A Visit from Professor Bruno Debaenst

This past spring, Professor Bruno Debaenst was the visiting professor to Minnesota from the Faculty of Law at Uppsala University. Professor Debaenst is an expert in legal history, whose scholarship and interests range widely and include employment, labor and insurance law, international legal organizations and the modern welfare state, Swedish legal history, and early and modern Belgian legal history, among other subjects. At the Law School, he taught an excellent class on historical trials in comparative perspective. 

Professor Debaenst was the most recent faculty visitor as part of a Minnesota-Uppsala exchange program that dates back to the fall semester of 1982. The program has been strengthened since then, sending numerous faculty members of the respective law schools back and forth for enriching teaching and study across the Atlantic. The kindred cultural and academic relationship has opened many doors for exchange students from the two universities, some of whom have stayed, lived and thrived in the US and Sweden.   

During the semester, Bruno took the time to visit the Riesenfeld Center and rare books collection, and became a good friend in the process. While here he found several items of particular interest. One was a remarkable work by Flemish jurist Joost de Damhoudere (1507-81), whose Latin title is Praxis Rerum Criminalium. First published in 1554 and reprinted many times after, it is the most extensively and vividly illustrated law book of the 16th century, a compendium of Flemish-Roman criminal law that depicts in more than 50 woodcuts the wide range of crimes it discusses. 

The book is one that had caught our eye also, and was featured in an exhibit that was mounted two years ago. Of the two copies of the work in our rare books collection, one we acquired was formerly owned by the great German jurist and legal historian Hermann Kantorowicz. That copy is enhanced by unique and rich student annotations - probably from a German student contemporary to the book's publication - and the book was perhaps partly purchased or given to Professor Kantorowicz for that reason.   

In discussing the book with me, Bruno pointed out the potential that it had for further research. Among other interesting perspectives on the work is that of plagiarism. In fact, Joost de Damhoudere plagiarized his magnum opus from Philips Wielant, an earlier jurist and public official who also served as a mayor of the Liberty of Bruges. Why Damhoudere chose not to acknowledge his principal source is a mystery. Although the 16th century placed no modern legal or perhaps cultural prohibitions on plagiarism, it seems there were some basic rules of ethics, which Damhoudere must have been aware that he violated. In addition, other questions were raised: one was the extent of the work's reliance on an existing Roman law tradition vs. its reflection of contemporary Flemish law. Other questions involve the woodcut depictions, the complex publication history of the book, and the fascinating topics of criminal law that are covered (some seem included only to highlight a particular sensationalistic woodcut). In all, the book raises many more questions than an ordinary (even historical) law book typically does.

In our second copy of the book, the rich annotations also reveal information about the student who took notes in it. Apparently a humanist by inclination, the student was fond of citing Latin classics and appended quotes in Greek. The text itself became an imaginative space for the student's heavy multi-colored pen work, with interlinear and marginal notes, pointers and labeling. 

Likewise for us, thinking about the book centuries later, it provides a similar space for discussion and thought, and the elaboration of new approaches to the material. It is a wonderful conversation piece, ripe for further research.   

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections