Sovereign subjects, feudal law, and the writing of history

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 223-261

  Davis, Kathleen ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67650085838     PISSN: 10829636     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10829636-2005-001     Document Type: Review

References (82)

1. Donald R. Kelley, "De Origine Feudorum: The Beginnings of an Historical Problem," Speculum 39 (1964): 228
2. citing Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 1-2
3. See R. J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688-1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
4. In France, féodalité was coined in the late eighteenth century. See Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), vol. 1
5. J. Q. C. Mackrell, The Attack on "Feudalism" in Eighteenth-Century France (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973)
6. For discussion of the different uses of the term imperium from the classical through the early modern periods, see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500-c.1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 14-19 (which also discusses the implications of these uses in a colonial context)
7. Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. 1
8. Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). I will discuss the issue of imperium more fully below
9. Feudalism, of course, has long moderated debates over the history and development of modes of power, whether these battles rage among medieval historians interested in military, dynastic, and state formations, or among Marxists disputing the history of modes of production. The scholarship is far too vast to document, but as samples of the former one could consider the exchange in Past and Present 142 (1994): 6-42; 152 (1996): 196-223; and 155 (1997): 177-95
10. Bloch, Feudal Society, xvii-xviii
11. and Mackrell, The Attack on "Feudalism," 1-16
12. Kelley, "De Origine Feudorum," 228
13. See also J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, (1957; reissued with a retrospective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1-29
14. and Donald Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970)
15. For an excellent discussion of the Libri feudorum's popularity, the thirteenth-century commentaries, and their use in legal practice, see Magnus Ryan, "Ius Commune Feudorum in the Thirteenth Century," in Colendo iustitiam et iura condendo, ed. Andrea Romano (Roma: Edizioni De Luca, 1997), 51-65
16. Kenneth Pennington, "Law, Feudal" and "Libri Feudorum" in The Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Supplement I, ed. William Chester Jordan (New York: Scribner, 2004)
17. Pennington, "Libri Feudorum," 324, 325
18. Pennington, "Libri Feudorum," 325
19. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, 5-10 and 181-257
20. and Ryan, "Ius Commune Feudorum"). It would reward literary study to focus on this text, which deals with inheritance laws (including the problem of women's ability to inherit a fief), the relations of fidelity between lord and vassal, and offenses deserving forfeiture of a fief (for example, desertion of one's lord in battle, revealing his secrets, seducing or attacking his wife or daughter)
21. Ryan, "Ius Commune Feudorum," 63, 57-59
22. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals. See her introduction, 4-5, which briefly discusses the sixteenth-century historiography
23. David Lloyd, Ireland after History (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1999), 37
24. Cited in Ryan, "Ius Commune Feudorum," 63. Ryan provides a fascinating account of the legal flexibility of the term fief in the thirteenth century, which he reads through the implicit contradiction of a rubric in the Libri feudorum: "De feudo non habente propriam naturam feudi."
25. For his career, see Donald Kelley, François Hotman: A Revolutionary's Ordeal (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973)
26. On the desire to purge nonclassical elements from the Roman legal corpus, see Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, 19-50
27. Pocock, Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, 8-11
28. Ralph E. Giesey, "When and Why Hotman Wrote the Francogallia," Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 219 (1967): 581-611
29. Julian Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963)
30. See also Donald R. Kelley, "Law," in the Cambridge History of Political Thought: 1450-1700, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 66-94
31. See also Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985)
32. Hotman, De Feudis, 1-2
33. Giesey, ed., Francogallia,32
34. David Baird Smith, "François Hotman," Scottish Historical Review 13 (1916): 328-65
35. and Kelley, François Hotman
36. Tribonian's efforts were part of an earlier attempt at classical revival. When Justinian became emperor (of the Eastern Empire) in 527, he initiated a program to restore the ancient glory of the Roman Empire, in part through revival of classical Roman law. His Digest (or Pandects) is an anthology of extracts arranged in fifty books. See P. G. Stein, "Roman Law," The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350-c.1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 42-47
37. Giesey, "When and Why Hotman Wrote the Francogallia," 608
38. François Hotman, Antitribonian (Paris, 1603)
39. David Wallace, "Carving up Time and the World: Medieval-Renaissance Turf Wars; Historiography and Personal History," Center for Twentieth-Century Studies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, working paper no. 11 (1990-91)
40. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 430-33; and see esp. 20 and his afterword, 315 -34
41. See Pagden, Lords of All the World, for discussion of the deployment of this phrase in colonial logic
42. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, 53-85
43. David O. McNeil, Guillaume Budé and Humanism in the Reign of Francis I (Genève: Droz, 1975)
44. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, 63, 60
45. Guillaume Budé, Annotationes priores et posteriors ... in pandectas (Paris, 1556), fol. 192v
46. For a critique of the "triumvirate" conception and its historical distortions, as well as of the German "reception" of Roman law, see Rowan, Ulrich Zasius, 206-13 and 6-13 respectively
47. Ulrich Zasius, Usus feudorum epitome (Lyon, 1550), in Opera omnia, ed. Johan Ulrich Zasius and Joachim Münsinger von Frundeck, 7 vols. (Aalen, Germany: Scientia Verlag, 1964-66), vol. 4, col. 243; hereafter cited by volume and column numbers
48. Charles Du Moulin, Commentarii in Parisienses ... consuetudines (Cologne, 1613), 7
49. Du Moulin, Comentarii, 3
50. Kelley, François Hotman. Hotman follows Du Moulin in forwarding his Germanist thesis for the origin of fiefs in his De Feudis
51. Du Moulin, Commentarii, 26
52. See Gilmore, Argument from Roman Law in Political Thought, 1200-1600 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941)
53. Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2:129-30 for Zasius, and 261-64 for Du Moulin
54. Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought
55. Howell A. Lloyd, "Constitutionalism," in the Cambridge History of Political Thought, ed. Burns, 254-97
56. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 15
57. Rowan, Ulrich Zasius, 86-87, 100-101
58. Gilmore, Argument from Roman Law, 57-61. Both Rowan and Skinner find that Zasius bases his argument on the restriction of the emperor's power and the location of the merum imperium upon his theory of the contractual relation of the fief
59. See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)
60. I take these examples from Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 263-64. They are typical, however, of the reception of Du Moulin and the feudists' work generally
61. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1974), 24
62. For a subtle, classic discussion of Petrarch and his contemporaries in this regard, see Theodore E. Mommsen, "Petrarch's Conception of the 'Dark Ages,'" Speculum 17 (1942): 226-42
63. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past, 12
64. Fred C. Robinson, "Medieval, the Middle Ages," Speculum 59 (1984): 745-56. Discussions of the advent and constitution of "modernity" are of course legion. I am particularly interested in those that attend to the modern as a sense of historical consciousness, or historical time. These are the most promising in terms of potential engagement with medievalists, in that they refuse a simple chronological or content-based concept of periods
65. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982)
66. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories
67. Du Moulin, Comentarii, 60. See Lloyd's discussion in " Constitutionalism" of Du Moulin's view that the king was an administrator, not proprietor, of jurisdictions
68. See Susan Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti," Critical Inquiry 26 (2002): 821-65. I discuss this essay further below
69. See Peter Osborne, Politics of Time, 70-81
70. Osborne, Politics of Time, 72
71. For a good discussion of Hegel's position in the history of the concept of feudalism, see Brunner, "Feudalism: The History of a Concept."
72. Cole, "What Hegel's Master/Slave Dialectic Really Means."
73. Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti," 850
74. Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République, ed. Christiane Fremont, Marie-Dominique Couzinet, and Henri Rochais, 6 vols. (Paris: Fayard, 1986)
75. trans. Richard Knolles, The Six Bookes of a Common-weale (London, 1606)
76. ed. Kenneth D. McRae, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale: A Facsimile Reprint (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 99 and 106
77. Six Bookes of a Commonweale, 114
78. Six livres de la République, 1:229: "le droit des fiefs, usitez par toute l'Europe et l'Asie, et plus encor en Turquie qu'en lieu du monde."
79. Hotman, Francogallia, 297
80. Henry Heller, "Bodin on Slavery and Primitive Accumulation," Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994): 53-65, argues that for most of Bodin's contemporary Frenchmen, the Turks were a negative symbol of tyranny and oppression, an orientalist counterexample of a strong monarchy
81. Ernst Renan, "What Is a Nation?" trans. Martin Thorn, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 8-22. This essay was originally a lecture delivered as "Qu'es-ce qu'une nation?" at the Sorbonne, March 11, 1882
82. See the discussion of Bodin and subsequent theorists of sovereignty in Blandine Kriegel, "The Rule of the State and Natural Law," Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty: Moral Right and State Authority in Early Modern Political Thought, ed. Ian Hunter and David Saunders (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 13-26