Charles Steinman

In the historiography of medieval Europe, Angevin Provence and the Capetian Languedoc have been traditionally portrayed as paradigmatic cases of rapid political centralization and state-building during the thirteenth century; in French historiography especially, they are nothing less than the ancestors of the modern French state. However, this process of state-building was not uncontested, and the transition to centralized state power was slower, more complex, and far more uneven than these narratives suggest. My doctoral dissertation explores the role of official and unofficial enforcers of powerful lords in the assertion, maintenance, and disruption of lordly authority in southern France in the thirteenth and early fourteenth-centuries. I argue that the
physical presence, and often violence, of these enforcers was an essential element of the lived experience of power. These representatives of the powerful had complex, messy relationships to territorial boundaries, and played an important role in carrying out political violence that shaped the experience of jurisdiction in this period. Drawing on historiographies of legal pluralism, I analyze how people availed themselves of the power of enforcers to coerce one another, as well as to influence the different institutional bodies in their orbit. Through an examination of a wide variety of sources in Latin, Occitan/Provençal, and Hebrew, including administrative inquests, court records, accounts, notarial records, and rabbinic responsa, I propose an institutional history that focuses on the human point of contact between the ruler and ruled: the low-level agent of authority. I eschew the traditional opposition between “top-down” and “bottom-up”; by putting the petty agents of the powerful at the center of the story, this project writes a history of the
experience of power and jurisdiction from the “middle-out.”