Order in the Court: Medieval Procedural Treatises in Translation by Bruce C. Brasington (review)

The traditional understanding of western European legal history was that a watershed moment happened in the late eleventh or early twelfth century when the Digest was somehow rediscovered at Bologna by a man named Irnerius. From Bologna the new legal method that the Bolognese professors developed spread all over western Europe, leading directly to the codifications of the nineteenth century. The development of Romano-canonical procedure over the course of the twelfth century, a development that seems to have begun with a letter by Bulgarus, one of the ‘four doctors’ who are thought to have succeeded Irnerius as teachers of Roman law at Bologna, provided considerable support for the story. This development is strongly supported by contemporary evidence, a number of ‘ordines iudiciarii’, treatises that describe the entire course of a lawsuit, and a number that deal with some aspect of the procedure, such as testimony by witnesses. Although there were always those who had their doubts about the traditional understanding, it is, I think, fair to say that the last twenty years have seen work that makes the traditional story no longer tenable as it was originally formulated. In particular, Anders Winroth’s path-breaking work on the making