Carl Stephenson

Background

Carl was born on August 10, 1886 in Fayette, Indiana, United States, the son of Andrew and Julia Root Stephenson.

Education

His father taught at DePauw University, where Stephenson took the A. B. in 1907 and the A. M. in 1908. Like his father, he then studied history at Harvard, receiving the Ph. D. in 1914.

The most important event in Stephenson's development occurred in 1924, when he was awarded a Commission for Relief in Belgium fellowship to study at the University of Ghent with Henri Pirenne, the medieval social and economic historian.

Career

After teaching at Harvard (1909 - 1912), the University of Arkansas (1912 - 1913), Princeton (1913 - 1915), and Washington University, St. Louis (1915 - 1920), Stephenson taught at the University of Wisconsin from 1920 to 1930, rising from assistant to full professor.

Stephenson's training as a medievalist began at Harvard in the research seminar of Charles Gross, under whom he began working on the history of the town in medieval England. After Gross's death, Charles Homer Haskins stimulated his interests in Continental urban history.

In the ensuing social revolution, trading settlements became mercantile communities, with a way of life and attitude toward law and government that differentiated them from the surrounding rural society with its peasantry subject to a landed aristocracy. Stephenson set out to apply this model to England.

In the remainder of his career Stephenson produced no other research monograph, yet his teaching of the whole range of medieval history led to two successful textbooks - Mediaeval History (1935), which went into a fourth edition in 1962, and A Brief Survey of Mediaeval History (1941).

With Frederick G. Marcham, his colleague at Cornell, he translated and edited Sources of English Constitutional History: A Selection of Documents From A. D. 600 to the Present (1937), which remains the standard one-volume collection in American universities.

Stephenson's interests also included the development of lordship and feudal institutions in the early Middle Ages.

His interpretative study Mediaeval Feudalism (1942) was a stimulating exposition and was favorably received. Scholarship, however, has followed different directions; and specialists no longer accept his stress on the role of cavalry warfare.

In his articles on lordship in Anglo-Saxon England and on aspects of the Domesday Book, he conveyed a refreshing skepticism about current notions of the origins of medieval society, foreshadowing the arguments developed by younger English scholars beginning in the late 1950's.

In 1930 he became professor of history at Cornell University, retiring as professor emeritus in 1954. He died in Ithaca three months later.

Achievements

• Carl Stephenson did his best work on those institutions found in medieval Europe between the Loire and the Rhine. For fifteen years Carl Stephenson regularly published articles in the leading historical journals of America, England, Belgium, and France and established himself as an authority on taxation, representative assemblies, and the origin of urban institutions. His most mature work - Borough and Town, where he combined his research with scholarly methods developed on the Continent to show that the English borough was not an insular peculiarity but that it was like its continental counterpart in origin and constitution.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Mediaeval Feudalism

    ("In the following pages I have tried to explain, as simpl...)

  • Sources of English Constitutional History: A Selection of Documents From A.D. 600 to the Present

    (Britain's unwritten constitution depends upon a long succ...)

  • Mediaeval Feudalism

    (1942 Cornell University Press NY. Blue hardcover with gol...)

  • Die Krone der Schöpfung

    (Strong signs of use!)

  • Medieval Feudalism

    (Trade Paperback book)

  • Medieval History
  • Mediavel Feudalism
  • Sources of English Constitutional History: v. 2
  • Mediaeval Feudalism
  • A brief survey of mediaeval Europe, (Harper's historical series, under the editorship of G.S Ford)
  • Mediaeval Institutions: Selected Essays
  • Borough and Town: A Study of Urban Origins in England
  • Leiningens Kampf mit den Ameisen
  • Mediaeval History Europe From the Second

Views

He emphasized the crucial role of the Norman Conquest in English urban development. Stephenson showed courage in venturing into a field that the learned English medievalist James Tait had claimed for his own, and he displayed imagination in attempting to place English urban origins within a Continental framework.

Connections

He married Olive Elizabeth Diall on September 15, 1915; they had two sons.

Father:

Andrew Stephenson

Mother:

Julia Root Stephenson

collaborator:

Siegfried Rietschel

Wife:

Olive Elizabeth Diall

colleague:

Frederick G. Marcham