The mediality and materiality of law
Once again we are very excited to be welcoming a group of early-career researchers from all over the world here in Frankfurt for the Max Planck Summer Academy for Legal History. This year’s overarching research theme is: ‘The mediality and materiality of law’.
‘Mediality’ and ‘materiality’ are important keywords in historical and cultural studies debates. Legal scholarship has also been devoting a great deal of thought to the material and medial conditions of the production and enforcement of law. Legal history has been pursuing this avenue of research for quite some time, with noteworthy examples including legal archaeology and the long-standing discussions on orality and writing, for example in medieval legal history.
As of late, more theoretically grounded considerations have entered this discussion, which ask, for instance, about the interplay between the form and content of legal texts through the advent of new technologies such as printing or digitisation. There is lively interest in the legal significance of rituals and how they are performed, the connections between architecture, furnishings and attire, and in the normative power of images. Some even ask whether the history of law would look very different if it had not been based solely on written sources but, for example, on images and artefacts. The question of the ‘mediality’ and the ‘materiality’ of law thus also touches on fundamental aspects of legal-historical research such as the concepts of the ‘source’, the ‘archive’ and ultimately even that of law.