The life and work Raoul Charles van Caenegem (1927-2018)

Abstract

Summary This article deals with the life and work of the Belgian legal historian R.C. van Caenegem. It shows how van Caenegem’s work was influenced by his teachers, first of all François-Louis Ganshof, but also many others like Theodore Plucknett. Van Caenegem’s research was very diverse and addressed different groups of readers, so that most of them only know a fragment of his work. Van Caenegem learned from Ganshof’s mistakes. Unlike his master, van Caenegem took an interest in sociology and he did not hesitate to publish the grand overviews of history which Ganshof had stopped writing in the second half of his career. Many of van Caenegem’s books on English, medieval and legal history were a product of his teaching. Whereas the books for the students in Ghent, where van Caenegem was burdened by a heavy teaching load, presented a complete survey, the books for select groups of foreign students cherry-picked from legal history and took part in discussions on larger debates. Van Caenegem’s many articles offer a better insight into his personal evolution from a scholar who started out as a jurist, but very soon lost interest in dogmatic legal history and preferred to investigate the lawmakers instead of the law itself. As a historian, van Caenegem put the middle ages first, because in his opinion the middle ages laid the foundations for the modern rule of law. However, these ‘modern’ middle ages only started in the twelfth century. Although he claimed that the future of legal historical research lays in teamwork, van Caenegem himself remained an indvidualistic scholar.