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227
traditional view, that "it was territorial lordship and supremacy that con?
stituted a territorium" (p. 139) Brunner says that the sources do not dis-
tinguish between territorial supremacy and the territory itself, calling both
"Land." The unity of a Land did not derive from its lord or prince alone,
for we know of lands without lords (e.g., in Switzerland), but in essence
a Land was a community of law. In the course of the Middle Ages,
Brunner writes, "the law of an association of persons who cultivated the
land necessarily became the law of the Land, tribal and ethnic law be?
came territorial law; 'people' and 'land' were now interchangeable" (p. 158).
The "people" were, of course, immediately "an association of 'landed'
lords who could not belong to this association unless they possessed land
cultivated by them or others" (p. 158), and although Brunner admits the
extension of membership to non-nobles?hence the inclusion of clergy,
burghers, and even peasants in territorial estates?his own analysis is re-
stricted to the associations of landholding nobles who predominated in
the Austro-Bavarian region.4
The possession of lordship constituted the Land as a community of law
and extended up and down through the social order. Lordship began
with the "house" (i.e., household), over which the householder was sole
lord (out to the roof's drip line), as was the seigneur over his peasants,
and the prince over both the peasants of his domain and the burghers,
clergy, and Jews who stood under his advocacy. All structural relation?
ships depended on an exchange of protection and loyalty, which is the
foundation of Brunner's conception of an isomorphic medieval order
undisturbed by any distinctions between "private" and "public," "economy"
and "politics," or "individual" and "state." The core of this isomorphism
is the house or household, the nucleus of all forms of lordship and the
architectonic zone of friendship and peace.
At the top of the hierarchy is the "LanJ-community," which originally
embodied the unity of prince and people under the law of the Land. In
this Land and its lordship originated all later forms of the state, and "it
was of the essence of lordship based on protection and safeguard, holding
dominion in the Land, and conceiving of its lordship over people in terms
of advocacy, or guardianship, that it in fact be exercised and implemented,
against opposition threatening the peace of the Land from within and
without" (p. 318). In time, of course, the princes' many advantages?
military leadership, jurisdictional rights, and advocacy over the towns, the
clergy, and the Jews?helped the prince to become lord of the Land, while
at the same time the L<w</-community grew from an undifferentiated asso?
ciation of armed landholders into a complex group of parliamentary estates.
4. Presumably,had Brunner extended his study to include the Swabian-Alemannicre?
gion of the southwest, a very much more complex picture would have resulted.
This is the core of Brunner's account of how the first states, in the mod?
ern sense of the term, began to develop out of the late medieval Ldnder.
Brunner concludes that medieval society cannot be studied in terms of
modern concepts, for in the Middle Ages there was no peaceful civil
society and no state. Rather, the entire society was ordered by the cat?
egories of household and lordship and their structures of loyalty and homage,
protection and safeguard, and counsel and aid, which were common to
the seigneury, the town, and the territory. These terms, at once legal
concepts and moral and religious values, may seem simple, but reproduce
the language of the sources.
This is what Brunner says. What he does not say is almost as interest?
ing. First, he virtually ignores the concept of "feudalism" and relegates
vassalage to the status of one among many isomorphic relationships based
on protection and loyalty.5 Just as he denies (against Georg von Below)
that medieval governance derived from Carolingian comital offices, he
argues (against Heinrich Mitteis) that it grew out of feudal relationships.
For Brunner not vassalage but the Land is the fundamental unit of medi?
eval political history.
A second silence concerns the role of Christianity and the church in
shaping medieval conceptions of right, law, and representation. Brunner
will not allow any such influence, and when he must comment on ori?
gins?which, as a structuralist, he does reluctantly?he locates the origins
of the medieval constitution vaguely in Germanic practices of the tribal
and posttribal eras.
A third and more intriguing silence concerns the applicability of the
Brunnerian scheme to other German-speaking regions or even to other
European countries.According to his translators, Brunner's post-1945
revisions, whichremoved much of the pan-German language of the early
editions, also toned down to a whisper his original claim for the general
validity of his reconstruction of the language of political action in late
medieval Austro-Bavarian lands.
Reading Brunner also raises a question about the implication of Land
and Lordship for our view of postmedieval German history. After 1945,
Brunner developed his conception of a unified premodern "Old Europe"
reaching from the High Middle Ages to the French Revolution.6 This is
an unusual stance for a medievalist, and it may be partly explained by a
fact, rarely noted in the literature on Brunner, that he began not in medieval
5. It is worth to point out that this is a "socialization" of vassalage even more radical
than that advocated by Marc Bloch.
6. The issues are dealt with in a broadly European context in "Introduction: Renais-
sance and Reformation, Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era," in Handbookof European
History, 1400-1600. Late MiddleAges, Renaissance,Reformation,ed. Thomas A. Brady, Jr.,
Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1994-95), l:xiii-xiv.
but in early modern history. It is worth noting, too, that his sense of a
deep break in European history in the eighteenth century corresponds to
a similar sensibility in the writings of other figures, such as Michel Foucault
and most recent theorists of European economic development, both Marxist
and institutionalist. This similarity is a sign not of Brunner's influence but of
the more general critique of modernism that has been developing since 1918.
In Germany, however, Brunner's legacy is directly linked to the crea-
tion since 1960 of a new historical period, "the early modern era," actu?
ally much more a continuation of medieval history than an early stage of
modernity. Historians of the centuries between 1300 and 1800 tend to
emphasize continuity with the (late) Middle Ages in their studies of the
political functions of the Holy Roman Empire, the formation and cul?
tural functions of the confessions, and the vitality of "home towns" and
other forms of local association.7 More recently, interest in typically "early
modern" subjects, such as religion, has been moving forward into studies
on the nineteenth century.8 At the same time, however, the main body
of modern Germanists?or so is my impression?has been rushing toward
the twenty-first century more swiftly than the "later early modernists"
can move in behind them to reclaim German history for their own. Until
when? The late Thomas Nipperdey tried to draw a line at a Brunnerian
place in the opening sentence of his work on German history from 1800
to 1866: "In the beginning was Napoleon."9 If current trends continue,
there is virtually no chance that the line between early modern and mod?
ern German history will stabilize at that point.10
Although it does not bear directly on the utility of this translation, the
reason why Brunner is of considerable interest to students of twentieth-
century intellectual and political history requires some comment. Like many
other German and Austrian professors of history, Otto Brunner was a National
7. See Thomas A. Brady, Jr., '"Special Path'? Peculiaritiesof German Histories in the
Early Modern Era," in GermaniaIllustrata:Essays on Early ModernGermanyPresentedto
GeraldStrauss,edited by Susan Karant-Nunn and Andrew Fix, Sixteenth Century Studies
and Essays, vol. 18 (Kirksville, Mo., 1992), 197-216.
8. See MargaretLaviniaAnderson, "The Limits of Secularization:On the Problem of the
Catholic Revival in Nineteenth-CenturyGermany,"The Historical Journal38 (1995): 647-70.
9. Thomas Nipperdey, DeutscheGeschichte 1800-1860. BurgerweltundstarkerStaat(Munich,
1983), 11.
10. It could be argued that the chief works of Mack Walker and David Sabean, cited
below, promote this "ultra-Brunnerian"tendency by placing the definitive end of late
medieval tendencies in the Bismarckianera. Mack Walker, GermanHome Towns:Commu?
nity, State, and GeneralEstate, 1648-1871 (Ithaca, 1971); David W. Sabean, Property,Pro?
duction,and Familyin Neckarhausen (Cambridge, 1991). The relationshipof neither book to
Brunner's chief work is direct, and Sabean's conception of rural history, it seems to me,
owes far more to Karl Siegfried Bader than it does to Brunner. Based, admittedly, on far
better sources, Sabean carriesthe analysisof lordship into the household and confronts its
fundamentalissues?gender and generations?as Brunner never did.
11. For example, Carl Schmitt, to which the translated version makes four references,
three positive (pp. 14, 95?96) and one negative (p. 31).
12. Hartmut Lehmann and James Van Horn Melton, eds., Paths of Continuity: Central
EuropeanHistoriographyfrom the 1930s to the 1950s (Cambridgeand Washington, D.C., 1994),
which contains a valuable study of Brunner by Melton.