«Истинная правда». Языки средневекового правосудия

The study deals with the medieval court of law not within the framework of the institutional or legal history. The interest is with a place of meeting of represantatives of power (the judges) and its subjects (the criminals). Hence, the book focuses on the problem of communication: the problem of the contact of these two agencies, of their ability to speak with each other, to share the information. How did this contact take place? In what language did the judges and the criminals communicate? What did they try to express? What words, what notions and analogues, what gestures each of them used to convince the others in the truthfulness of his or her words? Such are the questions posed in this book within the framework of the micro-historical approach.

The methods of micro-history with their focus on a person, an individual, certain details and cases (including legal cases as a précédent) appear to be the most adequate while studying the individual perception of law, legal procedure, judicial rituals, etc. in the Medieval France. This book attempts to show the possibilities of micro- (and macro-) analysis in relation to the registers of judicial practice of the Late Middle Ages. As the most telling document the author examines the «Registre criminel du Châtelet de Paris», composed in the end of the 14th century.

The tradition of the studies of the «Registre» is based on the serial character of such documents. Thus, the «Registre» and its analogues are used primarily in macro-historical research, treating such problems as the phenomenon of medieval criminality, the influence of this specific stratum on the society as a whole, its internal composition, the laws governing its existance. The authors of such works study the society of the criminals holistically, not representatively. This attitude bears the influence of Michel Foucault's methodology: the personality of a man is described not as a subject, but as an object of relationships, deprived of his/her own language. The author tries to offer other ways of analysis, partly based on Carlo Ginzburg's methodology, in particular on his assumption of a different type of discourse of the accused and of the accuser. The difference between the two types of discourse, in author's opinion, allows to apply the micro-study of the personality of an individual (or the judge or the criminal), his outlooks, his internal motivations and his Weltanschauung.

The first chapter, «Waiting for Death», deals with the pecularities of the criminals' discourse and behaviour at the royal court, with their perception of the power and the law. Where lies the border between «normal» and «individual» behaviour is the question which the author considers looking at the «Registre criminel du Châtelet de Paris». The expectation of death and the understanding of such a possibility made the criminals' discourse and behaviour in prison and at court unpredictable. The themes of violence (forced imprisonment), of loneliness (broken social relations), of physical pain (perception of tortures) become dominant here. But the attempts of the medieval criminals to overcome this situation appeared to be very different. Some tried a trick of using their «doubles», i.e. pretending to be a «clerc» with a tonsure (it was forbidden to try the clergy in royal and secular courts) or a «homme honnêtte» wearing good clothes. Some tried to change his/her name or pretended that he/she is infirm (mad) or pregnant. Some agreed to testify but refused to repeat their own words claiming that these words had been extorted by torture. Some even preferred to keep silence even after numerous torments.

The «Registre criminel du Châtelet de Paris» is a real collection of such individual conduct strategies of the medieval criminals and of their methods to resist the judges' intentions. The second chapter of the book, «A Man and a Woman: Two Love-stories», deals in detail with one of these methods — the way of speaking without saying, i.e. without testifying. The author tries to understand for what reasons the compiler of the «Registre», Alaume Cachemarée, incorporated the love-stories of two criminals, Florant de Saint-Lô and Marion la Droiturière, in his text considering that they were not their confession. The analysis of these stories (as of the love-discourse in Roland Barthes' terms) and of the peculiarities of men's and women's speech allows the author to assume that the two criminals' perception of love, sex and private life was too atypical for the end of the 14th century. The peculiarity of the two love-stories — beside the attempt of their authors to talk the judges' heads off — was the very reason to include them into the «Registre criminel».