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Memoirs of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America

Stephan Kuttner died in his home in Berkeley on August 12, 1996. It was the opening day of the Tenth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law in Syracuse, New York; the news was waiting as his colleagues, students, and friends assembled to carry on in the spirit and intentions of the work he had pioneered in the institution he had founded. Few scholars in modern medieval studies have made such an impact as Kuttner. By the clarity of his intellectual vision and the power and dedication of his manuscript studies he enlarged and strengthened the foundations of European history. He made it easier to understand the formative creativity of the medieval church. And his devotion to wife, family, students, and friends deeply impressed all who knew him. He inspired young people to renew one of the humane legacies of the Middle Ages to modern life. Stephan Georg Kuttner was born in Bonn, Germany, on March 24, 1907, into a family of Jewish ancestry. Brought up in the Lutheran observance, he was converted to Roman Catholicism in 1932. By then he had taken academic degrees in law, working at Frankfurt, Freiburg, and Berlin, where Ulrich Stutz was among his mentors. He received the J.U.D. at Berlin in 1930 with a thesis entitled "Die juristische Natur der falschen Beweisaussage." Focused on oaths and perjury, this work revealed the inadequacy of existing knowledge of the medieval underpinnings of modern jurisprudence. Beginning in 1930 Kuttner carried out manuscript research in Rome. His wife remembers how he returned from one of his journeys a changed man, won over by Italy even before his religious conversion. Married to Eva Illch in 1933, he promptly emigrated with her to Italy. In April 1934 Pope Pius XI appointed him Research Associate of the Vatican Library in charge of preparing a comprehensive corpus glossarum of medieval canon law. These were years of phenomenal productivity. Two major books (not counting his dissertation, as he did not, printed in Berlin in 1931) and seven substantial articles were completed before Kuttner turned thirty in 1937. He served as Associate Professor of the history of sources at the Pontifical Institute of the Two Laws at the Lateran from 1937 to 1940. In 1940 the Kuttners made their perilous ways to the United States. Having journeyed ahead on a Vatican passport, Stephan could only be reunited in Lisbon with Eva and their three children (including an infant) by the intervention of church officials. His first American appointment was as Visiting Professor (1940-42) in the Catholic University of America, where he served as Professor of the History of Canon Law (1942-64). Kuttner became the first T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of Roman Catholic Studies in Yale University (196470) and was subsequently Director of the Robbins Collection in Roman and Canon Law in the Law School of the University of California at Berkeley (1970-88), where he continued to live as Emeritus Professor of Law until his death. The groundwork for all he achieved, and in a larger sense for much of what his collaborators, students, and successors will achieve, was laid in a personal program of travel and labor in European manuscript collections that can only be called heroic. To locate, identify, and describe the unprinted collections, treatises, and glosses on Gratian and the decretals was virtually to create a new field of textual scholarship. To organize this field, Professor Kuttner founded the Institute of Medieval Canon Law in 1955, over which he presided for more than a quarter century, and launched the series of international congresses (LouvainBrussels, 1958), of which Syracuse (1996) was the tenth. A plan for a collaborative edition