On Friday 23 May 2025 (4pm - 5 pm CEST) Dr. Esther Liberman Cuenca, associate professor at University of Houston-Victoria (TX, USA), will review the major arguments and sources of her new book, The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England (Oxford, 2025), and will go in-depth into Chapter 1, “The Making of Urban Charters and Custumals". 

This will be a digital session, to convene in MS Teams setting. If you are not yet part of the MS Teams group, please get in touch with the Pirenne Institute coordinator. All welcome!

Abstract

The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England examines the development of urban customary law from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries and argues that urban customs were crucial to the development of a distinct, bourgeois identity in medieval and Reformation England. Urban customary law regulated political officeholding, trade, property holding, and even moral behaviour in English towns. This book explores the forms, genres, and content of urban customary law, which could appear in standalone and compilation custumals, as well as charters granted to towns by royal, seignorial, or ecclesiastical lords. This book makes two principal claims: First, customary law advanced the interests of an urban oligarchy. These were urban (male) elites who drafted laws and obtained privileges to enhance their wealth and assert their political independence from local lords. They often made claims about the legitimacy of their privileges or laws by rooting them in history or some kind of ancestral past. These lawmakers also made considerable efforts to establish their identities as morally upright and even-handed patriarchs. Second, urban customary law lent particular meanings to the “common good” in towns, as it helped lawmakers articulate policies that cohered with their vision of an ideal civic community.

Speaker

Esther Liberman Cuenca received her PhD in History from Fordham University and is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston-Victoria in Victoria, Texas. She is an editor of the undergraduate textbook, Law, Justice, and Society in the Medieval World: An Introduction through Film (Fordham Press, 2025), and her essays have appeared in Urban History, The Paris Review, Continuity and Change, and Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques. She has received fellowships and awards from the Mellon Foundation, Medieval Academy of America, and American Philosophical Society. In 2022/23, she was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where she completed The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England (Oxford, 2025).