Evgenia Vladimirovna Gutnova as a Historiographer of the English Medieval Parliament: The Anglo-American Research Perspective

This article considers the Anglo-American historiography of the early English parliament based on the extensive contribution and heritage of Evgenia Vladimirovna Gutnova (1914–1992), an outstanding Soviet and Russian medievalist and historiographer. E.V. Gutnova was a pioneer and groundbreaker in the historical and historiographical study of the English state and medieval parliamentarism during the 13th–14th centuries. Through her work, she expanded the pool of historiographical sources available to the scientific world. This vast collection included the fundamental works on the English constitutional history of the Middle Ages published by major historians of England and the USA in the middle of the 19th–the first half of the 20th centuries. She performed a detailed analysis of their concepts of the English medieval parliament by comparison of the Whig-liberal (W. Stubbs) and “critical” (F.W. Maitland) models in line with the Marxist methodologies of history. Here, based on the historical-genetic and -comparative methods, along with historical analysis and synthesis, E.V. Gutnova’s role in the study of the early English parliamentarism within the Anglo-American historiography was defined. The conclusion is made that she developed and introduced an innovative historiographical concept, which has become a widely used algorithm for research in the field of foreign history of historical science, with the Anglo-American historiography of early parliamentarism in England as its integral part.

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