Stephan Kuttner: A Remembrance

Abstract

Stephan Kuttner:A Remembrance Stanley Chodorow As did everyone else in our field of medieval canon law, I read everything Stephan Kuttner wrote from the 1930s to the 1990s. Actually, I read everything at least twice, because when Stephan was assembling the volumes of his collected articles for publication by Variorum Reprints, he called on me to help with the project. Even before we undertook that effort, I knew that Stephan had never let go of any of his publications. As he continued his work and learn new things, he returned to his earlier work and made notes. On every publication, he had files with corrections and additions carefully noted. When he faced the prospect of reprinting the articles, he and I gathered and organized all those notes and additions and appended them to the volumes. It pleased him greatly to title the additions 'Retractationes', the title of the revisions and reconsiderations that St. Augustine wrote at the end of his life. Stephan was one of those rare people who knew that his work was invaluable and who could not be accused of hubris or excessive self-regard in so thinking. I began working with Stephan in 1971-1972, during a year I spent on an ACLS Fellowship at the School of Law at Berkeley. Stephan had moved to Berkeley from Yale the year before to become one of two directors of the Robbins Collection, dedicated to research in religious and civil law. David Daube, a renowned scholar of civil and Jewish law, was his co-director. Stephan brought the Institute of Medieval Canon Law with him from Yale; he had founded the Institute at The Catholic University of America in the 1950s, after emigrating from Europe during World War II. I was taking law courses as part of my fellowship, but I spent every available hour in the Institute doing research in the Robbins Collection and learning from Stephan. The relationship we developed during that year led to my assisting him with the Variorum project. [End Page 15] As I learned during that year at Berkeley, Americans did not do their doctoral work under Stephan Kuttner. (Robert Somerville was the only American student who took his doctorate under him.) Rather, those who regarded themselves as studying with Stephan were recent Ph.Ds. That pattern began, so far as I know, with my own mentor, Brian Tierney, who completed his doctorate at Cambridge under Walter Ullmann and then won a position, with Stephan's help, at Catholic University. Brian established the pattern many of us later followed. It was not that we went to study with Stephan at Catholic or Yale or Berkeley, but that we worked in his aura and absorbed his standards by listening to his direct comments, reading his scholarship, and observing him at work. I came to think that a doctoral student was not yet knowledgeable or experienced enough to get what Stephan had to offer, although Somerville's example belies that view. The danger for a doctoral student working with Stephan was that he set such a high standard of knowledge and insight that one could not imagine being able to do scholarship worthy of his example or sit for the exams of the doctoral program with him as one of the examiners. Once one had done all that, one could work with the master. The experience of working with Stephan was humbling. His scholarship set the standard we all aspired to, and his genius sometimes overwhelmed. It was a common experience to go ask him a question and hear, 'Oh. You asked me that three months ago, and the answer I gave you was …'. He was not criticizing you; he was merely stating a fact. By the time I was working with him, he had gotten over any feelings of superiority he might have had as a young man. He just remembered everything and from time to time noted the fact. The most common experience of working in his shop was the feeling that his help and his example made you better at the job. He did not give an impression of a stellar classroom teacher, but he was a marvelous teacher to all...