The American Society for Legal History is pleased to elect
Professor Charles Donahue, Jr., as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.
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| Charles Donahue (Credit: Harvard Magazine) |
Professor Donahue is one of the leading medieval legal historians
working today. He is widely admired and
respected for the range of his scholarship, the depth of his knowledge, and his
generosity toward other scholars both young and established.
His scholarship ranges widely across medieval law and
history. He has examined the place of
human rights in Roman law and the roles of women in medieval litigation, as
well as fundamental questions of English common law and more. With his prodigious breadth of knowledge, he
has made pioneering contributions in every area he has addressed. But throughout his scholarly travels, he has
always returned to his abiding interest, medieval canon law.
Professor Donahue has devoted much of his career to
exploring the question, “What Causes Fundamental Legal Ideas?"–a question
he first posed in the title of an article on marital property in England and
France in the thirteenth century in the Michigan
Law Review in 1979. He has led the
way in extending Roman and canon law scholarship to include the impact of Roman
and canon law in real world settings. In
his most sustained exploration of the question, he asked whether the canon law
of marriage and marital property was monolithic or whether it was shaped by
local needs and assumptions. To answer,
he dug deeply into the records of ecclesiastical courts in England and across
western Europe. His investigations
culminated in what truly and literally can be described as his magnum opus–Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages: Arguments About Marriage in Five Courts,
published by Cambridge University Press in 2007.
The book is a tour de
force of comparative legal history.
Professor Donahue moves beyond the canonical rules governing the
formation and dissolution of marriage and studies how the rules were
applied. With his profound knowledge of
canon law and ecclesiastical court practices, he demonstrates that within the
common application of the general canon law of marriage, there were significant
differences among courts in the types of cases heard and their outcomes. He discerns differences in practice with such
a fine eye that, as one reviewer remarked, he “enables us to grasp the world
views or mentalités of the men and
women who brought proceedings” before the courts. In other words, he sees the people in the records.
That Professor Donahue could see the people in the records
so clearly is in no small measure due to his intimate familiarity with archival
court records that he himself translated, edited, and published. Translating and editing court records, law
reports, legal treatises, and the like, has been a staple of scholarship in
medieval legal history to a degree unmatched by legal historians of any other
period. Professor Donahue is the
preeminent modern exemplar of this tradition.
His contributions in this area have been many, significant,
and selfless. He has edited or co-edited
major volumes for both the Selden Society and the Ames Foundation. Indeed, whether or not he was editor, every
volume published by the Ames Foundation in the last twenty-five benefitted from
his advice, counsel, and often direct supervision as Literary Director of the
Foundation. He has had a hand–often both
hands–in making available to fellow students of the field a large swath of the
sources on which their own scholarship rests.
In sum, Professor Donahue
has shaped the broad discipline of legal history and influenced the work of
others. As a scholar we admire, whose
work we aspire to emulate, and on whose shoulders we stand, we are pleased and
honored to welcome him as an Honorary Fellow of the Society.
