1 September – 26 October: Once Upon a Law: The Grimm Brothers’ Stories, Language and Legal Culture
This exhibition, a collaboration between the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the Faculty of Law, and the University Library, includes materials from Maastricht University’s Special Collections and aims to help students and a more general public to understand the unexpected connections between storytelling, language, and law. The exhibition was co-curated by the students of Arts and Audiences elective in the Master Arts and Heritage as well as Agustin Parise, Emilie Sitzia, Odin Essers and Melissa Prinz who coordinated the whole project.
The physical exhibition takes place from September 1st until October 26th 2022.
Address: Minderbroedersberg 4-6, Maastricht, The Netherlands
Opening hours: 8am-7pm
The online exhibition can be found at onceuponalaw.org.
What is the link between the Grimm Brothers’ collection of stories, their work on language, and law?
This exhibition explores how the Grimm Brothers depicted the legal culture of their time through storytelling and the study of language. For example, The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats enhances the importance of agreements between parties. Hansel and Gretel teaches on the respect for the elder and their commands, something subscribed to blindly at that time and place.
The first part of the exhibition focuses on the legal environment of Wilhelm (1786–1859) and Jacob Grimm (1785 –1863): from their training in law and their interaction with the leading jurist of the time, Friedrich von Savigny (1779–1861). The Grimm Brothers were immersed and engaged in the legal debates of their times. The exhibition then focuses on the Brothers’ stories identifying the underlying legal customs. How can the stories be read as a manual for good behaviour? What do they tell us about the social codes and legal framework of the time?
Finally, the exhibition explores how language plays a key role in legal culture and how it is closely connected to traditions and stories. Language is a conduit for the law, a fact confirmed by the philological work of the Grimm Brothers.
This interdisciplinary research-based exhibition has an online multi-modal component that includes extra information, images of rare (illustrated) books from UM’s and other Special Collections, video interviews of experts, prints, readings of tales, and objects related to the topic. Our objective was to intrigue and engage the audience with an unusual approach to fairy tales and legal history.