Edda Frankot. “Of Laws of Ships and Shipmen”

Edda Frankot's monograph makes a clear and intelligent yet concise intervention in the historiography of European maritime law. The book's argument is as simple as it is original: debunking existing opinion, Frankot shows that the Rôles d'Oléron were not universally applied in the urban trading emporia of northern Europe. Instead, cities relied on idiosyncratic combinations of local, customary, and unwritten laws that were occasionally supplemented with some of the better-known international codes, such as the Rôles d'Oléron or the Dutch Ordinancie. In this otherwise lucid book, only the preface stands out as puzzling, in that it privileges Scotland: “This book seeks to determine which aspects of Scottish maritime law ... were unique in northern Europe ... Second, the study aims to establish whether a common maritime law existed in northern Europe” (pp. xiii–xiv). Yet neither the blurb on the dust jacket nor the book's actual argument allocates particular attention to Scotland. Hence, the introduction corrects the preface: “the main question my study seeks to answer is whether it is accurate to speak of a common law of the sea in medieval northern Europe” (p. 2). This focus on “a common law of the sea” is sustained throughout the book

Argument (complex analysis · Historiography · Intervention (counseling · Political science · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies