
The third CoSyn Workshop is off to a great start! The day began with an overview of the Corpus Synodalium database and progress, followed by presentations of work-in-progress by Stanford graduate students Ana Núñez and Lane Baker. The afternoon session, moderated by Fiona Griffiths (Stanford), featured papers by Michelle Armstrong-Partida (UTexas-El Paso) on concubinage and clandestine marriage in late medieval Catalonia, Carole Avignon (Angers) on the vocabulary of betrothal, and Sara McDougall (John Jay College of Criminal Law-CUNY Graduate Ctr) on the treatment of illicit pregnancy in northern French ecclesiastical legislation. The afternoon concluded with a keynote address by Charles Donahue, Jr. (Harvard Law School) on the (very appropriate!) topic of “Why Should Anyone Care about Medieval Synodal Legislation?” – a question to which the day’s collective discussions offered a rich set of answers!