IMC 2018: Sessions
Session 1542: Power, Mercy, and Memory: Royal and Princely Pardons in the Late Middle Ages
Thursday 5 July 2018, 09.00-10.30
Organisers: | Rudi Beaulant, Archéologie, Terre, Histoire, Sociétés (ARTEHIS - UMR 6298), Université Bourgogne, Dijon Quentin Verreycken, Centre d’histoire du droit et de la justice (CHDJ), Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve / Centre de recherches en histoire du droit et des institutions (CRHiDI), Université Saint-Louis, Bruxelles |
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Moderator/Chair: | Quentin Verreycken, Centre d’histoire du droit et de la justice (CHDJ), Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve / Centre de recherches en histoire du droit et des institutions (CRHiDI), Université Saint-Louis, Bruxelles |
Paper 1542-a | L'espace de la grâce ducale: L'invention d'un langage princier en Bretagne sous le règne de Jean IV (Language: Français) Index terms: Administration, Historiography - Modern Scholarship, Political Thought |
Paper 1542-b | The Good, the Bad, and the Pardoned: The Evolution of the Pardon Procedure in Burgundy in the 14th and 15th Centuries (Language: English) Index terms: Archives and Sources, Charters and Diplomatics, Law, Politics and Diplomacy |
Paper 1542-c | To Forgive and To Forget?: The Use of Abolition Letters for Rebel Cities by King of France Louis XI, 1461-1483 (Language: English) Index terms: Archives and Sources, Charters and Diplomatics, Politics and Diplomacy |
Abstract | In the late medieval period, the power to pardon criminals and rebels who asked for mercy was one of the most important rights of sovereign rulers like the king of France, the duke of Burgundy, or the duke of Britain. By granting remission or abolition letters that allowed individuals and communities to escape punishment and get back to society, the monarchs constructed their own sovereignty upon their subjects and their justices by imposing an extraordinary procedure they controlled. Following a legal and political fiction, the merciful king or prince had even the power to erase crimes from memory itself. Thereby, the act of forgiving could also be an act of forgetting. |