There are many passages in this book which contain gnomic, almost throwaway anecdotes and details that provoke a desire to delve much deeper into the global Middle Ages. They demand simple repetition: King Zärä Yaqob of Ethiopia (1399-1468) enforced stringent sumptuary rules on his Christian subjects, ordering that adherents were required to have the names of the Trinity branded on their foreheads, and fasten signs of the cross on all their clothing, weapons, and ploughs; the Nahua inhabitants of premodern central America employed a graphic communication system (GCS) that integrated with spoken language and performance in such a way as to unsettle one's sense of the boundaries of written communication; at Sharma, an entrepôt on the Gulf of Aden, recent excavations found eleventh-century qingbai ("bluish-white") ceramic lidded boxes that were produced in China for exporting spices, medicines, and ointments to the Philippines and Indonesia.
If these sit-up-and-listen moments partly reflect this reviewer's ignorance of the world that lay beyond Europe between the fifth and sixteenth centuries, they are also testament to the quality of the papers assembled here. They are at once richly detailed and accessible to non-specialists, with the authors giving a clear sense of where they are building on previous work, and where they are innovating. They have, moreover, been well-marshalled into conversation with one another. Despite a diverse and interdisciplinary group of scholars working on a range of subjects and geographical areas, many of the chapters speak to a common set of concerns, and make reference to the insights of the others. In its (nearly) worldwide reach, intellectual breadth, and consistency, it is a great indication of what The Medieval Globe series, of which this is the second volume, will add to scholarship.
The thread that holds these seven heterogenous papers together is law, or more particularly, as becomes clearer over the course of the volume, legal categories. The "encounters" of the title, explained in a very short preface by the editor Elizabeth Lambourn, are scattered throughout--between the Spanish colonial forces and the indigenous inhabitants of Aztec territories (Jerome A. Offner), across the borders of the fragile Ethiopian polity of the sixteenth century and the Adali sultanate (Habtamu Mengistie Tegegne), or the arrival of Chinese porcelain in the Jewish communities of Yemen (Lambourn and Phillip Ackerman-Lieberman). What such encounters consistently make apparent is the way that categories had to be made and remade as flows of people, goods, and information across the medieval world brought different, sometimes contradictory legal ideas into conversation or conflict with one another.
Susan Elizabeth Ramírez's wonderful chapter on early colonial Peru, for example, focuses on the way that conceptions of land tenure changed after the arrival of Francisco Pizarro in 1532 and the establishment of the Spanish Viceroyalty there. Most of the different ethnic groups who had lived under Inca rule or in loose federation with it had regarded land as sacred and sapci, "common to all." Kin groups used the land which they worked, but if they abandoned it for some reason--death, drought, or infertility--it might be brought back into cultivation by some other, with no obvious rules of ownership or exchange governing such transitions; indeed, there were no Quechua words for "owner," "ownership," or "property" (52).
The Spanish, of course, brought with them a set of very different ideas about land, based upon dominion and rights, backed by foreign procedures, alien livestock, and, ultimately, force. A petition lodged by the chieftain of Ferreñafes in 1566 to the viceregal visitador complained that two encomenderos--colonialists granted huge tracts of land, which they often used for sheep and cattle ranching--let their animals wander and destroy the local fields, and asked that the local authorities should be made to place markers on the fields in order that they would recognize the boundaries. Such evidence, vanishingly rare though it is, suggests the hard lessons that had to be quickly learned when it came to dealing with other people's legal categories. Ramírez does brilliant work in setting out both these complex schema in both indigenous and colonial society.
On the other hand, several chapters do not focus on encounters; two explicitly adopt approaches which hold different contexts together for comparison. Patricia Skinner's concise examination of mutilation in the law of early-medieval Europe and India, although it found some neat juxtapositions, was a little ambivalent about what these might mean; Laurel Ann Wilson's careful study of sumptuary law in England, France, and Italy, by contrast, highlights the value of comparison both in this subject and elsewhere, pointing up the "common threads" that scholars working on individual areas and polities have missed, and to future directions that a more comparative textile history might pursue. Meanwhile, Donald Davis focuses solely on medieval India, and specifically the role of documents in its legal tradition, though with a comparative eye on Michael Clanchy's From Memory to Written Record evident throughout.
Indeed, Davis's chapter--though it largely consists of a long translation of and commentary on a passage from the Smrticandrika ("Moonlight on the Laws"), a twelfth-century digest of Hindu law--is perhaps the most theoretical of the whole volume; drawing on this text he not only arrives at insights about the relationship between the material documents themselves, local practice, and legality (192-194), but also on law itself as a tense dialogue between practical arrangements and rules and categories (169-170). More such reflections on law itself would have been very welcome here, and might have given a sharper analytical bite to several of the chapters. A global perspective on the Middle Ages, alongside its new evidence and exploration of quite different cultures, can bring a way of unsettling established categories of medieval scholarship.
Law is ready for precisely such unsettling: the idea that it is a distinct mode of thought which we can label as "law" is clearly culturally specific. As Skinner notes, the Hindu legal tradition represented by dharmasastra ("the teaching or science of righteousness") is often likened to the Christian canon law of western Europe, but the comparison is simplistic; though it does comprise moral and religious ideas, it does not hold them distinct from secular concerns, and may not even transliterate straightforwardly as "legal," as she describes it as "an overarching, systematic presentation of precepts suited to the diversity of Indian society" (118). Yet while there are allusions and implications, here and there, to what medieval "law" might look like once it has been reimagined across these global flows and contexts, the volume might have usefully gone further in probing and critiquing its central analytic concern.
At the same time, though, it is important to celebrate this volume for what it is: a pioneering exploration, a suggestion for what a global medieval legal history might look like, and, hopefully, a harbinger of more such studies. Indeed, it will help to make them possible through the sources it offers up to the reader: there are several new sources and translations offered here--most remarkably in Tegegne's fascinating chapter on a 1548 edict of King Gälawdéwos that he recently discovered in an Ethiopian monastery--and besides them, all of chapters give an excellent sense of the evidence available, and the difficulties it frequently presents for interpretation. Like the volume as a whole, these excerpts and outlines will not only prove useful to experts but also help to give non-specialists a taste of what is available, and the categories at stake; and it will leave them wanting more of the same.