Urban Customary Law with Esther Liberman Cuenca

May 1 at 12pm ET/ 10am MST/ 5pm GMT

Join NACBS to celebrate Esther Liberman Cuenca’s recent publication The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval & Reformation England. Katharine French will join Esther Liberman Cuenca in conversation.

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Drawing on a quantitative analysis of hundreds of printed and archival sources from 77 towns, The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval England is the first cross-regional investigation into the history of urban customs since Mary Bateson's seminal, two-volume work Borough Customs (1904-1906). In contrast to English common law and church law, which both had long institutional and academic traditions devoted to training men in their legal philosophies, customary law constituted local practices that acquired the force of law over time. Urban customary law regulated political officeholding, trade, property holding, and even moral behaviour in English towns.

The Making of Urban Customary Law argues that urban customs, which governed the lives of people in English towns, were crucial to the development of a distinct, bourgeois identity in England-an evolution that this new study tracks from the early twelfth to the late sixteenth centuries. In the years following the Black Death, and especially during the Reformation period, this law became more concerned with defining political authority, maintaining morality, and articulating a consensus about the “common good” for townspeople.

This book makes two principal claims: First, customary law advanced the business interests of an urban oligarchy. These were urban (male) elites who drafted laws and obtained privileges to enhance their wealth and assert their political independence from local lords, and often made claims about the legitimacy of their privileges or laws by rooted them in history or some kind of ancestral past. These lawmakers also made considerable efforts to establish their identities as morally upright and even-handed patriarchs. In so doing, urban customary law played a central role in the development of a distinct bourgeois identity in medieval and Reformation England. Second, this law lent particular meanings to the “common good” in towns, as it helped these lawmakers articulate policies that cohered to their vision of an ideal civic community.

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Esther Liberman Cuenca is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston-Victoria in Victoria, Texas. Her book, The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in May 2025. She is also an editor of an undergraduate textbook, Law, Justice, and Society in the Medieval World: An Introduction through Film (forthcoming from Fordham University Press in May 2025), and her essays have appeared in Urban History, The Paris Review, Continuity and Change, and Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques. She has received fellowships and awards from the Mellon Foundation, Medieval Academy of America, and American Philosophical Society. In 2022/23, she was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Katherine French is the J. Frederick Hoffman Professor of medieval English history at the University of Michigan. She is the author of several books and articles on local religion, women, and material culture, including most recently Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Domesticity and Consumption after the Plague (UPenn Press, 2021).