The Dutch in the Early Modern World: A History of a Global Power. David Onnekink and Gijs Rommelse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xxii + 294 pp. $29.99.
concerning the development of single legal institutions, and the city’s political system as a whole, over the course of time. The leading question and theoretical framework of the book make it immune to teleological narratives, such as the supposed increase of rationality and professionalization in the legal sphere. I offer here one example of the book’s merit as a work historicizing late medieval legal cultures and presenting them in their own right: the case of spatial organization. Although Cologne’s council in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries was eager to demonstrate its increasing power by creating specialized spaces and buildings for individual institutions (e.g., for fiscal offices, scribal offices, or archives), the field of jurisprudence was a special case. The council’s manifold courts (Ratsgerichte) were embedded in public spaces, like markets and town halls, and in most cases, the sessions were even held in the open (101–17). Even though the older Schöffengericht was located in a proper building on the cathedral’s square, the impression of openness toward the city space and the community at large was cultivated by leaving the doors and windows open during trials. Furthermore, this court was known by citizens as the court zwischen den vier Bänken (between the four benches), recalling its former location under the open sky (78–101). Arlinghaus’s central assumption, therefore, is that the spaces of the courts were open and even undetermined. Its communication was not differentiated from the communicative context of the city and its citizens, because even minor lawsuits were connected to the fundamental question of inclusion/exclusion of the city’s members. It was through the use of highly ritualized and formalized speech acts (in the case of the Schöffengericht) that the boundaries of the court’s communicationwere demarcated, distinguishing it from the communications of its bystanders, and from the everyday life going on around it (esp. 188–90). To sum up, Arlinghaus’s survey on the communication of law courts surpasses the boundaries of the field of legal history and gives important insights that are also relevant for historians of other fields (e.g., social, communicative, cultural history) and even of other epochs. The book delivers on its promise to make more understandable the legal practices of a large medieval metropolis like Cologne.