Top of page
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
We are in the midst of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. Often known as “the Festival of Lights” in reference to the basic feature of its observance – the lighting of the eight-branched candelabra – Hanukkah commemorates the events surrounding the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem after a period of political oppression and forced …
Posted in: Collections, Law Library
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
Richly tessellated fields, icons of altars and Doric columns, glyphs of all-seeing eyes, sun-gods and the man in the moon – Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz’s engravings were meant to be at once mysterious and explanatory, a window for the initiated into a world of speculative arcana. Twenty-five of Caramuel’s engravings displaying an array of anagrams, …
Posted in: Collections, Law Library
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
Although Alessandro Aldobrandini (1664-1734) was not the first in the long history of Italy’s Aldobrandini family to traverse the cursus honorum of the church’s hierarchy, his record of achievement was substantial: educated first in the Seminario Romano and later in the University of Pisa, where he attained the degree of doctor utriusque juris, he was …
Posted in: Collections, Global Law, Law Library
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
On November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II declared the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont. In so doing, he inaugurated a period of centuries of intense, though intermittent, warfare fought at the peripheries of Christendom. The Crusades exist in our historical memory as a period of near constant bloodshed and destruction, but out of the chaos …
Posted in: Collections, In the News, Law Library
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
This month marks the ten year anniversary of Italian scholar Barbara Frale’s discovery of lost medieval documents relating to the trial of the Knights Templar. Frale, a scholar of medieval paleography, was doing historical research at the Vatican Secret Archive when she uncovered a fourteenth century manuscript which recounts a previously unknown chapter in the history …
Posted in: Collections, Education, Law Library
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
It’s surprising, but true, that the laws of nature sometimes find themselves at the mercy of the courts. I found a great example of this in a book that the Law Library recently acquired for its rare book collection. Tractatus juridicus & practicus, de partu of Alonso Carranza (Cologne, 1629) is a staggeringly comprehensive book about human embryology …
Posted in: Collections, Law Library
Posted by: Nathan Dorn
Exactly 400 years ago today on June 22, 1611, a leader in the colony of Jamestown promulgated the very first code of law ever to be produced for Englishmen in the Americas. Named for its principle creator, Sir Thomas Dale, posterity has remembered it as Dale’s Code. Yes, it happened 400 years ago today. Dale’s …
Posted in: Collections, Law Library