Mujuru died suddenly, in a mysterious house fire on 15 August 2011. News of his death captured Zimbabwean and international popular and scholarly attention. There were multiple attempts to make sense of the implications of Mujuru’s death and to uncover the cause of his demise. Drawing on rare access to Mujuru’s inner circle and family, the chapter reconstructs -to an unprecedented degree - events prior his death and argues that there are serious shortcomings in the state’s contention that Mujuru’s demise did not involve foul play.

Christian leaders and scholars during the first millennium in the West were preoccupied with written norms and corrective practices. Law (lex) during this era needs to be understood in a broader normative context. This introductory chapter provides historical and historiographical background to the specialized chapters that follow, explores the notions of lex, ius, norma, regula, and canon, and proposes an overarching schema of four normative fields, as understood by authors of the period: laws, canons, penitential prescriptions, and monastic rules, with their corresponding normative practices and textual compilations. The legal status of conciliar canons and papal decretals during this era is problematic. Although scholars today usually construe these as constituting a body of law, Isidore of Seville did not, and authors of the era usually treated laws (leges) and canons as distinct but complementary categories. The final section of the chapter examines this problem, proposing several fields of inquiry that would shed light on it, and suggesting that canonical collections, as a genre, were practical but not attached to any particular application.

As regards law and legal institutions, the period of the post-Roman successor kingdoms is understudied, misunderstood, and often maligned in histories of European law. This chapter, emphasizing the often-overlooked role of Roman law in practice and administration, begins by sketching the changing general historiographical framework that has shaped scholarly approaches to law of the period. The historiographical framework has largely been an attempt to define a Germanic order that subsumed the provincial Roman norms and structures of the former regime. The language used by modern scholars to describe the law of the period is then examined critically, especially the narrow understanding of the concept of Roman law and the expansive and uncritical application of the misleading term “Germanic.” The last part of the chapter notes the sources of law: not only the law codes of the various kingdoms but also other sources of Roman law and practice. In conclusion, the range of sources for royal legislation, administrative law, and institutional practice in the Merovingian kingdom are surveyed to illustrate their potential for fleshing out a legal profile of the period.