Land and Lordship Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria [Hardcover]

Otto Brunner contends that prevailing notions of medieval social and constitutional history had been shaped by the nineteenth-century nation state and its liberal order. Whereas a sharp distinction between the public and the private might be appropriate to descriptions of contemporary society, such a dichotomy could not be projected back onto the Middle Ages. Focusing particularly on forms of lordship in late medieval Austria, Brunner found neither a state in the modern sense nor any distinction between the public and private spheres.

Behind the apparent disorder of late medieval political life, however, Brunner discovered a coherent legal and constitutional order rooted in the the rights and obligations of noble lordship. In carefully reconstructing this order, Brunner's study weaves together social, legal, constitutional, and intellectual history.

Originally published in 1939 and available here in English,Land and Lordshiphas been one of the most influential works of the twentieth-century medieval scholarship.