Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria

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 di...