site, "Law Libraries", with images of both real and imaginary law libraries. Below is one of my favorites, the frontispiece for the 1743 edition of a popular legal bibliography, Bibliotheca iuris selecta by Burkhard Gotthelf von Struve (1671-1738). Struve's legal bibliography was first published in 1703 and went through nine editions. It's interesting to note that a direct descendent of the author, Henry Clay von Struve (1874-1933), was the first fulltime law librarian of the University of Texas Law Library, in 1895.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Yes: the Dark Knight went to Yale." That is the verdict of the Yale Alumni Magazine. Inspired by our "Superheroes in Court!" exhibit, the magazine devoted the cover and three articles in its March/April 2011 issue to Batman's J.D. from the Yale Law School, set out in our exhibit and here in the Yale Law Library Rare Books Blog (by far the most-viewed post in the history of our blog, with over 7,000 views as of today).

The issue contains three articles on the Caped Crusader and Yale:

• In "Holy Eli, Batman!", graphic artist Chip Kidd examines the evidence. He discards the Yale connections from the 1960s television show as "meaningless," especially for "true Bat-geeks" who despise the campy show for turning their hero into "the ultimate costumed laughingstock." However, he accepts the diploma on Bruce Wayne's office wall at face value, and concludes that Yale's emphasis on community service is entirely consistent with Batman's role as "an urban steward."
• Kathryn Day Lassila '81, the editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine, tracked down and interviewed the artist who drew the Yale Law School diploma in "Why Batman Went to Yale."
• My Law Library colleague Fred Shapiro, a regular contributor to the Yale Alumni Magazine, reviews memorable Batman quotations in "Bruce Wayne's Verbal Legacy."

The credit for discovering Batman's Yale Law School diploma goes to the Hon. Mark Dwyer, Judge of the Court of Claims (Supreme Court of the State of New York) and a 1975 graduate of the Yale Law School. Dwyer himself credits a fellow law student for showing him the comic, and acknowledges the help of William Lee Frost, Yale Law 1951.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Among the most outstanding illustrated law books of all times is an edition of Justinian's Institutes published by a member of the Giunta printing dynasty of Venice, Instituta novissime recognita aptissimisq[ue] figuris exculta (Venice: Luca-Antonio Giunta, 1516). The "aptissimae figurae" are small woodcut vignettes that introduce 22 of the titles in the Institutes. Below is the woodcut for Inst. 2.10, De testamentis ordinandis (Of the execution of wills), showing a man dictating his last will from his sickbed. The Roman emperor Justinian promulgated the Institutes as a textbook for students of Roman law, and remained the standard introduction to Roman law for students throughout the medieval and early modern periods.

All 22 woodcuts are in a new gallery on our Flickr site, Justinian's Institutes illustrated. The images appear first in two-page spreads, showing them in context, and then as cropped images of the woodcuts themselves. The image titles cite the title of the Institutes where the woodcut appears (i.e. "Inst.2.10" is Book 2, Title 10 of the Institutes), followed by the title in Latin and an English translation taken from R. W. Lee, The Elements of Roman Law, with a Translation of the Institutes of Justinian (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1944).

This edition of the Institutes is stylistically a companion to the three heavily illustrated volumes of the Corpus Juris Canonici that Luca-Antonio Giunta published in 1514: Gratian's Decretum, the Decretals of Gregory IX, and the Liber Sextus of Boniface VIII, all of which we were fortunate to acquire in 2009.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

This past month I've added 44 additional images containing depictions of Justitia (Lady Justice), to our Flickr gallery Justitia: Iconography of Justice. In addition, the Courtroom Scenes gallery grew by a dozen or so images. Below is an image that now appears in both places: it is the frontispiece to Johann Stephan Burgermeister's Teutsches corpus juris publici & privati, oder, Codex diplomaticus (Ulm: In Verlegung Johann Conrad Wohlers Buchhändlers, 1717), and shows Lady Justice as the presiding judge, encouraging the downtrodden of the Holy Roman Empire to draw near and enter their pleas.

For the past several months I've been scouring our collection for such images, and also buying books containing images of Justitia, as part of our collecting focus on illustrated law books. The project has taken on additional relevance with the publication of Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-states and Democratic Courtrooms by Yale Law professors Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis (Yale University Press, 2011), and the Spring 2011 seminar, "Representing Justice," taught by Professors Resnik and Curtis. See the Law Library's Representing Justice page in its Document Collection Center.

I've discovered that an Italian law library shares our interest in images of Lady Justice. The law library of the Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia has built an excellent website, Immagini della Giustizia. The user can view examples based on their role in the printed book (frontispiece, headpieces, initials, architectural borders, etc.), as well as via iconography (the scales, sword, blindfold, etc.). I don't read Italian, and I still found the site easy to navigate. It also has a thorough bibliography. Our rare book collection owns very few of the examples in the Modena website, so I have new titles to pursue!

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Best wishes for a happy & prosperous New Year
from the Rare Book Collection, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

From the Bambergische Halssgerichts Ordenung (Mentz: Johann Schöffer, 1508).

 The newest galleries in the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site feature two of the most heavily illustrated books in the history of legal literature, both by the Flemish jurist Joost de Damhoudere (1507-1581). Both were also among the most popular law books of their time, going through numerous editions in several languages.

Damhoudere's Praxis rerum criminalium became the standard handbook of criminal law in northern Europe. We recently acquired the first edition, published in Louvain in 1554 under the title Enchiridion rerum criminalium. Our Flickr gallery, Enchiridion Rerum Criminalium (1554), presents all 54 of its woodcuts, which illustrate specific crimes and criminal procedure and also serve as documents of daily life in early modern Europe. Below is my personal favorite, illustrating the crime of dumping one's garbage on passers-by. Praxis rerum criminalium was published 36 times between 1554 and 1660, and was translated from Latin into Dutch, French, and German.

The other gallery, Practique iudiciaire et causes civiles (1572), contains the 17 woodcuts from Damhoudere's Practique iudiciaire et causes civiles (Antwerp, 1572), including the portrait of the author at right. It is the only French edition of Damhoudere's Praxis rerum civilium, which was appeared in 14 editions between 1567 and 1660.

These two works must owe much of their popularity to their usefulness, but perhaps their illustrations also played a role in making them attractive to buyers. I know of few other early law books with so many illustrations, and none with such lively ones.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

I have added several more images of Justitia (or Lady Justice, if you prefer) to the Justitia gallery in the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site. Below is one of them, taken from no. 3 of the Bollettino delle leggi della Repubblica Romana (Rome, 1798-1799).

Among the motives for building the Justitia gallery are the new book by Yale law professors Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms, due out shortly from the Yale University Press, and the Spring 2011 seminar on the same topic that Professors Resnik and Curtis will be teaching. The book features over 220 illustrations, including five taken from books in our Rare Book Collections, which are featured in our Representing Justice gallery.

In several recent posts in the Rechtsgeschiedenis blog, my Dutch colleague Otto Vervaart has written three recent posts on the value and use of legal iconography for historical research. These posts also provide a number of useful links to online resources for legal iconography. These links (and more) can also be found on the Digital Collections page of Vervaart's Rechthistorie website. One of these resources, the Dutch Database for Legal Iconography (NCRD) at the National Library of the Netherlands, is currently restricted to library pass holders, but a librarian there has told me that early in 2011 the database will be opened to all users. Watch this space for an announcement.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

The "Justicie atque iniusticie" gallery in the Rare Book Collection's Flickr site now contains all of the illustrations from our copies of Guillaume Le Rouillé's Justicie atque iniusticie. We own the first edition of this intriguing work (Paris: Claude Chevallon, 1520). In addition, we own the 1549 Lyon edition of the 18-volume Tractatus Universi Iuris; volume 1 contains Le Rouillé's essay with different renderings of the illustrations. "Justicie atque iniusticie" also appears in our 1584 Venice edition of Tractatus Universi Iuris, but without illustrations.

Guillaume Le Rouillé (1494-ca. 1550) was a French jurist, public official, historian, publisher, bookseller, merchant, and poet. "Justicie atque Iniusticie" was his first published work; other editions include Lyon 1529, Lyon 1530, Lyon 1531, and Paris 1534. Other legal works that he published included Le grand coutumier de Normandie (Paris 1539), and Le grand coutumier de Maine (Paris 1535).

Below is the "beast of injustice" from the 1520 edition, gobbling up the innocent. The beast's twelve legs are labeled to represent those who support or promote injustice, including disobedient youths, iniquitous princes, negligent bishops, immodest women, and undisciplined commoners.

Thanks to Nicholas Makarov, a junior in Yale College, for providing biographical information on Le Rouillé.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

The Yale Daily News published an excellent feature on the Rare Book Collection, "Amid legal scholarship, some wacky stacks", on the front page of its March 26, 2010 issue. Thanks to reporter Danny Serna and photographer Joseph Breen for the considerable time and skill they invested. They were especially intrigued by our illustrated legal materials, such as the Supreme Court bobbleheads, law-related comic books, and the Morris Cohen Juvenile Jurisprudence Collection. Not many rare book collections are chacterized as "wacky." They meant it as a compliment and I take it as a compliment. Wacky is good!

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Books from the Morris Cohen Juvenile Jurisprudence Collection. Photograph by Joseph Breen, Yale Daily News.

The January 12, 2010 issue of the Yale Daily News has an excellent article on our "Images of Justice" exhibit, curated by my intern Seth Quidachay-Swan of Southern Connecticut State University. Thanks to the reporter, Alison Greenberg, for a well-written piece.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

"Images of Justice" is an exhibit prepared by Seth Quidachay-Swan, who recently completed an internship in the Lillian Goldman Law Library as part of his work toward a Master's in Library Science from Southern Connecticut State University. Seth will receive his M.L.S. in January 2010, and he also has a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School (2008).

In his research for the exhibit, Seth drew on Images of Justice, 96 YALE LAW JOURNAL 1727 (1987), by Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis of the Yale Law School. This article has evolved into a book that will be out soon: Judith Resnik & Dennis Curtis, Representing Justice: From Renaisance Town Halls to 21st Century Democratic Courtrooms (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2010).

The exhibit is on display on Level L2 of the Law Library, in the wall case to the left of the door to the Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Room.

IMAGES OF JUSTICE

The image of Justice has been around for over 2000 years. Her lineage traces back to Egypt, Greece and Rome, in depictions of the goddesses Ma’at, Themis, Dike and Justitia. During the medieval period, Justice was adopted by Christian iconography as a representation of ancient virtue. Images of Justice were also common in Renaissance art and texts. Even today, Justice remains recognizable. Her image adorns many modern government buildings and court houses.

Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres (Amsterdam, 1735).

Today, Justice is most recognizable as a blindfolded woman with a sword and scales. However, earlier depictions of Justice displayed a wide array of allegorical meanings. Justice’s iconic scales measure the strength of a case. Images of a dog and snake with Justice are thought to represent friendship and hatred that could corrupt judgment. Sometimes, Justice’s sword is replaced with a fasces, the Roman symbol of a judge’s power to punish. Two-faced depictions of Justice sought to dispel fears of blind justice morphing into blind fury by prudently leaving one face unblindfolded to carefully wield her sword in meting out judgments and one face blindfolded to show her impartiality in judging the merits of cases.

Joost de Damhoudere, Praxis rerum civilium (Antwerp, 1567).

Renaissance iconography often depicted Justice with her sister virtues: Prudence (looking into a mirror), Temperance (holding a bridle and water jug), and Fortitude (wearing a lion skin or carrying a broken column). This artistic tradition continued into the 17th and 18th centuries, but is rarely used today.

Hugo Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis libri tres (Frankfurt, 1699).

Why is Justice so recognizable? Perhaps because Justice represents an idealized model of the legal system, with which political leaders and thinkers throughout history have sought to align themselves. For example, an image of Justice adorns a 1766 edition of Cesare Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene (Of Crimes and Punishments). In this seminal work on criminal justice, Beccaria argued that punishments should be based on the injury caused to society, and that the prevention of crime was more important than its punishment. The text’s portrayal of Justice underscores Beccaria’s argument: Justice turns away from the barbaric and arbitrary punishments of medieval times in favor of a more enlightened penal code.

Cesare Baccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene (Haarlem, 1766).

 -- SETH QUIDACHAY-SWAN, Southern Connecticut State University

My Flickr frenzy continues... Another new portrait gallery in the Rare Book Collection's section of the Yale Law Library Flickr site comes from Lodovico Vedriani's Dottori Modonesi di teologia, filosofia, legge canonica, e civile (Modena, 1665). The majority of the 36 portraits are of the leaders of Modena's legal profession, along with churchmen, diplomats, politicians, and authors. One woman is included: Tarquinia Molza. Each portrait is accompanied by a lengthy panegyric highlighting the individual's virtues and accomplishments.

The example below is of Aurelio Bellencini, "gran leggista," one of four Bellencini family members pictured in the book.

Our copy of Dottori Modonesi is bound with Vedriani's most well-known work, Raccolta de pittori, scultori et architetti modonesi (Modena, 1662), an important source for art historians. Our copy is also notable for having once formed part of the enormous private library of Richard Heber (1773-1833).

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

One of the first portrait albums ever published featured Italy's outstanding jurists, Antoine Lafréry's Illustrium iureconsultorum imagenes (Rome, 1566?). The book consists of 25 portraits, attributed to Niccolò Nelli, that reportedly were based on a set of portraits in the collection of Mantova Benavides, a jurist in Padua. The volume is one of the treasures of the Lillian Goldman Law Library's Rare Book Collection.

Scanned images of all the portraits are now up in the Law Library's Flickr site. The portraits are of leading jurists from the 13th to 16th centuries, and include such famous names as Accursius (ca. 1182-1260), the compiler of the standard gloss to the Corpus Juris Civilis, Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313-1357), and the Renaissance humanist Andrea Alciati (1492-1550). In the midst of the 24 jurists' portraits is, inexplicably, the image of Dante Alighieri. Below is the portrait of Gerolamo Cagnolo (1491-1551), author of commentaries on the Digest and Code of Justinian.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

The Rare Book Collection's image galleries on Flickr are now part of the Yale Law Library's Flickr site. All the previous content is still there -- Legal Trees, Dutch Court Scenes, and Provenance Markings -- and I continue to add images to these sets. New sets include:

• 21 images from Francesco Maria Pecchio's profusely illustrated Tractatus de aquaeductu (1713), a 4-volume treatise on the Roman law of aquaducts and riparian rights (see an example at right).
• Images of Justitia (or Themis), or "blind-folded Justice with her scales."
  
• Title pages from a half-dozen 18th-century German legal dissertations. Our rare book cataloger, Susan Karpuk, spoke at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries on how to decipher their long-winded and complicated titles.
• Two pamphlets relating to the prosecution of William Lanson, a leader of New Haven's African-American community in the early 19th century. Lanson built the original Long Wharf and several other developments. In 1845 Lanson was accused of operating a house of ill repute. Isaiah Lanson's Statement and Inquiry, Concerning the Trial of William Lanson (1845) is a defense of Lanson by his son Isaiah, and William Lanson's Book of Satisfaction (1848) is William Lanson's own defence, including a poem describing the events.

More to come...

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Here are a few of the highlights from our acquisitions in the past three months.

For our growing collection of illustrated law books:

• Quadruvium ecclesie (Paris, 1509) by Johann Hugonis de Sletstat (a.k.a. Johann Hug), considered the first text on German constitutional law; only one other copy in the U.S. (Robbins Collection). See the image at right.
  
• The first edition in German of Damhoudere’s Praxis rerum criminalium (Frankfurt, 1565), a standard work on the criminal law of northern Europe with woodcuts illustrating crimes and criminal procedure; the only U.S. copy.
• Juristische Ergötzlichkeiten vom Jungfrauen-Rechte (Frankfurt & Leipzig, 1715) bound with Juristische Ergötzlichkeiten vom Jung-Gesellen Rechte (Frankfurt & Leipzig, 1723), a pair of little books on law for young women and young men, respectively, with charming frontispieces; the only U.S. copies.
• Two standard works, Justinian’s Institutes (1516) and the Liber Sextus (1514) in lovely editions published by the Giunta family in Venice, with dozens of woodcut illustrations. They join an illustrated Giunta edition of the Decretals (1514) we acquired 60 years ago.
• Esdaile’s Temple Church Monuments (London, 1933) showing the tombs of Edmund Plowden and John Selden.
• Jesse Turner’s A Page from the English State Trials (1907?) extra-illustrated with 55 plates.
• Several 19th-century trials adorned with portraits of the accused and/or their victims.
• Fire on the Nunnery Grounds (2000), a graphic novel based on the the arson attack on the Ursuline Convent in Boston. We also obtained The Charlestown Convent: Its Destruction by a Mob, on the Night of August 11, 1834 (Boston, 1870), an account of the attack and the trials that followed.

We have acquired several law-related children’s books to join the Juvenile Jurisprudence Collection donated by Professor Morris L. Cohen, including:

• Jehoshaphat Aspin, The Constitution of England, or, Magna-Charta, Bill of Rights, Habeas Corpus, and All the Other Laws of England: Familiarly Explained for the Instruction of Youth; Illustrated with an Analytical Chart of the Government of Great Britain, Elegantly Coloured (London, 1810).
• Cruel Jim: and Other Stories (Philadelphia, 1869), a cautionary tale of how cruel children grow into career criminals.
• The Tragi-comic History of the Burial of Cock Robin: with The Lamentation of Jenny Wren; The Sparrow's Apprehension; and The Cuckoo's Punishment (Philadelphia, 1811); printed by John Bouvier, author of the first American law dictionary.

The American Trials Collection grew by 28 titles, including:

• Several trials featuring female victims: The Authentic Life of Mrs. Mary Ann Bickford (Boston, 1846); Lizzie Nutt's Sad Experience (Philadelphia, 1886), Myron Buel, the Murderer of Catharine Mary Richards (Binghamton, NY, 1879), Poor Mary Pomeroy! (Philadelphia, 1874), Trial for Libel: Susanna Torrey, Plaintiff (Fayetteville, VT, 1835), Confession of John Joyce: Who Was Executed on Monday, the 14th of March 1808, for the Murder of Mrs. Sarah Cross, with an Address to the Public and People of Colour (Philadelphia, 1808).
• A Report of the Trial, of James Sylvanus M'Clean (Philadelphia, 1812), an early use of the insanity plea, involving an extortion attempt against Stephen Girard, the wealthiest American of his time.
• More murder trials: Cluverius: My Life, Trial and Conviction (Richmond, 1887); Report of the Trial of Dominic Daley and James Halligan for the Murder of Marcus Lyon (Northampton, MA, 1806); Confession of Jesse Strang (Albany, 1827); Report of the Trials of the Murderers of Richard Jennings (Newburgh, NY, 1819); Trial of John Schild (1813).
• And... a small collection of manuscript court documents and transcripts relating to the trial of William Fitzgerald, accused of murdering a Shawnee Indian in Indiana Territory in 1802.

Additions to our William Blackstone Collection included:

• Blackstone’s Letter to the author of The Question stated (London, 1769), his contribution to the debate over the John Wilkes election.
• Outlines of the Jurisdiction of All the Courts in England and Wales by R. Maugham (London, 1838), a work closely tied to the Commentaries.
• The first edition of The Comic Blackstone (London, 1844-46) in two parts.

And a few odds & ends:

• The first edition of Edmund Plowden’s Commentaries (London, 1571), the first and for centuries the finest of the nominative reports.
• Statuti della Honoranda università de mercatanti ... di Bologna (1550), with a vellum musical manuscript used in the binding; the only U.S. copy.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library

Papal States. Gli statuti dell’agricoltura con varie osservazioni, bolle, decisioni della S. Ruota, e decreti intorno alla medesima (Rome 1718). Acquired with the Albert S. Wheeler Fund, May 2008.

(View the Papal States on a map: "Stato Pontificio".)

The agricultural statutes of Rome were first collected during the pontificate of Gregory XII in the early 1400s, and underwent several revisions and reforms before they were promulgated for the last time in 1848. Yale Law Library owns six different editions of this wide-ranging collection of regulations and advice of use to lawyers, agriculturalists (agronomo), and rural merchants in the Papal States. The 1718 edition shown here was the first to be translated from Latin to Italian, and includes a twenty-six page illustrated treatise on locusts.

BENJAMIN YOUSEY-HINDES & MIKE WIDENER
Exhibit Curators

“The Flowering of Civil Law: Early Italian City Statutes in the Yale Law Library” is on display October 2008 through February 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.

A recent addition to our collection of illustrated law books is Johann Werle's Album Juridicum (Augsburg, 1733), a collection of legal maxims arranged by topic. The frontispiece depicts the author seated in his library as a latter-day St. Jerome. He points to a diagram outlining the book's contents.

At the top of the diagram is the Latin maxim, "Bibliotheca sola non sufficit; unde disce piger", which, roughly translated, means "A library alone is not enough; learn, you lazy man!" Words to live by.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

Spring 2008 has been a busy season for acquisitions in the Yale Law Library's Rare Book Collection.

The American trials collection grew by thirty titles in Spring 2008. These included The Fall River Tragedy: A History Of The Borden Murders (1893); a bizarre recreation of the Lindbergh kidnapping (Criminal File Exposed!, 1933): the Amistad trial (New England Anti-Slavery Almanac, 1841; see image ar right); the adultery trial of the Rev. Joy Fairchild (Boston, 1845); censorship of abolition literature (Remarks on the Decision of the Appeal Court of South-Carolina, in the Case of Wells, 1835), sidewalk preaching in New York City (Account of the Trial of John Edwards, 1822); Rev. Henry Ward Beecher's adultery trial (True History of the Brooklyn Scandal, 1878), and murder trials aplenty (The Most Foul and Unparalleled Murder in the Annals of Crime: Life and Confession of Reuben A. Dunbar, 1851; Account of the Short Life and Ignominious Death of Stephen Merrill Clark, 1821; Trial of Henry G. Green, for the Murder of His Wife, 1845; Trial of Rev. Mr. Avery, 1833; Report of the Trial of William Henry Theodore Durrant, 1899).

Seven titles were added to the William Blackstone Collection. The most notable is an apparently unrecorded variant of Eller 180, Commentaire sur le code criminel d'Angleterre (2 vols., 1776), still in its original paper wrappers. Two somewhat ephemeral items testify to Blackstone's role in debates through the years. Our Legal Heritage (2001), by Judge Roy Moore, the Chief Justice of Alabama who lost his judgeship for refusing to remove the Ten Commandments from his courtroom, contains a lengthy excerpt from Blackstone with commentary by Judge Moore. An 8-page pamphlet by the English mystic John Ward is titled This penny book proves clearly that the bishops and clergy are religious imposters, who falsely pretend to an extraordinary commissio[n] from Heaven, and terrify and abuse the Peop[le] with false denunciations of judgment, and as suc[h] by the present laws of England, according [to] Blackstone's Commentaries, vol. IV, p. 62, a[re] liable to fine. imprisonment, and infamo[us] corporeal punishment. This pamphlet also contains a true song, of 18 verses, against priestcraft and oppression to be sung to the tune of the Vicar and Moses (Birmingham, 1832).

Another 18 volumes of Italian statutes and related treatises were acquired, including statutes of Vicenza (1675), Trento (1640), and Milan (1800), as well as ordinances for the notaries' guild of Cremona (1597), the Bergamo marketplace (1701), the legal profession in Bergamo (1795), and the pawnbrokers of Vicenza (1676). The 1718 edition of the agricultural statutes of Rome, Gli statuti dell' agricoltura, includes illustrations of the life cycle of locusts.

In all, thirty of the titles acquired in Spring 2008 sported illustrations. San Antonio tax attorney Farley P. Katz donated two long-sought French codes filled with colorful and humorous images by the illustrator Joseph Hémard: the deluxe edition of Code général des impôts directs et taxes assimilées (1944; see image at right), and Code civil: Livre premier, Des personnes (1925). Katz recently published a study of Hemard's tax code that reproduces several of the illustrations: "The Art of Taxation: Joseph Hémard's Illustrated Tax Code," 60 Tax Lawyer 163 (2006). We acquired two more illustrated French codes perhaps inspired by Hémard: the Code Napoléon rendered into verse with 60 risqué woodcuts by Pierre Noël (1932-33), and the Code Pénal (1950) with illustrations by Jean Dratz (1950). The Coutumes generales d'Artois (1756) has eight large woodcuts depicting the judicial process. Joost de Damhoudere's Practycke in criminele saecken (1642) has dozens of woodcuts depicting crimes and criminal procedure.

I highlighted gifts from Mrs. Beverly M. Manne and Mr. Harold I. Boucher in previous posts, and I am happy to repeat my thanks again.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian

One focus of my collecting efforts is law books with illustrations. These illustrations are often portraits of the authors or allegorical images, but I am especially interested in illustrations used to describe legal concepts.

Tree diagrams have been used since the Middle Ages, particularly in legal texts from the European continent on Roman, canon, or feudal law. They were most commonly used to diagram family relationships: trees of consanguinity dealt with relationships by blood, while trees of affinity described relationships by marriage.

In 16th-century law books, trees were often used to describe other legal concepts and relationships. The "arbor dividui et individui" at right is one example. It comes from Arbor dividui et individui by Martin Sanchez (1538), bound at the end of Luca da Penne's commentary on the Code of Justinian. The "arbor dividui et individui" diagrams different types of legal actions regarding stipulations and contracts having to do with divisible and indivisible things (thanks to my colleague Jennifer Nelson, reference librarian at the Robbins Collection, UC-Berkeley, for deciphering the meaning).

See my gallery of legal "trees" on Flickr for other examples.

The Arbor dividui et individui by Martin Sanchez is quite rare. The first edition (Toulouse, 1519) is held by the Robbins Collection, the Bavarian State Library, and France's Bibliotheque Nationale. The only other copy of our 1538 edition is at the Baden-Württemberg State Library. Our copy is part of the Roman-Canon Law Collection of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

MIKE WIDENER
Rare Book Librarian