This is a new critical edition of the legal treatise by John of Ibelin, count of Jaffa and Ascalon (died 1266). John was a leading magnate in the Latin East, and his first-hand experience of the courts meant that he was well-placed to write authoritatively on his subject. His work is in French and describes in detail the procedures of the High Court of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and the law as administered there.
The treatise has long been recognized as being of fundamental importance for the legal, institutional and social history of the Latin settlements in the Levant, and this is the first edition to take into account all the surviving medieval manuscripts and the first to be published since 1841.
Peter Edbury, Ph.D. (1974) at St Andrews University, is a professor in the School of History and Archaeology, Cardiff University. He has published extensively on the history of the Latin East, including The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades (1991).
'Edbury's greatest merit is to provide a clear and dependable version of the text closest to the original version of John of Ibelin (pp. 49-616), isolated from later alterations and additions. His text definitively replaces the defective edition published by Count A. Beugnot in the Recueil des historiens des croisades: Lois, 1 (Paris, 1841).'
David Jacoby, Speculum, 2006.
'...magnificent edition of the court of Jaffa and Ascalon's legal treatise...'
K. Stöber, Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature.
Preface
Introduction
Le Livre des Assises
Appendices
1. Additions unique to MS C
2. Addition unique to MS O
3. The ‘z’ Recension
4. Additions unique to MS A
5. The ‘z1’ Recension
6. Additions unique to MS B
7. Additions unique to MS V
8. John of Ibelin’s discourse on the regency.
Bibliography
Index rerum
Index nominum
All interested in the history of the Crusades and the Latin East, of medieval customary law, of medieval legal literature and of medieval society in general, as well as Old French philologists.