Response to August

I haven't read Maitland. I haven't even begun to find him. I've found authors in the law library who seem to echo the points for which E.K. cites Maitland, but tracking down that author will come later for me.

With regards to your discussion with "Anonymous" - I doubt you were speaking to TQM. Two bases for the assumption. (1) Too much identification with abstractionism; (2) stylistic or linguistic discrepancy... doesn't "sound like him." I could be mistaken, but I suspect that's someone else.

The Aachen frontispiece... I suspect you're wrong. While it's true that such a book would only be available to those with an "expertise" in writing, I suspect that in that age (much as our own) such experts had a "duty" to translate their understandings to the laity. We don't have an empirical hook on which to hang such suspicions. But my comparison to a contemporary power point show wasn't accidental. I believe such images were meant as explanatory tools - not only to help the literate student, but to give him a capacity to evangelize an untutored audience. A parallel that leaps to minds is the architecture of a Gothic cathedral, in which many details of the era's cosmology were inscribed upon the very walls. The specialized understanding of the literate cleric charged its recipient with a public duty to explain the concepts to which he'd been made privy.

Alas, I don't have the tools to adequately argue the point. But I strongly suspsect that the emphasis on illustration in medieval manuscripts serves as much to bridge the gap between the illiterate and the literate... much as a contemporary children's book uses big pictures to impress the meaning of the words upon the child, while the letters of the text are only accessible to the adult.

All that said, I think your shift towards the implicit communication of imagery is well-grounded. I'm going to bracket that invitation, not because it's uninteresting (quite the contrary), but because it's too big for me at present.

I dimly recall the book by Aries... I actually took a course on the development of childhood in American culture, and it was a seminal work.

When you get to my question, you make a conflation I tried hard to avoid - the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The Renaissance may be the Middle Ages... but it certainly leads to the Enlightenment, which is not. Two book recommendations that come to mind are Evil in Modern Thought by Susan Neimann, which I read just last year and New Worlds, Ancient Texts (which I read almost a decade ago). At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if you're already intimately acquainted with one or both. But, just in case...

Nevertheless, your response relies upon the continuity of tradition (certainly a Renaissance value)... yet, the Enlightenment seems to have sparked an emphasis on originality of thought. One of Grafton's points ("New Worlds, Ancient Texts") is that we've come so far in our prioritization of the novel, that we've lost sight of how medieval people saw themselves situated within time. Why did Christopher Columbus have a copy of The Travels of Mandeville with him as he sought his route to China? Because he was retracing a historical voyage, not blazing a new trail towards a new world. In today's world, we find Mandeville a fabulist and Columbus a pioneer. But in 1492, Mandeville was a travelogue and Columbus was nearly an historian.

When I suggest we might need to "go medieval" on our own asses (or rather, our intellects), I mean to suggest that the post-Enlightenment development of the Western mind may have elevated what were once believed the means towards understanding into the ends of understanding. This blends into an epistemological and metaphysical critique of my own existence, that I alas cannot yet comprehensibly defend. I've met a surprising number of people my age, who seem to be haunted by an ineluctable "something" - a philosophical belief they can't yet think into expression. We seem able to agree that they're possibly the "birthing pangs" of a post post-modern mind - the possibility of building anwe, through the tools of deconstruction. I submit that this description is either a product of some species of derangement or it is the pre-verbal germ of a developing idea. I'm eager to be drawn out if such a line of discussion interests you. If it seems deranged, it'd be kind of you to say so.

Your General Points.

Rulership.

I think he has provided us a view of the ranges... however, on a higher level of generality than you're looking for, and across a broader swathe of text. The juristic King, the ecclesiastical King, the natural King, the accidental King, the messianic King... it's all there.

But - the Anglo-Saxon deficiency does seem writ large across the text. I took a wonderful course under Philippe Buc at Stanford (how I first encountered Kantorowicz, incidentally) about the spread of Christianity through Pagan Europe. The course split its analysis between two major periods of conversion - the Roman Empire to Christianity in, I believe, the 4th century A.D., and the conversion of Scandinavian culture in the 9th and 10th centuries A.D. If you want a fascinating insight into the legal structure of the Scandinavian world, I highly recommend Njal's Saga - a fascinating tale of Icelandic political history. I can't seem to find it on my shelf... though I'm fairly sure it's the one I mean.

It seems clear that E.K is neglecting the indigenous side of this discourse. He's laying a tremendous foundation for the canonical and ecclesiastical doctrines which will infuse the doubled British King. But it seems like the atheological side of British Culture... the Magna Carta hasn't been mentioned, and according to the index will only be discussed once upon page 407. He makes it clear that the British Divine King is less than his Continental Divine Counterpart but seems to attribute it to an accidental British essentialism:

"England in the thirteenth century was less messianically minded than Italy and the rest of the Contient, and the doctrine of the ruler as a lex animata descending at the command of God from high heaven down to men seems to have fallen on particularly barren ground in England before the age of Queen Elizabeth."

This may not be due so much to some quotidian nature of the British soul, but might have far more to do with the precarious negotiations of an alien sovereign over a deeply seated indigenous tradition.

Context
Bracton's writing for lawyers. Before Blackstone, he was the definitive work on English law. He wrote "The Laws and Customs of England" (or as E.K. assumes you can translate, De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae p. 145). And lawyers in that time are walking a fine line between a tenacious English common law and an evangelical civil law. At least, according to Blackstone:

NOR was it long before the prevailing mode of the times reached England. For Theobald, a Norman abbot, being elected to the fee of Canterburya, and extremely addicted to this new ftudy, brought over with him in his retinue many learned proficients therein; and among the reft Roger firnamed Vacarius, whom he placed in the univerfity of Oxfordb, to teach it to the people of this country. But it did not meet with the fame eafy reception in England, where a mild and rational fyftem of laws had been long eftablifhed, as it did upon the continent; and, though the monkifh clergy ( devoted to the will of a foreign primate) received it with eagernefs and zeal, yet the laity who were more interefted to preferve the old conftitution, and had already feverely felt the effect of many Norman innovations, continued wedded to the ufe of the common law. King Stephen immediately publifhed a proclamation c, forbidding the ftudy of the laws, then newly imported from Italy; which was treated by the monks d as a piece of impiety, and, though it might prevent the introduction of the civil law procefs into our courts of juftice, yet did not hinder the clergy from reading and teaching it in their own fchools and monafteries.


FROM this time the nation feems to have been divided into two parties; the bifhops and clergy, many of them foreigners, who applied themfelves wholly to the ftudy of the civil and canon laws, which now came to be infeparably interwoven with each other; and the nobility and laity, who adhered with equal pertinacity to the old common law; both of them reciprocally jealous of what they were unacquainted with, and neither of them perhaps allowing the oppofite fyftem that real merit which is abundantly to be found in each.

Is that a good quote, or what? Blackstone fucking rocks.

Legal History
I think you're wrong. For starters, scientists aren't compelled to abuse their own history. Lawyers are horrible with it. To a lawyer, history is a thing to be shaped for a present purpose. Judicial reasoning is a travesty of intellectual integrity, but a necessity of political life. Treating it seriously will drive you crazy. Not treating it seriously will leave you impotent before the Law. I'll admit, E.K. isn't discussing the difference between Norman Sicily and Norman England. And, that's probably a good thing. I'm armed to explaine something about Norman England. I have barely a clue about Norman Sicily. (And Norman Byzantium? I can only admit I know it was so.)

What's different? That requires a lot of explanation. What are Normans? How did they manage that? Why did they do it? It's too much for E.K.'s purpose... he's assuming you know the basics, and it's probably an over-generous assumption (even for me).

Presentism
I won't go into the name-dropping either (except to say that I've neither read Habermas nor do I "know what to say" about him (a prof friend of mine frequently says "haven't read him, but I know what I should say..."))

But I say "good catch" on E.K.'s conflation of "public sphere" with res publica - I missed that and must think upon it. "Secular" is also tricky in this context, because of E.K.'s undelineated context of binding pre-Christian authority. To Blackstone, the British Druids have an undeniable place in English legal history...