understanding the law in a historical and comparative perspective 241 times just provided the seed of a new idea, or the terminology for developing it, as in the case of metus reverentialis or pollicitatio. Both illustrations also show that England is part of the European legal culture, or Western legal tradition.35 In the nineteenth century, Pothier’s Traité des obligations was read as much as Jean Domat’s Loix civiles dans leur ordre naturel, Hugo Grotius’ De jure belli ac pacis, and Samuel Pufendorf ’s De jure naturae et gentium. The latter three works had already been translated in the early eighteenth century; by 1750 Grotius’ masterpiece had seen six English editions. From the 1840s on there was a stream of German pandectist literature in translation: Savigny’s Obligationenrecht, Mackeldey’s Lehrbuch des Römischen Rechts, the general part of Thibaut’s System des Pandekten-Rechts. This was the literature that shaped the development of nineteenth-century English contract law.36 Sometimes, as in the case of the offer and acceptance model, doctrinal innovations took hold even more firmly than in Germany. Private law in Europe constitutes a tradition, and even the modern codifications, first in Prussia, France, and Austria, and then in most other continental states, are part of that tradition. Concerning the promise of reward (§ 657BGB), Franz Philipp von Kübel and the subsequent draftsmen of theBGBdecided to follow the ‘pollicitation theory’,38 while §397 BGBperpetuates the prevailing view among pandectist writers that the release from liability requires a contract with the debtor. Undue influence, again in line with pandectist literature, simply did not appear on the intellectual radar of those who drafted the BGB.Of course, in several instances, the draftsmen of the great codifications succeeded in settling long-standing doctrinal disputes. Very widely, however, the codifications did not contain ‘new’ law, as far as their substance was concerned. They 35 See Reinhard Zimmermann, ‘Der europäische Charakter des englischen Rechts: Historische Verbindungen zwischen civil law und common law’, Zeitschrift für Europäisches Privatrecht 1 (1993), 4–51 36 See Simpson 1975; David Ibbetson, A Historical Introduction to the Law of Obligations (Oxford: OUP, 1999), 202–244. 37 See Reinhard Zimmermann, ‘Codification’, in Wen-Yeu Wang (ed.), Codification in International Perspective (Cham: Springer, 2014) 11–43; Max Planck Encyclopedia 2012, 221–5 s.v. ‘Codification’ by Jan Schmidt. 38 For details, see Zimmermann 2005, 469–73.
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