Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779–1861), a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century legal thought whose ideas had a profound impact both on legal practice and legal history, argued that law grows organically within a people — forming part of the unconscious backdrop of their social and cultural life. Rowan Dorin’s No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe beautifully demonstrates Savigny’s proposition by showing how the practice of expulsion cannot properly be understood without thinking of the ways in which law is fundamental in shaping social and cultural life. Where scholars have tended to look for answers for expulsion in religious divides, a desire for purification, or mob violence, Dorin shows expulsion germinating in lay and ecclesiastical governments of the medieval Latin West. Expulsions, in other words, rested on increasingly firm intellectual legal reasoning and were typically legal processes that required new statutes, legal reasoning, and bureaucratic infrastructure. My task in this commentary is to focus on legal thought, governance, and regulation. For while it is easily apparent that Dorin’s book is a pivotal contribution to social, cultural, economic, and political history — crucially, it is a legal history. In his own words, “Throughout the high and later Middle Ages, expulsion was almost always a political and administrative act, the result of decision-making processes of authorities rather than a consequence of relations between moneylenders and their neighbours” (233). No Return reframes expulsions of Jews and foreign Christians as legally articulated and institutionally embedded practices, ones that were deliberated and deliberate. The way in which Dorin makes his argument is important. Legal and institutional history has seen some fundamental changes in the last decades in terms of methods, questions, and scope. Once a field defined by analysis of doctrine, state formation, institutional structures, and elite thinkers, the field has expanded to examine how these functioned socially and culturally — how people used, resisted, or interpreted them as well as their cultural embeddedness and deeply pluralist existence. Still, however, we sometimes see a lingering tension in the field, presented as an either/or, a contrast between law “in theory” and law “in practice,” about what is worthier of attention: what people did or what people thought. This book shows not only the value but also the great payoff of an expansive approach that encompasses both. Indeed, it is because Dorin carefully examines both ideas that were taken up, as well as those whose impact seems to have been small or imperceptible, that he is able to explain the various ways in which discourses surrounding usury and expulsion were implemented and adapted in various social and political contexts. As the book begins, we are in the later twelfth century and in France and England, and as it ends, we are in the fifteenth century and in Italy and Spain. Dorin offers not only a Europe-wide story but also one that spans both lay and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, so often studied separately by scholars despite their symbiotic nature. By bridging traditional divides, Dorin is able to show that expulsion became thinkable and doable, and morphed into a widespread phenomenon, because legal ideas and models travelled. They provided templates for action, templates that made mass expulsion part of a broader legal and political repertoire that spread across jurisdictions. This book exemplifies the richness of looking at medieval legal thought and practice both from a local and from a Europe-wide perspective. Indeed, No Return is tacitly a study of the jurisdictional complexity of medieval legal life. Dorin emphasizes that expulsion was often the product of overlapping and sometimes competing jurisdictions — royal, municipal, ecclesiastical, …
