Sara Menzinger

Sara Menzinger is Full Professor of Legal History in the University of ‘Roma Tre’, Law Faculty. She graduated cum laude in the University of Rome 'La Sapienza', obtained her PhD from the University of Turin, and subsequently specialised in Italy and Germany at the Istituto Storico-Germanico di Roma (DHI) and the Max-Planck-Institut für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main as a Research Fellow and Stipendiat of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. She has participated in conferences in France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, England and the USA, and published in international journals and conference proceedings.

The project

Title: Fiction in Medieval Law

This research project aims to approach the theme of the historical origins of legal fiction from a different point of view to that adopted by historiography to date. Instead of starting from the extraordinary role that fiction played in Roman law and the consequent dependence of medieval and early modern jurists on the Roman model of fiction (Pugliatti 1968, Todescan 1979, Thomas 1995), the aim is to begin with the Christian tradition and the great debate on fiction that took place at the end of antiquity.

The programme of invitations to Paris also provides for seminars to be held at the EPHE on the following themes: "the death of Thomas Becket, fiction and the birth of a new season in European criminal legal thought"; "l'habit ne fait pas le moine: actes de fiction subjective entre les XIIe et XIIIe siècles".

Hosting institution: École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE)

Selective Bibliography

• Finzioni del diritto medievale, Macerata: Quodlibet, 2023.
• Theological or Legal Fiction? Opposing conceptions of fiction in Ernst H. Kantorowicz and Yan Thomas, in «Droit & Philosophie» 3(3), 2023, pp. 81-100.
• Legal Profession, in A Cultural History of Law in the Middle Ages, vol. 2, edited by Emanuele Conte and Laurent Mayali, London: Bloomsbury, 2019, Chapter 8, pp. 125-139.
• The Past, the Others, Himself: the Open Dialogue of a Medieval Legal Author with his Text, in Sicut dicit: Editing Ancient and Medieval Commentaries on Authoritative Texts, ed. by Shari Boodts, Pieter De Leemans, Stefan Schorn, Turnhout: Brepols, 2019, pp. 273-300.
• Dante and the Law: The Influence of Legal Categories on 14th century Political Thought, in “Roma