摘要：This essay offers an account of the task of medieval legal history, suggesting that its importance lies in its ability to recognize and explain the most alien features of our legal past. In so doing, the discipline of medieval legal history makes what is alien intelligible while preserving its essential differences. It is the delicate and difficult task of engaging with our past without judging the past by the needs of the present, without taking our own limited perspective to be universal, but also without relegating our past to a mere object of antiquarian curiosity, thus cutting off the possibility of understanding the relation of our past to ourselves.
其他摘要：This essay offers an account of the task of medieval legal history, suggesting that its importance lies in its ability to recognize and explain the most alien features of our legal past. In so doing, the discipline of medieval legal history makes what is alien intelligible while preserving its essential differences. It is the delicate and difficult task of engaging with our past without judging the past by the needs of the present, without taking our own limited perspective to be universal, but also without relegating our past to a mere object of antiquarian curiosity, thus cutting off the possibility of understanding the relation of our past to ourselves.
关键词：Law; Legal Studies; Law and Society; Interdisciplinary Research; History; Philosophy; Literature; Rhetoric; Psychology; Cultural Studies; Sociology; Criminology; Economics; Politics; Government; Geograp
