Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 27 Oct 2022).

Introduction : vernacular writing and the transformation of customary law in Medieval France -- What is custom? Concept and literary practice -- Composing customary law as a vernacular law -- Writing a 'iusiusiusius non scriptum' : writtenness, memory and change' -- Uneasy jurisdictions : lay and ecclesiastical law -- Roman law, authority and creative citation -- Custom in lawbooks and records of legal practice -- Dynamic text : dialectic, manuscript culture and customary law -- Implications of circulating text : crafting a French Common Law -- Conclusion : lasting model and professional community.

Custom was fundamental to medieval legal practice. Whether in a property dispute or a trial for murder, the aggrieved and accused would go to lay court where cases were resolved according to custom. What custom meant, however, went through a radical shift in the medieval period. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, custom went from being a largely oral and performed practice to one that was also conceptualized in writing. Based on French lawbooks known as coutumiers, Ada Maria Kuskowski traces the repercussions this transformation - in the form of custom from unwritten to written and in the language of law from elite Latin to common vernacular - had on the cultural world of law. Vernacular Law offers a new understanding of the formation of a new field of knowledge: authors combined ideas, experience and critical thought to write lawbooks that made disparate customs into the field known as customary law.