Spotlight on Rare Books: Joost de Damhoudere's Praxis Rerum Criminalium

Last spring, Professor Bruno Debaenst was the visiting professor to Minnesota from the Faculty of Law at Uppsala University. As an expert legal historian, he has truly wide-ranging interests, from employment, labor and insurance law, to international legal organizations, Swedish legal history, and early and modern Belgian legal history. At the Law School, he taught an excellent class on historical trials in comparative perspective.

Bruno visited as part of the wonderful exchange program between the Minnesota and Uppsala law schools that dates back to the fall semester of 1982. The program has sent numerous faculty and students of the two law schools back and forth for enriching teaching and study across the Atlantic.  

 

During Bruno's stay we became good friends and he became interested in one of our historical law books in particular, a striking copy of Joost de Damhoudere's Praxis Rerum Criminalium (1570). The book is remarkable as one of the most extensively illustrated law books, featuring dozens of woodcuts graphically depicting the crimes it discusses. Our 1570 copy is additionally interesting for the unusually rich, creative annotations made by a contemporary student, citing literature and law in German, Latin and Greek. Notably, our copy was also owned by Hermann Kantorowicz, an influential legal historian and scholar of the 20th century, whose personal library is held in our collections.

 

Last spring, we had a nice opportunity to discuss this extraordinary book for the Premodern Podcast "I've Got A Thing" series, hosted by the Center for Premodern Studies at Minnesota. Bruno highlighted in his discussion one further feature that is especially remarkable about Damhoudere's magnum opus: it was plagiarized from a manuscript by Philip Wielant, a city magistrate of an earlier generation. Bruno's great comments 'revealed the steal' and we talked further with Elijah Wallace, a PhD candidate in the History Department, about the illustrations and annotations. The podcast is available here.

 

   - Ryan Greenwood, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections