William G. Wagner (1950–2021): Pioneering New Fields

Abstract

William G. Wagner (1950–2021)Pioneering New Fields Gregory L. Freeze The recent and premature passing of William G. Wagner (1950–2021) evoked deep sorrow among his colleagues, as is duly attested in the professional obituaries.1 This essay examines his contribution to the field, focusing on the three phases of his evolving scholarship: legal history, women’s history, and religious history. It includes his forthcoming monograph and draws upon his personal papers in the special collections at Williams College.2 After graduating from Haverford College in 1972 (with a B.A. in an independent major in Russian studies), Wagner studied at Oxford University, with a focus on Russian legal history, and earned a M.Phil. (1974) and doctorate in modern history (1981). In 1976, he published his first article on tsarist legal policies and four years later defended a doctoral thesis on tsarist law on property and inheritance after the judicial reform of 1864.3 The thesis [End Page 443] explores how the celebrated judicial reform of 1864 influenced civil law on property and inheritance, a sphere that affected far more people than the famous political cases. Wagner demonstrated that, in the tension between old law and new judiciary, the Cassation Department of the Senate—the supreme appellate court for civil law—gradually modified existing law through its activist interpretation. Deeply influenced by West European models, jurists expressed growing dissatisfaction with traditional patrimonial law, which they deemed to retard economic progress and growth of individual rights. Wagner came to a nuanced “pessimist” view of the reformability of the ancien régime: on the one hand, he recognized the incremental adjustments, while on the other he documented the inability to adopt substantial legislative reform. Only after 1907 did the government finally adopt some legislation to expand the proprietary powers of the owner. The thesis is a remarkable piece of research. It offers a systematic analysis of formal law and decisions by the Cassation Department, showing how a reformist judiciary labored—in the absence of new legislation—to modernize what the jurists regarded as an obsolescent corpus of civil law. The thesis is also comparative, emphasizing the radical difference between Russian and Western law on property and inheritance law. That comparative approach was de rigueur in postemancipation Russia among jurists, even those of a conservative bent.4 Finally, Wagner conducted massive research on the public debate about these legal questions, consulting not only legal journals and monographs but the general press (including newspapers like Novoe vremia). Indeed, the contemporary press accounts for the majority of titles in the 50-page bibliography. Because of strict limits on the length of a thesis at Oxford, Wagner could not include all this research in the final text and had to publish the missing chapter as a separate article.5 In the 1980s, Wagner showed a growing interest in a dimension that received only marginal treatment in his thesis—the impact of civil law on women and the family. Already in 1981, he delivered a paper at the national Slavic convention on “Women and Property and Inheritance Law in Russia” [End Page 444] and gradually took a growing interest in the field of women’s and family history.6 One important publication was “The Trojan Mare,” on women’s rights in the late imperial period.7 He also became active in the Association of Women in Slavic Studies, serving on the board in 1993–95.8 All that presaged a fundamental reconfiguration of his 1980 thesis when it was published in 1994 as Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia.9 As in the thesis, the monograph discusses the family and women in the first of two symmetrical parts. The argumentation for both parts follows that of the thesis, but the empirical data has been vastly expanded. Most striking is the inclusion of extensive quantitative data—29 tables on such topics as judicial personnel (education, social origin, landownership), the number of civil cases in district and higher courts, and divorces and separation. Moreover, Wagner now made extensive use of the central archives, the goal being to determine why the ancien régime had such difficulty adopting new legislation. Wagner offered a close analysis of...