Law, Rulership, and Rhetoric: Selected Essays of Robert L. Benson ed. by Loren J. Weber (review)

In an interview published in this journal, Patrick Geary summed up the career of the late Robert Benson as follows: “[He] was a brilliant scholar but published almost nothing. He had difficulty getting things out—a perfectionist who worked and reworked but didn’t finish and didn’t publish—but every presentation he gave was a jewel, polished, brilliant, beautifully delivered, insightful; but very little of it ever entered the print world” (Courtney M. Booker, “Interview with Patrick J. Geary,” Comitatus 29 [1998] 3–4). Arriving nearly two decades after Benson’s passing in 1996, Law, Rulership, and Rhetoric both confirms Geary’s high estimation of Benson’s (unpublished) papers and serves as a very welcome corrective to the heretofore limited accessibility of these “jewels.” The editors of this volume, Loren J. Weber, Giles Constable, and Richard H. Rouse, acknowledge from the outset that the included essays vary quite significantly in terms of their apparent completedness, and they note that in some cases it was quite difficult to piece together drafts with relatively skeletal notes—not least because rough translations of computer files from DOS to Macintosh had resulted in “disastrous consequences for both content and formatting” and the real possibility that “some or even many of [Benson’s] works were lost completely in the process of translation” (xi–xii). The combined efforts resulting in this collection were discernibly labors of love for all involved, a tribute to a multi-faceted historian whose work too infrequently made it to print.

As its title suggests, the essays compiled in Law, Rulership, and Rhetoric cover the topics that most interested Benson, best-known for his classic 1968 monograph The Bishop-Elect: A Study in Medieval Ecclesiastical Office. Benson dedicated that book to his teacher, the German medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz (who had died five years prior to its publication), and the influence of Kantorowicz specifically, and of the meticulous scholars of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (where Benson, as a young American in Munich on a Fulbright scholarship, worked in the mid-1950s) generally, are apparent across the new volume. Horst Fuhrmann notes in his preface that Benson had a “special connection to German historical scholarship” (vii), while Geary described Benson as the “one person in America who really was completely connected to that tradition of canon law and imperial history within a German tradition of scholarship” (4). This sense of “connection” is most explicit in a paper titled “Norman Cantor and the ‘Nazi Twins’: on Inventing the Middle Ages.” This piece is, at once, a polemic directed against Cantor’s controversial book and its characterization of Benson’s mentor (“a massive libel…one who does such things is no historian at all,” fumes Benson, 332) and an affectionate portrait of the Kantorowicz that Benson knew well and admired greatly. Benson recounts his memories of the inspired, yet (contrary to Cantor’s over-heated, queasily homophobic description) “matter-of-fact and businesslike,” seminars held by Kantorowicz at his Berkeley home, and firmly refutes Cantor’s indictment of Kantorowicz as ideologically sympathetic to Nazism. Benson’s essay is both frank and insistently fair-minded; he limits his remarks mainly to Kantorowicz, noting of Cantor’s other purported “Nazi twin,” Percy Ernst Schramm, that “he seemed a perfect example of a Großordinarius, a famous German professor of the old stamp, with a lordly presence and little inclination to waste time talking to mere students” (333), a figure Benson contrasts with the dedicated teacher Kantorowicz. In another paper, on “The ‘Mythic’ in Studies of Frederick II Hohenstaufen,” Benson reflects on the historiography of the much-studied emperor, concluding that “the twentieth century now has only seven years to run, and in that short time it is unlikely that anyone will successfully challenge the position won by [Kantorowicz’s] work [Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite] (347).” More generally, Kantorowicz’s idées fixes...