More Trouble with Henry: The Historiography of Medieval Germany in the Angloliterate World,...

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More Trouble with Henry: The Historiography of Medieval Germany in the AngloliterateWorld, 1888-1995Author(s): Edward PetersSource: Central European History, Vol. 28, No. 1 (1995), pp. 47-72Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Conference Group for Central European History ofthe American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4546485 .

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More Trouble With Henry:

The Historiography of Medieval Germany

in the Angloliterate World, 1888-1995

Edward Peters

HO

R S T Fuhrmann's recent survey of medieval hostility toward

Germans and their political structures, chiefly the Empire, has a

subtitle (Origins of German Imperialism), that might very well

be applied to the fate of the historiography of medieval Germany in the

English-speaking world from its considerable prominence up to the eve

of the First World War to its low point in the aftermath of the second.1

From the beginning of the professionalization of historical studies in

British and North American colleges and universities in the late nine?

teenth century until the First World War, the dominant model of histori?

cal scholarship for all periods of history, virtually from antiquity to the

present, was that developed in Germany during the course of the nine?

teenth century. Conspicuous in that model was the history of the Middle

Ages. Since the end of the First World War, however, the most influen-

tial models of medieval historical research in Angloliterate scholarship have

been those developed for the study of France and England (in the case of

Henri Pirenne, of course, including Belgium), and, more recently and to

a lesser extent, Italy and Spain.2

This essay is a revised and considerably expanded version of part of the opening address to the German-American Conference on German Medieval History in Comparative Per? spective, held at The University of Notre Dame, 9-11 May 1993. I express my gratitude to the sponsors of the Conference, The German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C, and The Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame, and its Director, John Van Engen.

It is a companion piece to another, longer study entitled "Wissenschaft von gestern? Wissenschaft von morgen: The Historiography of Medieval Germany in the Twentieth Century," in progress. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for Speculum for suggesting that this essay be struck off from the longer piece, to the reader for Central European History for a number of very helpful suggestions, and to Charles McClelland for his con? tinuing encouragement.

1. Horst Fuhrmann, "Oki's Teutonicos constituit iudices nationum? The Trouble with Henry," Speculum 69, no. 2 (1994): 344-58.

2. Perhaps the best general introduction to the vast modern scholarship is James J. Sheehan, "What is German History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography," Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 1-23. For the nineteenth

47



48 MORE TROUBLE WITH HENRY

With very few exceptions, in spite of the efforts of Geoffrey Barraclough and others in Britain between 1935 and 1950 to bring German and other

historiography of the Middle Ages into the new mainstream, not until

the late 1960s has there been any sign that the situation might improve. This study examines the circumstances surrounding the initial appeal and

subsequent fading of medieval German history from the Angloliterate academic world, the peculiar and limited influence it had between the

First World War and the late 1960s, and the signs of its recent emer?

gence into a position?certainly not of the prominence it once held, but

into one that represents a vast improvement over the preceding half

century.

John Freed has recently?and caustically?summarized some of the chief

reasons for the declining influence of German historiography on the Middle

Ages in this century. Although Freed speaks specifically of scholarship on

the nobility, his observations also apply to the general problem:

A reluctance to read technical German prose and a general attitude of bitterness toward Germany after two world wars explain why most

English-speaking scholars have ignored German scholarship on the medieval

nobility, but those historians who have ventured into this area have

probably been repulsed for two other reasons as well. First, German

scholarship remains highly politicized because the study of the Middle

century, see G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (1913; reprint Boston, 1959), which concludes with Waitz, Giesebrecht, and the Prussian School, as well as some Austrian scholarship in the century. An incomplete, but important set of essays on the turn ofthe century is Notker Hammerstein, ed., Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft um 1900 (Stuttgart, 1988),

Nor has this general post-1914 neglect of German, Swiss, and Austrian scholarship on the Middle Ages been an entirely Angloliterate phenomenon. For all of the attention to the theory and practice of historical research and writing in and about Germany in this century, very little attention has been paid, even by German specialists in historiography, to German medieval history. There is remarkably little notice of medieval history in Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middletown, CT., 1968), although Iggers offers the best general introduction to German historical thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or in idem, New Directions in European Historiography (Middletown, 1975). The same may be said of Bernd Faulenbach, Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland (Munich, 1974), and idem, Ideologie des deutschen Weges (Munich, 1980); Konrad Jarausch, "Illiberalism and Beyond: German History in Search of a Paradigm," Journal of Modern History 55 (1983): 268-84, and the work cited there. See also Ernst Schulin, Traditionskritik und Rekonstruktionsversuch. Studien zur Entwicklung von Geschichtswissenschaft und historischem Denken (Gottingen, 1979), and idem, "Geschichtswissenschaft in unserem Jahrhundert. Probleme und Umrisse einer Geschichte der Historie," Historische Zeitschrift 245 (1987): 1-30. Schulin, however, has been largely responsible for much ofthe extant interest in the historiography of medieval Germany. See below, n. 20.

There is now a full-length study of a major figure in Wilhelmian historiography. See Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht. A German Academic Life (1856-1915) (Atlantic High? lands, NJ, 1993), and the review essay by Georg G. Iggers, "The Historian Banished: Karl Lamprecht in Imperial Germany," Central European History 27 no. 1 (1994), 87-92.



EDWARD PETERS 49

Ages is not a politically neutral topic in the German-speaking world and because German social historians have used the study of social

history to seek explanations for German national disunity. Second, many of the underlying premises of German scholarship on the medieval

period?for example, the linkage of freedom with service?are repug- nant to English-speaking scholars steeped in the Western tradition of natural rights.3

The first two of Freed's reasons require little comment here except to

point out that they are not unrelated. However, the political animosity that Freed notes has not prevented American and British historians from

doing extensive research on the period between the Reichsgrundung and

the Cold War, but perhaps this focus of research on the modern period

may be explained by the inherent fascination of historians with the scale

and consequences of the two wars and the political and social pathology of the NSDAP. The third addresses internal problems of German

historiography that require a full study of its past in order to assess fully. It will be considered briefly in the concluding section of this essay. The

fourth rounds out an explanation, a discussion of which had best be post-

poned until the sequence of attraction, revulsion, indifference, and re?

stored interest have been surveyed, in that order.

3. John Freed, "Reflections on the Medieval German Nobility," American Historical Review 91 no. 3 (1986): 553-75 at 554. On Freed's point concerning political partisanship, see, for example, Timothy Reuter, "Otto III and the Historians," History Today 41 (1991): 21-27, and Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of "Ostforschung" in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1988). On the problem ofthe German history of social history, see James Van Horn Melton, "From Folk History to Structural History: Otto Brunner (1898-1982) and the Radical-Conservative Roots of German Social History," in Hartmut Lehmann and James Van Horn Melton, eds., Paths of Continuity: Central European Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s (Cambridge, 1994), 263-92, and Irmline Veit-Brause, "The Place of Local and Regional History in German and French Historiography: Some Gen? eral Reflections," Australian Journal of French Studies 16 (1979): 447-78. Freed himself has been the most productive Anglophone historian of medieval German society, and he has commented extensively on recent social history: "The Origins of the Medieval Nobility: The Problem ofthe Ministerials," Viator 7 (1976): 211-41; "The Counts of Falkenstein: Noble Self-Consciousness in Twelfth-Century Germany," Transactions of the American Phil? osophical Society, vol. 74, part 6 (1984): 1-70; "Medieval German Social History: Gener? alizations and Particularism," Central European History 25 no. 1 (1992): 1-26. He spells out some of the points above in greater detail in his review of Werner Rosener's Peasants in the Middle Ages, cited below, n. 50. Freed has most recently published Noble Bondsmen: Ministerial Marriages in the Archidiocese of Salzburg, 1100-1343 (Ithaca, 1995).

The parlous state of German medieval history in the U.S. has been the theme of a number of panels at scholarly conferences in recent years: The Midwest Medieval Con? ference in 1984; The American Historical Association Annual Meeting ofthe same year; and the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in 1990. There are about twenty American scholarly reviewers who review German-language scholarship on medieval his? tory, and even fewer in the United Kingdom.




I

The achievement of German historical scholarship that was largely initi-

ated by Ranke and disseminated by his students and others chiefly (but not exclusively) through the new model universities of nineteenth-century

Germany, was quickly and enthusiastically adopted by scholars and institutions

in Great Britain but even more so in the United States. The attractiveness

of that scholarship lay in its insistence upon the importance of documentary sources, and on the most accomplished techniques of text-editing in any field of history (derived from earlier developments in German classical

scholarship?as was the later interest of medievalists in prosopography). It resulted in the opening?and organization?of archives and state libraries, the production of exhaustive guides to the sources, and the promise that, in time, these resources and methods would offer the historian a surer

grasp of the nature of human experience.4 The promise of these methods

was not restricted, of course, to medieval history, and this was part of its

attraction to North American scholars.

The appeal was strengthened by the forms of institutionalization and

dissemination of these techniques. The prominence of the Monumenta

Germaniae Historica is perhaps the best-known example.5 The MGH was

the greatest and most influential work, but only one of several examples ofthe institutionalization of scholarship. Beginning in the 1860s the Royal

Academy of Sciences in Bavaria sponsored the publication of the Jahrbucher der Deutschen Geschichte, a meticulous and scholarly, almost year-by-year account of German medieval history, often written by scholars associated

with the MGH.6 The Institut fiir osterreichische Geschichtsforschung, established in 1854 on the model of the Prussian Historical Institute in

Berlin, became a component of the University of Vienna and associated

with the MGH in the publication of imperial charters from the Middle

Ages.7 In the pve-Reichsgrundungsara, the German lands had more univer?

sities and more local historical societies with state backing than any other

country in Europe. Finally, the existence and circulation of a number of

4. The most influential was Wilhelm Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1858), reedited and republished by various authors between 1952 and 1990. See the brief discussion in Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages (London and New York, 1991).

5. There is a large literature on the Monumenta. The best short account in English is that of David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises. Problems in Monastic History (London, 1963).

6. Jahrbucher der Deutschen Geschichte, ed. Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 21 vols. (Leipzig and Berlin, 1862-1954).

7. See Alfons Lhotsky, "Geschichte des Instituts fur osterreichische Geschichtsforschung 1854 bis 1954," Mitteilungen des Instituts fiir osterreichische Geschichtsforschung, Supplement 17 (Vienna, 1954).



EDWARD PETERS 51

scholarly journals with demanding and rigorous standards for publication? the Historische Zeitschrift, for example, or the Neues Archiv (from 1937 and

currently, the Deutsches Archiv) of the MGH?offered a format for much

of the Vorarbeit and often some of the greater Arbeit of the historical

profession. The seminar method of teaching, in which documentary re?

search was conducted under the guidance of an expert scholar, was re?

garded as the most advanced and authentic introduction to historical study of its time. German medieval historical research was modern, and it was

scientific. It attracted North American scholars from the moment when

President Kirkland of Harvard dispatched George Bancroft and Edward

Everett to Germany, and it continued into the early twentieth century.8 The shortcomings of the German system were not as readily visible.

Strong on technique, its practitioners were socially and politically pro-

foundly conservative, and much of their conceptual apparatus was anach-

ronistic. It was focused upon the centrality of state politics at a time

when political issues dominated much of German culture, and it assessed

the German past with the problems?and the imagined history?of po? litical unification in mind, developing the argument of a German histori?

cal Sonderweg, an exceptional political past that was not comparable to

those of other nation-states, but perfectly consistent with?even encour-

aged by?Prussian-German nationalism. Much of their work, as well as

the social makeup of the historical profession, reflected the widespread

religious differences to be found among Germans and their political con?

sequences. It tended to subordinate regional history and social and eco?

nomic history to political, legal, and institutional history. Its central themes

were politics and Verfassungsgeschichte?at the time a narrow construction

of legal constitutionalism.9

8. See David Levin, History as a Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman (Stanford, 1959); Harry B. Henderson III, Versions ofthe Past: The Historical Imagination in American Fiction (New York, 1974), and Cushing Strout, The American Image of the Old World (New York, 1963). The best studies of North American interest in the Middle Ages in this period are those of Hans Rudolf Guggisberg, Das europaische Mittelalter im amerikanischen Geschichtsdenken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Basel and Stuttgart, 1964), and idem, Alte und neue Welt in historischer Perspektive (Bern and Frankfurt am Main, 1973), as well as William J. Courtenay, "The Virgin and the Dynamo: The Growth of Medieval Studies in North America," in Medieval Studies in North America: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Francis G. Gentry and Christopher Kleinberg (Kalamazoo, 1982), 5-22.

On the general phenomenon, see Jurgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship: A Study in the Transfer of Culture (Ithaca, 1965); Charles Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, 1770-1870 (New Haven, 1978), and Ernst Schulin, "German and American Historiography in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," in An Interrupted Past: German- Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and James J. Sheehan (Cambridge, 1991), 8-31. For emigre German historians, see below, pp. 63, 64.

On the somewhat lesser German academic influence on the social sciences, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991).

9. There have been many discussions of the historical culture of German historiography




These aspects did not reduce the attraction of German medieval his?

tory to non-German scholars, either in method or in substance.10 Georg Waitz's Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte of 1844 provided, for example, the

model for Bishop Stubbs's Constitutional History of England and both model

and substance for Stubbs's lectures on medieval German history, which

were edited and published by Arthur Hassall in 1908.11

In North America, Henry Adams began teaching medieval history at

Harvard in 1870 after having studied legal history at Berlin and Dresden.

From 1876, Herbert Baxter Adams taught at Johns Hopkins after study -

ing at Gottingen, Berlin, and Heidelberg, where he received a doctorate

in 1876. Herbert Baxter Adams's student, Charles Horner Haskins, stud?

ied briefly at Berlin in 1887-88. Ephraim Emerton, Henry Adams's younger

colleague at Harvard, had studied at Berlin and Leipzig, where he also

received a doctorate in 1878. Adams's other younger colleague, Charles

Gross, had studied at Gottingen. The widely read historical surveys of

Ephraim Emerton?An Introduction to the Study ofthe Middle Ages (315-

814) of 1888 and Mediaeval Europe (814-1300) of 1894?reflect this con?

siderable degree of German scholarly influence. Emerton's student, Ernest

F. Henderson, continued Emerton's interest with several widely circu-

lated works in 1896 and 1902.12

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For a brief summary, see Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 1-17, and the works cited above, n. 2.

10. Part of the success of German scholarship outside German-speaking lands was the result of tours made by other scholars and occasional extensive reports like those of Paul Fredericq of Belgium. On Fredericq 's 1885 report, "L'Enseignement superieure de l'histoire," see Bryce Lyon, Henri Pirenne: A Biographical and Intellectual Study (Ghent, 1974). On the potentiality for transatlantic distortion and misunderstanding, see Iggers, The German Con? ception of History, 63-65.

11. William Stubbs, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 476-1250 and idem, Germany in the Later Middle Ages, 1200-1500, ed. Arthur Hassal (London, 1908). The German historians cited in Stubbs's work are Waitz, Giesebrecht, Gregorovius, Nitszch, and Ranke. On Waitz as Stubbs's own model for the constitutional history of England, see Eduard Fueter, Geschichte der neueren Historiographie (Munich and Berlin, 1911), 488. Just missing the century's turn was the work of Herbert Fisher, The Medieval Empire, 2 vols. (New York, 1898), an attempt to update the earlier work of James Bryce, deriving also largely from Waitz. On the problem of the medieval Empire as distinct from German history, see now D. J. A. Matthew, "Reflections on the Medieval Roman Empire," History 77 (1992): 362-90, and Timothy Reuter, "The Medieval German 'Sonderweg'? The Empire and Its Rulers in the High Middle Ages," in Kings and Kingship in the Middle Ages, ed. Anne Duggan (London, 1993).

12. Pride of chronological place in North America in the twentieth century thus goes to Henderson. See Ernest F. Henderson, A Short History of Germany, vol. I (New York, 1902). Henderson had earlier published Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages (Lon? don and New York, 1986), as he said, "a work compiled with the idea of laying a foundation for the present history." Shortly afterwards, Edgar Holmes McNeal published his doctoral dissertation, Minores and Mediocres in the Germanic Tribal Laws (Chicago, 1905). On the European education of these scholars, see the essays by Karl F. Morrison, "Henry



EDWARD PETERS 53

And then came the war. The North American historical profession

delayed its reaction to German scholarship somewhat longer than did, for

example, the scholars of Belgium and France.13 But ultimately the reac? tion in North America brought the age of German scholarly influence to

a close. Perhaps the last vestige?or the epigone?of this widespread

Angloliterate interest in medieval German history was Feudal Germany,

published in 1928 by the American medieval historian James Westfall

Thompson. Thompson's book was based largely on the research of the

same German scholars of the mid- and late-nineteenth century as had

been the work of Emerton and Henderson. Its principal focus was upon German expansion eastward, and it ended at the end of the twelfth cen?

tury. In a perceptive review in the Historische Zeitschrift in 1929, Bernhard

Schmeidler complained about Thompson's failure to use more recent re?

search?that of Stutz, Poschl, Hirsch, Alfons Dopsch, Hartmann, Peitz, and Caspar, for example?and said of Thompson's work:

Es ist alles ein wenig Wissenschaft von gestern, vielleicht von gestern Abend, was da geboten wird, nicht die letzte Feinheit der heutigen Problemstellungen und Gesichtspunkte.14

A decade later, Geoffrey Barraclough took Schmeidler's words to heart?

and quoted them?in his own work, Medieval Germany, a two-volume

study, the first volume of which was a broad essay by Barraclough him?

self and the second a collection of eight essays by German historians

translated into English.15

Barraclough succeeded: Medieval Germany went through four reprintings

Adams," and Sally Vaughan, "Charles Homer Haskins," in Medieval Scholarship: Biographi? cal Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. I, History, ed. Helen Damico and Joseph Zavadil (New York, 1995), with bibliographies.

13. For a striking case?striking because Pirenne had received much of his training and considerable intellectual sympathy from German scholars?see Lyon, Henri Pirenne, 205-10, 312-19. See also Peter Linehan, "The Making of the Cambridge Medieval His? tory," Speculum 57 (1982): 463-94.

14. James Westfall Thompson, Feudal Germany (Chicago, 1928; reprint New York, 1962); Bernhard Schmeidler, review of Thompson, Historische Zeitschrift 140 (1929): 591-95 at 592.

15. Geoffrey Barraclough, Medieval Germany, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1938). Barraclough quoted Schmeidler in vol. I, p. 3, n 5. He went on to observe that "So long as the development of the German people is measured by outworn standards, so long as factors are empha? sized which no longer loom as large as they did in the closing years of the nineteenth century, if there is a mistaken formulation of questions and an unrealistic conception of historical potentialities, the significance of German history must remain obscure and in? terest in its problems be diminished." Barraclough specifically criticized the work of L. Reynaud, Les origines de Vinfluence francaise en Allemagne (Paris, 1913) as failing in this respect, deriving, like Thompson's, from an uncritical use of the work of nineteenth- century German scholars. For the problem of French historians' interest in and use of German scholarship, see below, pp. 57-59.




(1938, 1948, 1961, 1967), and, with Barraclough's 1946 monograph, The

Origins of Modern Germany, as well as a number of volumes of German

scholarship in English translation that continued Medieval Germany in

Barraclough's series, Studies in Medieval History remained for the English-

speaking world the standard account of medieval German history.16 But

Barraclough also had a particular agenda in his work on medieval Ger?

many between 1935 and 1946, wishing to present a version of German

history that would not only reflect the recent scholarship that he thought

particularly important, but that would also facilitate comparative studies

with medieval England and France, focusing upon the state of the Ger?

man lands chiefly in the aftermath of the Investiture Contest in terms of

economic and social conditions, the growth of local territorial powers,

16. Geoffrey Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany (Oxford, 1946; rev. second ed. Oxford, 1947; reprint 1949, 1952, 1957; paperback ed. New York, 1963). The later part ofthe work was translated into German by Heinrich Mitteis in 1947, and the medi? eval chapters proper by Friedrich Baethgen, as Die mittelalterlichen Grundlagen des modernen Deutschland (Weimar, 1953), generally favorably reviewed by Karl Bosl, "Die mittelalterlichen Grundlagen des modernen Deutschland in englischer Sicht," Historische Zeitschrift 179 (1955): 512-29. The first volumes in Barraclough's series "Studies in Medieval History" edited for Basil Blackwell after Medieval Germany were Gerd Tellenbach, Church, State and Chris? tian Society at the time of the Investiture Contest, trans. R. F. Bennett (Oxford, 1938; reprint 1948), from the German original, Libertas, Kirche und Weltordnung im Zeitalter des Investiturstreites, (Leipzig, 1936), and Fritz Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages, trans. S. B. Chrimes (Oxford, 1940; reprint 1949), originally published as Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht im fruheren Mittelalter. Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Monarchie. The preface to the first edition is dated 1 August 1914. Chrimes also added his translation of an essay on legal history to the Kern monograph.

Although they are not part of the old Barraclough series, the English translations of Heinrich Fichtenau, The Carolingian Empire, trans. Peter Munz (Oxford, 1957; reprint New York, 1964), Karl Hampe, Germany Under the Salian and Hohenstaufen Emperors, trans. Ralph Bennett (1909; reprint Totowa and New Jersey, 1973), and Heinrich Mitteis, The State in the Middle Ages: A Comparative Constitutional History of Feudal Europe, trans. H. F. Orton (New York, 1975) (a work of which Barraclough greatly disapproved). On the English reception?or lack of one?of Mitteis's work, see Paul R. Hyams, "Heinrich Mitteis and the Constitutional History of Medieval England," in Heinrich Mitteis nach hundert Jahren (1889-1989), Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse Abhandlungen, ed. Peter Landau, Hermann Nehlsen, and Dietmar Willoweit, new series, 106 (1991) seem to me to be the last manifestations of the spirit of the early volumes of the series (some later volumes turned to English history) and the kind of work that interested Barraclough and such contemporaries of his as Ralph Bennett and H. S. Offler. Barraclough himself, of course, virtually left the field after 1946. Echoing the title ofa 1946 essay by Alfred Weber, Barraclough announced his own changing interests in an essay entitled "Abschied von der europaischen Geschichte," in Merkur 8 (1954): 401-14, translated with a new title, "Europe in Perspective: New Views on European History," in Barraclough's History in a Changing World (Oxford, 1955), 168-84.

Aside from those works translated by Barraclough or under his sponsorship, one of the most frequently translated historians writing in German, the Austrian Friedrich Heer, is not generally cited in other Germanophone scholarship. See now Adolf Gaisbauer, Friedrich Heer (1916-1983). Eine Bibliographie (Vienna and Cologne, 1990), esp. the "Biographisches Nachwort," 420-72.



EDWARD PETERS 55

the relations of church and state, and what Barraclough and others con?

sidered to have been the constitutionally destructive role of the late Staufer

monarchy and the princes. Finally, as the title of his own study indicated,

Barraclough was concerned with the origins of modern Germany, employ-

ing a method of dealing with the past in relation to the present whose

theory he did not lay out until the Introduction to Contemporary History in

1964.17 In these respects, Barraclough indeed surpassed the earlier work

of Thompson, whose book he dismissed in the opening pages of the first

volume of Medieval Germany. Of the seven historians whose work Schmeidler had criticized Thompson

for not using, Barraclough translated essays by two?Ulrich Stutz and

Hans Hirsch?and one by Schmeidler himself.18 Stutz was a pioneer in

the application of medieval canon law to political history, and his study of the proprietary church, originally published in 1895, transformed the

study of the relationship between spiritual and temporal power. Hans

Hirsch and Theodor Mayer represented the cosmopolitan and original

scholarship in social, economic, and political history produced at the

University of Vienna under the aegis of Hirsch himself, as well as Oswald

Redlich and Alfons Dopsch. The other essays in Medieval Germany fo?

cused on constitutionalism in a comparative mode, and indeed, compar? ative constitutional history was the theme of the volume, a theme laid

out in order to suggest comparability with the history of France and

England. The essays in Medieval Germany and the two studies by Gerd Tellenbach

and Fritz Kern that followed them in Barraclough's series for Basil Blackwell

indeed represented many of the most interesting and important directions

in German medieval historiography at that time. With the exception of

the essays by Stutz (1895), Hans Hirsch (1913), and Otto Freiherr von

Dungern (1913), the studies in Medieval Germany were all originally pub? lished between 1922 and 1936. Barraclough acknowledged the advice given

by Percy Ernst Schramm, whose own work, beginning in 1927, had begun to open the influential field recently termed the "medieval symbology of

the state," and he acknowledged the cooperation of the authors in revis-

ing some of their essays for publication in English.19

17. Geoffrey Barraclough, Introduction to Contemporary History (London, 1964; reprint Harmondsworth, New York, 1967), 9?42. A work with the identical title to Origins is Francis Rapp, Les origines medievales de VAllemagne moderne (Paris, 1989), but, as its subtitle suggests?De Charles IV a Charles Quint (1346-1519)?it has no great relation to the work of Barraclough, but it is rather an interesting contribution to French versions of German medieval history, for which see below, p. 000.

18. Ofthe others, there is a full-length study only of Hartmann: Giinther Fellner, Ludo Moritz Hartmann und die osterreichische Geschichtswissenschaft (Vienna and Salzburg, 1985).

19. On Schramm, see J. M. Bak, "The Medieval Symbology of the State: Percy E.




The promise of Medieval Germany and the volumes by Tellenbach and

Kern that followed it was wiped out by the Second World War, and by the renewed resentment and suspicion of Germany and German culture.

Unrevised?or minimally revised?reprintings of older works of scholar?

ship after the war, and the profound implication of several of the histo?

rians translated in Medieval Germany (and many others) in Nazi party politics, as well as the apparent ease of the return of many of these scholars to

their prewar teaching posts and academic prominence added to the rejec- tion of things German.20

Barraclough's own Origins of Modern Germany of 1946 had a very different

purpose from Medieval Germany. Barraclough's commitment to the im?

portance of medieval German history in the mid-1930s had been given an urgency by the events of 1933-1945, and Origins had an immediate

and broader aim than the service of scholarship alone. Moreover, Barraclough left some contemporaries, but no followers with similar interests, either

in Great Britain or in the United States, where he taught for several

Schramm's Contribution," Viator 4 (1973): 33-64. Tellenbach's work was first published in German in 1936. Although Kern's Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages had appeared in German in 1914, the war and its aftermath had rendered it virtually unknown outside of Germany, where it appeared in a second edition edited by Rudolf Buchner in 1954 and was reprinted in 1962 under the title, Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht im friihen Mittelalter. But although Chrimes acknowledged influence of Kern's work on such scholars as Wilhelm Berges and Percy Schramm, his translation omitted Kern's formidable scholarly apparatus?one hundred pages of footnotes and one hundred-fifty pages of appendices, making the monograph look far more like an essay in the history of ideas than the brilliant attempt to rethink the nature of early European constitutional history that it really was. On Kern, see Liselotte Kern, Fritz Kern 1884-1950. Universal Historiker und Philosoph, Hinweis auf einen unverqffentlichten Nachlass (Bonn, 1980).

20. Stutz had died before the publication of Medieval Germany. Schmeidler had been forcibly retired from Erlangen in 1936. Mayer and Brackmann were in varying degrees enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi regime.

There is a large literature on the subject. The most thorough study is that of Karen Schonwalder, Historiker und Politik. Geschichtswissenschaft im Nazionalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 1992). See the review essay by Georg G. Iggers, "Professors in the Third Reich," Central European History 25 (1992): 445-50. In addition to Schonwalder's work see Karl Ferdinand Werner, Das NS Geschichtsbild und die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1967), and idem, "Die deutsche Historiographie unter Hitler," in Faulenbach, Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland, 86-96; Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards; idem, "Albert Brackmann (1871-1952) Ostforscher: The Years of Retirement" Journal of Contemporary History 23 (1988): 573-88; Klaus Schreiner, "Fiihrertum, Rasse, Reich. Wissenschaft von der Geschichte nach der nationalsozialistischen Machtgreifung," in Wissenschaft im Dritten Reich, ed. Peter Lundgreen (Frankfurt, 1985), 163-252, and the works cited in Melton, "From Folk History to Structural History." On the problems of continuity and disconti- nuity, see Klaus Schreiner, "Wissenschaft von der Geschichte des Mittelalters nach 1945. Kontinuitaten und Diskontinuitaten der Mittelalterforschung im geteilten Deutschland," in Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (1945-1965), ed. Ernst Schulin, with assistance from Elisabeth Muller-Luckner, Historische Zeitschrift, supplement 10 (Mu? nich, 1989): 87-146.



EDWARD PETERS 57

years in the 1960s and early 1970s. For the two decades following 1946, Medieval Germany and The Origins of Modem Germany, along with Tellenbach's

Church, State, and Christian Society and Kern's Kingship and Law, aside

from the isolated and specialized research of some North American and

British scholars, the works of emigre historians, and occasional reviews in

scholarly journals, remained the standard Angloliterate access to the his?

tory of medieval Germany for students and non-specialist scholars alike.

ii

The cases of France and Belgium provide an interesting parallel to the

developments described above. Henri Pirenne had studied in both France

and Germany and, until the events of 1914-1919, maintained a close

relationship with a number of his German colleagues, including Karl

Lamprecht and Pirenne's fellow-student in Berlin, Bernhard Schmeidler.21

Pirenne's creative use of the work of Lamprecht and Gustav Schmoller, freed from the furious disputes of the Lamprechtstreit that troubled Ger?

man scholarship around the turn of the century, as well as Pirenne's friend?

ship, influenced the work of the young Heinrich Sproemberg, subsequently one of the most prominent medieval historians in the DDR, and on

Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. The latters' work at Strasbourg, a win-

dow of scholarship on both France and Germany, provided for French

readers a running series of reviews, in the case of Bloch first in the Revue

Historique until 1938 and later in Annales.22 But the 1930s witnessed a

declining interest and a growing hostility in France to German historical

21. See Bryce Lyon, Henri Pirenne, 205-10, 312-19. 22. On Pirenne and Sproemberg, see Lyon, Henri Pirenne. On Bloch and Febvre, see

Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Chicago, 1984), 79-165, and John E. Craig, Scholarship and Nation-Building: The Universities of Strasbourg and Alsatian Society, 1870- 1939 (Chicago, 1984). Much ofthe highly self-conscious reform instinct in early twentieth-century French historiography was directed not only against earlier French historiography, but also against French perceptions of German historical treatments of both earlier Ger? man and French history. For the French, of course, the political and cultural concerns were also directed against 1870 as well as the two later world wars. See especially Fink, Marc Bloch, 30-32, 74-57, 96-97, 101-19, 129-31, 193-94, and Karl Ferdinand Werner, "Marc Bloch et la recherche historique allemand," in Marc Bloch et son oeuvre, ed. J. LeGoff and K. F. Werner (Paris, 1986), reprint in Hartmut Atsma and Andre Burgiere, eds., Marc Bloch aujourd'hui (Paris, 1990), 125-33.

Recently, Peter Schottler has memorialized and edited several essays by Lucie Varga, the young Austrian medieval historian and student of Dopsch who migrated to Paris and played a considerable role in keeping Bloch and Febvre apprised of contemporary Ger? man scholarship: Lucie Varga, Zeitenwende, ed. Peter Schottler (Frankfurt, 1991), French trans. Lucie Varga, Les autorites invisibles (Paris, 1991).

Strasbourg/Strassburg had been exchanged between France and Germany, and the Ger? man academic presence in Strassburg had been marked by a distinctive interest in French history, particularly in the cases of Harry Bresslau, Johannes Haller, Robert Holtzmann, and Walter Kienast.




scholarship. The French parallel to Barraclough's Origins was the dismal

study of Joseph Calmette, Le Reich allemand.23 When Yves Renouard delivered

his communication, "Rapport sur les etudes d'histoire politique medievale

dans le monde de 1938 a 1950" to the Ninth International Congress of

Historical Sciences in 1950, he mentioned only a half-dozen examples of

German historical scholarship, most of them in the area of text editing.24 The situation began to improve slowly with the establishment in 1964

of the German Historical Institute in Paris, the result of the efforts of

Eugen Ewig, Paul Egon Hiibinger, Gerd Tellenbach, and others.25 The

Alsatian Philippe Dollinger produced his study of the Hanseatic League in 1964.26 But attitudes and degrees of unfamiliarity were slow to change. In 1971, Jacques Le Goff published a short article entitled "Is Politics

Still the Backbone of History?"27 Le Goff praised what he considered a

new kind of political history, citing the work in German and English of

Percy Schramm and Ernst Kantorowicz.28 But Le Goff appeared not to

23. Paris, 1951. On the place of Calmette's study, see the extensive discussion ofthe historiographical debate on the origins of France and Germany in Carlrichard Briihl, Deutschland-Frankreich. Die Geburt Zweier Volker (Cologne and Vienna, 1990), 7-82, and esp. at 78. There is now an abridged French translation: Carlrichard Briihl, Naissance de deux peuples: Francais et Allemands (IXe-XIe siecle), ed. Olivier Guyotjeanin, trans. Gaston Duchet-Suchaux (Paris, 1994).

24. Yves Renouard, "Rapport sur les etudes d'histoire politique medievale dans le monde de 1938 a 1950," IXe Congres International des Sciences historiques, vol. I, Rapports (Paris, 1950), 541-60, reprint in Renouard, Etudes d'histoire medievale, vol. I (Paris, 1968), 41-60.

25. See "Das Deutsche Historische Institut in Paris," Francia 1 (1973): 17-21; Karl Ferdinand Werner, "Die Forschungsbereiche des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Paris, ihre Schwerpunkte und Projekte," Francia 4 (1976): 722-48, and Gerd Krumeich, "Das Deutsche Historische Institut in Paris (DHIP)," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 13 (1987): 267- 71. Its journal, Francia, with its supplementary volumes (Beihefte), has opened a new line of communication between French and German medieval historians. Its director for many years was Karl Ferdinand Werner, who has written the first volume in the series Histoire de France edited by Jean Favier: Les origines (avant I'an mil) (Paris, 1984). The medieval chapters of Werner Conze, The Shaping of the German Nation, trans. Neville Mellon (New York, 1979), are, as Conze acknowledged, largely derived from Werner's work.

26. Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa, trans. and ed. D. S. Ault and S. H. Steinberg (London, 1970), from the French original of 1964 and the German translation of 1966. Dollinger seems exceptional here. He had published his L'evolution des classes rurales en Baviere at Strasbourg in 1949.

27. Daedalus 100 (1971): 1-19. 28. On Schramm, see above, n. 19. On Kantorowicz, see Friedrich Baethgen, "Ernst

Kantorowicz 3.5.1895-9.9.1963," Deutsches Archiv 21 (1965): 1-17; Percy Ernst Schramm, "Nachruf von Ernst Kantorowicz," Erasmus 18 (1966): 449-56; Josef Fleckenstein, "Ernst Kantorowicz sum Gadachtnis," Frankfurter Universitdtsreden 3 (1964): 11-27, reprint in Fleckenstein, Ordnungen und formende Krdfte des Mittelalters. Ausgewahlte Beitrdge (Gottingen, 1989), 508-21; David Abulafia, "Kantorowicz and Frederick II," History 62 (1977): 193- 210; Yakov Malkiel, "Ernst H. Kantorowicz," in Four Modern Humanists, ed. Arthur R. Evans (Princeton, 1970), 146-219; Ralph E. Giesey, "Ernst H. Kantorowicz: Scholarly Triumphs and Academic Travails in Weimar Germany," Publications of the Leo Baeck Institute, Yearbook 30 (1985): 191-202; Eckhart Griinewald, Ernst Kantorowicz und Stefan George



EDWARD PETERS 59

know of the tradition in which Schramm and Kantorowicz wrote and to

which they contributed.

Jean-Pierre Cuvillier and Francis Rapp have recently produced two

surveys of medieval German history that perhaps represent a new French

interest.29 But the most impressive sign of any new French interest re?

mains the degree of French academic participation in the activities of the

German Historical Institute in Paris and its journal, Francia.

III

From the 1960s virtually until the present, the results of German medieval

historiography have circulated in the Angloliterate world in quite different

ways: through individual scholarly essays translated for thematic collec?

tions; the irregular translation of individual monographs by German historians; the research of the small number of Angloliterate specialists in German

medieval history, including emigres from Germany and Austria; the occa-

sional interests of non-specialists; reviews (often random and never system-

atically comprehensive of all German scholarship) in scholarly journals; and

one recent consideration in a book-length survey of medieval historiography in this century that may be worse than no consideration at all.30

One reason for the new appearance of German medieval historiography in American scholarship has been, paradoxically, a consequence of the

preponderant influence of French historical scholarship on North American

and British medieval historical research since the 1950s. One prominent

aspect of that influence has been that of comparative history, particularly

(Wiesbaden, 1982); Alain Boureau, Histoires d'un historien. Kantorowicz (Paris, 1990), an interesting study from a French perspective; Robert E. Lerner, "Ernst Kantorowicz and Theodor E. Mommsen," in An Interrupted Past, ed. Lehmann and Sheehan, 188-205; Tumult. Schriften zur Verkehrswissenschaft, no. 16 (1994), a number entitled Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz Geschichtsschreiber, containing several essays by and about Kantorowicz. Most recently, see Carl Landauer, "Ernst Kantorowicz and the Sacrilization of the Past," Central European History 27 (1994): 1?25. The results of two conferences on the work of Kantorowicz held in Frankfurt in 1993 and Princeton in 1994 will be published in Germany in 1995. The chapter on Kantorowicz and Schramm in Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1991), 79-117, should be read with considerable skepticism and dismay.

29. Jean-Pierre Cuvillier, LAllemagne medievale. Naissance d'un etat (VIIIe-XIHe siecles) (Paris, 1979); Francis Rapp, Les origines medievales de VAllemagne moderne (cited above, n. 17). An eloquent example of this French interest is the article by Elisabeth Magnou- Nortier, "Un grand historien: Walter Schlesinger," Francia 16 (1989): 155-67.

30. Norman Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages is a highly impressionistic, largely auto- biographical, and rarely reliable series of studies. Some of Cantor's interests in this direction were laid out in an article in 1968, "Medieval Historiography as Modern Political and Social Thought," Journal of Contemporary History 3 (1968): 55-73. Cantor's views could only have been confirmed by the mediocre essay that followed his in the same issue of the Journal, August Nitschke, "German Politics and Medieval History," 75-92.




social history.31 The journal Comparative Studies in Society and History was

one product of this interest, and its editor, the Canadian-born medieval

historian Sylvia Thrupp, also produced an anthology of essays in this mode

in 1967, in which she included studies by a number of German historians,

including Karl Bosl, Eugen Ewig, and Edith Ennen.32 In the same year the University of California Press issued the English translation of Fritz

Rorig's study of the medieval town, a German contribution to the equally current American interest in urban history.33 The next year Fredric L.

Cheyette, the American historian of medieval France, edited a collection

of essays more ambitious even than that of Thrupp, Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe.54 Cheyette found that the most interesting deconstructions

of the term "feudalism" were these produced by the German historians

Otto Hintze and Otto Brunner, that the most stimulating study of lords

and followers in early European history was that of Walter Schlesinger, and that those of knighthood and the relations between ruler and ruled

in the Empire were those of Arno Borst and Karl Bosl. Cheyette was

not, of course, primarily interested in anything like a new synthesis of

German history, but rather with the growth of the nobility and its relation

to the growth of communities on a Western and Central European basis, and he, like Thrupp, had adventurously found some of the riches of

German historical scholarship on these topics. At the same time as some aspects of recent German medieval historical

scholarship were entering American scholarship via the unlikely route of

comparative history, social history, and urban history, Karl Leyser, a young German emigre who had been trained in England and made a Fellow of

Magdalen College, Oxford in 1948, independently inaugurated a new

line of British scholarship on medieval Germany with his remarkable study of England and the Empire published in 1960.35 Since then, Leyser's scholar?

ship, including important reviews, and the work of his students, particularly

31. Marc Bloch, "A Contribution Towards a Comparative History of European Societies," in idem, Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch, trans. J. E. Anderson (New York, 1969), 44-81.

32. Sylvia Thrupp, ed., Early Medieval Society (New York, 1967). 33. Fritz Rorig, The Medieval Town (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967). 34. Frederic L. Cheyette, Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe (New York, 1968). 35. Karl Leyser, "England and the Empire in the Early Twelfth Century," Transactions

ofthe Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 10 (1960): 61-83; reprint in Karl Leyser, Medieval Germany and Its Neighbours, 900-1250 (London, 1982). On Leyser, see the reminiscence by G. L. Harriss and the bibliography in Timothy Reuter, ed., Warriors and Churchmen in the High Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Karl Leyser (London and Rio Grande, 1992). Leyser's subsequent work consisted chiefly of essays and detailed reviews. See Karl Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (Bloomington and London, 1975); Timothy Reuter, ed., Communications and Power in Medieval Europe: The Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries (London, 1994); idem, The Gregorian Revolution and Beyond (Lon? don, 1994).



EDWARD PETERS 61

Timothy Reuter, Benjamin Arnold, and John Gillingham, has constituted

a dramatic return of interest in medieval Germany in the United King? dom. The work of Leyser and his students parallels a similar renewal of

interest in an earlier period on another front?that of Carolingian and

post-Carolingian Europe on the part of some of the students of J. M.

Wallace-Hadrill, a revival of Carolingian and post-Carolingian studies in

the United Kingdom that is, if anything, even more impressive than the

revival of medieval German history.36 In the United Kingdom, too, indi?

vidual scholars have sometimes made significant contributions to the sub?

ject. One of these was Barraclough's associate Ralph Bennett; another

was F. R. H. Du Boulay, who published in 1983 what is still the best

survey of late medieval German history in English.37 Other historical interests also began to generate wider reading in, and

English translations of, German historical scholarship. One of these was

the Investiture Conflict, in which Angloliterate historians have long had

an interest often independent of any particular interest in German his?

tory.38 The strong American and British interest in the crusades led to

36. See, e.g., Stuart Airlie, "After Empire?Recent Work on the Emergence of Post- Carolingian Kingdoms," Early Medieval Europe 2 (1993): 153-61, and Peter Godman and Roger Collins, eds., Charlemagne's Heir: New Perspectives on Louis the Pious (814-840) (Oxford, 1990), with chapters by different scholars in German, French, and English.

Like the Investiture Conflict and the Crusades (discussed immediately below), the Carolingian period has also been an area in which German scholarship has played a wider general role because of a common interest that is not German-specific. Here, too, the work of a German scholar, the emigre Wilhelm Levison, has played an important role: England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946). See, most recently, Richard E. Sullivan, "The Carolingian Age: Reflections on Its Place in the History of the Middle Ages," Speculum 64 (1989): 267-306.

Two recent translations of the work of Germany's leading paleographer, the late Bernhard Bischoff, have contributed greatly to the Anglolexic presence of one of the great strengths of German scholarship: Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Daibhi O Croinin and David Ganz (Cambridge, 1990); idem, Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne, trans. Michael Gorman (Cambridge, 1994).

Early medieval archaeology has also become something of an international field with substantial German contributions. See most recently Giinther P. Fehring, The Archaeology of Medieval Germany: An Introduction, trans. Ross Samson (London, 1992), and Herbert Jahnkuhn, "Umrisse einer Archaologie des Mittelalters," Zeitschrift fiir Archaologie des Mittelalters 1 (173): 9-19. This journal, with Germania, as well as occasional studies in Fruhmittelalterliche Studien, is the principal source of scholarship for medieval archaeology in Germany.

37. F. R. H. Du Boulay, Germany in the Later Middle Ages (New York, 1983). 38. This interest goes back at least as far as Emerton. It was stimulated by several of

the essays in Medieval Germany and particularly by the studies of Tellenbach and Kern that followed them. One of the first results of this interest in the United States was the volume of translated and annotated texts, T. E. Mommsen and Karl F. Morrison, eds., Imperial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century (New York, 1962). Mommsen was an emigre German historian of great talent who taught at Cornell and Princeton. See Lerner, "Ernst Kantorowicz and Theodor E. Mommsen," above, n. 28., and below, n. 43. There are brief sketches of Kantorowicz, Mommsen, and Karl Hampe in Felix Gilbert, A European Past: Memoirs 1905-1945 (New York, 1988). Mommsen appears as a kind of leitmotif in




the translation of two key works by the German scholars Carl Erdmann

and Hans Eberhard Mayer.39 Yet another areas of common, if not German-specific interest in which

German scholarship has made an impression has been the general prob? lem of spiritual and temporal power and the history of political thought,

including the papacy and medieval canon law. Much German scholarship in this area has either been translated or absorbed by the Austrian emigre in England, Walter Ullmann, and his students, including Brian Tierney in

the U.S., and by Stephan Kuttner, the great historian of medieval canon

law, also an emigre to the U.S. The highlight of this long process will be

the forthcoming History of Medieval Canon Law, an international collabo-

rative history on a monumental scale, involving an impressive number of

North American, British, and German scholars.40

Finally, the area of Reformation history has also drawn scholars into

the late Middle Ages in Germany. Some of this interest may have derived

from an American Protestant, specifically Lutheran, interest in the Ger?

man Reformation. Most influential has been the pioneering work of Heiko

Oberman and Gerald Strauss. Strauss published in 1971 and 1972 a col?

lection of translated sources on late medieval German society and culture, and a collection of essays by distinguished German historians of the later

Middle Ages.41

Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages. Morrison, perhaps the American medieval historian most thoroughly imbued with some of the most important aspects of German historical method, has himself surveyed American medieval historiography: Karl F. Morrison, "Frag? mentation and Unity in 'American Medievalism,'" in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past Before Us (Ithaca and London, 1980), 49-77. Most recently, see Uta-Renate Blumenthal, Der Investiturstreit (Stuttgart, 1982), Eng. trans. by the author, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia, 1988).

39. Hans Eberhard Mayer, The Crusades, trans. John Gillingham (Oxford, 1972); Carl Erdmann, The Origin of the Idea of Crusade, trans. Marshall W. Baldwin and Walter Goffart (Princeton, 1977).

40. On Ullmann, see Brian Tierney and Peter Linehan, eds., Authority and Power: Studies on Medieval Law and Government Presented to Walter Ullmann on his Seventieth Birthday (Cambridge, 1980). On Tierney, see James Ross Sweeney and Stanley Chodorow, Popes, Teachers, and Canon Law in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, London, 1989); on Kuttner, see Kenneth Pennington, "Stephan Kuttner," in Der Einfluss deutscher Emigranten auf die Rechtsentwicklung in den USA und in Deutschland, ed., Marcus Lutter, Ernst C. Stiefel, and Michael H. Hoeflich (Tubingen, 1993), 361-64. Kenneth Pennington and Wilfried Hartmann, eds., A History of Medieval Canon Law (Washington, D.C., forthcoming). An important example of American scholarship on German church history is Lawrence G. Duggan, Bishop and Chapter: The Governance of the Bishopric of Speyer to 1552 (New Brunswick, 1978). On emigre historians, see below, p. 000.

41. Gerald Strauss, Manifestations of Discontent in Germany on the Eve ofthe Reformation (Bloomington and London, 1971); Pre-Reformation Germany (New York, 1972). For Strauss, see Andrew C. Fix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn, eds., Germania illustrata: Essays on Early Modern Germany Presented to Gerald Strauss (Kirksville, Missouri, 1992), with a memoir, "Gerald Strauss, Historian," xix-xxiii.



EDWARD PETERS 63

Neither the extension of social history nor that of other areas of com?

mon and comparative interests of historians have served to do more than

include occasional items of German historical scholarship, (often for com?

parative purposes) in areas whose research focus and main emphasis lie

elsewhere, particularly in other national areas. Few of the American scholars

who specialize in medieval German history have held appointments at

major research universities at which they might establish particular and

continuing schools of scholarly specialties in their fields.42

Nor did the work of emigre scholars offer the chance for more pro? found influences, development of interests, and the training of students.43

The most prominent German medieval historians who emigrated to the

U.S. were Guido Kisch, Stephan Kuttner, Gerhart Ladner, Ernst Kantorowicz, Felix Gilbert, Hans Baron, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Helene Wieruszowski, and Theodor E. Mommsen.44 But these scholars were all German historians

in very particular ways: Ladner, an Austrian trained at Vienna, was a

master of both Geistesgeschichte and art history in the service of intellectual

history; Kuttner a historian of medieval canon law throughout Western

Europe; Kantorowicz a historian of comparative constitutional symbol? ism, Mommsen an intellectual historian of wide range; Kisch a legal historian

Of the work of the leading German historian of the later Middle Ages, Peter Moraw, there exists in English a translation of his article, "The Court of the German King and Emperor at the End ofthe Middle Ages," in Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, ed. Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (New York, 1991), Moraw's important survey, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung: Das Deutsche Reich im spaten Mittelalter 1250 bis 1490 (Berlin, 1985), the third volume of the series Propylaen Weltgeschichte Deutschlands, is one of the works of recent German historical scholarship badly in need of English translation. For others, see below, n. 55.

42. The consequences of these limitations have also been felt in the academic job market, in which positions in Central European medieval history are relatively few, and have been for some years. At least two American scholars, Linda Fowler-Magerl and Stuart Jenks, have made academic careers in Germany.

43. There is a large literature, much of it conveniently referenced in Lehmann and Sheehan, eds., An Interrupted Past. See also the work cited above, n. 40.

44. On Kantorowicz, see above, n. 28; on Ladner, see John Van Engen, "Images and Ideas: The Achievements of Gerhart Burian Ladner," Viator 20 (1989): 85-115; on Mommsen, see Lerner, "Ernst Kantorowicz and Theodor E. Mommsen," Theodor E. Mommsen, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Eugene F. Rice (Ithaca, 1959; reprint Westport, CO 1982).

Guido Kisch's The Jews in Medieval Germany, 2nd edition (New York, 1970), represent? ed a field in which there had been extensive German research, but none worth speaking of by Germans in the middle years of this century. recent German research, however, has returned to this topic: Frantisek Graus, Pest?Geissler?Judenmorde. Das 14, Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit (Gottingen, 1987); Alfred Haverkamp, ed., Zur Geschichte der Juden im Deutschland des spaten Mittelalters und der friihen Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 1981); Peter Herde, "Gestaltung und Krisis. Juden und Nichtjuden in Deutschland vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit," in Neunhundert Jahre Geschichte der Juden in Hessen, ed. Christiane Heinemann (Wiesbaden, 1983), 1-40.




and a historian of Jadaism; Gilbert, Baron, and Kristeller were primarily historians of the Renaissance; Wieruszowski worked chiefly on medieval

Mediterranean intellectual history. Their influence on colleagues and stu?

dents was formidable and profound, but the German-specific element in

it was extremely cosmopolitan and European, focused on intellectual, ec?

clesiastical, and legal history, and these scholars had in common only the

renowned Germanic emphasis on Textforschung and methodology. And

until relatively recently, with the exception of Kuttner, U.S. emigre schol?

arship did not have a particular impact on scholarship in postwar Ger?

many itself.

In all of the instances cited above, the influence of German historical

scholarship has been evident only in specific areas of historical interest

and concern, and in the last instance in individual scholarly publications and in the careers of students. The work of Karl Morrison, Robert L.

Benson, Robert Somerville, and John Van Engen reflects much of the

style, learning, and particular interests of their teachers?Mommsen,

Kantorowicz, Kuttner, and Ladner respectively.45 On occasion, scholars with particularly specialized interests in a specific

period of German history have produced useful scholarship that can bridge the gaps across the Atlantic and between specialized teachers and stu?

dents. That is the case with Boyd Hill's unfortunately titled The Rise of the First Reich in 1969, which contained translations of essays by Martin

Lintzel, Carl Erdmann, and Percy Ernst Schramm, as well as Hill's volume

of translated royal and imperial documents from Henry I to Henry IV of

1972, Medieval Monarchy in Action46

In a revisionist monograph entitled The Kingdom of Germany in the High Middle Ages, published in 1971, John Gillingham drew impressively on

postwar German historical research and on that of his teacher Karl Leyser.47

45. See Van Engen, cited above, n. 44, and below, n. 61; on Morrison, see the "Lobrede" by Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, 424, and above, n. 38; Robert L. Benson, "Political Renovatio: Two Models from Roman Antiquity," in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. R. L. Benson and Giles Constable (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 299-323. This volume also presented the work of the German historians Peter Classen and Knut Wolfgang Norr. See also Kenneth Pennington and Robert Somerville, eds., Law, Church and Society: Essays in Honor of Stephan Kuttner (Philadelphia, 1977).

Somerville was the teacher of Uta-Renate Blumenthal, and Benson has produced a student whose work reflects a classic tradition of German historical scholarship: John W. Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship and Royal Monasteries in Early Medieval Germany, c. 936-1075 (Cambridge, 1993).

46. Boyd Hill, The Rise of the First Reich (New York, 1969); idem, Medieval Monarchy in Action: The German Empire from Henry I to Henry IV (London, New York, 1972). Hill's useful translations supplement those in Mommsen and Morrison, Imperial Lives and Letters ofthe Eleventh Century. Hill's 1969 title was unfortunate because it echoed a thesis particularly prominent among many German historians and most German political figures in the NSDAP.

47. John Gillingham, The Kingdom of Germany in the High Middle Ages (London, 1971).



EDWARD PETERS 65

Timothy Reuter's edition and translation of a number of studies on the

medieval nobility, published in 1978, was, like Cheyette's work a decade

earlier, focused upon a particular, and important, problem, but with a

predominantly German focus, and, like that of Cheyette and John Freed,

may very well served to widen knowledge of and interest in German

medieval history by including it in topically-oriented approaches to Eu?

ropean political history in general, along with evidence from the conven-

tional English and French material.48

Properly done, as it was by Reuter, the translation and editing of such

collections offer access to an entire recent tradition of German historiography and its most important representatives and scholarly landmark-essays, in

contrast to the useful but isolated instances of individual articles translated

and published in English. The latter, as in Thrupp and Cheyette, offer

the work of major scholars, but often without the research-context in

which those scholars have written. The journal Viator has since its inception in 1970 been especially hospitable to German subjects and to German

and Austrian scholarship, in some cases offering both highly original schol?

arship and individual articles that summarize the state of a field at a par? ticular moment.49

The translation of German monographs offers more substance, of course, than individual articles, but the choice of works to be translated is often

random and dependent on the availability of rights, translators, and the

agenda of Angloliterate publishing houses. In some respects articles and

article-collections of articles offer more focused and consistent perspec? tives. Among the more important monographs that have been translated

into English very recently have been Karl Jordan's study of Henry the

Lion, Heinrich Fichtenau's Living in the Tenth Century, Otto Brunner's

"Land" and Lordship, Arno Borst's study ofthe computus, Werner Rosener's

study of peasant history, Hans-Werner Goetz's study of daily life, and the

forthcoming translation of Herbert Grundmann's monumental and classic

Gillingham's most recent revisionist study is "Elective Kingship and the Unity of Medi? eval Germany," German History 9 (1991): 124-35.

48. Timothy Reuter, ed. and trans., The Medieval Nobility: Studies on the Ruling Classes of France and Germany From the Sixth to the Twelfth Century (Amsterdam and New York, 1978). Reuter included essays by Karl Schmid, Karl Hauck, Franz Irsigler, Karl Ferdinand Werner, Gerd Tellenbach, Karl Bosl, and Johanna Maria van Winter. Aside from the work of Cheyette and Reuter, the approach that consists of bringing German evidence together with evidence from other parts of Europe to bear on topical problems in comparative history is well-illustrated in Leopold Genicot, Rural Communities in the Medieval West (Baltimore, 1990), and Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe (Ox? ford, 1984).

Another volume that reflects the collaborative thematic work of both German and non-German historians is Neithard Bulst and Jean-Philippe Genet, eds., Medieval Lives and the Historian, (Kalamazoo, 1986).




Religibse Bewegungen im Mittelalter.50 These are all important books in their

own right, and the works of Fichtenau, Goetz, and Borst illustrate some

of the most dramatic and important new directions of German historiography. But they are all in the broadest sense, occasional translations, their rela?

tion to other scholarship unclear, and their reading public uncertain.

In the case of the Brunner translation, however, some of these short?

comings have been overcome by the long and detailed introduction pro? vided by the translators, one that fairly and extensively considers not only the scholarly originality and history of a work first published in 1939, but

frankly and subtly confronts the still-vexing problem of the author's po? litical history, especially his association with the NSDAP. It was an im?

portant and difficult, but certainly not an easy work to have published in

the U.S.51

One standard method of imposing some kind of order on broad and

prolific fields of historical research, in both translation and the original German has been the review article, like the studies of Sullivan and Freed

cited above and the recent essay by Charles Bowlus on the Salian period.52

49. As examples of the former, Herwig Wolfram, "The Shaping of the Early Medieval Kingdom," Viator 1 (1970): 1-20, and "The Shaping ofthe Early Medieval Principality as a Type of Non-Royal Rulership," Viator 2 (1971): 33-51. Ofthe latter, Franz Staab, "A Reconsideration of the Ancestry of Modern Political Liberty: The Problem of the So- Called 'King's Freemen' (Konigsfreie)," Viator 11 (1980): 51-69.

Wolfram, the successor of Heinrich Fichtenau at the University of Vienna, has also written a perceptive European analysis of medieval studies in the U.S.: Herwig Wolfram "Medieval Studies in America and American Medievalism," trans. Boyd H. Hill, Jr., Fruhmittelalterliche Studien 11 (1977): 396-408. trans. Boyd H. Hill, Jr., also in Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 2 (1981): 1-14. I am grateful to Boyd Hill for this reference and other advice and interest.

50. Karl Jordan, Henry the Lion, trans. P. S. Falla (Oxford and New York, 1986); Heinrich Fichtenau, Living in the Tenth Century: Mentalities and Social Orders, trans. Patrick Geary (Chicago, 1991); Otto Brunner, "Land" and Lordship, trans. Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton (Philadelphia, 1992); Arno Borst, The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer, trans. Andrew Winnard (Chicago, 1994); Werner Rosener, Peasants in the Middle Ages (Urbana and Champaign, 1992); but see John Freed's review of Rosener in Central European History 26 (1993): 115-17); Hans-Werner Goetz, Life in the Middle Ages from the Seventh to the Thirteenth Century, ed. Steven Rowan, trans. Albert Wimmer (Notre Dame, 1993). The Grundmann translation is forthcoming. There is also a collection of Arno Borst's essays: Medieval Worlds: Barbarians, Heretics, and Artists in the Middle Ages, trans. Eric Hansen (Chicago, 1992), with an interesting essay, "My Life," 244-50.

51. Interestingly, the earlier English publication ofthe work of Dietrich Gerhard, Old Europe: A Study of Continuity, 1000-1800 (New York, 1981) established an Angloliterate introduction to ideas that were very similar to those of Brunner, although Gerhard was a student of Friedrich Meinecke and an emigre himself. See Edgar Melton, "Comment: Hermann Aubin," in Lehmann and Melton, Paths of Continuity, 251-61 at 253, n. 11.

52. Sullivan, above, n. 36; Freed, above, n. 3; Charles W. Bowlus, "The Early Kaiserreich in Recent German Historiography," Central European History 23 no. 4 (1990): 349-67. See also Charles W. Bowlus, Franks, Moravians, and Magyars: The Struggle for the Middle Danube (Philadelphia, 1995). Review articles can also sometimes demonstrate a lack of impact of



EDWARD PETERS 67

Another is the translation of some of the recent?and numerous?gen? eral multi-author surveys of medieval German history, virtually a minor

German industry itself over the past several decades.53 The English trans-

lations of the first three volumes of Joachim Leuschner's ten-volume series

Deutsche Geschichte, written by Josef Fleckenstein, Horst Fuhrmann, and

Leuschner himself, represented the first comprehensive survey since that

of Barraclough.54 Although these volumes reflect some of the most im?

portant directions of German historical research in the past few decades

(Fleckenstein's judicious discussion of very early European history; Fuhrmann's

eloquent setting ofthe period in a broad European context), they do not

constitute a satisfactory single survey and may be supplemented by other

works by German and English historians that have also recently appeared.55

Finally, the recent survey by Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages 800-1056, represents the most successful attempt ever in the

English language to deal with the early medieval period in the light of

the most recent and best scholarship done inside or outside Germany. The Carolingian period was not of great interest to Barraclough and is

one of the least satisfactorily treated parts of The Origins of Modern Germa?

ny. In the intervening decades, Carolingian history has undergone a

scholarship like much of that described above. Charles T. Wood, "The Return of Medieval Politics," American Historical Review 94 (1989): 391-404, pays little attention to German scholarship.

53. Johannes Fried, "Deutsche Geschichte im fruheren und hohen Mittelalter. Bemerkungen zu einigen neuen Gesamtdarstellungen," Historische Zeitschrift 245 (1987): 625-59, lists at least five of these since 1973. The first of these was the Deutsche Geschichte, edited by Joachim Leuschner, all three of whose medieval volumes have been translated into English.

54. Joseph Fleckenstein, Early Medieval Germany, trans. Bernard S. Smith (Amsterdam, 1978); Horst Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages c. 1050-1200, trans. Timothy Reuter (Cambridge, 1986); Joachim Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages, trans. Sabine MacCormack (Amsterdam, 1980). See the perceptive review article by Timothy Reuter on the first and last of these in English translation and the Fuhrmann book in German, "A New History of Medieval Germany," History 66 (1981): 440-44.

55. Alfred Haverkamp, Medieval Germany 1056-1273, trans. Helga Braun and Richard Mortimer (Oxford, 1988). Haverkamp's volume, like that of Fuhrmann (although the end-dates in each are different?and significant), was part of another series, the Neue Deutsche Geschichte. At least one of these projects, Martin Vogt, ed., Deutsche Geschichte von den Anfangen bis zur Wiedervereinigung, was reedited in order to accommodate the Wiedervereinigung of 1989: The first edition appeared in 1987 with an excellent chapter on medieval Germany by Hannah Vollrath, the second in 1991 with the new title.

Among individual volumes in the new series, a number should certainly be translated into English. Among these are the study of Peter Moraw, cited above, n. 41, and the volumes that chronologically precede it in the Propylaen Geschichte Deutschlands, Johannes Fried, Der Weg in die Geschichte. Die Urspriinge Deutschlands bis 1024 (Berlin, 1994), and Hagen Keller, Zwischen regionaler Begrenzung und universalem Horizont. Deutschland im Imperium der Salier und Staufer 1024?1250 (Berlin, 1986). Fried's work begins and concludes with astute discussions of what "German" was in the period. English translations are underway of Stefan Weinfiirter, Herrschaft und Reich der Salier. Grundlinien und Umbruchzeit (Sigmaringen, 1992), and Briihl, Deutschland-Frankreich.




remarkable revival, not least at the hands of English scholars, and Reuter's

work is surely one of the high points of this revival.56 But as John Freed

has pointed out, German historical scholarship, producing chiefly very detailed studies of particulars, has generally shown a reluctance to synthecize,

usually choosing political themes as unifying principles for the surveys that do appear.57

If the picture I have painted so far has been one of incomplete and not

always useful syntheses and the thematic selection of a few essays out of

a vast body of historical scholarship, there is nevertheless reason to be

optimistic about the prospects of the growing familiarity and wider interest

in medieval German history in the immediate future. Increasing personal and professional contracts between American and German historians, and the integration of their research results with the broader (or, in the Anglo- French focus, narrower) idea of early European history are a sign of progress. Especially the reconstruction of Germany and Eastern Europe and the

reconsideration of German history that is taking place in the wake of the

events of 1989 should widen and deepen the interest in (and the research

opportunities for) the study of medieval German history. The conference

at Notre Dame in May 1993, and some of the results it has already achieved is one justification of such optimism.58

IV

One of the points made by Herwig Wolfram in his assessment of North

American medieval studies was the obvious?and important?-one that

Americans are not Europeans and usually (at least in theory) take a pan-

European view of medieval European history, permitting medieval history in the U.S. to deal not only with Western Europe, but with Byzantium, Islam, and the Slavic East as well. Although German medieval historians

56. Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages 800-1056, the first volume ofthe three- volume series Longman History of Germany. Reuter's first chapter, 6-17, offers a very useful perspective on many ofthe topics of this essay. A good example ofthe new Carolingian scholarship is Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians 751- 987 (London and New York, 1983). As McKitterick points out (p. 196, n. 12), her narrative tilt toward West Francia in this survey was deliberate, anticipating the Reuter volume. See also above, no, 36.

57. Freed, "Medieval German Social History": Freed has argued that the predominance of detailed Forschung in German historical scholarship has led to syntheses (Darstellung) having been produced either by non-historians or by non-German historians.

58. Another is the appearance of familiarity with German scholarship by non-specialists. For instance, John Mundy, Europe in the High Middle Ages, 1150-1309 (New York, 1973), 26 n.: "I am surprised to recognize my debt to a largely German east of schol? ars .. . In the study of medieval history there is no doubt that the German contribution to the relationship of ideas to institutions has been greater than that of any other people." Another instance is the case of the author of this essay.



EDWARD PETERS 69

often do much the same thing, frequently having their own primary?or at leaststrong secondary?fields: in English (Hannah Vollrath), French (Karl Ferdinand Werner), or medieval Italian history (Alfred Haverkamp, Hagen Keller, and others), medieval German history represents to most German

historians their own national history in a way that it cannot for non-

Germans.

For both groups, however, it is also a part of early European history, whether one subscribes to the theory of Alteuropa or not. As Johannes Fried asked in the review article cited above, what is "German"? When

did "German" history begin? How is it located in overall historical de?

velopment? How is "German" history to be extracted from?or located

in?its European context? Fried asked these questions primarily of Ger?

man scholarly readers, for whom, as John Freed pointed out in the re-

mark cited at the beginning of this essay, German history has not always been a politically neutral topic. The use of medieval history in debates

between proponents of Grossdeutschland and Kleindeutschland is only one

instance of the absence of neutrality. Another is the instrumentalization

of medieval history in the idea of the Sonderweg. A third is the debate

over medieval imperial Italian policy vis-a-vis the Drang nach Osten. But

with the appearance of the new series of historical syntheses discussed by

Johannes Fried in the review article cited above, and with Carlrichard

Bruhl's, massive Deutschland-Frankreich, the political urgency of much ear?

lier German historical scholarship on the Middle Ages appears to have

become far less characteristic of German politics and academic life than it

once was. A number of recent studies?notably Horst Fuhrmann's Ger?

many in the High Middle Ages?now locate medieval German history firmly in a broad European context.

But the process is not complete. Johannes Fried has also addressed the

degree to which some aspects of medieval German history have tended

to remain particularly German in their treatment by German historians?

political and constitutional history?while others?economic, social, and

intellectual history?had come to be treated by German and other historians

in general European terms. It is possible to expand Fried's list somewhat.

Early medieval history, including that of the Carolingians, legal history

(particularly medieval canon law), much urban history, and the history of

women and gender have all regularly acquired a European dimension.

But outside of Germany, a number of areas of historical research, even

research in political and constitutional history have had a different fate.

The view of political and constitutional history that dates from the

work of Kern, and then from that of Schramm, Kantorowicz, Tellenbach,

Erdmann, and others has helped to remove a number of key elements

from the traditionally confining and purely local context of individual




national histories and treat them in a comparative mode?rulership, for

example, and the rituals surrounding it.59 A scholarly organization was

instituted in 1985 that continues the comparative study of early European rulership: Maiestas. Rulership. Souverainete. Herrschertum. Thanks to this in?

fluence, U.S. and other non-German scholars in the fields of political and

constitutional history more regularly use sources from the history of art and liturgy. In this area, Barraclough's early interest in casting medieval

German history in a comparative constitutional mode may at last be tak?

ing place, although with elements of German scholarly influence some?

what more wide-ranging than those Barraclough used. Perhaps the German

influence here has been strongest outside Germany, but there is evidence that it is breaking traditional conventions in Germany as well.60

A second area in which the German influence has been particularly

prominent is the study of church history, religious movements, and pop? ular religion, chiefly deriving from the impact of Herbert Grundmann's

Reiigiose Bewegungen im Mittelalter, originally published in 1935.61 In addition,

Angloliterate historians also deal originally with other aspects of German church and religious history in both the institutional mode and in such fields as hagiography.62

German social history, too, has both inspired non-German scholars and

59. See J. M. Bak, ed., Comnations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchie Ritual (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990). Bak's volume contains an essay by Reinhard Elze, one of the most impressive successors to some of Schramm,s interest: "The Ordo for the Coronation of Roger II of Sicily: An Example of Dating from Internal Evidence," 165-78.

60. See, e.g., Johannes Fried, Otto III. und Boteslaw Chrobry. Das Widmungsbitd des Aachener Evangeliars, der "Akt von Gnesen" und das fruhe polnische und ungarische Konigtum (Stuttgart, 1989).

Another German contribution that should have a wide impact is that of Begriffsgeschicte, the history of concepts. See Melvin Richter, "Conceptual History (Begriffsgeschichte) and Political Theory," Political Theory 14 (1986): 604-37, and idem, "Begriffsgeschichte and the History of Ideas," Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 247-63; Reinhard Koselleck, "Begriffsgeschichte and Social History," trans. Keith Tribe, Economy and Society 11 (1982): 409-27.

61. Herbert Grundmann, Religiose Bewegungen im Mittelalter, 2nd edition (Hildesheim, 1961). Grundmann's classic work is soon to appear in an English translation by Steven Rowan from the Notre Dame University Press. See also John Van Engen, "The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem," American Historical Review 91 (1986): 519-52.

American examples of Grundmann's influence are Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972; reprint Notre Dame, 1992); John Freed, The Friars and German Society in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), and Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Learned and Popular Culture (Berkeley, 1976); idem, Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany (Philadelphia, 1979); idem, "The Specific Rationality of Medieval Magic," American Historical Review 99 (1994): 813-36.

62. See Bernhardt, above, n. 45, On the impact of the hagiographical work of Frantisek Graus and Friedrich Prinz, see Paul Fouracre, "Merovingian History and Merovingian Hagiography," Past & Present 127 (1990): 3-38.



EDWARD PETERS 71

taken a distinctive turn at their hands. Not only the history of the nobil?

ity in the work of Freed and Geary, but also that of the older German

category of Landesgeschichte has turned out somewhat differently in non-

German scholarly hands.63

Another traditional German field, the history of women, pioneered by Karl Biicher's Die Frauenfrage im Mittelalter of 1882, has been greatly ex?

tended and moved in a comparative direction by the work of both Ger?

man and U.S. historians during the past decade.64 American scholars have

also been particularly prominent in the study of the devotional lives and

mysticism of German women.65

Even John Freed's final point, that, historically, there has been a pro? found difference in the ways that German and non-German medieval

historians conceptualize basic constitutional features?such as the linking of freedom with service?may not prove as durable as it has in the past. The movement toward Begriffsgeschichte, for example, has succeeded in

clarifying much of the essential terminology in its historical context. The

shift from rigid and largely legal ideas of "feudalism" toward a wider

spectrum of "lordship" should lead more readily to an extended compar? ative history, supported by some of the developments in the use of an?

thropology and social history by historians.66 In short, Freed's explanation

63. See Richard C. Hoffmann, Land, Liberties, and Lordship in a Late Medieval Country? side: Agrarian Structures and Change in the Duchy of Wroclaw (Philadelphia, 1989); Benjamin Arnold, Count and Bishop in Medieval Germany: A Study of Regional Power, 1100-1350 (Philadelphia, 1991), and the Kaminsky-Melton translation of Otto Brunner, cited above. Some of these interests are reflected in the numbers of the journal Medieval Prosopography.

A recently translated example of Alltagsgeschichte is that of Hans-Werner Goetz's Life in the Middle Ages, cited above, n. 50.

German work in social history has been more regularly reviewed in American journals. See, for example, the review by Fredric Cheyette in Speculum 55 (1980): 107-9. An example of urban history is Paul Strait, Cologne in the Twelfth Century (Gainesville, 1974).

64. Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago, 1986); idem, with the collaboration of Suzanne Wemple and Denise Kaiser, "A Documented Presence: Medieval Women in Germanic Historiography," Women in Medieval History and Historiography, ed. Susan Mosher Stuard (Philadelphia, 1987), 101-31; 171-84, tells the historiographical story well. Since Howell published this essay a useful bibliography has appeared: Werner Affeldt, Cordula Nolte, Sabine Reiter, Ursula Vorwerk, eds., Frauen im Mittelalter. Eine ausgewahlte, kommentierte Bibliographie (Frankfurt, Bern, New York, Paris, 1990). On women rulers, most recently Kurt-Ulrich Jaschke, Notwendige Gefahrtinnen: Koniginnen der Salierzeit als Herscherinnen und Ehefrauen im romisch-deutschen Reich des 11. und beginnenden 12. Jahrhunderts (Saarbriicken and Scheidt, 1991). There is a recent review article: H. Rockelein, "Historische Frauenforschung. Ein Literaturbericht zur Geschichte des Mittelalters," Historische Zeitschrift 255 (1992): 377-409.

65. Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987); Anne L. Clark, Elisabeth of Schonau: A Twelfth-Century Visionary (Philadelphia, 1992); Frank Tobin, Meister Eckhart: Thought and Language (Philadelphia, 1986).

66. The classic challenge is Elizabeth A. R. Brown, "The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe," American Historical Review 79 (1974): 1063-88.




certainly describes accurately the period before the 1960s, but it need not

be considered permanently in force.

These considerations suggest that Johannes Fried's questions and obser?

vations have elicited slightly different responses in the work of non-Ger?

man historians, particularly those in the U.S., from the responses they have traditionally invoked in German scholarly readers. The recent schol?

arship surveyed in this article suggests the importance both of German

scholarly research since the First World War and the use made of it and

the contributions made to it by scholars outside German-speaking lands, in areas that we recognize as crucial to the study of early European history

generally. The circulation of German scholarship in the Angloliterate world

during the past two decades and the use made of it by Angloliterate (and now even Francoliterate) historians ought to enrich the historical study of the Middle Ages done on both sides of the Atlantic, in all fields. It

should mean, in short, less trouble with Henry. If it does not, it will not

be the fault of John Freed, Robert Benson, John Van Engen, Martha

Howell, Karl Morrison?or Horst Fuhrmann.

University of Pennsylvania



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