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Abstract

Narrations of Law. New paths to a conception of medieval law. The article, starting from a review of two publications on medieval Scandinavian literature, tries to find out the role of law in the sagas of medieval Iceland, dealing with mostly bloody conflicts in a society without a ruler or state. Different from classical legal history, today we have to understand law in this context not as a systematic order of norms, but instead as an oral tradition in a world of mainly violent solutions of conflicts by revenge, partly by mediation or arbitration, seldom through a legal proceeding. Not a norm of law, but a compensation in relation to the honour or social position of the parties is the key for a solution. – The theory of a radical cultural change in history (axial age) turns out to be useful for understanding the changing role of law in medieval societies, including Scandinavia.

The essay, originally written in German as an introduction to a volume of collected papers, shows the influence of the Historical School of Law on legal, historical and social sciences in Germany throughout the 19th and even 20th centuries – a time span running contrary to the dominate view that sees the end of the School in the middle of the 19th century. In my view the School constitutes not only a method for developing norms of private law out of the historical materials of Roman and German-Germanic laws, but is based on a wider conception of culture, law and history that is also connected to the political positions of that time. In Savigny's founding pamphlet, "The vocation of our time .", two major theoretical topics for this long-lasting influence can be found: The Romantic one, which views law as a part of culture and parallel to language and custom, based on the "spirit of the people", and, on the other side, the rationality of the European tradition of Roman law, which was developed and administered by jurists. These two basic points, in part standing in contradiction to one another, form a fertile tension that provides an impulse to the intellectual discussions and new movements in jurisprudence and history analysed in the text. Realism, founded in the connection of both sciences to political and social life, builds a kind of "basso continuo" and acts as a counterbalance to the former two. And it is in this context that the works of Jacob Grimm, Puchta and Beseler, Heinrich Brunner, Georg von Below and others are analysed, in particular the works of Otto von Gierke and Max Weber. Finally, evidence is furnished that a new image of the medieval period, and its impact on law, as a centre of Western identity was outlined in the 20th century by authors like Ernst Kantorowicz, Fritz Kern, Otto Brunner and, last but not least, by Harold J. Berman (walking in the footsteps of Eugen Rosenstock- Huessy), all of whom were situated in different ways within the tradition of the broader, cultural-based Romantic view.

L'autore ricostruisce l'impatto del saggio di Max Weber sulla città nella storiografia tedesca a partire dalla fine degli anni Ottanta. Esso indica altresì il significato politico della "scoperta" weberiana della città come nucleo genetico della politica occidentale, con il suo universalismo che Weber data addirittura all'incontro tra gli apostoli Pietro e Paolo ad Antiochia. La "città" è per Weber la sede della possibilità teorica e fattuale di creare un diritto autonomo e nuovo. Essa è certamente il luogo di origine della predominanza politica della borghesia, ma nel paradigma weberiano basato sulla razionalizzazione come processo tipico della cultura occidentale, essa indica un percorso che prosegue ancora oggi nell'epoca delle migrazioni e della globalizzazione. ; The author reconstructs the impact of Max Weber's essay on the city in German historiography starting from the end of the Eighties. He also shows the political meaning of Weberian "discovery" of the city as the genetic nucleus of western politics, with its universalism that Weber dates back even to the meeting between the Apostles Pietro and Paolo in Antioch. The "city" is for Weber the site of theoretical and factual possibility of creating an autonomous and new right. It is certainly the birthplace of the political preponderance of the bourgeoisie, but in Weberian paradigm based on the rationalization as a typical process of western culture, it reveals a path that carries on still today in the epoch of migration and globalization.

Eine erstaunliche Tatsache: Ein amerikanischer Rechtswissenschaftler, im Denken des common law geschult, dann hervorgetreten vor allem mit Studien zur Rechtsvergleichung und zum Recht der Sowjetunion, schreibt in vorgerückten Jahren ein umfassendes Werk über die mittelalterlichen Ursprünge der Rechtstradition des Westens. Diese verankert er in jenem politisch-religiösen Konflikt, den wir einmal unter dem Begriff "Investiturstreit" kennen gelernt haben. Inzwischen wird er als Vorspiel der "Renaissance des 12. Jahrhunderts" gesehen. Für Berman handelt es sich jedoch um die "päpstliche Revolution", the Papal Revolution. Diesem Band "Law and Revolution" von 1983 hatte Berman im hohen Alter 2003 noch einen zweiten mit dem gleichen Titel folgen lassen, dessen Gegenstand ebenfalls im Untertitel genauer umschrieben wird: "The impact of the protestant reformations on the Western legal tradition". .