| The Smithfield Decretals (London, BL Ms. Royal 10E.iv, C 1340) is a well known book traditionally appreciated for the vividly painted trail of images that run along the bottom of almost every page depicting narratives from the Old Testament, saints' lives, fabliaux, and "everyday life." Although the book has been mentioned in art historical stylistic and iconographic studies, it has not, until recently, received sustained attention that treats it as a complex and integrated object pertaining to law. The present study attempts just that.;After a history of the literature and statement of approach, Chapter One explores the state of the book when it arrived in London, before work was begun on its larger illustrative campaign. This is the space the London designer and artists worked in, and it distinctly invoked matters jurisprudential. The next two chapters cover medieval English legal culture, especially in its 'lived' aspect. Chapter Two examines the legal culture of the late eleventh century, when both the canon law and the common law of England were taking on their distinctive shapes. Although legal habits formed then would be much altered by the fourteenth century, they were by no means forgotten; they would, in fact, be an object of nostalgia. Chapter Three entertains the legal culture of the fourteenth century, again concentrating on its lived aspects. It measures the quick and profound legal change of late thirteenth-century England and notices the manifestations of an active recollection of earlier and nearly vanished forms of justice.;The final chapter of the study returns to the Smithfield Decretals and to the London illustrative campaign. As the designer and artists made their way through this enormously long legal codex, putting down five different registers of imagery on nearly every page, their perception of their work changed. This later chapter calls out patterns, measuring them against the legal culture in which the designer and artists lived and worked. The study ends with a brief conclusion. |
