Black community members in and of Montreal have always worked to document and transmit their histories. Over the years, constellations of women and men spread histories that anchored Blackness in the city, while anchoring the city in wider Black networks. By circulating historical, methodological, and archival knowledge, they forged a Black Montreal historical tradition that continues to be carried forward. The contributors to this special section of the Journal of the Canadian Historical ...

Custom was fundamental to medieval legal practice. Whether in a property dispute or a trial for murder, the aggrieved and accused would go to lay court where cases were resolved according to custom. What custom meant, however, went through a radical shift in the medieval period. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, custom went from being a largely oral and performed practice to one that was also conceptualized in writing. Based on French lawbooks known as coutumiers, Ada Maria Kus...