An unpublished work by the late Ralph Giesey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.
A dissertation which Ralph supervised at Iowa:
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 turned out, that chain of correspondence took place in the final months of Ralph's life. During those months, Ralph was probably mindful of this and thinking of his own legacy. He had entrusted to me many of his scholarly possessions, some of which I still have in my office, including an original 4-volume of von Gierke:
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| von Gierke on the Genossenschaftsrecht |
A dissertation which Ralph supervised at Iowa:
The disc, however, was the most mysterious. I realize I never thoroughly inspected its contents. So I took a look today, and it appears to be an unpublished manuscript for a book:
This is a really exciting discovery and, from what I can tell from a preliminary survey of the manuscript, it is still in need of significant editing. Any French medievalists interested in seeing this in print? Is this worth exploring? I don't know who would own copyright at this stage. I don't believe he had any children. Wouldn't it be great for the next generation of medievalists to have this in print?
