Simon Teuscher's engaging discussion of law in German- and French-speaking Switzerland explores the ways in which law becomes established through a process of writing. Using collections of local laws, encoded and gathered as Weistümer (the record of spoken pronouncements of local laws) as well as witness deposition records, Teuscher shows how local disputes and discussion of past practice encouraged, in the later middle ages, a gathering and formalization of laws into a more coherent and recoverable legal form.

Weistümer, in particular, are well known to French, German, and Swiss historians. Many examples were gathered by Jacob Grimm in the nineteenth century; Teuscher notes that Grimm's original interpretation of these as written representations of a vibrant oral culture has been largely rejected by legal historians, who now tend to see the movement to a written legal culture as progressive. In the formulation of Grimm and those who followed him, law was not a product of the state or some other higher earthly authority, but rather an excrescence of long-standing and shared moral norms, law that was, to use modern legal-anthropological jargon, processual rather than rule centered, and which reflected a common understanding of right. This conception of the “good old law” and its transition has held a significant position in conceptions of the development of law and the transition from oral to written cultures within and beyond Germany and central Europe. In the instances examined by Teuscher, there are significant steps in the development of a written culture. In particular, a small group of relatively high status witnesses in the thirteenth century was replaced by a much larger group of witnesses in the fourteenth century; the role of the latter was to respond to a series of written articles intended to establish the rights of local lords (where such issues were contested). This approach was developed further in the fifteenth century, with local courts expected to make responses, again to written articles, and to gather information on past practice as well as generally applicable law with regard to the issue at hand. It is especially the Weistümer that allow us a glimpse of the ways in which memory informed decision making at the local level, recording as they do processes of oral transmission founded upon the memory of witnesses to pre-existing conceptions of the law. As Teuscher notes, the conception of peasants as “living archives” of law poses certain challenges. In the first instance, it is evident that law was and is far from static, and the simple distinction between lords and peasants as interlocutors in a dialogue of law and precedent is subject to challenge on the basis that peasant witnesses did not serve as storehouses of an immutable law; instead, the law was rehearsed and redeployed with regard to the matter in hand. Second, it is also clear that the socioeconomic identity of the parties cannot be easily ascertained, and that the identification of witnesses as “peasants” is far from a straightforward category; larger witness groups may have reflected both a more diverse and, at times, more particular grouping, including townsmen and selected representatives. That said, as Teuscher sets out in the second chapter of his book, pre-existing bonds between lord and peasant could be the instruments through which law was rehearsed, notably in the expectations that peasants placed upon their lords in terms of protection of their rights, especially insofar as these were claimed by other, neighboring lords. Related themes emerge in the following chapters in which, in a discussion of narrative in deposition records and of Weistümer respectively, Teuscher considers the ways in which depositions came to be constructed not so much as verbatim reports but by the expectations of the legal matter in hand, and challenges the notion of an immutable law as transmitted in Weistümer.

In short, this is an illuminating study, which grapples purposefully with the issue of how, in the particular context of German- and French-speaking Switzerland, law was used in multiple and complex ways and transmitted by parties who were moving in general terms toward a greater reliance on written form, but who were often committed to a sense of an old and established oral law. Teuscher offers both a valuable case study of later medieval legal development, as well as a more general reflection on the processes in the development of legal traditions and, in also making his work more widely available to an Anglophone readership, through this clear translation of a work first published in German in 2007, has produced a welcome and significant contribution to this area of research.