In this Book

  • Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria
  • Book
  • Otto Brunner. Translated and with an introduction by Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton
  • 2015
  • Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
summary

Otto Brunner contends that prevailing notions of medieval social and constitutional history had been shaped by the nineteenth-century nation state and its "liberal" order. Whereas a sharp distinction between the public and the private might be appropriate to descriptions of contemporary society, such a dichotomy could not be projected back onto the Middle Ages. Focusing particularly on forms of lordship in late medieval Austria, Brunner found neither a "state" in the modern sense nor any distinction between the public and private spheres.

Behind the apparent disorder of late medieval political life, however, Brunner discovered a coherent legal and constitutional order rooted in the the rights and obligations of noble lordship. In carefully reconstructing this order, Brunner's study weaves together social, legal, constitutional, and intellectual history.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Series page, Copyright
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. v-x
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  1. List of Abbreviations
  2. pp. xi-xii
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  1. Translators' Introduction
  2. pp. xiii-lxii
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  1. Author's Preface to the Fourth, Revised Edition (1959)
  2. pp. lxiii-lxiv
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  1. Chapter I. Peace and Feud
  2. pp. 1-94
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  1. Chapter II. State, Law, and Constitution
  2. pp. 95-138
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  1. Chapter III. The Land and Its Law
  2. pp. 139-199
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  1. Chapter IV. House, Household, and Lordship
  2. pp. 200-293
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  1. Chapter V. Lordship over the Land, The Land-Community
  2. pp. 294-364
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  1. Glossary
  2. pp. 365-368
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  1. Bibliography
  2. pp. 369-412
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 413-425
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