Bacher, Wilhelm, Marcus Brann, David Simonsen, and Jacob Guttman, eds. Moses ben Maimon:
Sein Leben, seine Werke und sein Einfluss. 2 vols. Leipzig: Fock, 1908–14.
Haberman, Jacob. Maimonides and Aquinas: A Contemporary Appraisal New York: KTAV, 1979.
Kraemer, Joel L., ed. Perspectives on Maimonides: Philosophical and Historical Studies. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991.
Pines, Shlomo, and Yirmiyahu Yovel. Maimonides and Philosophy: Papers Presented at the Sixth
Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter, May 1985. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1986.
MAINMORTE
. When a peasant tenant died without a direct heir living in his house and ready to assume
his tenancy and debts, his property was said to have fallen into “dead hands” (manus
mortua) and thus reverted to his landlord. In most cases, the heirs living away from home
or collateral heirs paid a tax in order to assume possession of the deceased’s personal and
landed possessions: they forfeited the best animal or, more often, negotiated a cash
payment. Although mainmorte, along with the taille and marriage tax, have been
traditionally regarded as characteristic of “serfdom,” recent French scholarship has
considerably downplayed the servile nature of those taxes. Mainmorte, in fact, was
similar to the feudal relief in that it represented the landlord’s consent to an irregular
succession.
Mainmorte is mentioned frequently in the 12th century, when landlords attempted to
discourage the emigration of their tenants to new lands and into towns. But it was the
newly wealthy townsmen who most strongly resented restrictions on the disposition of
their property, and perceptive lords invariably abolished or commuted mainmorte in the
community franchises of the late 12th and 13th centuries. By the 14th century, those still
subject to mainmorte, mostly residents of small villages or tenants of conservative lords,
were stigmatized as being socially inferior.
Theodore Evergates
Evergates, Theodore. Feudal Society in the Bailliage of Troyes Under the Counts of Champagne,
1152–1284. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.
Jordan, William Chester. From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Sénonais in the
Thirteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986.
Petot, Pierre. “L’origine de la mainmorte servile.” Revue historique de droit français et étranger.
4th ser. 19–20(1940–41): 275–309.
MANDEVILLE, JEAN DE
(d. 1372). Composed at Liège ca. 1357 by an otherwise unidentifiable English
knightvoyager, Mandeville’s Voyages d’outre-mer was the most popular secular book of
its day, surviving in over 250 manuscripts and some ninety incunabula, including
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