An unpublished work by the late Ralph Giesey
Sabbatical has given me time to go through some of the piles of papers and books in my office. In recent days, I came across and rediscovered this: I instantly remembered what this was. During my first postdoctoral appointment at Columbia, just after being awarded my Ph.D., I started a lively correspondence with Ralph Giesey , the eminent medievalist specializing on the French monarchy and the Salic law. I was a huge fan. His work was vital for my dissertation because he prepared (with J.H.M. Salmon) the unsurpassed standard translation and textual study of François Hotman's Francogallia . I was also a huge fan of his monograph, Juristic Basis of Dynastic Right to the French Throne. And he also wrote what I still regard one of the best articles on Bodin. Ralph, as I learned, was a Berkeley Ph.D., and once a student of Kantorowicz. It's no surprise, then, that we should share many interests and cultivated a fruitful correspondence. As it...
