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Untersuchungen zu den Thronwechseln der ersten Hälfte des 11. Jahrhunderts und zur Adelsgeseschichte Süddeutschlands by Eduard Hlawitschka Review by: John Gillingham The English Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 420 (Jul., 1991), pp. 686-687 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/573276 . Accessed: 04/12/2014 07:12 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The English Historical Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 4 Dec 2014 07:12:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Untersuchungen zu den Thronwechseln der ersten Hälfte des 11. Jahrhunderts und zur Adelsgeseschichte Süddeutschlandsby Eduard Hlawitschka

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Page 1: Untersuchungen zu den Thronwechseln der ersten Hälfte des 11. Jahrhunderts und zur Adelsgeseschichte Süddeutschlandsby Eduard Hlawitschka

Untersuchungen zu den Thronwechseln der ersten Hälfte des 11. Jahrhunderts und zurAdelsgeseschichte Süddeutschlands by Eduard HlawitschkaReview by: John GillinghamThe English Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 420 (Jul., 1991), pp. 686-687Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/573276 .

Accessed: 04/12/2014 07:12

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The EnglishHistorical Review.

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Page 2: Untersuchungen zu den Thronwechseln der ersten Hälfte des 11. Jahrhunderts und zur Adelsgeseschichte Süddeutschlandsby Eduard Hlawitschka

686 SHORTER NOTICES July

He shows, better than anyone I have ever seen, how the advances in juristic sophistication in the period come not from a 'reception' of Roman law from outside, but from generational developments in the sophistication of arguments about Lombard law. The Institutes and then the Digest, probably (the Institutes at least) always available in some form, only began to be used when Lombard jurists gained the necessary theoretical understanding; first crudely, to fill in the gaps in Lombard legislation; then (with the Expositio) in a more sophisticated manner, to act as a parallel legal system which contained concepts useful for developing Lombard juristic theory; finally, with Irnerius, as a system to be analysed (though by the same means) separately and in its own right. Irnerius thus does not represent a break with the past, but rather the result of a century of development (pp. I9-7i). I would have liked Radding to discuss the ideology of the use of Roman law more. Why was it that Lombard legists saw a legal system which nobody in the world still followed as lex omnium generalis (pp. II2, I36-7)? I should also have liked some discussion of the paradox that court cases themselves were barely affected by those developments, and, in the twelfth century, often became less, not more, sophisticated - an extreme example of the principle that legal theory is of no use to anyone except lawyers. I was also irritated by continual inconsistencies in the use of personal names, with Latin, English and Italian used at random, Vualpertus (p. 5i) being the same as Walpert (p. 52), or Louis II (an Italian king) set against Lodovico III (from Provence) (pp. 40, S?). This book nevertheless seems to me the best account yet of the origins of Italian legal thinking and of the Italian law schools: no small achievement.

University of Birmingham CHRIS WICKHAM

It is a fair reflection of Helmut Beumann's standing among post-war German medievalists that his Ausgewdhlte Aufsdtze aus den Jahren i966-i986 Festgabe zu seinem 75- Geburtstag, ed. J. Petersohn and R. Schmidt (Sigmaringen: Jan Thor- becke, i987; pp. xiv + 5io. DM78) should be the second volume of his collected essays to be published. The first, Wissenschaft vom Mittelalter, celebrating his sixtieth birthday in I972, contained work done during the previous two decades, and the same principle has been followed, as its title indicates, in the present substantial collection. The nineteen articles reprinted include three studies of Saxon monastic charters; and the Saxon Church, in particular its missionary activity, is the subject of three other essays. Most of the rest deal with Carolingian and early German history in the period from the ninth to the eleventh centuries. As a noted exponent of Ideengeschichte, Beumann is less concerned with 'what happened' and more with the conceptual background against which men acted and which helped to shape their actions. If there is one theme to emerge more sharply than any other it is the development of the idea of the German nation and kingdom, particularly in the context of the Carolingian Empire and the Investiture Contest.

London School of Economics & Political Science JOHN GILLINGHAM

The disputed succession which followed the death of Otto III in I002 has long engaged the attention of historians interested in the debate as to when

EHR Jul. 9I

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Page 3: Untersuchungen zu den Thronwechseln der ersten Hälfte des 11. Jahrhunderts und zur Adelsgeseschichte Süddeutschlandsby Eduard Hlawitschka

I99I SHORTER NOTICES 687

and to what extent the medieval kingdom of Germany was an elective rather than a hereditary monarchy. This is because it was always assumed that two of the candidates, Ekkehard of Meissen and Hermann II of Swabia, were able to bid for the throne despite the fact that they had no royal blood in their veins. But in I978 Eduard Hlawitschka published an iconoclastic article arguing that the well-known story of Ekkehard being told that his wagon lacked the fourth wheel was an allusion not to his lack of royal blood, but to his lack of one of the four cardinal virtues, probably moderation. From then on the hunt was up, and in the last decade a number of scholars, foremost among them Hlawitschka himself, have joined in the search for Liudolfing ancestors for both Ekkehard and Hermann. Now, in the first part of his Untersuchungen zu den Thronwechseln der ersten Hdlfte des ii. Jahrhunderts und zur Adelsgeseschichte Sud- deutschlands (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, I987; pp. 207. Pb. DM58), Hlawitschka has taken the opportunity to restate and elaborate his view that both Ekkehard and Hermann, the former in the male, the latter in the female line, were descended from a brother - or perhaps from two different brothers - of King Henry I. Particularly important - and here he takes up and modifies an idea put forward by Armin Wolf in I980 - is his identification of Hermann's father, Conrad of Swabia, with that Kuno of Ohningen whose wife, according to the twelfth century Genealogia Welforum was a daughter of Otto the Great, a mistake which both Wolf and Hlawitschka suggest reflects a confused reminiscence of a real Ottonian connection. The book falls into two very distinct halves, and in the second part Hlawitschka argues that the nobles, among them Rudolf of Rheinfelden, who in I07I-77 made a joint benefaction to St Blasien, were all descended from Kuno of Ohningen. With the exception of the twelve pages which he devotes to discussing the date of birth of Conrad II's wife, this part deals not with the royal kindred in the tenth century, but with the south German aristocracy in the eleventh. Within the space of a brief notice it is impossible to do justice to the number, complexity and ingenuity of Hlawitschka's massively annotated arguments. I would only observe that at a number of points he excludes alternative hypotheses on the grounds that these would have involved marriages within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity; that had such marriages taken place, we would find evidence of objections to them, yet we do not. But the fragmentary nature of the evidence both makes many alterative combinations possible and renders the argument from silence a notably fragile one, particularly in view of the possibility that many nobles (both secular and ecclesiastical) may have been less canon law-abiding than he believes.

London School of Economics & Political Science J OH N GILL IN G HAM

Much new work has been done in recent years to penetrate the obscurity of parochial origins and of the early history of minsters and parish churches; and it has been advanced most fruitfully by studies which employed topographi- cal, archaeological, art historical and other techniques as well as documentary research. This makes it a particular pleasure to welcome Minsters and Parish Churches. The Local Church in Transition, 950-I200, ed. John Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Comm. for Archaeology, I988; pp. 2I8. Pb. ?25). Three theses

EHR Jul. 9r

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