​This book analyses the legal literacy, knowledge and skills of people in premodern and modernizing Europe. It examines how laymen belonging both to the common people and the elite acquired legal knowledge and skills, how they used these in advocacy and legal writing and how legal literacy became an avenue for social mobility. Taking a comparative approach, contributors consider the historical contexts of England, Finland, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden. This book is divided into two main parts. The first part discusses various groups of legal literates (scriveners, court of appeal judges and advocates) and their different paths to legal literacy from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The second part analyses the rise of the ownership and production of legal literature – especially legal books meant for laymen – as means for acquiring a degree of legal literacy from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

In Learning Law and Travelling Europe, Marianne Vasara-Aaltonen offers an account of the study journeys of Swedish lawyers in the early modern period, and their connection to the state-building process and the development of the Swedish legal profession.

The articles in Nordic Inheritance Law through the Ages – Spaces of Action and Legal Strategies explore the significance of inheritance law through the use of topical and in-depth studies that bring life to historical and contemporary Nordic inheritance law practices.

This book explores the judicial treatment of suicides in early modern Sweden, with a focus on the criminal investigation and selective treatment of suicides in the lower courts in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Riikka Miettinen shows that reactions and attitudes towards suicides varied considerably despite harsh condemnation by officials. The indictment, investigation, and classification of suspected suicides and the mental state of a person already deceased were challenging, and depended on local co-operation and lay testimonies. Not all suicides were considered alike; a widespread view on the heinousness of suicide was not the same as agreement about specific cases, and did not result in uniform handling of them. The social status and local ties of the deceased influenced the interpretations and responses at the local lower courts and communities. Esteemed local community members had a better defence and greater chance to escape the shameful penalties.

This book focuses on the history of the provision of legal aid and legal assistance to the poor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in eight different countries. It is the first such book to bring together historical work on legal aid in a comparative perspective, and allows readers to analogise and contrast historical narratives about free legal aid across countries. Legal aid developed as a result of industrialisation, urbanization, immigration, the rise of philanthropy, and what were viewed as new legal problems. Closely related, was the growing professionalisation of lawyers and the question of what duties lawyers owed society to perform free work. Yet, legal aid providers in many countries included lay women and men, leading at times to tensions with the bar. Furthermore, legal aid often became deeply politicized, creating dramatic conflicts concerning the rights of the poor to have equal access to justice.

An examination of instances, experiences, and spaces of early modern privacy. It opens new avenues to understanding the structures and dynamics that shape early modern societies through examination of a wide array of sources, discourses, practices, and spatial programmes.

Getting divorced and remarried are now common practices in European societies, even if the rules differ from one country to the next. Civil marriage law still echoes religious marriage law, which for centuries determined which persons could enter into marriage with each other and how validly contracted marriages could be ended. Religions and denominations also had different regulations regarding whether a divorce only ended marital obligations or also permitted remarriage during the lifetime of the divorced spouse. This book deals with predominantly handwritten documents of divorce proceedings from the British Isles to Western, Central, and Southeastern Europe, and from 1600 to the 1930s. The praxeological analysis reveals the arguments and strategies put forward to obtain or prevent divorce, as well as the social and, above all, economic conditions and arrangements connected with divorce. The contributions break new ground by combining previously often separate fields of research and regions of investigation. It makes clear that the gender order doesn’t always run along religious lines, as was too often assumed. This book will be of interest to all scholars and students of economic, social, religious, cultural, legal, and gender history as well as gender and well-being in a broader sense.