As a recurrent visitor to the Robbins Collection Research Center over the past twenty years, Raphaël Eckert knows the environment that the Center provides for conducting medieval legal research. Calling the Center’s Collection as “one of, if not the greatest library in my research field,” The Robbins Collection was delighted to welcome Eckert back as a Robbins Fellow in July 2024, once again providing him with resources to continue his research.
A professor of legal history at the University of Strasbourg for the past 12 years, Eckert teaches courses in legal history. He has continued to advance medieval legal scholarship through his research on canon law theory in the 12th century.
His most enduring research project is the “Circulation des Savoirs Médiévaux – CiSaMe” in collaboration with Robbins Fellow Corinne Leveleux-Teixeira over the past four years. This project aims to bridge the divide between the fields of law and theology that arose in the 13th century as they formed into the distinct areas of scholarship we know today. Eckert postulates that scholars in the 12th century could have been highly collaborative, as their fields were not separate. The project will create a database of law and theology manuscripts and editions (from approximately 1050-1220) and use computer-driven analysis to detect patterns. It will become possible to analyze automatically these works from supposedly distinct traditions. “We hope to investigate and discover new links, new relationships between works [and] authors that were [previously] impossible to see,” said Eckert.
For his paper about 14th and 15th century canon law, Eckert found Robbins MS 128 and MS 83 the most helpful. He noted that these two manuscripts from the end of the 13th century are especially rare, as they are not listed in most catalogs. Eckert is also especially interested in Robbins MS 312, a text which he researched during his visit to the Center over ten years ago and will continue to explore as a long-term project.
Eckert’s visit to the Robbins Collection Research Center also coincided with the Center’s conference on “Access to and Interpretation of Medieval Legal Sources” conference, allowing him to collaborate with numerous medieval legal scholars from all over the world, several of whom Eckert met for the first time. He expressed that he deeply enjoyed hearing participants share their hypotheses on a wide range of medieval legal questions and their progress on current projects.
Raphaël Eckert highly appreciated the opportunity to be a part of the Robbins Collection Research Center as a Robbins Fellow, and expressed his thanks for the friendly and helpful staff, for the peaceful atmosphere in the reading room.