Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe

by Barbara H. Rosenwein

Why did early medieval kings declare certain properties to be immune from the judicial and fiscal encroachments of their own agents? Did weakness compel them to prohibit their agents from entering these properties, as historians have traditionally believed? In a richly detailed book that will be greeted as a landmark addition to the literature on the Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein argues that immunities were markers of power. By placing restraints on themselves and their agents, kings demonstrated their authority, affirmed their status, and manipulated the boundaries of sacred space. Rosenwein transforms our understanding of an institution central to the political and social dynamics of medieval Europe. She reveals how immunities were used by kings and other leaders to forge alliances with the noble families and monastic centers that were central to their power. Generally viewed as unchanging juridical instruments, immunities as they appear here are as fluid and diverse as the disparate social and political conflicts that they at once embody and seek to defuse. Their legacy reverberates in the modern world, where liberal institutions, with their emphasis on state restraint, clash with others that encourage governmental intrusion. The protections against unreasonable searches and seizures provided by English common law and the U.S. Constitution developed in part out of the medieval experience of immunities and the institutions that were elaborated to breach them.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Prof. Barbara Rosenwein was the Humanitas Visiting Professor in Historiography at the University of Oxford for the year 2014-2015.

Barbara H. Rosenwein (Ph.D. (1974), B.A. (1966), University of Chicago) is a professor at Loyola University Chicago. An internationally renowned historian, she has been a guest professor at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France; the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France; the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and most recently at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Since 2009, Rosenwein has been an affiliated research scholar at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University in London. She was a scholar in residence at the American Academy in Rome in 2001-2002 and was elected Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2003.

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has everything!

Okay, not quite everything, but Latin grammar, obscure footnotes, numbered illustrative Figures, and all that sort of stuff to delight any Arts and Letters nerdy heart. Also theory and irrelevant comparisons.