• Vita

    Susanne Lepsius, Dr iur, MA (University of Chicago) is professor of learned law, German and European legal history and civil law at the LMU Munich. She studied law and history at the universities of Heidelberg, Chicago, Frankfurt a.M. and Pisa. She held research and teaching positions at the Max Planck Institute of European Legal History and the University of Frankfurt a.M. Her research interests focus on the field of the European ius commune tradition, courts and procedure in the medieval Italian city republics and the historiography of law. Currently she is a principal investigator in the Sonderforschungsbereich (1369) on cultures of vigilance in late medieval and early modern cities.

  • Research Project

    Law in the Middle Ages

    The book project will give a survey on the importance of law in the medieval world. As audience it addresses mainly non lawyers and non legal historians. Therefore it should prove useful to focus on the practice of law, especially the diversity of courts and court proceedings in the Holy Roman Empire, which gradually became more homogenous thanks to the influence of the Latin Church and the universities, themselves legal institutions. Law specialists in the different epochs, who were crucial in implementing and writing down the law, but who would also stand up for the validity of rules in front of mere power will form the second main perspective. The monograph planned will try to give a synthesis of the current interdisciplinary historiographical debate on law in the Middle Ages as well as on the law as such from a practical view of medieval lay persons and legal specialists, including the legal documents they produced.

  • Selected Publications

    Lepsius, Susanne (Ed.), Juristische Glossierungstechniken als Mittel rechtswissenschaftlicher Rationalisierungen: Erfahrungen aus dem europäischen Mittelalter – vor und neben den großen Glossae ordinariae (Abhandlungen zur rechtswissenschaftlichen Grundlagenforschung), Berlin [in preparation, 2022].

    Lepsius, Susanne, Gemeiner Prozess, in: Konfliktlösung im Mittelalter (Handbuch zur Geschichte der Konfliktlösung in Europa 2), ed. by D. von Mayenburg, Berlin 2021, 183-199.

    Lepsius, Susanne/Vollhardt, Friedrich/Bach, Oliver (Eds.), Von der Allegorie zur Empirie. Natur im Rechtsdenken des Spätmittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (Abhandlungen zur rechtswissenschaftlichen Grundlagenforschung. Münchener Universitätsschriften. Juristische Fakultät 100), Berlin 2018.

    Lepsius, Susanne, Die Legitimierung nichtehelicher Kinder als Testfall für die Kompetenzen des römisch-deutschen Königs im späten 13. Jahrhundert, in: Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte 135 Kan. Abt. 104 (2018), 72-150.

    Lepsius, Susanne/Reichlin, Susanne (Eds.), Fides/triuwe - Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung 20 (2015), H2.

    Lepsius, Susanne, Von Zweifeln zur Überzeugung. Der Zeugenbeweis im gelehrten Recht ausgehend von der Abhandlung des Bartolus von Sassoferrato (Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte 160), Frankfurt am Main 2003.