The English Historical Review

Wiedemann, Benedict G E

2018 The English Historical Review

doi: 10.1093/ehr/cey104

Recent approaches to twelfth-century papal finance have drawn a distinction between ‘voluntary’ gifts to the pope and the prescribed dues which clergy and laity across Europe were legally bound to pay. Such a distinction is often unhelpful; for both types of income, the onus and agency tended to be on the part of the payers themselves: most papal income was in fact voluntary. This had an effect on how income and expenditure were recorded in Rome. Since it was the payer who decided when to send money to the Curia, the papal financial administration had no consistent expectations of what their income might be. Consequently an itemised record of income was not a necessity in the later twelfth century. On the other hand, by the end of the twelfth century expenditure was being recorded in detail at the Curia: the Gesta of Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) includes a gift-list which has clearly been culled from a record of expenditure. As well as giving an insight into methods of accounting, this gift-list allows us to speculate about what forms—coins, fabrics, chalices—papal income took. Overall the character of papal finance is dissimilar to that of contemporary European monarchies because it depended to a greater extent on the will of the many people across Europe who chose to go to Rome.

Cohen, Paul

2018 The English Historical Review

doi: 10.1093/ehr/cey140

This article proposes a novel interpretation of printed religious polemic in the context of European religious struggle in the Age of Reformations. While recent scholarship has underscored the virulence with which controversialists waged their doctrinal debates, I argue that such work has not yet acknowledged the structuring, autonomous role played by honour in religious polemic. To this end, I consider the case of Guillaume de Reboul, a Protestant-turned-Catholic polemicist who left France to take up service in the Roman Curia, before his arrest and execution under mysterious circumstances. First, I argue that the vocabularies of honour and calumny with which polemicists such as Reboul fashioned their texts played a role at least as important as that of theology, providing the motors which drove debates forward and many of the rules of the polemical game. Secondly, I consider Reboul’s writings as tactical moves in a broader strategy of personal, professional and confessional advancement. As Reboul’s case illustrates, writing was only one weapon among many in the polemical arsenal, and such debates represented forms of social struggle that could entail considerably more dangerous forms of conflict. Thirdly, I reconstruct the ecclesiastical, political and geopolitical landscapes which made a career like Reboul’s possible—and which made it possible to put authors like him to death when expedient. Fourthly, I consider how Reboul and his opponents’ printed appeals conjured into being a reading public. I argue that the culture of honour represented a defining feature of the early modern public sphere.

Butrón Prida, Gonzalo

2018 The English Historical Review

doi: 10.1093/ehr/cey138

In 1820, the reinstatement of the Constitution of 1812 placed Spain at the head of the international political agenda, since it presented the first challenge to the status quo defined at the Congress of Vienna. During the following years, the great powers increased the pressure exerted on Spain’s Liberal regime, shifting from diplomatic pressure to the eventual French military intervention in 1823, which ruined hopes of a liberal political efflorescence in Europe. The object of this article is to systematise knowledge about Spain’s foreign policy during the so-called Liberal Triennium (1820–23), and to analyse its progress from an initial idealism, associated with prevailing Romanticism, to ultimate isolationism. This was a result of a lack of resources and also of inconsistency in Spain’s foreign policy, at a time when a well-defined international plan might have changed the fate of Spanish Liberalism. The article also pays special attention to the diplomatic relations between Spain and Great Britain, the only great power that did not pursue the marked hostility towards Spanish Liberalism displayed by the continental powers after 1820. Accordingly, most of the hopes of an increasingly besieged Liberal Spain were placed on Britain’s good offices and support.

Owens, Edward

2018 The English Historical Review

doi: 10.1093/ehr/cey092

This essay examines the little-studied 1934 royal wedding of Prince George, Duke of Kent, the youngest surviving son of George V and the famously glamorous Princess Marina of Greece to argue that the British media projected this event on a scale, and in ways, never seen before. More than on any previous occasion it was a royal event driven by intimate publicity, and by a coterie of courtiers, clerics and newsmen who were committed to elevating a ‘family monarchy’ as the emotional centre-point of national life. I suggest that this celebration of royal domesticity engendered popular support for the House of Windsor in a period characterised by political turbulence at home and abroad. In this vein, I argue that social elites orchestrated royal family events as mass mediated nation-building exercises designed to create loyal subjects to the Crown, and that new technologies transformed how media audiences and royalty interacted with one another.

Rieger, Bernhard

2018 The English Historical Review

doi: 10.1093/ehr/cey087

Faced with persistently high unemployment in the first half of the 1980s, the Conservative government fundamentally recast the social policies directed at those who were out of work. Rather than regarding them as victims of economic problems beyond their control, Thatcher and her allies came to view the unemployed themselves as an economic problem because they allegedly lacked sufficient motivation to take up paid employment. In response, the government implemented measures that required the unemployed to play a more active role in changing their employment status. In particular, it designed new disciplinarian welfare regulations to force the unemployed onto the labour market irrespective of the incomes that available positions offered. Drawing on the national press, memoirs, parliamentary debates and official archival records, this article explores the motivations behind the gradual implementation of changes in social policy that redefined the social citizenship of millions of Britons by exposing those out work to market mechanisms. In addition to espousing market rationales, Thatcher pursued a culturally conservative project of moral reform that aimed to reinvigorate the virtues of hard work, thrift, and self-dependence. This neoliberal welfare regime had significant material consequences because it intentionally promoted low-wage labour, thereby stoking rising social inequality in Britain in the Eighties.

Rapoport, Yossef

2018 The English Historical Review

doi: 10.1093/ehr/cey072

The aim of this volume, summed up in the concluding remarks by Alan Walmsley, is to highlight the importance of looking at the entirety of rural landscapes—not just the sites with tangible remains but also the wide spaces in between. By doing so, what was considered barren becomes visible. For the world of Islam, such a perspective is crucial, given the perceived importance of the desert and of transhumant societies in Islamic history. But it is also a task that is beyond any one discipline. The texts available to historians have a marked urban bias, and ethnography distorts the past. It is therefore the archaeologists who are taking the lead, as they do in this volume, edited by Stephen McPhillips and Paul D. Wordsworth, which contains a series of case-studies focusing on small settlements and agricultural and transhumant communities from the Islamic Middle East in the medieval and the early modern periods. One theme highlighted in this volume is that of desert sites that rely on networks of connectivity, without a hinterland of their own. This includes the Umayyad site of Qasr Mushash in Transjordan, where water facilities are out of proportion to the residential area, indicating that it must have served as a halting place for travellers, part of an east–west itinerary of sites with outstanding hydraulic installations. In Afghanistan, the architectural legacy of the twelfth-century Ghurid dynasty consists of remote mountain fortifications and religious monuments along strategic routes and key grazing areas. Such a legacy is linked with the mobile nature of Ghurid society as a whole and with the mobility of the Ghurid court in particular. In the Karakum Desert, stopping places are marked by undated mud-brick structures in areas with no local water supply. In the Introduction, Tony Wilkinson suggests that these three examples indicate a broader pattern, driven by the unique interconnectivity of the pre-modern Islamic world. The other contributions in the volume are wide-ranging, although mostly with a decidedly archaeological bent. Two contributions on the ecology and archaeology of Qatar— including a reconstruction of fishing methods from the zooarchaeological finds in a pearl-fishing site—are surely an important addition to the study of sites there. There are also a couple of studies of medieval and early modern water installations in Syria, a study of a late medieval copper-mining site in southern Transjordan and localised ceramic production in the Yemen. From a historian’s point of view, however, the two most interesting chapters here are those which attempt a synthesis of historical and archaeological data. Both deal with Transjordan in the later medieval period, under the Ayyubids and the Mamluks. In what is likely to become a seminal work on husbandry in the medieval Middle East, Robin M. Brown surveys the faunal assemblage data of multiple sites, illustrating regional patterns of animal exploitation and quantitative distribution of major food-animal remains. Brown shows that sheep and goat were the most common meat source; most females were retained on site for breeding, and perhaps milk-production, with periodic culling for meat production and for maintaining optimal herd size. The consumption of goat became more common towards the end of the Middle Ages, and very widespread by the Ottoman period, suggesting a shift from pasturage to weeds and expansion of grazing into more arid regions. The overall conclusion by Brown is that livestock production undertaken by these mixed farming communities was primarily directed at maintaining long-term, low-risk household subsistence. This goes against much earlier scholarship, where market-driven production of meat for non-producers is generally assumed. The discussion of livestock production is complemented by a second important chapter, by Bethany Walker, who develops a model of ‘liquid landscapes’ to explain the widespread abandonment of sites in late medieval Transjordan. The archaeological evidence from this area shows that a great number of villages and towns were deserted during the second half of the fourteenth century and especially during the fifteenth century. They were replaced by new, smaller and more ephemeral sites in new ecological zones, accompanied by a shift from market-based to subsistence agriculture. While scholarship usually views this process as a symptom of decline, Walker asks what this shift meant for the rural communities themselves. What we see here, she argues on the basis of both historical texts and archaeological data, is settlement dispersal, with larger towns and villages abandoned because the state withdrew its control over the agricultural regime, in particular sugar production. This may in fact have brought some degree of local prosperity, and no demographic decline. Walker views abandonment of sites as a normative pattern of rural migration, a result of collective decision by a village-qua-clan unit, which does not relinquish contact with its former ‘homeland’. Her interpretation is complemented by Jennie Bradbury’s innovative chapter on rural burial sites, a topic that has rarely been studied before. She notes that settled Bedouin communities still choose to bury their dead in tribal burial lands away from their village, often around prominent landmarks. The burial sites maintain real or imagined connections with these locales, meaning that abandonment and migration do not sever ties with the past. These practices appear to go against the injunctions of Islamic law, yet should not be labelled as ‘folk’ Islam. They are, in fact, meaningful and deliberate adaptations of Islamic teachings to the rural Islamic landscape. © Oxford University Press 2018. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Childs, Wendy R

2018 The English Historical Review

doi: 10.1093/ehr/cey071

This is an important volume, not only for those already interested in fishery history, but for those interested in the development of commercial activity in the Middle Ages and in the social history of diet. It provides fascinating detail, interesting statistics (where available) and wide-ranging arguments by experts in full command of their material. It is (as its editors, James H. Barrett and David C. Orton, rightly say) a ground-breaking volume in its combination of archaeological and documentary evidence and the new application of stable isotope analysis to archaeological deposits. Together these sources provide evidence for a convincing hypothesis on the chronology of fishing and fish consumption spanning over a thousand years, between c.500 and c.1550, around the northern seas (north Atlantic, Irish, North and Baltic Seas). Fish has long been a part of the human diet, but (as the contributors to this volume demonstrate) marine fish became a significant dietary element for most of northern Europe only in the high and later Middle Ages. In the early period, consumption was mainly of freshwater fish by elites and urban societies; sea-fish bones are rare deposits on archaeological sites for this period, except in Scandinavia. The evidence suggests that consumption of sea fish, especially of herring, increased in the long eighth century, intensified c.850 to c.1050 at varying speeds (quite quickly in England, more slowly in the Netherlands and Poland, not yet in Estonia), and surged in the high Middle Ages, with increasing supplies of cod. Catches probably peaked c.1300, and preserved herring and cod contributed to long-range trade in high-bulk, low-value goods. This development was part of the great economic expansion of Europe at this time, with its increasing demand for food, growing facilities for regular international trade and greater availability of capital. The risks, investment and effort of sea fishing became worthwhile. There were, of course, regional variations across northern Europe in the speed of change, types of fish traded and organisation, but it seems clear that, overall, growth in the consumption of sea fish occurred throughout northern Europe. The volume contains much for British historians: more than half of the chapters deal directly with British evidence; several others deal with areas in direct contact with England; and the remainder provide valuable context to show how England’s experience compared with the wider northern European pattern. The volume opens with James Barrett’s lucid introduction explaining the methodologies of the various disciplines, the geographical and environmental contexts, and the central themes. He also raises interesting supplementary questions, such as the possible role of state formation and Christian rituals as drivers in the expansion, and whether the shift to sea fish ad c.1000 was ‘revolutionary’. The introduction is followed by nineteen specialist chapters divided into two sections, ‘Perspectives from History and Settlement Archaeology’ and ‘Perspectives from Zooarchaeology and Stable Isotope Analysis’. In the first section, the chapters most immediately relevant to British developments are by Maryanne Kowaleski, exploring the origins of English commercial fishing; Mark Gardiner on English fishing and trade in Icelandic waters; Colin Breen on fishing in Ireland; and Alison Locker on the declining use of preserved fish in the post-medieval period. Chapters by Poul Holm (fishing in the western Baltic), Arnved Nedkvitne (the Norwegian stockfish trade), Helge Sørheim (Norwegian fisheries and techniques), Alf Ragnar Nielssen (cod fishing settlements in northern Norway) and Orri Vésteinsson (the role of fishing in Icelandic life) are also directly relevant, as they relate to places where England regularly fished and traded. In the second section, chapters focus on the archaeological evidence of fish bones, which show the types and sizes of fish consumed, methods of preservation and (through the recently available stable isotope analysis of protein extracted from the bones) their approximate geographical origin and role in human diet. The authors in this section all write with great clarity and deserve historians’ gratitude for making their methodologies understandable to non-specialists. The first four chapters range widely: Lembi Lõugas examines Viking sites in the western Baltic and medieval sites in Estonia; Daniel Makowiecki, David C. Orton and James H. Barrett consider changes in Poland; Inge Bødker Enghoff surveys Danish activity from prehistory to the sixteenth century; and Wim Van Neer and Anton Ervynck examine sea-fish consumption in inland Flanders. All find a similar trajectory, although at different speeds. Of the following six chapters, five focus on British sites. Jennifer Harland, Andrew K.G. Jones, David C. Orton and James H. Barrett revisit the rich zooarchaeology data from York, and David C. Orton, Alison Locker, James Morris and James H. Barrett examine the cod remains in London. In both cities butchery techniques and stable isotope analysis point to the consumption of mainly local (North Sea) fish, supplemented by Arctic imports. Rebecca Russell compares two high-status Anglo-Saxon sites (which show a wide selection of fish) with mainly herring deposits in early towns, and Sheila Hamilton Dyer reviews data for medieval Ireland. Anne Karin Hufthammer’s survey of Norway AD 80–1400 provides a contrasting chapter, and, in a final chapter, Gundula Müldner discusses the stable isotope analysis of human bones in medieval Britain. She emphasises that the use of this technique for this purpose is still in its early stage, but preliminary results confirm the archaeological and documentary evidence, showing a significant shift towards consumption of marine fish in the medieval period, although these remained a relatively minor part of total diet. In a masterly conclusion, James Barrett draws the volume together, analysing each chapter in detail, providing a scholarly, nuanced discussion of the broad convergence they show, drawing attention to some contrasting interpretations and pointing to areas for further research. No review can do sufficient justice to all the contributors in such a richly informative and rewarding book. As its editors say, it may not be a definitive volume, but it is an excellent, eminently clear synthesis of current research, demonstrating how well different disciplines, different types of evidence and new scientific techniques can complement and challenge each other, and provide stimulating encouragement to further research. © Oxford University Press 2018. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Boulton, Jeremy

2018 The English Historical Review

doi: 10.1093/ehr/cey075

This book represents the fruits of a four-decade-long interest in the history of the dead from one of our leading cultural historians. It is about how the dead were cared for, treated, memorialised and recorded. Thomas Laqueur’s theme is why the dead mattered in history and the part they played in the making of the modern world. His is an interdisciplinary study, drawing on literature, history, law, anthropology, sociology, psychology, theology and medicine—to name but a few. The book is wide-ranging in other senses: although its temporal focus is the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it deploys evidence from the dawn of time to the present day. Its geographical scope is also considerable: despite being (mostly) a study of the British dead, there is material here from Europe, America and the wider world. It is highly erudite: 557 pages of prose are reinforced by 120 pages of footnotes, many of which take the form of scholarly vignettes and commentary. Lastly, this is a work of enormous humanity, particularly in those parts of the book devoted to the tragedies of the twentieth century. This book, in sum, is a masterpiece in every sense of the word. It comes in four parts. The first, ‘The Deep Time of the Dead’, explores the human urge to mark places of burial and give corpses special treatment. Christianity developed a new ‘necrogeography’ (one of the many necro-words encountered) wherein corpses were interred in, or adjacent to, churches. Human remains became relics with special spiritual power and meaning. This sacred Christian necrogeography survived the English Reformation: most Protestants were buried east–west, in consecrated ground, with the wealthy inside the church. This regime was overthrown in the nineteenth century when new cemeteries broke the link between parish church and deceased parishioners—to create ‘new memorial communities, to make a new civic order’ as part of the new industrialised, capitalised world (p. 93). The second part, ‘Places of the Dead’, explores further how the ‘old regime’ of churchyard interment gave way to the ‘cosmopolitan necrogeography’ (p. 111) of the cemetery. A churchyard was ‘an idealised community in deep time’ (p. 114). Only a few dissenting groups rejected the traditional orientation of the corpse, or buried their dead in unconsecrated ground. The peripheral (such as the unbaptised) were interred in unfashionable parts of the churchyard, or (in the case of suicides) expelled altogether. Churchyards were, in the eighteenth century, increasingly romanticised and eulogised. This regime was, however, increasingly under threat. In part, it was undermined by those who took up space by erecting memorial stones or burying the dead in iron or lead-lined coffins. It was also threatened by the growth of religious dissent. Reactionary clerics used their monopoly over churchyards to refuse to bury (or read the burial service for) those outside the Anglican communion. Bitter local disputes at the end of the eighteenth and in the nineteenth century increased demand for religiously neutral burial spaces. Chapter Five is pivotal, and tells the (familiar) story of the development of large-scale urban cemeteries—the new regime of the dead. Another reason these were needed was growing fear of the polluting power of the dead, who supposedly produced lethal effluvia. The resulting moral panic had (as Laqueur brilliantly points out) little scientific foundation, but it served to bring interment under the supervision of public health officials. The cultural impact of the new cemeteries owed a lot, too, to new fashions in design and architecture drawing on ancient notions of Arcadia and Elysium. Above all, the French cemetery of Père Lachaise (1804) was ‘ground zero’ (the template) for the new necrogeography. Nineteenth-century cemeteries thus took the form of landscaped gardens or parks, vanguards of modernity and progress, providing acres of space to be sold or rented out. Often divided into consecrated or unconsecrated ground, they enabled those with cash to erect permanent memorials in a bewildering range of architectural styles. The third part of the book investigates the ‘Names of the Dead’. The first chapter surveys lists of the dead drawn up in the ancient world for military purposes and, in medieval Britain, largely for spiritual ones. The great age of ‘necronominalism’, however, began in the sixteenth century with the development of the nation state, which produced parish registers and other attempts to record the names of citizens. The need to record and commemorate the dead by name, however, reached its real fruition in the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries, as mass slaughter demanded remembrance and recording on an unparalleled scale. Here the author describes movingly the creation of an ‘empire of the dead’: the names of over a million dead soldiers of the British Empire engraved on gravestones and monuments after the First World War. The fourth part of the book deals with the rise of cremation in the 1870s. New industrial techniques were used to dispose of corpses seen increasingly as a biological threat, and less as a repository of religious and spiritual beliefs. Any truly important book will provoke objections and promote further lines of enquiry. In this case, the author’s view can be rather metrocentric, and arguably places too much weight on the role played by new large-scale urban cemeteries: until well into the nineteenth century, traditional churchyards and burial grounds remained an important means of interring the dead even in rapidly industrialising cities such as Manchester and Sheffield. Keith Snell has shown recently, too, that many rural cemeteries opened in Victorian England. Furthermore, historically transient keepsakes and heirlooms worn on the person or kept in homes were (and surely still are) far more potent sources of memory than the place where the dead end up. In fact, few British diaries and autobiographies mention visiting the graves of dead relatives. How common was this practice in the past—how common is it today? Perhaps the dead do not matter as much as the author thinks? One of the great strengths of this wonderful book is that such questions remain open. © Oxford University Press 2018. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

MacCarron, Máirín

2018 The English Historical Review

doi: 10.1093/ehr/cey079

Niamh Wycherley’s monograph study assesses the evidence for the cult of relics in early medieval Ireland by examining literary sources, linguistics and archaeological finds from approximately the fifth to ninth centuries. The majority of the sources and consequently most emphasis relates to developments in the seventh- and eighth-century Church, a famously dynamic period in Irish history. In the book’s six chapters, she briefly sketches the history of relic culture in the world of Late Antiquity (ch. 1), outlines the origins of the cult of relics in Ireland (ch. 2), discusses the importance of translatio (translations) in relic culture (ch. 3), the role of relics in church consecrations (ch. 4), the varied uses of relics (ch. 5) and the link between relics and identity which had implications for power and control in early medieval Ireland (ch. 6). She endeavours to associate relic culture in Ireland with broader trends in European Christianity; the presentation of the material, including associating early medieval practices with ‘relic’ cultures of different types in the modern world, lends accessibility to the work. Wycherley’s broad knowledge of the source material is apparent throughout, and her discussion of the varied terminology applied to relics (helpfully presented in an appendix) will be useful for subsequent scholarship on this topic. The attention paid to recent developments in Irish archaeology is commendable, especially when physical remains challenge the (often scanty) written evidence, and underlines that historians must be cautious when extrapolating general trends from limited sources. She also sets out to integrate the cult of relics into discussions of developments in wider society, such as the promulgation of law codes. The book succeeds in demonstrating how widely accepted relic culture was in early medieval Ireland, and Wycherley engagingly associates attitudes to patron saints with earlier reverence for ancestors indicating continuity between early medieval and pre-Christian Ireland in what would appear to be an ostensibly Christian practice. Most of the book is based on written evidence, and several sources repeatedly appear as witnesses to different aspects of relic culture. The Patrician material is clearly significant in understanding Irish attitudes to relics, not least because Armagh was without Patrick’s body and resorted to promoting other types of relics in bolstering its claims to primacy in the Irish Church. Their inventive approach is apparent in sources such as the Book of the Angel, and Wycherley carefully explicates the complex nature of relic veneration in Armagh. However, while she clearly knows the source material, insufficient attention is paid to these sources’ context: for example, when looking to texts such as the Book of the Angel (e.g. p. 169) or the later Tripartite Life of Patrick (first introduced on p. 77), considering when and why they were written is essential to understanding the extent to which they serve as witnesses to specific cases rather than widespread trends. This uncritical approach to textual sources is heightened when the Irish annals are introduced. The annals are preserved in a range of later manuscripts, such as the Annals of Ulster, Annals of Tigernach, Chronicum Scotorum and others, all of which post-date the early medieval period: indeed, the latest witness, the Annals of the Four Masters, was compiled in the seventeenth century, though this is never mentioned when it is cited here as evidence for the eighth and ninth centuries (e.g. pp. 86, 98, 165, 184). Similarly, when these sources disagree (for example, the Annals of Inisfallen and the Annals of Ulster provide conflicting information for the imposition of Emly’s law on Munster), this is introduced without comment (pp. 148–9). There is a brief attempt to consider the nature of the annals in the Appendix, ‘Hiberno-Latin: (B) martyr’ (pp. 200–202). In asserting that there is a distinction in the terms used for martyrs in the seventh and eighth centuries, the reader is told that ‘scholarly work’ (p. 201) shows a discernible shift in annal entries in this period, and the footnote refers to A.P. Smyth, ‘The Earliest Irish Annals: their first contemporary entries, and the earliest centres of recording’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, C lxxii(1972), and the opening of Nicholas Evans, The Past and the Present in Medieval Irish Chronicles (2010), pp. 1–6 (p. 202, note 20). This ignores much recent scholarship on the origin, provenance and composition of the annals—for example, that of Thomas Charles-Edwards and Daniel P. Mc Carthy, to name but two—and inaccurately implies a scholarly consensus where there is none. While Wycherley may have wanted to avoid getting mired in such debates, neglecting contextual considerations weakens the book’s argument. The wide-ranging nature of this study allows for a broader assessment of relic culture than has previously been possible: the concerns expressed here notwithstanding, Wycherley’s multidisciplinary approach presents a nuanced interpretation of the nature and practice of the cult of relics in early medieval Ireland. © Oxford University Press 2018. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Gondek, Meggen M

2018 The English Historical Review

doi: 10.1093/ehr/cey076

This recent addition to the impressive Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture focuses on the relatively tight geographic region of the historic county of Nottinghamshire. The structure reflects the CASSS standard of introductory chapters covering earlier research; geology; historical background; a discussion of key styles and motifs of ornament; general overviews of monument types and groupings; and a discussion bringing various strands together, before the presentation of the detailed catalogue and photographic illustrations. Catalogue entries follow the standard CASSS format, including detailed monument descriptions and specific discussion on art historical context. Paul Everson and David Stocker’s Nottinghamshire volume includes detailed catalogue entries for thirty-two monuments from twenty-two sites (with a further sixty-seven more briefly listed in an appendix, as they post-date the Anglo-Saxon period). When first opening the volume, it is perhaps advisable for those not already well versed in the sculpture of Nottinghamshire to begin ‘at the back’ and peruse through the catalogue entries and photographs first. This would help reinforce the range and challenging conditions of the monuments discussed before the detail of the authors’ text is attempted. The volume includes high-profile monuments such as Stapleford no. 1, a tall heavily carved round-shaft type, for which the authors develop new and important strands of argument on its date (early? ninth century) and iconographic content with a consideration of its materiality (a hard to carve gritstone), monumentality (pp. 189–95) and landscape situation near a ford in the river (p. 76). The volume also champions the smaller, less well-studied and new fragments from South Leverton, including a cross-shaft fragment and fragment of stone rood (pp. 74–5; 170–8), which help to flesh out the Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical and lordly landscape. The same authors produced the CASSS volume for Lincolnshire (1999) and there is a steady thread of analysis that offers comparative insights. This is particularly true for the discussion (ch. 4) on style and ornament and in the overview on monument types and groups (ch. 5), where useful comparative drawings of ‘Mid-Kesteven Grave Covers’ are provided across Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. Chapter Five in general is an admirable effort to showcase a more holistic over a regional approach that sometimes results from the CASSS use of modern boundaries. There are some production issues with graphics that are a shame, given the generally high standard of illustration. Figure 1 contains large black boxes obscuring text, and rivers are not labelled. Figure 13 (p. 84) depicts a map with shading, but no key for clarity. The methodological statement (p. 10) highlights the impressive fieldwork conducted by the authors, but also notes that not all fragments of pre-Conquest sculpture in Nottinghamshire were included. This somewhat undermines the objective of a comprehensive sculpture catalogue; some additional information and justification for how sites were excluded (and a list at least of those excluded) would have been useful for future researchers. I would have preferred the final introductory chapter (ch. 8) on ‘overlap and continuing tradition’ to precede the conclusions or be summarised elsewhere. This would leave Chapter Seven on conclusions, which offers dense discussion and analysis, to bring the authors’ narrative text to a close and a chance to end with a punchier finale. As with most cataloguing ventures, not every lead can be followed, and the task is now for scholars to pick up the threads and continue to challenge and unpick the stories of the stones in this region. Everson and Stocker have shown how research which is alive to the sense of deep investment by the Anglo-Saxons in stones and their iconography, materiality and landscape contexts can offer insight into land organisation, social context and change. They have been able to weave sculpture fragments into multi-stranded arguments for new ecclesiastical sites. They have helped to break down presumptions about the Nottinghamshire region based on previous cherry-picking of sculpture and its narratives and highlighted the power of interdisciplinary investigation for lesser-known or less artistically impressive monuments. The volume stands as a key acquisition for scholarly libraries. © Oxford University Press 2018. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Vessey, M

2018 The English Historical Review

doi: 10.1093/ehr/cey077

The editors of this volume (which launches a series on ‘Late Antique and Early Medieval Iberia’), Andrew Fear and Jamie Wood, have gathered together nine essays, several originally papers for a one-day workshop at the Instituto Cervantes in Manchester in 2013, others commissioned, ‘to create [as Paul Fouracre writes in the preface] the first English-language collected volume on Isidore’. That such a claim seems worth staking in an age when academics of all nationalities routinely publish in English is a symptom of the special isolation of the Isidorian contingent. Monuments of scholarship on Isidore have so far appeared either in Latin (W.M. Lindsay’s 1911 Oxford edition of the Etymologiae) or under German auspices (C.H. Beeson’s 1913 Isidorstudien). In the second half of the last century, only Jocelyn Hillgarth stood shoulder to shoulder with such giants as Jacques Fontaine and Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz. Now we have a splendid annotated English translation of the Etymologies by Stephen A. Barney and others (2006), plus John Henderson’s The Medieval World of Isidore: Truth from Words (2007), a maverick classicist’s maddeningly stylish sortie into post-classical territory. The hub for the present volume is the University of Manchester, where the combined presence of Andrew Fear and Paul Fouracre has encouraged the kind of trafficking between classical, late antique and early medieval worlds that the patron saint of the internet invites. A page or two of information on contributors could have revealed the larger geography of these new Isidorian studies in English, the space easily spared if repetitive bibliographies had been consolidated. A book on this scale can offer only a taste of its subject, and the editors forestall unreasonable hopes. Even so, not all contributions earn their place. Two out of nine are undermined by flagrant mistranslations of Latin. (Was the collection refereed? The copy-editing has failed to ensure accuracy of transcription or consistency of bibliographical style. The better-argued papers are also the more cleanly presented. If a university press is merely an aggregator, why not publish on the internet?) The payload of the volume consists of a pair of finely calibrated studies of Isidore’s world-view, a tantalising account of the earliest posthumous profiling of his authorial persona and œuvre, two disabused and substantive accounts of how his works were initially received outside Spain, and the description of a Carolingian homiliary in which one of them was heavily excerpted. The duet of Mary Beagon’s ‘Isidore and Pliny [the Elder] on Human and Human-Instigated Anomaly’ and Andrew Fear’s ‘Isidore and De Natura Rerum’ confirms the Etymologist as a dogged adversary of such tricks of a divinely fashioned nature as might defy his universal hermeneutics. Although ‘a deus ludens is not an impossibility’, Beagon concludes, ‘it would make the task of revealing an overall logic in the world’s verbal manifestation much more difficult’ (p. 72). Contra Fontaine, Fear convincingly shows how Isidore ‘Christianised’ nature, subordinating Lucretius as an authority to the Church Fathers. (Fontaine’s special pleading for Isidore’s ‘classical culture’ and his respect for the autonomy of secular learning now looks like the reflex of an era when most classicists would not have given this author the time of day.) A cumbrous title (‘The Politics of History-Writing: Problematizing the Historiographical Origins of Isidore of Seville in Early Medieval Hispania’) conceals a thumbnail account of what appears to be a highly original doctoral thesis by Michael J. Kelly on competing ‘first-generational representations’ or ‘written memor[ies]’ of Isidore (p. 93). A judicious piece by Marina Smyth (‘Isidorian Texts in Seventh-Century Ireland’) finds evidence for the circulation of several of the writer’s works, ‘including at least one version of the Etymologiae’ (p. 125). Following Michael Lapidge’s numbering of the Etymologiae, De natura rerum, Synonyma and De ecclesiasticis officiis among the ‘staple patristic texts’ of a typical Anglo-Saxon library, Claudia Di Sciacca explores the role of the Synonyma as a source for the author of the Vita s. Guthlaci, who followed Aldhelm of Malmesbury in realising the possibilities of the stilus ysydorianus (‘Isidore of Seville in Anglo-Saxon England’). Melissa Markauskas brings the volume home to Manchester with an analysis of the extensive use silently made of Isidore’s De ortu et obitu patrum, an account of the lives and deaths of select biblical figures, in a homiliary written at Luxeuil and now in the John Rylands Library (‘Rylands Ms Latin 12: A Carolingian Example of Isidore’s Reception into the Patristic Canon’). © Oxford University Press 2018. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Rembold, I

2018 The English Historical Review

doi: 10.1093/ehr/cey078

Prague, Archiv Pražského hradu, MS. O. 83, more commonly known as the Prague Sacramentary, forms the subject of this tightly focused volume, edited by Maximilian Diesenberger, Rob Meens and Els Rose. This manuscript has long been of interest to historians, palaeographers, liturgical scholars and linguists alike; this volume collects together such interdisciplinary perspectives to form a rounded view of this remarkable historical artefact. This microhistorical focus pays clear dividends, evoking not only the context in which the Prague Sacramentary was produced in late eighth-century Bavaria, but also wider trends, for example in the liturgy, early Caroline minuscule and the written forms of Old High German. The Prague Sacramentary is a composite work. The first part of the manuscript consists of a sacramentary and Mass lectionary; the second part, which was produced in the same scriptorium and bound to the first part soon after its composition, includes Theodore of Canterbury’s penitential and Gregory the Great’s Libellus responsionum. Subsequent additions include a list of names (notable for its unique inclusion of Pippin the Hunchback as ‘Pippinus rex’), a sermon (the so-called De creatione mundi) and a number of Old High German glosses. The potential identification of the scribal hand of the sermon with ‘scribe a’ of the sacramentary suggests a tight frame of composition for the different constituent parts in the late eighth century, and at least one portion of the text, the list of names, may be securely dated to the period between September 791 and July 792. Such circumstances of composition, placed alongside various correspondences in form and content, suggest that, while the manuscript is a composite work, it is not, as Rosamond McKitterick notes (p. 16), a miscellany, but rather forms a coherent whole. The volume is divided into three parts, prefaced by a helpful introduction. Part I, on the manuscript and its users, begins with McKitterick on the scribes of the manuscript, with particular attention paid to the variety of scripts, including early Caroline minuscule and a seemingly unique cursive-influenced minuscule, and their ‘imaginative deployment … to differentiate between types of liturgical text’ (p. 28). Elvira Glaser follows with a discussion of the ink and dry-point Old High German glosses, unusual in such a manuscript, which she dates to c.800 and the first decades of the ninth century respectively; such glosses, as she notes, may rank among the first transmitted examples of Old High German. Rounding out Part I, Maximilian Diesenberger analyses a manuscript produced around the same time at the same scriptorium, Munich, Universitätsbibliothek, MS 4o 3. Diesenberger traces the transmission of the texts copied in this manuscript from northern Italy to Bavaria, painting a picture of intensive transalpine contact. Part II explores what the Prague Sacramentary can reveal about contemporary religious culture. Yitzhak Hen undercuts any neat categorisation of the liturgical material as either Old Gelasian, Eighth-Century Gelasian or Gregorian, arguing instead that it ‘should be regarded as parallel, independent liturgical development’ (p. 87) and that the presence of such dynamic local traditions suggests the inherent flexibility of contemporary liturgy. Els Rose then addresses the manuscript’s sanctoral cycle, with particular attention paid to the liturgy of the cults of Zeno, the apostles and Saint Martin, the last of which includes a mass setting adapted from Old Gallican rites. Capping off this section, Richard Corradini explores the influences behind the sermon De creatione mundi, arguing that a preponderance of insular models and some telling mistakes in the text’s copying indicate that ‘the scribe … copied an insular exemplar that he found difficult to decode’ (p. 153). Part III turns outwards to the manuscript’s Bavarian and wider Carolingian context. Rob Meens discusses the ‘Gregorian part’ of the manuscript, comprising the Iudicia Theodori and the Libellus responsionum; as he argues, these texts had clear resonances in their eighth-century Bavarian context, where church reorganisation was under way and where definitions of incest could be weaponised for political gain. Philippe Depreux then analyses the prayers for the king and the state of the realm included in the manuscript, arguing that their inclusion may be related to the programmatic statement put forward in the Capitulary of Herstal in the previous decade. Finally, Stuart Airlie addresses the list of names included in the manuscript with particular attention paid to the entry ‘Pippinus rex’. While examining the complex politics between Charlemagne’s sons and heirs in this contested period, Airlie continues to emphasise the liturgical function of the name-list, arguing against its reduction to ‘an expression of some timeless culture of power politics’ (p. 222). A particularly commendable aspect of this book is its profusion of images, tables and appendices: readers are provided with all the necessary apparatus to retrace the authors’ working methods, whether in the form of images of the original manuscript and its script-types, editions of texts or thematic selections from the manuscript’s liturgical content. The inclusion of such material renders this volume particularly useful for students and scholars of manuscript studies alike, illustrating as it does not only the techniques employed but also their potential dividends. The Prague Sacramentary offers a window onto society, religion and politics in late eighth-century Bavaria; this excellent volume presents its insights to a wide readership, bringing interdisciplinary perspectives to bear on the many facets of this important manuscript. © Oxford University Press 2018. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)

Roach, Levi

2018 The English Historical Review

doi: 10.1093/ehr/cey084

The volume under review originated in a conference held in Manchester in 2005 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Max Gluckman’s influential ‘Peace in the Feud’. Though only one of the constituent chapters was originally presented at the conference, the contributors seek to further the themes discussed there, probing our understanding of western (or ‘Latin’) Europe between Late Antiquity and the central Middle Ages. As Conrad Leyser explains in the introduction, the volume aims to move discussion of the period beyond the traditional fetishisation of the state and central authority (which is alternatively held to have collapsed in Late Antiquity or the years straddling the first millennium) and on to matters of religion and society. The inspiration here comes from recent work on the late Roman and Carolingian empires, which emphasises that neither was a monolith—and that daily life was generally dictated by social (rather than political) forces. Put playfully, as Leyser states, the modern British political mantra, ‘Small State–Big Society’ (associated with David Cameron’s Conservatives), is used to explore the years between 300 and 1200. In particular, the aim is to use the Church and social conflict as alternative prisms through which to construct an understanding of developments over these years. Thankfully, ‘Big Society’ proves a rather less vacuous (and elusive) concept when applied historically than in modern politics. Opening the volume, Kate Cooper is able to show how informal episcopal office was (and remained) through much of the fourth century, only slowly (and fitfully) taking on more institutional guises. In a similar vein, David Natal and Jamie Wood then examine conflicts within the episcopate in Late Antique Spain and Gaul, suggesting that these served to structure the Church, both by creating new institutional frameworks locally and by opening the way for external influence from the pope. It was thus out of a complex interplay between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ (terms which the authors carefully avoid, it should be noted) that the institutional Church gradually emerged. Helmut Reimitz thereafter takes us into the sixth century, examining Gregory of Tours’ fraught relationship with ‘Frankish’ identity, which was starting to gain currency at this point. There follows a detailed consideration of the Venerable Bede’s thoughts on Church and society by Martin Ryan, adding profitably to more politicised readings of the homilist’s œuvre. Taking us more firmly into the world of secular politics, Paul Fouracre next asks why rebellion (rather than simply revolt) was so uncommon in the early Middle Ages, suggesting that the manner in which courts and regnal politics were constructed left little room for direct challenges to authority. Along somewhat similar lines, Marios Costambeys provides a thoughtful reflection on how not only conflict, but the documents this generated, helped shape society in early- to central-medieval Italy. The focus thereafter turns back to the Church. In perhaps the most original contribution to the volume, Riccardo Bof and Conrad Leyser provide a detailed examination of how divorce and remarriage regulations evolved across Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, with a particular eye to the later cause célèbre of Lothar II and Theutberga. This neatly sets the stage for Leyser’s own consideration of how the legacy of Gregory the Great influenced the evolution of the Church in the Carolingian and post-Carolingian age, arguing that the memory of the venerable pope informed developments every step of the way. The implications of this perspective are wide-ranging, though it would have been nice to see it developed in greater detail, particularly where the tenth century is concerned (and note that ‘Reccared’ should read ‘Recemund’ at p. 200). Rounding out the volume, R.I. Moore and Stephen White take us into the central Middle Ages, the former tackling the thorny question of popular involvement within the Church between the tenth and twelfth centuries, and the latter providing a critical tour d’horizon of how medievalists have used (and not used) the work of Gluckman on the ‘Peace in the Feud’. Both illustrate the problems of certain revisionist tendencies in scholarship—though precisely where Moore and White themselves stand could have been clearer. Overall, the contributors do a good job of shifting debate away from the state and on to society (and, in particular, the Church) in these years, providing a number of thoughtful new ways of framing developments. As is often the case with edited volumes, the focus is tighter in some contributions than others (those of Natal and Wood, on the one hand, and Bof and Leyser, on the other, stand out). Indeed, the contributions feel rather disparate at times, jumping swiftly and unexpectedly between periods and regions. Thus England only figures prominently in Ryan’s contribution (with occasional asides in Moore’s), while Spain only takes centre stage (briefly) in Natal and Wood’s chapter; one might be forgiven then for thinking that these regions are of little interest—an impression I am sure the editors would not wish to create. Likewise, the twin themes of conflict and the Church are more prominent at some points than others, with many contributions only tackling one of the two. Still, there is much important food for thought furnished by this book, which will repay careful reading (and re-reading). What it may lack in coherency and coverage, it more than makes up for in th