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A View from a Distance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Piotr Górecki
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Extract

Susan Reynolds's article is a culmination and a turning point. It builds on several approaches to medieval law and culture, of which two strike me as especially important. One is a study of legal history as a domain of human activity, especially habitual or routine activity, pursued by a wide range of social groups. The other is a search for the meaning and the criteria of the enormous transition during the central Middle Ages, which Christopher Dawson at the dawn of this subject, and Robert Bartlett in its currently definitive moment, have identified as “the making of Europe.” The first subject exists above all thanks to the work of Reynolds herself, while the second is an outcome of a number of quite distinct scholarly trajectories, spanning several generations. Apart from some suggestive and implicit links, those two subjects have, over the past quarter century, been pursued separately. Reynolds's article brings them together.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , Summer 2003 , pp. 367 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2003

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References

1. Dawson, Christopher, The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity (London: Sheed and Ward, 1932)Google Scholar; Bartlett, Robert, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

2. Reynolds, Susan, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984; 2d ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).Google Scholar

3. The publications that both open and define this genre include: Cheyette, Fredric L., “Suum cuique tribuere,” French Historical Studies 6 (1970): 287–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; White, Stephen D., “Pactum … Legem Vincit et Amor Iudicium: The Settlement of Disputes by Compromise in Eleventh-Century Western France,” American Journal of Legal History 22 (1978): 281–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davies, Wendy and Fouracre, Paul, eds., The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See the historiographical survey in Brown, Warren and Górecki, Piotr, “What Conflict Means: The Making of Medieval Conflict Studies in the United States, 1970–2000,” in Conflict in Medieval Europe, ed. Brown, and Górecki, (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 1–35.Google Scholar

4. Reynolds, Kingdoms, 12–66.

5. This conjunction of intellect, curiosity, and constructive impatience has been the common thread of her inquiry ever since her first book on the early English towns, through the Kingdoms of 1984, to the major intervention in the debate on feudalism ten years later, and beyond; see her An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, repr. 1982), Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), and “The Historiography of the Medieval State,” in Companion to Historiography, ed. Bentley, Michael (London: Routledge, 1997), 117–38.Google Scholar

6. Two contributions about those two frontier regions of medieval Europe that are explicitly indebted to Reynolds's methodology are Davies, Rees, “Kinsmen, Neighbours and Communities in the Western British Isles, c. 1100-c. 1400,” in Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays in Honour of Susan Reynolds, ed. Stafford, Pauline, Nelson, Janet L., and Martindale, Jane (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 172–87Google Scholar, and Górecki, Piotr, “Communities of Legal Memory in Medieval Poland, c. 1200–1240,” Journal of Medieval History 24 (1998): 127–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Kloczowski, Jerzy, Europa slowiańska w XIV–XV wieku [Slavic Europe in the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Centuries] (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1984)Google Scholar; Kloczowski, , Mlodsza Europa: Europa Środkowo-Wschodnia w kręgu cywilizacji chrześcijańskiej średniowiecza [The Younger Europe: East Central Europe in the Ambit of Medieval Christian Civilization] (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1998)Google Scholar; Bartlett, Making; Southern, Richard W., Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, vol. 1, Foundations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).Google Scholar

8. Southern, Scholastic Humanism, 163–97.

9. Clanchy, Michael T., From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).Google Scholar

10. See especially Clanchy, From Memory, 38–40, 156–57, 254–55, 258–60; he returns to the significance of the knife in particular in Clanchy, “Medieval Mentalities and Primitive Legal Practice,” in Stafford, Nelson, and Martindale, Law, Laity and Solidarities, 83–94.

11. The last is my own addition; for the source, see Matuszewski, Józef, ed. and trans., Najstarszy zwód prawa polskiego [The Oldest Compilation of Polish Law] (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1959).Google Scholar For Reynolds's own suggestion of these implications in this geographical direction of the Continent, see her “Rationality and Collective Judgement in the Law of Western Europe before the Twelfth Century,” Quaestiones Medii Aevi Novae, vol. 5, Tenth Century: Roma, Gallia, Germania, Sclavinia (Warsaw: Instytut Historyczny Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2000), 3–19.Google Scholar

12. Kodeks dyplomatyczny Wielkopolski, ed. Zakrzewski, Ignacy and Piekosiński, Franciszek (Poznań: Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciól Nauk, 1877–1908), no. 33, 1:40–42.Google Scholar

13. Stein, Peter, Roman Law in European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hyams, Paul, “Due Process versus the Maintenance of Order in European Law: The Contribution of the ius commune,” in The Moral World of the Law, ed. Coss, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 62–90Google Scholar, especially 86–90 (appendix on maxims).

14. Reynolds, English Medieval Towns, 80–85, 103–;4, 108–10; Brown and Górecki, “What Conflict Means,” 14.

15. On this kind of thematic affinity, especially in the current generation of the scholarship produced in the United States, see Brown and Górecki, “What Conflict Means,” 16–18, 28.

16. Grodecki, Roman, ed. and trans., Ksiega henrykowska. Liber Fundationis claustri sancte Marie Virginis in Heinrichow (Poznań and Wroclaw: Instytut Zachodni, 1949)Google Scholar, reissued with a new preface by Matuszewski, Józef and Matuszewski, Jacek as Liber Fundationis claustri sancte Marie Virginis in Heinrichow, czyli Ksiega henrykowska (Wroclaw: Muzeum Archidiecezjalne we Wroclawiu, 1991)Google Scholar, abbreviated below as K.H., with page references to the 1991 edition. The following is documented in my treatments, cited below, of Abbot Peter's engagement with the law.

17. I am most grateful to Susan Reynolds for alerting me to Abbot Samson as one of several clerics worth considering in the placement of Abbot Peter in a broader perspective.

18. Reynolds's basic distinction between (and association of) cognition and learning (Kingdoms, 4–5) is reiterated and developed throughout the first two chapters; see also her “Introduction to the Second Edition, 1997,” in Kingdoms, 2d ed., xi–lxxv, at xlvi–xlvii, and the editors' “Introduction,” in Stafford, Nelson, and Martindale, Law, Laity and Solidarities, 1–11.

19. Górecki, Piotr, “Rhetoric, Memory, and Use of the Past: Abbot Peter of Henryków as Historian and Advocate,” Cîteaux (1997): 261–93, at 268–69, 271.Google Scholar

20. Górecki, , “A Historian as a Source of Law: Abbot Peter of Henryków and the Invocation of Norms in Medieval Poland, c. 1200–1270,” Law and History Review 18 (2000): 479–523CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 481–84; Górecki, , “An Interpreter of Law and Power in a Region of Medieval Poland: Abbot Peter of Henryków and His Book,” in Building Legitimacy: Political Discourses and Forms of Legitimation in Medieval Societies, ed. Antón, Isabel Alfonso (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2003).Google Scholar

21. For Peter's descriptions of the monastery's establishment as an act of auctoritas fundationis, see Górecki, , “Politics of the Legal Process in Early Medieval Poland,” Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s., 17 (1984): 23–14, at 35–39Google Scholar; Górecki, “Rhetoric,” 286–87, 289 (n. 163), and, at that last reference, citation to K.H., chap. 11, 114–15: “licet claustri vestri prime fundationis causa efficiens extiterim me tamen nequaquam ipsius fundationis auctorem dicatis sed ducem.” For the identity of the speaker, see the cited articles; for Aristotelian language of causation (causa efficiens) in this context, see Minnis, Alastair, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984), 5, 28–29, 75–84.Google Scholar

22. Górecki, “A Historian,” 482–91, 514–15, 517–18.