Law, Rulership, and Rhetoric: Selected Essays by Robert L. Benson (review)

Law, Rulership, and Rhetoric is a collection of unpublished writings left upon the sudden death of Robert L. Benson (1925–1996). Benson was a renowned historian of medieval canon law and the Holy Roman Empire, particularly under the Hohenstaufen dynasty. This collection includes articles in various stages of revision, as well as lectures and conference papers, selected and edited by Loren J. Weber, one of Benson’s last students, and collaborators Giles Constable and Richard H. Rouse. The editor and his collaborators are to be commended for the transparency with which they have addressed such issues as the uncertain dating and unfinished nature of some pieces and Benson’s incomplete or obscure notes. The ‘Editor’s Preface’ clearly explains why they have not reconstructed citations or updated the essays with newer scholarship to which Benson would not have had access.

Benson was a student of Ernst Kantorowicz, whose theorisation of the king’s two bodies profoundly shaped current understandings of how medieval rulership was conceived of and performed. Kantorowicz’s influence is clear in Benson’s work, which centred on examining the ‘elaborate network of concepts [used] to justify, express, and conceal the awful realities of power’ and the ‘ways in which medieval men conceived the highest governing officers: emperor, king, pope, archbishop, bishops’ (p. 46). Benson had an enduring interest in the ways in which power was theorised and bestowed in acts of ecclesiastical and imperial election.

Law, Rulership and Rhetoric comprises five sections, reflecting the main themes of Benson’s scholarship and his interdisciplinary approach to sources. These included decretals, capitularies, and chancery records as well as chronicles, religious texts, art, and poetry. Part I, ‘Thought and Culture’, considers the influence of classical Roman topoi in high medieval political and religious thought. Part II, ‘Art and Rulership’, explores images of imperial power in frescos, chalices, and manuscript illuminations. Part 3, ‘Medieval Rulership’, examines the rhetoric of kingship in early Germanic monarchies, while Part 4 focuses specifically on Frederick Barbarossa and his relations with the papacy. Part 5, ‘Medieval History in Modern Perspective’, includes three historiographical pieces defending Kantorowicz against accusations of Nazism and a rumination on ‘The Medievalist as Hero’ in contemporary popular culture. The essays reflect Benson’s characteristic wit and clarity of style, which rendered his dense and precise scholarship highly readable. To take one example: ‘Urbs et orbis’ (pp. 3–19) examines the significance of this classical Roman topos in twelfth- and thirteenth-century political thought. It begins with an anecdote about Benson’s wife purchasing an upscale shopping bag, inside of which is inscribed the legend ‘urbu et orbi’.

Scholars in Benson’s speciality areas will find much of value here. Of note are several lectures and unrevised articles from the 1980s that were probably intended for inclusion in Benson’s book on Frederick Barbarossa, left unfinished at his death. Complementing these is an important early piece, ‘Imperator oeconomus Ecclesiae: Notes on a Decretistic Theory of the Imperial Office’. This appeared in an unpublished 1955 festschrift but until now it was only accessible in typescript in the archives of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica.

More generally, the volume has plenty to offer political and legal historians and those interested in broader questions about medieval political culture and the semiotics of power. Finally, Benson’s witty, erudite, and sometimes poignant reflections on being a medieval historian in the modern world make this book an engaging read for any medievalist.