Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria
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.
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List of Abbreviations
Authors Preface to the Fourth Revised Edition 1959
Feud State and the Law Contemporary judgments of the feud
The Controversy over the German Medieval State The dis
Constitutional History as the History of Constitutional Law The
Our Task The demand for a conceptual vocabulary in accord
The Nature of the Land Länder and lordships The Land as the
House Household and Lordship