Per Andersen's study of Danish procedural law in the Middle Ages focuses on how this body of law was created and consolidated. According to Andersen, Danish procedural law (and thereby the administration of justice) was altered in the thirteenth century, as an after-effect of the Fourth Lateran Council, with the prohibition of ordeals as the most important adjustment. The procedural system gradually changed from being based on formal proofs— ordeals and compurgation—to substantive proof based on an ideology of “finding the trust,” which included, for example, the introduction of juries.
Andersen shows how the procedural system created in the middle of the thirteenth century was quite conservative and did not undergo radical changes until the seventeenth century. Minor alterations did, however, occur, such as the development of a profession of judges—although not professional in terms of learned law—and the development of an appeals system. Andersen tries to place the Danish experience in an international context and to explain why Danish procedural law was inspired by Roman-canon law, and yet did not develop a fully integrated inquisitorial system before the late eighteenth century.
The book consists of three parts. The first part (11–68) is a long introduction to Danish legal and political history and the creation of the ius commune and its importance for secular legislation. In the second part Andersen examines the procedural laws and legal institutions of thirteenth century Denmark (71–199), and in the third part examines the development of jurisprudential institutions and procedure from 1300 to 1558 (203–421).
Andersen gives a very thorough description of the Stand der Forschung in Danish medieval legal history: the rules of procedure specified in six medieval Danish laws and the function of all the different courts, judges, and officials. He spices up this account with a description of legal rules from penal and private law, court cases, and foreign parallels. In so doing, he provides a very valuable account of Danish law and its place in an international context. Andersen clearly wants to cover it all, and the structure he has chosen— describing law after law and institution after institution—achieves this goal, but it also means that there is some reiteration and that the text becomes very long and sometimes quite burdensome to read. It would been better for the book to have been shorter. Andersen's organization, however, makes it quite easy for scholars who are interested in a certain area to acquire the needed information from a specific chapter.
Because of the lack of secular legal practice in the thirteenth century, the transformation in the procedural system is primarily documented through an account of the written laws, backed up by a discussion of later legal practice. The lack of sources is explained by Andensen's focus on secular procedure. He has chosen not to use the charters from the thirteenth century regarding conflict over land between ecclesiastical institutions and a secular party. This is unfortunate, as these sources actually strengthen Andersen's argument about a radical change in Danish procedural law. Many of the cases were not solved by canonical courts but instead by arbitration involving a large number of secular arbiters. And from the second half of the thirteenth century, it is stated in the charters that the purpose of the investigations of these arbiters was to find the truth, a change in Danish procedural law that Andersen, because of his selection of source material, first finds in the fourteenth century.
Andersen has, in many cases, chosen not to translate the Danish terms, but he has not explained the basis for his choice to translate or not, which is unfortunate, as some of the choices seem quite strange. Why, for example, is the Danish medieval word “ombuzman” translated to the modern English word “ombudsman”? It has very little to do with the medieval meaning of the word, and either a translation as “the king's official” or keeping the Danish term would have been truer to meaning.
It would also have been very useful if there had been an appendix explaining Danish words. For a non-Nordic-speaking reader, it would probably be quite difficult to remember the meaning of all the Danish terms, even though most of them are explained the first time they are mentioned and some are explained more than once (although occasionally with different explanations and translations; e.g., “hovedlod,” [100 and 135]). In general, the book would have benefited from a thorough copy editing.
Aside from these minor objections, overall, the book is well written and researched. It will be illuminating for any scholar interested in procedural law, not only in Denmark but also—because of the comparative approach—in Europe more generally.
