judiciary

Honour was a universally present theme in the social interactions of pre-modern European societies. The current paper aims to analyse this concept through the urban community of Bardejov between approximately 1550 and 1750, focusing on verbal offences against honour. The topic is approached from two perspectives. Firstly, an emphasis is placed on the Reformation and humanist discourse in urban communities, the roles placed on preserving one’s own and one’s neighbours’ good reputation, and appropriate reactions to becoming the object of slander.

Research on crime, conflicts and violence in urban milieu usually focuses on authority and the competencies of town judicial courts, as well as preserved legal sources detailing norms and privileges. From another perspective, an analysis of judicial practice sources offers insight into the role of conflicts and violence in everyday life, and reveals strategies that authorities used to deal with them. This paper makes use of both approaches in order to study various aspects of crime and the attitudes and strategies of parties involved in conflicts.

The article examines the beginnings of people’s assemblies in the territory of present-day Slovakia. It consists of two parts. While the first one is concerned with the period of the Mojmírid dynasty (the 9th century), the second one deals with the period of the Arpadian dynasty until the 12th century. For both periods, it is typical that assemblies were termed variously, for example as “all the Moravians”, congregatio, consilium, etc. They were mostly juridical bodies for solving conflicts between individuals, but they also functioned as electoral or consultative bodies.

Perspectives of what is corruption have been changing with the development of the society and according to the shifts of its values. The study examines not only activities that were considered morally wrong and corrupted in the middle ages and early modern period, but also those forms of behaviour that started to be generally considered corrupted only later. Anachronistic as this approach might seem, it gives us better insight into the slow process of changing attitudes towards some forms of corruption.