Author Description

This book offers a comprehensive examination of how the Fourth Lateran Council’s prohibition against trial by ordeal was implemented in Danish secular law and how it required both a fundamental restructuring of legal procedure and an entirely different approach to jurisprudence in practice. It offers a broader understanding of how ideology could penetrate and change jurisprudence firstly by changing the norms, secondly by presupposing new kind of legal institutions. Rather than focusing on pure dogmatics, this investigation will focus on uncovering the ideological character of procedure with regard to how those learned in law and those holding political power thought that jurisprudence needed to be constructed in order to ensure that justice was done in medieval Denmark.