Susan Reynolds

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Susan Reynolds (* 1929 ) is a British historian .

Live and act

After graduating from Oxford , she worked as an archivist for one year at the Middlesex County Record Office and then at Victoria County History for seven years (1952-1959). Reynolds has a degree in archival administration, but neither has a Ph.D. another degree in history. After teaching at the Secondary Modern School , among others , she was a Fellow and Tutor in History at Lady Margaret Hall from 1964 to 1986 . Since 1986 she has been an Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. Reynolds is an Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research , Birkbeck College and University College London . She became a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1993 . She is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS).

Her research interests include the social, political, and legal history of medieval Western Europe. In 1994 Reynolds presented a groundbreaking study with her study on fiefs and vassals in Europe ( Fiefs and vassals. The medieval evidence reinterpreted ), although its reinterpretation in the German-language historical scholarship was initially much more critically commented or even completely rejected. According to Oliver Auge , Reynolds' monograph plunged German-language research into a kind of "paralysis". In international research, her theses were received much more calmly and quickly gained acceptance. Reynolds radically questioned the previously accepted notion of a " feudal system " that is said to have been widespread in Europe since the Carolingian era. Reynolds divided her study into country chapters (France, England, Italy and Germany) that correspond to today's nation-states in Europe. This approach enabled her to take into account the respective national research traditions, but property and social ties were rather structured on regions that such national chapters can hardly depict. According to Reynolds, the feudal system did not arise in the warrior society of the Franconian Empire in the early 8th century, but in its early form in the learned specialist discussions of Northern Italian lawyers of the high Middle Ages and was worked out individually by early modern lawyers. The conception of what modern historians understood by the medieval feudal system thus emerged only in the later Middle Ages and had nothing in common with the medieval social and constitutional structure. Reynolds pointed out, among other things, the openness of the source formulation. Words like beneficia and vassus are ambiguous and may no longer be interpreted in terms of feudal law.

Since it was first presented in 1947 by François Louis Ganshof and has been used for decades, it has been the subject of controversial discussion in all areas. A conference in Munich in 2008 dealt with Reynolds' theses. The focus of the conference was on the 12th century, because Medieval studies there most likely suspects the constitutional and social changes, which is said to have formed the feudal rule in the first place. Roman Deutinger drew the following conclusion for the conference: "The change in the feudal system from a bundle of legal customs to a uniform legal institution did not begin until the middle of the 12th century, at least in the German Empire".

Fonts

literature

  • Pauline Stafford: Law, laity and solidarities. Essays in honor of Susan Reynolds. Manchester University Press, Manchester 2001, ISBN 0-7190-5835-X .
  • Johannes Fried : review of Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals In: Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London 19, 1 (1997) pp. 28-41 (the answer by Susan Reynolds, in: Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London 19, 2 ( 1997), pp. 30-40.)
  • Elisabeth Magnou-Nortier: La féodalité en crise. Propos on "Fiefs and Vassals" de Susan Reynolds In: Revue historique 296, 1996, pp. 253-348.
  • Otto Gerhard Oexle : The abolition of feudalism has failed. Susan Reynolds' attempt to deny vassalage and to turn medieval research upside down. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 19, 1995, No. 116, p. 41.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ See the reviews of Kurt-Ulrich Jäschke: Journal of the Savigny Foundation for Legal History, German Department 116, 1999, pp. 523-525; Otto Gerhard Oexle : The abolition of feudalism has failed. Susan Reynolds' attempt to deny vassalage and to turn medieval research upside down. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung No. 116 of May 19, 1995, p. 41; Karl-Friedrich Krieger in: Historische Zeitschrift 264, 1997, pp. 174–179; Johannes Fried in: Bulletin. German Historical Institute London 19, 1997, pp. 28-41; Brigitte Kasten in: German Archive for Research into the Middle Ages 51, 1995, p. 307 ( online ) Timothy Reuter in: Early Medieval Europe 5, 1996, p. 244–245; DJA Matthew in: The English Historical Review 110, 1995, pp. 1209-1212.
  2. ↑ Oliver Auge: Lehnrecht, Lehnwesen. In: Concise Dictionary of German Legal History 3, 2nd edition, Berlin 2016, Sp. 717–736, here: p. 721.
  3. ^ Dominique Barthélemy: La théorie féodale à l'épreuve de l'anthropologie (note critique). In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 52, 1997 pp. 321-341, here: p. 324; Richard Abels in: The Historiography of a Construct. 'Feudalism' and the Medieval Historian. In: History Compass 7, 2009, pp. 1008-1031, here: p. 1023.
  4. ↑ Steffen Patzold: The fiefdom. Munich 2012, p. 58 f.
  5. ↑ Steffen Patzold: The fiefdom. Munich 2012, p. 56f.
  6. ^ Roman Deutinger: The high medieval feudal system. Results and Perspectives. In: Jürgen Dendorfer, Roman Deutinger (ed.): The feudal system in the high Middle Ages. Research constructs - source findings - relevance to interpretation. Stuttgart 2010, pp. 463–473, here: p. 468.
personal data
SURNAME Reynolds, Susan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British historian
DATE OF BIRTH 1929