‘Advocates of private ordering have fallen in love with the Middle Ages’, wrote the American legal historian Emily Kadens in an article from 2012, where she dissected how this love finds its expression in the argumentative employment of the Middle Ages as both precedence and justification for the creation of a conceptually new international customary commercial law.1 The object of this love, however, has little to do with the historical reality; it involves hardly more than a roughly sketched out idealised image of the Middle Ages that is invoked in order to lend a helping hand to the new law merchant. Yet, this present contribution is not meant as a further attempt to refute the myth of the lex mercatoria as an international and autonomously created legal order of medieval trade. Instead, I want to go beyond the myth and reflect upon the possibilities of future research on medieval trade law.2. The somewhat exhausted discussion concerning the history of ideas (sometimes a mere discussion about words) about the lex mercatoria should finally be replaced by a focus on the source-supported facts. This article tries to establish the framework for that future research. In the light of the old dogma of a universally applicable lex mercatoria , the cosmos of medieval trade law must have looked quite clearly arranged. But once the blinders of the lex mercatoria myth have been discarded, how might we continue to explore the history of trade law during the Middle Ages? If the dogma of the ‘ una lex ’3 falls away, the field becomes more confusing, yet also much more colourful and complex – diversity instead of universality. Given the changed conditions, it is crucial that we gain a multifocal overview; one that looks for new spaces, temporalities, and objects of …

中文翻译：

---

中世纪贸易法史的未来

美国法律历史学家艾米丽·卡登斯 (Emily Kadens) 在 2012 年的一篇文章中写道，“私人秩序的倡导者已经爱上了中世纪”，她在文章中剖析了这种爱如何在中世纪作为优先权和正当理由的论证性使用中得到表达为创建一个概念上新的国际习惯商法。1 然而，这种爱的对象与历史现实关系不大；它只涉及一个粗略勾勒出的中世纪理想化形象，为了向新的法律商人伸出援助之手。然而，目前的贡献并不意味着进一步试图反驳商业法作为中世纪贸易的国际和自主创建的法律秩序的神话。反而，我想超越神话，反思中世纪贸易法未来研究的可能性。2．关于 lex mercatoria 的思想史（有时只是关于文字的讨论）有些枯燥乏味的讨论最终应该被对来源支持的事实的关注所取代。本文试图为未来的研究建立框架。根据普遍适用的商业法的旧教条，中世纪贸易法的宇宙一定看起来非常清晰。但是，一旦 lex mercatoria 神话的盲点被丢弃，我们如何继续探索中世纪贸易法的历史？如果 'una lex'3 的教条消失，这个领域会变得更加混乱，但也会变得更加丰富多彩和复杂——多样性而不是普遍性。鉴于条件的变化，我们获得多焦点概览至关重要；一种寻找……的新空间、时间和对象