Feud in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

The most significant essay in this volume (which arises from a conference in Aarhus in 2003) is Jeppe Büchert Netterstrøm's sixty-page introduction, in which he gives a comprehensive overview of the historiographical background, the current state of research in the British Isles, Scandinavia and Germany, and provides a commentary on and analysis of three major definitions of the feud—reproduced here in their entirety. This makes it not just essential reading for specialists of the feud but historians more generally, for, as Netterstrøm points out, the importance of feuding lies in its close relationship to the concept and practice of peace, war and state-building. Modern interest in the feud has its origins in two divergent twentieth-century traditions. In most of Western Europe the foundations were laid by the anti-eurocentrist direction in anthroplogy, the most significant influence of which on the historical profession came with Max Gluckman's ‘The Peace in the Feud’, which first appeared in an early volume of Past & Present. More controversially, in Germany it derived from the anti-modernist direction in constitutional history represented by Otto Brunner. Land und Herrschaft is arguably the greatest historical work of the Nazi period, though Brunner himself only joined the party in 1943. Until recently, the two traditions developed independently and with little reference to each other. English-speaking readers will be particularly grateful for Netterstrøm's concise and illuminating summary of the German literature on the subject, unquestionably the most developed, the most insular and the most problematic of all the national historiographies relating to feud. Only in Germany does the issue of feuding remain politically charged, due to the role Brunner claimed for it in the development of German constitutional history. Brunner's enduring legacy lies in his challenge to flaccid liberal (for Germany read Weberian) conceptualisations of the state. In guiding us through the minefield, Netterstrøm reminds us that the English word ‘feud’ is an imprecise term that is not a synonym for Fehde, a much more narrowly defined legal right. What strikes the historian of the French and Italian scenes is how civilised were German noble feuds, and blood-letting rare. German nobles did not need to have their violent behaviour tamed by the duel, which did not become widespread in the Empire until the eighteenth century. This is the opposite of what Norbert Elias would have us believe

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