Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association

Whose Land? Whose Lordship? The New Translation of Otto Brunner

Land and Lordship. Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria by Otto Brunner; Howard
Kaminsky; James Van Horn Melton
Review by: Thomas A. Brady, Jr.
Central European History, Vol. 29, No. 2 (1996), pp. 227-233
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Conference Group for Central European History of
the American Historical Association
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 REVIEW ARTICLE

Whose Land? Whose Lordship?

The New Translation of Otto Brunner

Thomas A. Brady, Jr.

Land and Lordship. Structures of Govemance in Medieval Austria.

By Otto Brunner. Translated by Howard Kaminsky and James
Van Horn Melton. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press. 1992. Pp. lxiv 4- 425. $46.95. ISBN 0-8122-8183-7.

The appearance of an important book in an excellent English translation

is truly a reason to celebrate. The medievalist Howard Kaminsky and the
early modernist James Van Horn Melton mounted a happy collaboration
to produce this handsome, accurate version in prose that is both readable
and terminologically digestible by students of late medieval and early modern
Central Europe. They preface the long text with a 64-page introduction,
in which they discuss the author, his ideas, and his political record and
the text, its history, and its influence.
Otto Brunner (1898-1982) was an Austrian historian of significant stature
when he published Land und Herrschaft in 1939. He had begun as what we
would now call an early modernist, and all his work in late medieval
history bears the marks of having approached the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries from the modern rather than from the medieval direction. He
acquired his professorship at Vienna in 1941 and a chair at Hamburg in
1954, where he taught until retirement in 1967. He was an editor of the
influential Vierteljahrschriftfiir Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichteand, with Werner
Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, a founder and editor of the influential
encyclopedia, Geschichtliche Grundbegrife, 3l monument to the postwar approach
to the history of ideas called "conceptual history" (Begrifsgeschichte).An obituary
referred to him as "the reformer of historical writing on the Middle Ages
in Germany,"1 and today there is little dissent from Robert Jiitte's judg-
ment that "Otto Brunner has doubtless shaped our picture of the Middle
Ages more than any other medievalist has." The principle instrument of
this influence was Land und Herrschaft, first published in 1939, which Kaminsky
and Melton have translated from the fourth (last revised) edition of 1959.

AllgemeineZeitung, 16 June 1982.

1. Frankfurter

227

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228 WHOSE LAND? WHOSE LORDSHIP?

Brunner achieved "a radical reevaluation of medieval constitutional forms

and liberated the language of medieval constitutional history from the
juristic conceptual schemes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."2
He attacked the practice of writing medieval constitutional history solely
based on its relevance to the evolution of the modern (European) state
and its defining characteristics of full external and internal sovereignty,
explicitly defined boundaries, and a clear distinction between the realms
of public and private law that defined the respective fields of action of
the state and the citizen. Brunner was by no means the first medievalist
to insist that medieval history must be written from medieval documents
and not from modern experience, for this had been the starting point of
Karl Lamprecht's struggle to revolutionize German historical scholarship,
and it bears a deep kinship with the approach to history voiced and practiced
by the founders of the Annales in France. It was Marc Bloch, after all,
who disrupted the antiseptic legalism of the old, purely institutional con?
cept of feudalism; it was Lucien Febvre who taught that for historians the
unforgivable sin is anachronism.
Timing is one reason for Brunner's extraordinary success. Like Bloch,
he wrote for a generation to whom the war of 1914-18 had already
taught the mortality of the modern state. But Brunner also wrote under a
German regime, National Socialism, which had undermined respect for
scholarly conventions in many disciplines and afforded the possibility of
attention to new ideas, so long as their proposers stood at the very least
under the common umbrella of pan-Germanism.
Brunner was nothing if not a scholarly pugilist, and Land and Lordship
opens with a direct challenge to what he regarded as an anachronistic
view of medieval politics: "We shall have to ask just what politics could
mean in this or that context of the past, under what conditions political
action was possible at all, and who were the ones who carried on such
action" (p. 3). The context of action, political action, is Brunner's central
theme, and he demands that "studies concerned with medieval politics
must somehow account for the fact that political action, even warfare,
existed not only between medieval 'states' but also within them" (p. 3-4).
This is why he begins with the institution of the feud, which he portrays
as violent but licit action by persons who "aimed at retribution and vengeance
in order to restore the broken order of Right" (p. 28). There was no
distinction between war and feud until much later, and during the Middle
Ages "all wars within Christendom must be understood as feuds, in a
legal sense" (p. 35). In Brunner's view, the feud was a duty and a privi-
2. Robert Jiitte, "Zwischen Standestaatund Austrofaschismus.Der Beitrag Otto Brunners
zur Geschichtsschreibung,"Jahrbuchdes Institutsfiir DeutscheGeschichte13 (1984): 237-62,
here at p. 237.

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 THOMAS A. BRADY, ]R. 229

lege grounded not in any specific law?positive, natural, or divine?but

in an undefined but legitimating sense of "right" (Recht).
Who could conduct a legitimate feud? Based on the records of his
chosen area, roughly the lands of Austro-Bavarian speech, Brunner argues
that although everyone retained the more primitive right to blood ven-
geance, only "mounted knights," that is, armed landholders, could legiti-
mately pursue feud on other grounds. Such feuds were waged across the
boundaries between jurisdictions, by groups of vassals and parliamentary
estates against their own lords, and occasionally even by commoners. Such
struggles, he writes, "must have been motivated by a consciousness of
Right, one hardly comprehensible in the modern age," which considered
"the struggle for Right and hence honor a moral duty," so that "there
could be no peace if Right was violated" and therefore "the challenger
was willing to break the peace, become an enemy of the community of
law (Rechtsgenossenschaft), and indeed 'secede' from it." "Could these men
have been driven to feud," he asks dramatically, "by anything other than
a burning sense of Right, however morbidly exaggerated it may have
been?" (p. 62).
Brunner begins with feud because "any political history of the MA that
ignores the feud will fail to grasp the inner structure or 'constitution' of
the world in which the feud was an essential element. . . . The modern
state . . . does not recognize the legitimacy of feuds and rebellions. It was
self-help that distinguished the medieval polity from the modern state; it
was the advent of absolutism and the Enlightenment that made the feud
seem to be nothing but 'the law of the fist.' . . . [BJehind this 'law of the
fist' was one of the strongest moral impulses of all social life, the indi-
vidual's passionate sense of Right" (p. 92). From the forward position thus
established, Brunner lays waste to the prevailing historiography and the
concepts employed by the historians of law. The historian of the Middle
Ages must recognize, he writes, "that even though elements essential to
the modern state were absent in medieval political formations, the latter
were not merely "private" or "social" (p. 137). They were structured,
that is, "constituted," but an approach to them must begin with the con?
cept not of "the state" but of "lordship" (Herrschaft), which Brunner de-
fines in a Weberian sense as "the ability to exact obedience to a particular
command," and it existed wherever there was the power "to bid and
forbid, to compel and command" (p. 96). From this starting point, Brunner
hopes to unify medieval history into "a 'structural history' [Strukturgeschichte]
directed toward a genuine understanding of political action" (p. 138).
After lordship, reversing the title's order, comes the Land.3 Against the
3. The translatorscapitalize this term and put it in italics, a good device for distinguish-
ing the peculiar meaning Brunner gives it.

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230 WHOSE LAND? WHOSE LORDSHIP?

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.

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 THOMAS A. BRADY, ]R. 231

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.

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232 WHOSE LAND? WHOSE LORDSHIP?

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.

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 THOMAS A. BRADY, ]R. 233

Socialist. Unlike most others, however, he largely escaped the professional

consequences of party membership, for, having lost his chair at Vienna in
1945, he gained a new one at Hamburg in 1954. There were other ex-Nazi
historians?one thinks of Joseph Lortz and Giinther Franz?whose histori?
cal works commanded considerable influence after 1945, but who remained
professionally marginalized. Brunner, by contrast, gained a much wider
audience as a German historian after the war than he had possessed as an
Austrian historian before it, and he slipped smoothly from his pan-Germanist
persona into the role of a defender of the West against Communism.
Brunner's translators deal at length with his political trajectory and its
tracks in the original text and the various revisions of Land and Lordship.
They argue with force and some surprise that Brunner's postwar purge of
the text did not weaken his argument about medieval history. Further
comparison of the versions among themselves and with his other writings
will doubtless shed light on Brunner's intellectual evolution and his in-
debtedness to various writers of the interwar era,11 which are still murky
subjects, though better understood is how he became a central figure in
the genealogy of the structuralist social history that emerged in the 1950s
as a legacy of the 1930s.12
Prior to this translation, Brunner's reputation in North America has
been shadowy to all but specialists in medieval and early modern Ger?
many. Better known is his concept of "the whole house" (das ganze Haus),
which comes from later and, arguably, lesser work. The lack of a transla?
tion of his major work was an important deficit, for it was difficult to
follow developments in medieval and early modern Germany during the
past thirty years without some notion of Brunner's argument.
This deficit is now made good. In Land and Lordship Howard Kaminsky
and James Van Horn Melton have produced a version which is both
brilliantly faithful to Brunner's German and highly readable, an achieve?
ment for which they deserve the highest possible praise. The text is sup-
ported by an extremely helpful introduction, a glossary, a full bibliography,
and an excellent index, all of which should enhance its suitability for
classroom use and for the general reader. The only thing remaining to
wish for is a paperback edition from the University of Pennsylvania Press,
the publisher of this handsomely designed and produced volume.

University of California, Berkeley

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.

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