Maike Huneke, Iurisprudentia romano-saxonica. Die Glosse zum Sachsenspiegel-Lehnrecht und die Anfänge deutscher Rechtswissenschaft. (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Schriften 68.) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014. Pp. lxiii, 817. €98. ISBN: 978-3-447-10217-9

“Roman-Saxon Iurisprudentia” is a book on the medieval origins of German legal science. Across Germany, scientific juristic expertise was originally imported from Italian and French universities, where it was taught in the two branches of Roman and canon law and disseminated under the name of ius commune. Soon enough, it was adapted far and wide to shed light on local lay norms. North of the Alps and east of the Rhine River, Saxony assumed a leadership role in this process, beginning with the well-known Sachsenspiegel by Eike of Repgow (c. 1230), which presented the norms of the Saxon lands (Landrecht) for the first time in writing. About a century later, Johann von Buch wrote a gloss on the Landrecht, mimicking Italian and French scholastic habits by providing a standard Glossa ordinaria to be read alongside the law book itself. Maike Huneke’s doctoral dissertation of 2012, now available in a print version of nearly nine hundred pages, centers on an additional set of juristic commentary clearly inspired by von Buch’s example, an anonymous gloss composition written between 1325 and 1387 on the feudal law of the Saxons and traditionally referred to as the Sachsenspiegel Lehnrecht.

Huneke’s choice of topic was not accidental. Before she started writing her thesis in 2009, a critical edition of von Buch’s gloss on the Landrecht had been published by Frank-Michael Kaufmann in 2002 (Die Glossen zum Sachsenspiegel-Landrecht. Buch’sche Glosse [Hanover, 2002]). In 2007, it became the subject of a thorough historical assessment by Bernd Kannowski, Huneke’s doctoral adviser (Die Umgestaltung des Sachsenspiegelrechts durch die Buch’sche Glosse [Hanover, 2007]). In addition, a longer version of the gloss on the Lehnrecht had been reedited by Kaufmann in 2006 (Glossen zum Sachsenspiegel-Lehnrecht. Die längere Glosse [Hanover, 2006]) and his edition of the shorter gloss was on its way towards publication (Glossen zum Sachsenspiegel-Lehnrecht. Die kürzere Glosse [Hanover, 2013]). As a result, Huneke’s work was aimed at furnishing an interpretive companion volume to Kaufmann’s new editorial enterprise in the same way Kannowski had provided one for the Landrecht. Huneke seems to have channeled many of her findings immediately into this triangle of research efforts, most notably in her detailed argumentation (88-245) in favor of the longer text of the gloss on the Lehnrecht as older than the derivative shorter one. Kaufmann seems to have made her conclusion his own in the above-mentioned 2013 edition (see 147 n. 332).

The range of aspects covered by Huneke and the depth of her investigations are truly enormous, demonstrating a time-honored and positivistic closeness to the manuscript sources no less than her awareness of historiographical traditions and familiarity with both bygone and recent paradigms of interpretation. The gloss on the Lehnrecht occupies the center of interest, but Huneke’s comprehensive treatment also encompasses the Sachsenspiegel and its author Eike; Johann von Buch and his gloss; and also the urban complement to these Saxon rural and knightly norms, the Madgeburger Weichbildrecht and its Glossa ordinaria. Any reviewer would struggle to summarize the most significant of her arguments, were it not for the “Final Considerations” (776-88), in which she recapitulates key observations by conveniently presenting them in bold type.

Concentrating on the rise of jurisprudentia in the first of four major parts (13-87), Huneke explains how the glosses on the Lehnrecht and Landrecht pioneered the scientific treatment of Saxon law. Their authors were inspired by the Glossae ordinariae on the canonistic and Roman textbooks they had encountered through university training. Curiously, the Lehnrecht glossator in particular did not make use of the Libri feudorum and their commentaries, which might have served him as an obvious academic model had he ever studied them. In the second part on the textual history of the Lehnrecht gloss (88-245), special stress is put on the hitherto-unacknowledged distinctiveness of the Lehnrecht and the Landrecht, which do not warrant being lumped together as two portions of the same Sachsenspiegel, a title which in medieval times was reserved only for the latter. The gloss by Johann von Buch, moreover, formed the principal point of reference for the anonymous one on the Lehnrecht.

How and to what degree did the gloss share in the reception of scholastic legal science in Saxon and other German-speaking regions? As Hunecke’s third section (246-492) on the interpretive techniques of its author points out, the ius commune inspired the Saxon glossators primarily through the adoption into contemporary dialect of interpretive methods and technical terminology. Procedure and the material law with its sanctions retained their homegrown character. Regarding the social significance of Saxon feudal law as reflected through its gloss, the fourth part of Huneke’s treatment (493-775) emphasizes that the scientific trend implied above all that the Sachsenspiegel and the Lehnrecht were treated as imperial law introduced from above rather than as customs rooted in the land, in what permitted interpreters to treat them not as subsidiary to or overriding the imperial and papal laws of the ius commune, but as harmoniously interconnected and equal to them.

Given the different reading habits of German and Anglo-American scholarly audiences, it is unlikely that Huneke’s book will ever be translated into English. Much of the information is presented in dense prose, highly technical, with philological detail and encyclopedic juxtaposition. If the work were to appear in translation, however, it would introduce non-German speaking audiences at one strike to a staggering wealth of history that is hard to know otherwise. The Saxon Landrecht and the Lehnrecht, in their original and countless adaptations in German and most eastern European languages, exist, as Huneke reminds us, in numbers of manuscripts that easily rival those still preserved for the much better-studied ius commune. Thirty complete copies survive of the gloss on the Lehnrecht, more than two hundred of the Landrechtsglosse by Johann von Buch. The Sachsenspiegel counts well over four hundred such handwritten texts, not to mention the printed ones. Huneke’s work expertly introduces us to a vast legal literature and extensive stretches of late medieval Western Europe, which in the classroom fall all too regularly off the map.