Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-5wvtr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-24T03:42:19.499Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Metaphoric History: Narrative and New Science in the Work of F. W. Maitland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Maura B. Nolan
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article reads the work of F. W. Maitland, a foundational figure in medieval legal scholarship, as an extended meditation on the theory and practice of writing history. Because Maitland's scholarship not only occupies a central place in two disciplines (law and history) but also negotiates the competing demands of an older, narrative form of historiography and the newer, scientific discourses of sociology and anthropology, his writing illustrates the persistence of certain epistemological and methodological questions. In particular, it reveals a deep interest in the modes through which history is figured. Recognizing that history is epistemologically constructed through and by tropes—metaphor, metonymy, analogy—each with its own conceptual and practical logic, Maitland turns to a notion of metaphoric history to productively sustain the tension between the abstract and the concrete, the whole and the part, that haunts nineteenth-century history writing.

Type
Special Topic: Imagining History
Information
PMLA , Volume 118 , Issue 3: Special Topic: Imagining History , May 2003 , pp. 557 - 572
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Acton, John Emerich. “German Schools of History.” English Historical Review 1 (1886): 7–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baldwin, J. F. The King's Council in England during the Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon, 1913.Google Scholar
Bell, H. E. Maitland: A Critical Examination and Assessment. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965.Google Scholar
Biddick, Kathleen. The Shock of Medievalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blaas, P. B. M. Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Trans. Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge: MIT P, 1983.Google Scholar
Brentano, Robert. “Frederic William Maitland.” History. Ed. Damico, Helen and Zadavil, Joseph. New York: Garland, 1995. 131–51. Vol. 1 of Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline.Google Scholar
Burrow, J. W. Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Burrow, J. W. A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burrow, J. W. “‘The Village Community’ and the Uses of History in Late Nineteenth-Century England.” Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb. Ed. McKendrick, Neil. London: Europa, 1974. 255–84.Google Scholar
Butterfield, Herbert. The Whig Interpretation of History. 1931. New York: Norton, 1965.Google Scholar
Elton, G. R. F. W. Maitland. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Fifoot, C. H. S. Frederic William Maitland: A Life. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fisher, H. A. L. Frederic William Maitland: A Biographical Sketch. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1910.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. and trans. Bouchard, Donald F. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. 139–64.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973.Google Scholar
Gomme, George. The Village Community, with Special Reference to the Origin and Form of Its Survivals in Britain. London: Scott, 1890.Google Scholar
Graziadei, Michele. “Changing Images of the Law in Nineteenth Century English Legal Thought (the Continental Impulse).” The Reception of Continental Ideas in the Common Law World, 1820–1920. Ed. Reimann, Mathias. Berlin: Duncker, 1993. 115–64.Google Scholar
Harding, Alan. England in the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hudson, John, ed. The History of English Law: Centenary Essays on“Pollock and Maitland.” Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Iggers, Georg. The German Conception of History. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1968.Google Scholar
Iggers, Georg. Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Iggers, Georg. “The Image of Ranke in American and German Historical Thought.” History and Theory 2 (1962): 17–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. 1957. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Kracauer, Siegfried. History: The Last Things before the Last. 1969. Completed by Paul Oskar Kristeller. Princeton: Wiener, 1995.Google Scholar
Maine, Henry. Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas. 1861. New York: Dorset, 1986.Google Scholar
Maine, Henry. Dissertations on Early Law and Custom, Chiefly Selected from Lectures Delivered at Oxford. New York: Henry Holt, 1883.Google Scholar
Maine, Henry. Village Communities in the East and West. 1871. New York: Henry Holt, 1889.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William. “The Body Politic.” Maitland, Collected Papers 3: 285–303.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William. The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland. Ed. Fisher, H. A. L. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1911.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William. “The Corporation Sole.” 1900. Maitland, Collected Papers 3: 210–43.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William. “The Crown as Corporation.” 1901. Maitland, Collected Papers 3: 244–70.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William. The Letters of Frederic William Maitland. Ed. Fifoot, C. H. S. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1965.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William. “Moral Personality and Legal Personality.” 1903. Maitland, Collected Papers 3: 304–20.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William. “Outlines of English Legal History, 560–1600.” 1893. Maitland, Collected Papers 2: 417–96.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William, trans. Political Theories of the Middle Age. By Otto Gierke. Introd. Maitland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1900.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William, ed. Records of the Parliament Holden at Westminster. Introd. Maitland. London: Eyre, 1893.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William. “The Survival of Archaic Communities.” 1893. Maitland, Collected Papers 2: 313–65.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William. “The Teaching of History.” 1901. Maitland, Collected Papers 3: 405–18.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William. Township and Borough. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1898.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William. “Trust and Corporation.” 1904. Maitland, Collected Papers 3: 321–404.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William. “Why the History of English Law Is Not Written.” 1888. Maitland, Collected Papers 1: 480–97.Google Scholar
Maitland, Frederic William. “William Stubbs, Bishop of Oxford.” 1901. Maitland, Collected Papers 3: 495–511.Google Scholar
McIlwain, C. H. The High Court of Parliament and Its Supremacy. New Haven: Yale UP, 1910.Google Scholar
McKenna, J. W. “The Myth of Parliamentary Sovereignty in Late-Medieval England.” English Historical Review 94 (1979): 481–506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meinecke, Friedrich. Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook. 1959. Trans. J. E. Anderson. New York: Herder, 1972.Google Scholar
Milsom, S. F. C. “F. W. Maitland.” Proceedings of the British Academy 66 (1980): 265–81.Google Scholar
Montpensier Roy Stone, Montpensier. “Maitland and the Interpretation of History.” American Journal of Legal History 10 (1966): 259–81.Google Scholar
Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Philpott, Mark. “Bibliography of the Writings of F. W. Maitland.” Hudson 261–78.Google Scholar
Pollard, A. F. The Evolution of Parliament. London: Longmans, 1926.Google Scholar
Frederick, Pollock, and Maitland, Frederic William. The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I. Introd. S. F. C. Milsom. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1895.Google Scholar
Richardson, H. G., and Sayles, George O. The Governance of Medieval England from the Conquest to Magna Carta. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1963.Google Scholar
Stein, Peter. Legal Evolution: The Story of an Idea. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Stubbs, William. Constitutional History of England in Its Origin and Development. Oxford: Clarendon, 1880.Google Scholar
Vernon, James. “Narrating the Constitution: The Discourse of ‘the Real’ and the Fantasies of Nineteenth-Century Constitutional History.” Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England's Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 204–29.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973.Google Scholar
Wormald, Patrick. “Frederic William Maitland and the Earliest English Law.” Law and History Review 16 (1998): 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar