La Voix des dominés

A revised habilitation, defended in 2007, this book investigates the role of the investigative judicial procedure known as the enquête in the political society of thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Provence. Based on eight registers containing some of these enquêtes in the departmental archives of Bouches-du-Rhône, as well as a few published procedures, it is a relatively narrow study that makes two broad claims. The first is that the counts of Provence used the enquête procedure as a tool to limit seigneurial rights in order to expand their own sovereign power. The second, more diffuse, argument is that the enquête’s reliance on testimony to prove customary rights affirmed the affective as well as legal links between lords and their subjects. Lauren Verdon’s interest was clearly captured by the anthropological, and even philosophical, aspects of her subject. Thus the book begins not with an introduction to thirteenth-century Provence, the Angevin counts or later medieval lordship, but rather with a meditation on the construction of ‘truth’ and what it means to move from speech to document to archive. The second chapter, in which the source-base is outlined, gives some background to the development of the procedural in Provençal judicial and administrative history, and clarifies that we will be reading about enquêtes centred on two parts of Provence: those related to the Baux family in the environs of Tarascon and a more varied group from the bailliage of Castellane and a neighbouring district. The third chapter focuses on the relationship between the counts and the nobility, emphasising the former’s efforts to control the latter. The fourth chapter describes the practice of lordship, particularly from the perspective of the enforcement of justice and the collection of fiscal rights. The fifth is focused on the conceptualisation of the community through lands rights, mastery of space, and oaths

Argument (complex analysis · Art · Habilitation · Humanities · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sovereignty · Subject (documents · Classics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medieval and Early Modern Justice · Medieval Literature and History