220064 Geographies of Power. Studying and Comparing Court Records from Premodern Eurasia (S) (WiSe 2024/2025)

Court records are “ideal observation posts” for social historians, as the French historian Jean Delumeau has once put it. Court records are “where political power meets social structure”. Historical court records not only tell us about the crimes of the past allowing for statistical and quantitative evaluation. They are also expressions and results of political and institutional decisions and social and cultural taxonomies.
This class deals with the making of criminal justice, the negotiating and justifying strategies of the conflicting parties involved and the geographies of power in premodern Eurasian societies.
The class is part of an Erasmus+ “Blended Intensive Program” (BIP). This means that in addition to the regular seminar sessions of this class you will meet history students from other European universities – who have equally been working on premodern Eurasian court records – for a mobility study week of joint teaching and learning. The BIP week will take place at the University of Vienna and pursues two goals: (1) you will be learning how to use digital tools and methods to analyze court records, (2) we will be discussing samples of court records from different societies and language communities of premodern Eurasia and will be testing digital ways of analyzing and comparing historical data across time and space.
By the end of this class, you will present and publish your own sample of court records on a collaborative database.