Medieval Studies Lecture Series

"Thresholds of Heaven: The Creation and Judicial Use of Sacred Space in Post-Carolingian Catalonia, 800-1100"

Adam Matthews

AD White, Guerlac Room, Cornell University

28 March 2023, 4:45 PM to 6:00 Pm

Between the ninth and early twelfth centuries, judges in the Catalan counties of northeastern Iberia and Septimania adjudicated disputes using the Visigothic law code. These judges, who often lacked guarantees of litigant commitment to the judicial process, developed strategies in order to fulfill the code’s mandates and thereby keep courts functional. One such strategy was to place special emphasis on the procedural step of bringing witnesses and litigants to church altars to authenticate testimony with an oath. This practice transformed centers of worship into arenas of justice. Despite the prominence of churches in legal records and the importance of oath exaction to stabilizing particularly challenging disputes, scholars still know little about how exactly judges themselves understood the sacred spaces they used. Hundreds of documents of church dedication (dotalia) offer a way forward. They reveal the close relationship between judges’ conception of these places and the broader regional attitude toward sanctuaries in the wake of the Carolingian liturgical reforms. This talk explores the variety of ways in which judges participated at dedication assemblies, including as scribe, celebrant, builder/founder, and even liturgical commentator. Attention to such varied forms of involvement allows legal historians to nuance judges as a professional class and thereby to refine our understanding of the strategic resources at their disposal in the courts of post-Carolingian Catalonia.

Adam Matthews is a historian of the legal, documentary, and liturgical practices of medieval Catalonia and southern France during the ninth through eleventh centuries. His current book project examines how the judges and community leaders of the lands bordering the eastern Pyrenees Mountains capitalized on ever-evolving conceptions of churches as sacred spaces in order to develop innovative court strategies and thereby reinforce the authority of the region’s law code and disputing norms. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2021 and is currently a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of History at Cornell University.

The Cornell Medieval Studies Program presents a series of lectures on a wide range of medieval topics. All lectures take place on Tuesdays at 4:45pm.

Cosponsored by the Society for the Humanities

For more information: https://events.cornell.edu/event/medieval_studies_lecture_series_adam_matthews