Ecological Succession. ( ECOSYSTEM, B. Pharmacy, 1st Year, Sem-II, Environmen...
Reviews and Short NoticesGeneralPower to the People E.docx
1. Reviews and Short Notices
General
Power to the People: Energy in Europe over the Last Five
Centuries. By Astrid
Kander, Paolo Malanima and Paul Warde. Princeton University
Press. 2013. x +
457pp. $39.50/£27.95.
This is more than just another book on how the availability of
increasingly
cheaper energy sources, converters and carriers has shaped our
current way of
life, to be added to the very good ones published by Vaclav
Smil, Jean-Claude
Debéir with Jean-Paul Deléage and Daniel Hémery, Rolf Peter
Sieferle, Arnulf
Grübler, Alfred Crosby, Roger Fouquet, or Robert Ayres and
Benjamin Warr,
to name but a few. In my view it is, and will remain for a time,
the reference
book on the role of energy transitions in the long-term
economic development of
Europe for those coming from the standpoint of economic
history. There are three
main reasons for this. Firstly, the interpretation provided by
Paolo Malanima,
Paul Warde and Astrid Kander (following the order of their
chapters) is rooted
in an impressive wider scholarship of economic history and
historiography.
2. Behind their historical narrative there lies the knowledge
accumulated by several
generations of economic, social and environmental historians
devoted to the
study of economic growth from a long-term perspective.
Secondly, this book
goes deeply into a more theoretical and methodological
discussion on the role
of energy in modern economic growth, and how to account for
it. The authors
claim from the outset that ‘energy is a driver of economic
growth’ because ‘major
innovations in the field of energy were a necessary condition
for the modern
world’ (p. 6). This challenges the widespread belief in
mainstream economics
that ‘energy consumption is simply a natural function of
growth’ that requires
no further explanation (p. 209). Last but not least, the historical
interpretation
is based on a large dataset, which includes the new long-term
historical series
compiled by the three authors and other collaborators, which are
now available
in open access at www.energyhistory.org (and for Italy in
comparison to the rest
of Europe at www.paolomalanima.it).
The historical narrative is built around three main ideas. Firstly,
energy
transitions elapse through an interlinked set of some specific
general-purpose
macro-innovations which set in motion a wide range of micro-
innovations aimed
at cutting costs by increasing technical energy efficiency.
During an initial phase,
4. These differences depended upon the specific traits of each
macro-innovation and
associated fuels, together with the speed of the ‘rebound’ effect
of energy savings,
which led to lower energy prices, which in turn allowed
technical diffusion and
fostered growing energy consumption. The historical process of
technological
adaptation and adoption also depends on differences in natural
resources and
factor endowments, as well as on the geographical locations of
each region and
country – not to mention institutions and policies, which affect
the structure of
incentives. All these diverse settings and paths explain the
different levels and
trends historically registered in energy consumption per capita,
and in energy
intensity per unit of GDP, either spatially among countries or
across time.
Thirdly, the long-term energy dynamics of each ‘development
block’ entails that
economic growth has gone hand in hand with an increase in
energy consumption
(with all its derived environmental impacts). Yet the growth
rates of energy and
GDP have differed according to shifts in energy intensity, and
the underlying mix
of energy sources has changed. In that sense, the book ends by
arguing that the
current third industrial revolution based on the ICT is more
knowledge-intensive
and less energy-intensive than before, a trait that helps to
address the global
environmental challenges we are now facing. Astrid Kander
does, however, point
5. out that a transition towards more sustainable energy systems
‘will not occur from
consumer demand or competition on the supply side’, and will
require strong
political action (p. 383).
Underlying this story there is an unsolved question on energy
economics: do
the energy carriers and converters used by the economy have to
be seen as any
other input which can be substituted by others according to
market relative prices,
or rather are they an irreplaceable condition for economic
growth? Since Nicholas
Georgescu-Roegen argued in the 1970s that the economic
process cannot fail
to comply with the second law of thermodynamics, there has
existed a sharp
divide between mainstream neoclassical economics and
heterodox ecological
economics. Where does Power to the People stand in this
debate? ‘We propose
that a country embarks on modern economic growth because the
cost of energy
declines’ (p. 342), Kander says, and on this point the book is in
accordance with
the ecological economists Ayres and Warr. At the same time, it
stays within the
mainstream economic approach, keeping away from the view
proposed by Ayres
and Warr in The Economic Growth Engine (2009). As explained
in appendix A, the
authors prefer to adjust the neoclassical growth accounting
instead of exploring
more radical alternatives. In any case, what deserves to be
stressed is that this
7. students of the
early middle ages find it difficult to appreciate, and sometimes
to understand,
how day-to-day aspects of farming affected and involved the
people whose lives
they glimpse in early medieval sources. Recent studies focusing
on early medieval
economies and economic life have tended to explore trade,
money and towns
much more than the detailed aspects of production itself, and
this book therefore
fills a crucial and substantial gap for students of the Anglo-
Saxon past.
The book is not co-authored (except for the introduction and
conclusion)
but comprises two parts, one by each author. Part I (chapters 2–
5), by Banham,
focuses on crops, livestock, and the tools and techniques used to
produce them
in early medieval England; Part II (chapters 6–12), by Faith, is
a series of local
case studies exploring how farming took place in particular
kinds of landscapes.
Banham examines the types of crops farmed in early medieval
England, including
changing preferences for different varieties; how and when
crops were farmed and
produced; what was needed for growing, maintaining and
storing crops, and how
land and resources were organized. She then turns to livestock,
identifying the
types of animals kept in early medieval England; what they
probably looked like
and how common they were; how they were raised and kept;
how they were used
9. Both authors use a range of different kinds of evidence,
identifying their
approach as ‘source-pluralism’ (p. 14), so that while they see
themselves as
historians, they are not limited to traditional kinds of written
sources. An
approach like this is necessary for this topic owing to the
fragmentary and limited
nature of the available evidence (outlined on pp. 8–14): the vast
majority of
surviving textual (and visual) evidence from this period is
connected with elites
who tended not to provide detailed information about the day-
to-day business
of farming. (It is worth noting too that, despite what is
sometimes suggested,
archaeological material also tends to centre on elites, and does
not bring us as
close to peasants or peasant culture as we might like.) Part I in
particular offers a
sensitive and rigorous examination of this range of evidence,
though occasionally
detail is lacking for archaeological material, where we are
sometimes presented
with a general description of, or conclusion from, a particular
site or study,
but not given any details of the actual evidence on which such a
statement or
conclusion is based.
Frustratingly, given the heavy reliance of Part II on place-name
evidence, this
section offers no methodological consideration of how or why it
is appropriate
to use place-names as they are here. It is not always obvious
whether the place-
10. names used are early attestations, or indeed how exactly they
support the claims
made for them; moreover, some of the assumptions are rather
outdated or limited
(e.g. the idea that the place-name element -ingas always relates
to an earlier
folk-group, p. 155). The use of other kinds of evidence in Part
II is also rather
sloppy at times, e.g. on p. 154, where we are told that ‘an Old
English text’
distinguishes between different kinds of land: the footnote gives
a number from
Sawyer’s Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Charters
(http://www.esawyer.org.uk), but
we are given no information about date or context (nor yet told
that it is a
charter written in both Latin and Old English). And, despite the
note in the list
of abbreviations which states that all charters are cited by
Sawyer number, this is
not in fact the case in Part II; moreover there are frequent
unsupported assertions
here, and an over-use of direct quotation from scholarship
(though it is not even
always clear to whom such quotations should be attributed, e.g.
on p. 245). This is
really disappointing in a book which is otherwise so excellent,
and it is surprising
that this was not spotted and addressed prior to publication.
The book contains a good number of illustrations and figures,
ranging from
line-drawings of grains or tools to maps, to reproductions of
manuscripts, to
photos of landscapes and/or animals. Some of these are really
helpful, but the
12. would have been welcome, since for a substantial part of the
period people whom
we might think of as British or (Anglo-)Scandinavian must also
be represented by
the surviving ‘Anglo-Saxon’ evidence. But perhaps these are
matters for a sequel,
since this can hardly be all there is to be said on the subject: the
reader finishes
with questions and a sense of more work to come on a
fascinating and important
topic. The authors state that the book arose from their
‘frustration at having
no reading to offer our students when we told them that farming
was the most
important part of the Anglo-Saxon economy’ (p. vii); as one of
those students, it
is a great pleasure for me to be able now to read the fruits of
their labours, and to
have something to offer my own students in turn. This book will
be an invaluable
resource for all who study the Anglo-Saxon past.
Durham University HELEN FOXHALL FORBES
Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church. By
Alexander Murray. Oxford
University Press. 2015. xi + 206pp. £30.00.
Conscience and Authority gathers together five essays,
previously
published elsewhere, with a new introduction by the author.
(The pieces
are: ‘Confession before 1215’; ‘Confession as a historical
source’; ‘Counselling
in medieval confession’; ‘Archbishops and mendicants in 13th-
century Pisa’;
‘Excommunication and conscience’). This is a cause for
13. celebration for several
reasons. One is that the repackaging of old material is in this
case hugely helpful
for the reader: despite being one of the most important and
interesting historians
of the later medieval period, Murray has had a tendency to
publish in slightly
obscure byways, and some of these chapters are difficult to
track down even in
this internet age. Another is that the particular selection of
material presented
here, originally published between 1981 and 1998, coheres
remarkably well, with
each piece helping to illuminate its neighbours.
Murray’s core concern in these pieces is the coming into being
of sacramental
confession as a regular, essential practice in medieval
Christendom. The new
introduction to the book sets out very clearly the
historiographical and
interpretive context. Murray does not argue that the Fourth
Lateran Council of
1215 introduced regular lay confession for the first time, but he
does suggest that
its appearance as a regular practice before that date was limited,
and occurred
mostly in areas where there was a ‘renowned centre of pastoral
initiative’, such as
Fulda or Laon. This thesis, he notes, has been challenged by
early medievalist
scholars, notably by Rob Meens and Sarah Hamilton. But,
whilst very much
respecting the points that they have made and the evidence they
present, Murray
submits that his main thesis still stands (a viewpoint with which
15. particular, paying close
attention to the variety of lay experience, the challenges and
frustrations that
faced enthusiastic post-Lateran IV reformers, and the
theological, moral and very
human issues involved in matters of conscience and authority.
Murray was one of
the earliest historians to demonstrate the ways in which
preaching stories, and
indeed full sermons (in the latter case, those of Archbishop
Federigo Visconti of
Milan), could be used in subtle ways to shed light on the laity
themselves. We are
given again here one of the most important anglophone attempts
to grapple with
la religion vécue, in which the rough surfaces of everyday life
combine with learned
reflection on philosophy, theology and the moral reasoning of
well-intentioned
clerics; and it is good to revisit this work, to learn from it again
afresh.
And the final reason for celebration here is the sheer pleasure of
re-reading
these pieces. Murray writes prose of great elegance, clarity,
humanity and wit.
He gives a wonderful impression of having met and engaged
with the writers
who have provided his core evidence, without ever making them
inappropriately
‘modern’ or pretending that he has become unproblematically
‘medieval’. And
the pieces are sprinkled with little shards of idiosyncratic joy:
noting that he has
spent perhaps a little too much time demolishing arguments in a
particular area,
16. Murray briefly compares himself to a ‘dilatory crusader’; the
final chapter (on
excommunication) opens by musing on the lessons of quantum
physics in regard
to the only apparent solidity of matter; and other similar jeux
(that nonetheless
illuminate and relate to the serious core of business) enliven
throughout.
In short: despite the fact that these pieces are reappearances
rather than fresh
turns (the introduction aside), the book is an important one, and
deserves to be
read, both for pleasure and for continued profit.
Birkbeck, University of London JOHN H. ARNOLD
The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in
Medieval Europe, 1000–
1200. By Jehangir Yezdi Malegam. Cornell University Press.
2013. xiv + 335pp.
$55.00.
At the heart of this book lies a paradox. In the eleventh and
twelfth centuries,
the Church pursued peace through violent upheaval.
Challenging the false peace
of secular society, of emperors or kings (what the late twelfth-
century canon
lawyer Rufinus of Sorrento described as ‘the sleep of
Behemoth’), reformers
instead demanded the true peace of Christ. Malegam’s study,
consciously
responding to Philippe Buc’s call to reinterpret medieval
violence, steers a bold,
sometimes over-ambitious course, glancing en route at the work
of canonists,
18. only for the origins of the crusade, but for the later attempts by
twelfth- and
thirteenth-century popes to obtain peace at home specifically to
further the cause
of war in the east. Likewise, the reformers’ rediscovery of
Cyprian (rejecting
the false peace of pagan Rome) and Tertullian (seeking
penitential rebaptism
through the blood of the martyrs) are highly significant, not
only in terms of
crusade but with respect to R. I. Moore’s thesis on the ‘origins
of a persecuting
society’. The bishops, originally portrayed as the type of
Christ’s pacificus or
‘peace-maker’, became so heavily embroiled in the violent
rhetoric of reform that
the pope himself was promoted as ultimate author of concord. In
all of this,
Malegam offers sensitive readings of a great range of sources,
from patristics
to Rupert of Deutz, and from Anselm of Laon to Marsilius of
Padua. Not
everything here is satisfactory. The author is too fond of
digression, of paradox,
and of rhapsodic chains of conjecture. There are gaps in his
knowledge (for
example, Jane Martindale’s proofs of secular enforcement of the
peace movement,
Klaus van Eickels and Jenny Benham on the practicalities of
peace negotiation,
or Michele Maccarrone’s essential study of Novit ille and the
papal claim to
judge breaches of secular peace not as matters of feudal right
but as sin). Words
themselves need more careful handling, not least pax, here
allowed to shade into
19. a woolly sense of enlightenment, yet requiring more specific
anchorage both in
liturgy and in treaty-making. The Latin citations in the
footnotes do not always
bear out the claims made for them, especially when it comes to
manuscripts rather
than printed texts. There are inevitably errors: Geoffrey Babion
as bishop (sic) of
Bourdeaux (sic). How (and whether) to divide ‘reformers’ from
‘reactionaries’
remains problematic. The siren song of theory echoes here and
there, threatening
to drown out sense. Yet the good things far outweigh the bad.
There are, for
example, fascinating insights into the peace offered by the
communal movement,
originally greeted as a monstrosity, both in Italy and in France,
but then
transformed, by the hostility of Barbarossa, into a bulwark of
papally approved
‘reform’. Against this, Malegam contrasts the attempts made by
Otto of Freising
to present Barbarossa himself as a prince of peace. From this
same clash of
ideologies, he suggests, emerged the ideas of Dante and
Marsilius, reinterpreting
Aristotle (and one might add, St Paul), to define the state and
its secular rulers as
the true guarantors of a tranquil peace far from the turbulence
of a reforming
priesthood. Attempting far more than the average run of first
monographs,
this is a thought-provoking book. By turns brilliant and
infuriating, bold and
disturbing, it reflects many of the qualities of its subject matter.
I learned much
21. with notions
of courage and cowardice, as presented in First Crusade
narratives. He is
particularly effective in recreating the emotional thought-world
surrounding
these values, with discussion focused on individuals such as the
famous ‘traitor’
Stephen of Blois. His discussion on the role played by
opprobrium (the censure
of one’s fellows) in such discourses is particularly stimulating.
Natasha Hodgson
touches upon linked issues in her excellent piece on Norman
masculinity. Here she
explores the distinctive ways in which chroniclers constructed
and presented the
masculinity of the multiple Norman leaders who participated in
the campaign.
She rejects the notion that historians should seek a single ‘ideal
type of crusader’
in medieval sources, plausibly advocating the idea that there
were multiple
paradigms of idealized masculinity that were dependent on an
individual’s status
and role.
The famous crusade leader Bohemond of Taranto is – perhaps
predictably –
a particular focus of attention in this volume, and several
articles consider his
conduct and objectives during the First Crusade. Murray
thoughtfully explores
both his behaviour and that of his contingent, observing how
differently this band
of South Italian Normans acted from other princely contingents.
He affirms the
idea that Bohemond was an opportunist, with an eye for his own
22. advancement.
Albu touches upon related matters, discussing the Normans’
prior involvement
with the Byzantine empire and the impact of this relationship on
the crusade. She
also considers the role played by Antioch within the crusaders’
aspirations.
Crusading and Pilgrimage also contains essays centred on
Norman Italy,
Sicily and Iberia. Among these Drell and Oldfield discuss the
role played by
pilgrimage and crusading in Italy. Drell sets out to explain why
so few crusaders
were recruited from these regions; discussing the view that they
needed both
to safeguard their own position in these relatively newly
conquered regions
and to secure their trading relations with the Muslim world. She
goes on to
show that whilst only a few crusaders may have set out for the
east, the area
itself – particularly its urban populations – was deeply impacted
by the rise
in pilgrim and commercial traffic setting out for the newly
established Latin
east. Oldfield’s essay touches on similar themes, exploring the
role of pilgrimage
in the formation of the Norman polities in southern Italy and
Sicily and the
policies implemented by later Norman rulers, sometimes to
support, sometimes
to take advantage of, the travellers passing through their lands.
Cumulatively, they
offer many new insights into Sicily/southern Italy’s role both in
Mediterranean
24. Michel in stimulating crusading zeal.
Spear draws our attention across the Channel to Normandy,
examining the
contribution made by Normandy’s regular clergy to the early
crusades. Within a
stimulating discussion, he sheds new light on an individual who
is among the First
Crusade’s more colourful, but least studied, individuals: Arnulf
of Chocques.
Hicks focuses upon the miracle stories found in Norman
chronicles both in their
histories of the crusades and in their accounts of other events in
western Europe.
She looks specifically at the role played by the landscape in
these tales and she
successfully demonstrates how deeper layers of meaning can be
derived from an
author’s presentation of the natural world in such tales.
Overall, this is a lively group of essays, advancing discussion
on a range of
themes. Scholars interested in Bohemond of Taranto, the role
played by Sicily
in the crusades and the broader Anglo-Norman involvement in
the crusading
movement will find much to interest them. Aird and Hodgson’s
material on
Norman conceptions of right conduct and masculinity deserve to
be singled
out as major additions to more thematic strands of research. The
standard is
generally high across these essays, although, taken as a whole
(and there are
notable exceptions), their strength lies in synthesis rather than
analysis.
26. The largest town in fifteenth-century Wales was Cardiff with a
population
of 2,000 people. Fulton contrasts this with the town of
Oswestry, only just into
England across the border, with its 3,000 inhabitants. The 50
per cent difference
is marked, but the size of Cardiff was tiny compared to the
eastern English city
of Norwich, which may have had up to 30,000 souls before the
Black Death and
even in the fifteenth century probably outnumbered Cardiff by a
factor of eight or
more. London’s population perhaps approached 80,000, but this
total was itself
eclipsed by continental cities such as Paris, Bruges or Cologne.
It is a tribute to
this volume, therefore, that it identifies a distinctively
recognizable urban culture
within the small medieval Welsh towns.
Urban size may well be an irrelevance. Richard Suggett writing
on townscape
is not bothered by the smallness of Welsh towns. He makes the
case that urban
settlements in Wales were flexible institutions which ‘tended to
serve larger
hinterlands than their English counterparts ... They were
transformed during
the sessions, markets, fairs and wakes, as the country took over
the town’
(p. 54). His chapter is largely devoted to an assessment of the
upstanding
buildings within Welsh towns and thus necessarily only has
examples from
the fifteenth and (predominately) sixteenth centuries.
27. Aberconway House of
c.1420 in Conwy is the earliest surviving complete townhouse
and the point is
well-made that it is an entirely urban structure, combining
‘domestic and trading
functions in a deliberately eye-catching jettied building’ (p. 86),
thereby fulfilling
the writer’s assertion that towns were essentially trading
communities. However,
the presentation of physical evidence for this is naturally
limited by the small
numbers of surviving buildings. Examples of late fifteenth-
century structures are
cited from Beaumaris and Wrexham – open halls behind
commercial ranges – but
otherwise most of the data relates to buildings of the sixteenth
century and later. It
is noted that these structures may well sit above the footprints
of earlier examples
and therefore, as observed above, it would have been helpful if
this chapter had
contained some references to the results of urban archaeological
excavation.
Most Welsh towns differed in two important ways from towns in
England.
The first difference concerned ethnic mix with numerous towns,
notably the
Edwardian boroughs in north Wales, effectively excluding
Welsh burgesses, at
least at the outset. The other difference was that, while towns
may have been
trading entities, the Edwardian boroughs at least were examples
of ‘military-
economic’ foundation in the terminology adopted by Matthew
Frank Stevens.
29. difficulties of access to trades that a lack of training, wealth and
indeed citizenship
placed in front of women. Many therefore were restricted to
roles as servants and
menial work.
It is perhaps to be expected that a book addressing Welsh
culture should
contain reference to song and poetry. Such reference is overt in
the chapter
by Fulton on fairs, feast-days and carnival, that of Dafydd
Johnston which is
entitled ‘Towns in Medieval Welsh Poetry’, and that of
Catherine McKenna who
discusses the city of Chester in Gruffudd ap Maredudd’s poem
Awdl i’r Grog o
Gaer. However poetry is also cited by Dylan Foster Evans
discussing castle and
town, while David Klausner naturally references both poetry
and music, as well
as drama, when surveying entertainment and recreation in
towns. His assessment
suggests that Welsh urban life need not have been that
parochial: the collection of
musical instruments that he enumerates in the admittedly late
sixteenth-century
collection of Sir John Perrot ‘would have been the envy of the
great professional
civic bands of cities like York and Norwich’ (p. 260).
Reference to poetry is also made by Llinos Beverley Smith’s
essay on urban
society. She explores the lexicon of poetic description, noting
that for ‘the poets,
the contrasts of urbanity and rusticity were truisms which
underpinned much of
30. their consciousness of towns’ (p. 20). Urban descriptors such as
paement for paved
streets provided ‘arresting images and metaphors’ for Welsh
poets. This essay is
itself arresting, with much interesting observation; the writer
explores such issues
as social stratification and factionalism (this latter also
addressed by Spencer
Dimmock writing on social conflict within towns), as well as
the matters of urban
provisioning, diet and health. Her sources show a commendable
blending of both
documentary and archaeological evidence.
The volume is bookended with chapters by Ralph Griffiths on
townsfolk and
Peter Fleming on the Welsh diaspora in early Tudor English
towns. The former
seeks to characterize Welsh urban dwellers, providing a critique
of the ‘myopic
and partial’ view of outsiders such as Gerald of Wales who
commented on the
‘lack of urbanity of Welsh people’, but noting too the later
observer Ranulf
Higden who, writing about 1340, mentioned the gradual
adoption by the Welsh of
‘English lifestyles, living in towns and tilling their gardens and
fields’ (pp. 12–13).
Fleming uses a statistical approach, analysing the tax returns of
the 1524 Lay
Subsidy collections from Bristol, Gloucester, Hereford and
Shrewsbury, as well
as the 1525 collection from Worcester. He provides useful
tables of his results,
amongst his conclusions being the observation that while the
Welsh could be
32. first indication of
the enormous difficulty we have in trying to understand him.
For as Gillingham
convincingly demonstrates, whether he was killed in 1100 by
accident or by
design is unknowable, but what is knowable is that he was the
victim of the most
outrageous character assassination by the biographer of
Archbishop Anselm,
Eadmer of Canterbury. In writing this biography of William II,
Gillingham knew
that to make us see Rufus in anything other than a negative
light, he would
first have to destroy the testimony of that king’s harshest critic.
He does so
convincingly. Gillingham explains Eadmer’s purpose in writing
his two works
on St Anselm, which was to justify the unjustifiable: Anselm’s
abandonment
of his post as archbishop of Canterbury, thus leaving the
English Church
without its leader. This was a dereliction of duty the history of
which needed
to be whitewashed. As Gillingham shows, Eadmer achieved his
end in part
by blackening the name of Rufus. That he was successful in
destroying this
king’s contemporary reputation for being a humorous,
convivial, courteous
and well-liked king – a ‘new Julius Caesar’, in the assessment
of William of
Malmesbury (1085–1142) – is a testimony to the power of this
900-year-old
propagandist. Gillingham does as much as he can to unveil the
life of William
II, but it is a difficult task. With few contemporary
33. commentators and just 200
documents originating from his actions, this William is a
difficult man to pin
down. Inevitably, therefore, Gillingham has to write more about
William’s actions
than about his person in the hope that in his actions we may
perceive something
of the man. Gillingham does a fine job. The British perspective
in Rufus’s life is
one which is treated especially well in this book, as is the
continental dimension
to his life. There are good chapters on the English Church and
Secular Society.
Especially important is the chapter ‘War on land and sea’
where, for the first time,
an historian shows a proper appreciation of Rufus’s use of sea
power.
One of the advantages of getting good historians to write pithily
on subjects
about which they know a great deal is that it forces them to get
down from the
fence and tell you what they think without obfuscation (not that
Gillingham
has ever been guilty of that sin: one has always known what he
thinks). So we
are treated to crisp assessments that go to the heart of
Gillingham’s view: when
discussing Rufus’s sexuality, Gillingham explains to his readers
that ‘the king’s
body was an instrument of politics’ (p. 57) – it surely was – and
we are told just
why long hair was such a political hot potato in a secular court
dominated by
young men watched over by old bishops. It is one of the facts of
medieval life
35. Anticipating the upcoming 800-year anniversaries of two of the
most
famous events of the thirteenth century, the sealing of Magna
Carta and the
Fourth Lateran Council, the organizers of the 2013 conference
requested that
contributors did not concentrate solely on the great occurrences
of 1215. Instead
they were asked to conceive their contributions within a broader
framework of
authority and resistance. Thus Magna Carta, despite featuring in
the title, is
barely mentioned in the volume itself, which is split into four
sections focusing
on secular society, on the Church, on religious orders and on
imagery. Reflecting
the continued dominance in British historical scholarship of
traditional political
approaches to thirteenth-century history, almost half of the
contributions in the
volume appear in the section dedicated to secular society. Peter
Coss examines
those who stood pledge for three defendants in the Treason
Trial of 1225, thereby
uncovering the various networks that bound together aristocrats.
He argues that
these informal networks of association were as important as
formal institutions
in dictating aristocratic action. The theme of aristocrats and
institutions is
continued in Ian Forrest’s essay, in which he argues that we
should not see the
development of institutions in the thirteenth century as simply
change being
enforced from above, but recognize that local elites collaborated
36. with kings,
lords and bishops in the development of institutions because
they were mutually
beneficial. Essays by Richard Cassidy on sheriffs, Fergus Oakes
on the role of
castles in the Barons’ War, and Melissa Julian-Jones on the
possible reasons for
Thomas Corbet’s support of Henry III, complete this first
section.
The second and third sections contain a total of five essays and
bring welcome
interdisciplinary and transnational perspectives to the volume.
Philippa Hoskin
argues that it was a belief in natural law and the necessity to
return the English
kingdom to a state in accordance with God’s plan that
convinced four prominent
bishops to throw in their lot with de Montfort after 1263.
Jennifer Jahner
examines the poem known as Planctus super episcopis, written
in defence of
the Interdict of 1208–14. By taking a nuanced interdisciplinary
approach she is
able to identify affinities between this verse condemnation of
bishops loyal to
John and criticisms found in diplomatic correspondence.
Concluding the second
section, John Sabapathy delivers a sophisticated exploration of
the importance
of prudence in the political thinking of Innocent III. By
stressing that prudential
actions were not confined to Innocent’s response to the events
of 1215 but can
be found throughout his pontificate, Sabapathy provides a
welcome international
38. Edward II: His Last Months and his Monument. By Jill Barlow,
Richard Bryant,
Carolyn Heighway, Chris Jeens and David Smith. The Bristol
and Gloucestershire
Archaeological Society. 2015. xvi + 148pp + 68 plates. £30.00.
The tomb of King Edward II at Gloucester, long regarded as one
of the great
glories of English Gothic design, has acquired added notoriety
in the past few
decades. In 1878, a peculiar document came to light, known as
the ‘Fieschi Letter’
preserved in the cartulary of the southern French bishopric of
Maguelone. A
series of modern commentators, most notably in recent years Ian
Mortimer, have
employed this letter to suggest that, far from being murdered at
Berkeley Castle
in September 1327 and buried in Gloucester, Edward lived on,
smuggled out
of England to spend at least the next decade concealed as a
hermit, either in
Italy or Germany. A campaign of restoration carried out at
Gloucester 2007–8
serves as the springboard for this present revisiting of the
evidence. Combining a
detailed history and description of the tomb with an edition of
excerpts from
the Berkeley Castle estate records, this book serves two
purposes. The first it
accomplishes magnificently, offering a meticulous and lavishly
illustrated record
both of the architecture and setting of the tomb and of the
successive campaigns
of restoration that it has undergone (or perhaps more accurately
39. ‘suffered’).
Allowed to fall into neglect after the Reformation, it was
rescued in the 1730s
as the result of interest taken in their supposed founder by the
Fellows of Oriel
College Oxford. Mysteries remain, not least the tomb’s precise
date, here placed
only approximately c.1335, with further alterations to its setting
in the the 1350s
or 60s. The authors draw attention to the designer’s use of the
golden ratio and
the Gloucester foot of 320 millimetres, to the possibility of
French or Kentish
influence, to the over-enthusiastic ’reconstruction’ of certain
features in 1875,
and to the only excavation of the Edward’s body thus far
attempted. This was
carried out in 1855, but proceeded no further than the
anthropoid lead coffin in
which the corpse must be assumed still to rest. And here we
come to our authors’
second, sadly doomed intention. Besides recording the tomb,
they hope once and
for all to disprove rumours of the King’s survival. Without
engaging directly
with their chief adversary, Ian Mortimer, they meticulously
assemble the items
of account from the Berkeley estate records, here produced both
in facsimile and
English translation. These detail the castle’s provisioning
against Queen Isabella
in October 1326, Edward’s transfer from captivity at Kenilworth
to Berkeley on
Palm Sunday 1327 (an eerily appropriate date) and his
subsequent, relatively
41. certainly links it
to Arnaud de Verdale, from 1339 bishop of Maguelone, but
before this a diplomat
employed in 1338 by Pope Benedict XII to discredit the English
King Edward III
in the eyes of potential German allies, most notably Ludwig IV
of Bavaria. It was
in the circumstances of 1338 that rumours first circulated that
Edward II still lived
and that an imposter appeared in Germany, William the
Welshman, claiming to
be the long-vanished king. Smith’s appendix, taken together
with the Berkeley
estate records, leaves little doubt that Edward II died at
Berkeley and was buried
at Gloucester. The rumours preserved in Maguelone were part of
a campaign
of deception targeted against Edward III. To those viewing
events in evidential
perspective, all of this is entirely persuasive. To those viewing
them through the
eye of faith, I fear, no persuasion will ever be sufficient. The
conspiracists will
continue to weave their theories. To this extent, the authors
have laboured in vain.
Nonetheless for making available precious evidence, on both
sides of the debate,
they are to be heartily congratulated.
University of East Anglia NICHOLAS VINCENT
The Oxford History of Poland–Lithuania, I: The Making of the
Polish–Lithuanian
Union, 1385–1569. By Robert Frost. Oxford University Press.
2015. xxiii + 564pp.
£85.00.
43. and Belorussian – in a process brilliantly analysed in Timothy
Snyder’s book,
The Reconstruction of Nations (2004). Each of those
nationalisms has its
own interpretation of the Polish–Lithuanian union. Polish
historiography has
traditionally seen it as a form of civilizing Polish paternalism;
others as
Polish oppression and imperialism. In this book, Robert Frost
has bravely
and diplomatically stepped above the fray of a topic which
remains politically
charged, providing an account which gives equal coverage to all
the territories
and groups involved. Lithuania is placed on a level footing with
Poland, and
Lithuanian, Belorussian and Ukrainian historiographies are fully
incorporated
into the story (and footnotes). The book is dedicated to four key
historians of the
union from each of these countries: Halecki, Sapoka,
Hrushevsky and Liubavskii.
In that sense, this book is an important achievement, which can
offer a sensitive,
post-nationalist take on the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
history of this large
part of Europe.
This book offers a distinctive interpretation of the union. It is
possible to
read the Polish–Lithuanian relationship as bumpy, stumbling
from crisis to crisis,
pragmatic and contingent, with the final legal union of 1569 as
very far from
inevitable, punctuated by serious resistance. Frost’s framing
argument, however,
44. is that Poles and Lithuanians from the outset had a grand vision
of a joint state, ‘a
union of peoples’, right from the 1385 treaty of Krewo: ‘each
side clearly intended
this to be a lasting relationship’. Frost presents as the prime
movers in this process
of union not so much the Jagiellonian rulers themselves (the
dynastic glue which
joined the two polities), but the assertive Polish and Lithuanian
noble elites. It
was a project involving a wider political community.
This volume meticulously traces the history of the Polish–
Lithuanian political
relationship step by step, over two centuries. It is the first
exhaustive narrative
of these events in English. Frost pauses to analyse the texts of
the various
union accords (e.g. 1385, 1413, 1499) in some detail, offering
strongly revisionist
interpretations in many cases, which cut across medievalists’
readings of these
documents. The volume is interspersed with brief context
chapters on Poland
and Lithuania: on Polish peasants, foreign policy, the
development of local diets
(sejmiki). Frost offers too a brief survey of current scholarship
on early modern
unions and composite monarchy.
This book is a useful contribution to debates on the Polish–
Lithuanian
union, and it will bring those debates to a much wider audience,
offering fresh
perspectives for historians in central Europe to mull over.
However, it is in
46. Dariusz Kołodziejczyk on Poland’s links with Islamic powers,
none of which
fits into Frost’s account. This book is the fruit of considerable
labour in many
languages, and will be read with interest across central and
northern Europe.
University of Oxford NATALIA NOWAKOWSKA
Render unto Sultan: Power, Authority, and the Greek Orthodox
Church in the
Early Ottoman Centuries. By Tom Papademetriou. Oxford
University Press. 2015.
xv + 256pp. £60.00.
In this work, the author sets out with a very specific purpose: to
address
a vacuum which has existed since the publication of Braude and
Lewis’s
seminal Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, and in
particular Braude’s
‘Foundation myths of the millet system’ (1982). There has been
an over-reliance
on these works in discussing (and dismissing) the dominant and
widespread
narrative of the millet system as a constant, unchanging
institution or a ‘proto-
nation’ which became the foundation of modern nations. In
attempting to view
the history of the Greek Orthodox people during the Ottoman
period, the
author discusses the various paradigms and –isms through which
that history
was distorted, reinterpreted and crystallized, such as
nationalism and oriental
determinism, evident in the work of scholars such as Runciman
(1968) and
47. Papadopoullos (1952). This is an attempt to reconceptualize the
role of Greek
Orthodox hierarchy within the Ottoman context, moving beyond
the sterile and
‘dichotomous framework’ (p. 4) of good versus evil, which
often depicts the Greek
Orthodox community and the Church as ‘small, conquered,
oppressed, insulated
... in Ottoman society’ (p. 7).
The author does this by placing the community, and more
specifically the
Greek Orthodox Church, within the broader context of Ottoman
administration,
examining its evolving relationship with the state and with
powerful Greek
Orthodox lay groups. He also sets out to question the
description of the Greek
community as ‘uniform, unified ... governed by the Church’ in
favour of a ‘more
fractured picture of the “Greek community” and its leaders’ (p.
12, emphasis in
the original).
In Part I the author moves beyond the millet paradigm by
establishing its lack
of validity, especially for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Chapter 1 focuses
on the very myth of the millet system: Sultan Mehmed II’s
purported investment
of Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios – and by extension the
Patriarchate – with
specific rights and privileges a few months after his conquest of
Constantinople.
The author exposes this foundation myth, first, by highlighting
the lack of
49. in the period from the 1930s onwards, and Ursinus, Goffman,
Konortas and
İnalcık more recently.
Chapter 2 focuses on the Ottoman methods of conquest, and in
particular
the tradition of istimâlet, the cooperation with Church and
community leaders
and the accommodation of their practices in exchange for their
incorporation
into Ottoman administration – a process which enabled the
Greek Orthodox
populations – and especially their leaders – to become ‘part of
the fabric
of Ottoman society’ (p. 65). The author highlights the ad hoc
nature of the
negotiation between local ecclesiastical authorities and the
Ottomans, ‘often
against the wishes of the Synod’ (p. 65). He also draws
attention to the financial
nature of such arrangements, and offers the example of the
Metropolitan of
Ephesus, Matthew, and his experience with the Aydınoğulları to
illustrate that
money was never far from such arrangements, that it was in fact
a ‘sign of loyalty
and obeisance’ (p. 79). This serves to focus our attention on
local and regional
realities, and the need for local hierarchs to adapt pragmatically
to a new modus
vivendi of Turkmen or Ottoman rule (p. 80). The process by
which ‘the Church
was absorbed into the Ottoman fiscal administration’ (p. 101) is
at the heart of
this chapter, which explains the mutual nature of such
arrangements and sees the
50. relationship between Greek Orthodox Church and Ottoman state
as dynamic and
evolving, rather than something which Mehmed II and
Gennadios Scholarios set
in stone in 1454.
Part II serves as the evidence which supports the need for a
different,
economically based analysis. Chapter 3 is a further elaboration
of this
relationship between the Greek Orthodox Church and the
Ottoman state, by way
of closely examining the role of its hierarchy in tax collection
and tax farming
in particular. The author provides some sporadic examples of
early berats to
demonstrate the focus of the ‘arrangement’ on finances.
Crucially, and this is an
argument which was also expressed by Apostolopoulos (1992)
(and cited in this
section), the arrangement with the Ottoman state was with
individual bishops
and metropolitans, not with any kind of legal entity in the shape
of the Church
(p. 114). (This topic is also explored by Antonis Hadjikyriacou
in his doctoral
work, in which he coined the term ‘constructive ambiguity’ to
describe the
Ottoman state’s dealings with ‘quasi-institutional structures of
representation’,
such as hierarchs, and the negotiation of boundaries with them.
See his 2011
SOAS thesis ‘Society and Economy on an Ottoman Island:
Cyprus in the
Eighteenth Century’, pp. 162–88, at p. 276.) This is an
important counter-
52. to be) involved.
Competition for offices led to a system where hierarchs’
positions were always
subject to scrutiny, defamation and undermining by other
individuals or power
groups. The author places this work within the wider Ottoman
context, and
compares it to the nasihatnâme genre (advice literature for
Ottoman princes),
where authors such as Mustafa Ali of Gelibolu lamented the
‘slippery slope’
on which the Ottoman state was caught, having abandoned the
‘old ways’
(pp. 183–4). In this chapter we are offered, as an example of
power play, influence
and direct involvement of the elite in the appointment of
officials, the case of the
Kantakouzenos family, which used its influence in the Ottoman
state to influence
patriarchal appointments (pp. 200–3).
The book concludes with chapter 6, where the author
summarizes the key
points by citing impressive statistics on the frequency with
which patriarchs were
replaced: every two to three years on average (p. 214). This
enables the author to
question the degree of authority patriarchs had, when their
terms were very short
and constantly under threat, within a constant state of flux as a
result of ongoing
power struggles. However, the author again reiterates the
pragmatic reasons for
the Greek Orthodox hierarchs’ involvement with the Ottoman
state on a financial
basis.
54. 602 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES
Early Modern
John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen
Elizabeth I: A New
Edition of the Early Modern Sources. Edited by Elizabeth
Goldring, Faith Eales,
Elizabeth Clarke and Jayne Elisabeth Archer. 5 vols. Oxford
University Press.
2014. 4,064pp. £505.00.
The original version of The Progresses and Public Processions
of Queen
Elizabeth, published by John Nichols in two editions between
1788 and 1823,
has been a gold mine for generations of historians of
Elizabethan court culture
and politics: a voluminous, baggy, miscellaneous compilation of
documents and
commentary, often only loosely related to its ostensible subject.
Its contents are
immensely varied. There are detailed accounts of the major,
well-known civic,
academic and private entertainments of the reign, letters
between major and
minor courtiers, descriptions of royal residences, accounts of
the royal household,
extracts from chronicles and diaries etc., etc.
The contents are irresistible, but they are also problematic.
Nichols was never
comprehensive or systematic in any way at all. His volumes
55. contain plenty of
very niche material, but inevitably a great deal is left out. Much
of the content
can be found elsewhere. The chronological coverage is often
wildly uneven. The
material on Elizabeth’s week-long visit to Oxford in 1566, for
example, covers
206 pages in this edition; the section on 1575 contains 101
pages on the Queen’s
entertainment by the earl of Leicester at Kenilworth Castle and
a further 117
on those at Woodstock a month later. The whole of the year
1567, by contrast,
detains the reader for precisely twenty words of text.
A new edition of Nichols thus presents a challenge to any
editor. This new
edition, begun in 2000, has been compiled by a team based at
Warwick and
with over forty other scholars having contributed editorial
expertise to particular
sections. This is far from being simply a reprint: it is, as the
title accurately
states, an edition of Nichols’s sources, largely omitting his
commentary and
preface: taking the meat off the carcass of the Progresses and
attaching it to a
new skeleton. In principle, the venerable tradition of
republishing hard-to-find
volumes has been rather overtaken by the fact that one can now
download full,
searchable versions of all sorts of things from the likes of
Google Books or the
Internet Archive, something that has clearly arisen since this
project began. What
incentive, then, does the reader with £505 burning a hole in his
57. also impressive, particularly a thorough index which any
student of Elizabethan
court life will find useful. The notes do sometimes verge on the
excessive; it is
surprising, for example, that the fact that a frankly not-very-
interesting letter
from the queen to the sheriff of Lancashire happened to be
dated from the royal
house of Oatlands calls forth a footnote listing (inter alia) the
construction of a
coal house there in 1581–2. Similarly, the seventy-three pages
of mini-biographies
and lists of office-holders may well be regarded as unnecessary
in an age when
scholars automatically turn to the internet for such matters.
Nevertheless, on the
whole, the advantages of such close attention to the texts
comfortably outweigh
the drawbacks. Additionally, it is undoubtedly a handsome set
of volumes,
excellently produced, with high-quality paper, print and
binding, and copious
maps and illustrations both in colour and in black-and-white.
There are a small number of more substantive cavils. Readers
should also note
that this edition omits some elements of Nichols’s original
work. For example,
Nichols included multiple New Years Gift rolls in his work, and
they are a useful
insight into the queen’s relationship with her courtiers, but
whereas Nichols
provided both lists of gifts received by the queen and gifts
given by her, this
edition presents only the former. Furthermore (and perhaps this
58. is inevitable),
there remain errors in the fine detail of the work, and mistakes
introduced by
Nichols himself have not always been picked up. Vol. II, pp.
191–2, for example,
reproduces Nichols’s mentions of Sir Christopher Hatton’s trip
to Spa in 1574
which are simply wrong: this occurred in 1573. Nichols gave an
itinerary for the
1579 progress which can easily be shown to be both internally
contradictory and
completely wrong, but it is reproduced here without comment
(III, pp. 23–4). It
is perhaps unfair to single out relatively minor points such as
this, yet readers
should know whether or not they can trust the accuracy of the
contents.
Nevertheless, this is overall both an impressive and a useful
work. The editors
have deftly managed to deal with the many problems of re-
editing this complex,
multi-layered work into a coherent form, and deserve great
praise for managing
such a large and complex project. The result will be useful to
scholars for many
years.
The Open University NEIL YOUNGER
The Global City: On the Streets of Renaissance Lisbon. Edited
by
Annemarie Jordan Gschwend and K. J. P. Lowe. Paul Holberton
Publishing.
2015. 296pp. £40.00.
Even the most worldly-wise European looked on Lisbon as just
60. range of foreign,
even exotic, people and objects. This took the form of the
largest number of black
African slaves and freedmen, as well as the presence of the
greatest quantity (and
arguably quality) of Indian, Chinese and Japanese objects and
works of art in any
European city of the era.
This excellent and splendidly illustrated book documents and
explores these
distinctions by focusing on two anonymous panels – originally a
single painting –
depicting one of the most famous streets in sixteenth-century
Lisbon. The Rua
Nova dos mercadores, or ‘New Street of the Merchants’, was
originally laid out in
the late thirteenth century. Royal decrees mandating various
reforms beginning in
the 1480s facilitated its emergence as a vibrant commercial
centre near the city’s
waterfront. (Alas, it no longer exists, thanks to the devastating
earthquake of 1755
and the thorough restructuring of the neighbourhood that
followed.) Bringing to
bear a wide range of documents – especially notarial inventories
and descriptions
by contemporary travellers – the authors carefully identify the
street’s inhabitants
and the belongings in their houses. The results of this social
history from below
(and within) are impressive. Especially striking is just how
mixed a city Lisbon
was. As early as 1451 one visitor had noted that its ‘very varied
population’
included not only Christians, Muslims and Jews, but also ‘black
61. Africans, moors
and wild men from the Canary Islands’ (p. 58). While
Christianity soon became
the only faith tolerated in Portugal, Lisbon’s black population
continued to
grow, and by the mid-sixteenth century may have accounted for
one-fifth of
the city’s inhabitants. Africans, moreover, figured prominently
in contemporary
images such as the ones studied in this book, wherein they are
portrayed as
carrying out a wide range of tasks (note the depiction of a black
man on
horseback as a knight of the Order of Santiago in a painting
from the 1570s,
p. 72).
The rest of the volume documents in detail the wide range of
goods Lisbon
received from its trading posts in West Africa, the Indian Ocean
and Southeast
Asia. (While the chronological focus on the sixteenth century
largely precludes
the arrival of significant amounts of objects from its American
possessions, there
is a brief but engaging chapter on a recently deceased turkey
that appears in
the painting – one of the many interesting details explored in
this literally wide-
ranging book.) The authors focus above all on luxury items and
objets d’art,
ranging from sculptures in rock crystal and ivory to Muslim
lacquered shields,
along with small furniture, fans, jewellery and porcelain. Many
of these were
acquired for resale in the rest of Europe by the numerous
63. fascinating city
about which surprisingly little has been published in English.
Universidad Autónoma, Madrid JAMES S. AMELANG
The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material
Progress in Seventeenth-
Century England. By Paul Slack. Oxford University Press. 2015.
xii + 321pp.
£35.00.
This book, at the apogee of his very distinguished career, is the
most ambitious
Paul Slack has written. Its conceptualization and massively
detailed content
deserve the highest praise. His decision to claim in his title that
this is a
seventeenth-century story seems a little strange, given that the
last 90 pages of
321 in all are about the period from 1690 to 1730. We know
Slack as one of the
most eminent historians of the seventeenth century; he won his
spurs with the
impact of plague in that period; his Ford Lectures made him
first think about
‘improvement’, a word that appears in the title of their
published version. He
knew long ago that that had no neat 1700 ending. ‘Aspirations
towards material
progress, along with the conviction that it was an indispensable
foundation for
intellectual and moral progress, were fully formed by 1740’,
Slack writes in this
Preface. Quite so.
The starting point had to be how England was discovered by
topographers,
64. cartographers and the writers of ‘chorographies’ like that of
William Lambarde.
Slack’s account closely matches Alexander Walsham’s recent,
deeply pondered,
story of the reformation of the landscape. He is on well-tilled
ground in
his account of William Cecil’s handling of the notion of
‘reformation of the
commonwealth’. He makes it clear who the begetters of
‘improvement’, as it
was developed by Hartlib’s circle and Francis Bacon, were
known to be. Slack
is then very good indeed, one might say magisterial or
definitive, on belief and
confidence in information and on material, which often means
scientific, progress.
Baconianism of course is at the very heart of his story. Hence
Slack can claim in
his title that his book is about something new being ‘invented’.
‘Improvement’
summarizes a huge new intellectual world; he displays mastery
of much of it.
The economic thought of the period is intricately explained in
four chronological
chapters, successively 1570–1640, 1640–70, 1670–90 and 1690–
1730. Much of
course relies on others, like Mark Greengrass for instance, who
revealed the riches
of the Hartlib papers at Sheffield University. But it is all
assimilated, astonishingly
well documented and presented in limpid prose.
Slack’s Preface is confession time: he accepts that he has
neglected the theme
of ‘self-improvement’ and that this was what Bacon, Hartlib and
Locke, three
66. 1670–1690’, yet
Slack never tackles the concept quite fully and head on, nor is it
the centrepiece
of his story.
It is quite clear that thinking about happiness was at the core of
the intellectual
and cultural history of the period: it flowed from people’s
behaviour to, and
contact with, each other. Moral handbooks like Richard
Allestree’s Art of
Contentment (1675) were ‘more widely read than any tract on
commerce’, Slack
notes decisively. He comments that Allestree’s more famous
The Gentleman’s
Calling (1660) was shelved with works beside his key writers
Perry, Munn and
Locke, by a Lancashire wool-dealer and small farmer. He also
notes that a
Kendal tradesman saw Allestree’s works as essential reading in
1716. Such
works, including the celebrated The Lady’s Calling, were
socially hegemonic,
because they dealt with behaviour on its new gendered
foundation in Restoration
England. This is an issue he omits.
Yet there is a critical connection here. Mutual worldly
happiness for all
men and women became a field open for examination because
the problem of
womankind was being finally solved from 1660 onwards, by the
group of conduct-
book writers led by the bishop Richard Allestree. Women were
no longer simply
deceitful, voracious, untrustworthy, the weaker sex. Allestree,
67. on the contrary,
shows them ready to be taken into partnership, as the junior
partners of course.
The most striking finding of my own extensive study of the
upbringing of young
girls in 1660 to 1800 is that it was all about their
‘improvement’.
The word occurs again and again. It was taken for granted that
young men
had long been ready for improvement. This was what the
Renaissance notion
of civility, so well explored over a long time period by Anna
Bryson, was about.
Improvement of girls, as a crucial intent by middle- and upper-
class parents, came
later. It was created by living with polished London relatives,
by boarding schools,
by the provincial round of assemblies and balls, where female
politeness was
paraded. So Slack’s book, outwardly all one long continuous
story, actually has
a decisive shift of gender mentality at the very centre of its
account, which must
surely affect his argument. Material improvement, he shows,
was a single 150-year
story; the shift in gender ideology which opened that material
improvement to the
other half of humankind distinguishes the last ninety years of
the period 1600–
1750 from its first sixty. This caveat aside, Slack’s magnum
opus crowns a career
in the field of early modern economic history of quite
exceptional achievement.
Moreton-in-Marsh ANTHONY FLETCHER
69. African American and
pan-African cultures were forged at sea when a multi-ethnic
mass of Africans was
assembled (p. 122). Rediker also gives two more meanings for
the term ‘motley
crew’: firstly, an ‘organized gang of workers, a squad of people
performing similar
tasks or performing different tasks contributing to a single
goal’, and secondly, ‘a
social-political formation of the eighteenth-century port city’,
an ‘urban mob’ or
‘revolutionary crowd’ (p. 91). These definitions illustrate the
scope of the book,
which aims to represent a wide range of underclasses and the
roles that they
have played in shaping not only maritime history but also the
history of social,
intellectual and political change on land.
Methodologically Rediker acknowledges the debt of his
approach to maritime
history to both Eric Hobsbawm and Michael Foucault, fathers of
social and
spatial histories. He cites Foucault’s definition of the ship as ‘a
floating piece
of space’ (p. 3). Maintaining this Foucauldian influence, he
describes the
transoceanic ship as a site of ‘deep dialectic of discipline and
resistance’ (p. 121).
Rediker also tries to use his contextual focus on the sea as a
way to navigate
away from the ‘terracentric’ perspective of traditional histories
permeating the
‘deep structure of Western thought’ (p. 2). Given the
historiographical slant of the
book, one of its shortcomings is its lack of engagement with the
71. 608 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES
culture, of revolution and class struggle, of slavery and the
battle for liberty,
and of poverty and the quest for dignity. Rediker migrates
between the historical
biographies of individuals and the meta-narratives of national
politics and global
economy.
One of the book’s important contributions lies in the way it
integrates
intellectual and social history. Outlaws of the Atlantic not only
charts the way in
which the maritime underclasses were vectors of global
communication but also
the way in which they created knowledge and culture and
brought about social
change. In particular, Rediker shows the way in which
storytelling has played a
role in both social and intellectual history. Chapter 1, ‘The
sailor’s yarn’, depicts
how the physical labour of picking the yarn of the ships’ ropes
was woven together
with the spinning of yarns about nautical life. Rediker notes
that these stories
both socialized workers and transmitted the practical knowledge
developed by
communities of deep-sea sailors. Significantly, Rediker notes
that it was deep-
sea sailors who witnessed and experienced the world and that
their stories were
an important source of knowledge for the elites (p. 23). In the
72. final chapter he
describes how the events and stories at sea fuelled the rise of
literature about the
sea on land, and he indicates how the fictions and mythologies
developed at sea
constitute an important strand of intellectual history.
The ownership, development and use of different forms of
knowledge are an
important theme in Rediker’s book, and at the core of its
significance. Rediker
writes that ‘seaman occupied a strategic position in the global
division of labor,
which in turn gave them access to, and control of, certain kinds
of knowledge,
information, and ideas’ (p. 28). When describing rebellions on
slave ships, Rediker
reminds us that ‘uprisings required knowledge of the ship’ (p.
133), and that
‘slaves needed three specific kinds of knowledge about
Europeans and their
technologies’, to escape their chains, to use firearms and to sail
the ship (p. 134).
This focus on the role of knowledge in the insurrections of the
underclasses
suggests that Rediker’s approach is not only indebted to
Hobsbawm, but also
to Antonio Gramsci.
In this study Rediker gives us a new way to think, not just about
the
relationship with social and intellectual history, but also about
the history of
political thought. He describes the importance and use of
concepts of justice and
freedom to pirates, fugitives and slaves, and he explains the
74. sense to divide these wars into two phases. Anthony Page’s new
book focuses on
what he terms the ‘Seventy Years War’, an almost-continuous
series of conflicts
between Britain and (mostly) France, which started with the
shambolic response
to the Jacobite rebellion and culminated in the triumph of
Waterloo, paving
the way for a century of imperial dominance under the Pax
Britannica. From
the perspective of a Victorian Whig historian, this rise to
international pre-
eminence seemed linear and inevitable, but Page reminds us that
it did not appear
this way to people living through the eighteenth century. France
was Europe’s
leading military power, with immense resources and a
population three times that
of Britain. The danger of a French invasion recurred throughout
the period and
on several occasions came very close to happening. If the Duke
of Wellington
famously described the battle of Waterloo as ‘a damned nice
thing – the nearest
run thing you ever saw’, Page suggests that the same could be
said of the whole
Seventy Years War (p. 59).
With this in mind, Page offers a novel perspective on the
period. On the
one hand, this is a military and imperial history. After a gallop
through
the wars themselves, he examines the nature of the state and the
armed forces
that made success in war possible. He nuances John Brewer’s
familiar narrative
75. of the ‘fiscal-military state’ by emphasizing the fundamental
role of the navy in
Britain’s military strategy, imperial power and industrial base.
This was instead
a ‘fiscal-naval state’, in which a large, permanent and expensive
navy contrasted
with an army that was kept to a minimum in peacetime and
expanded to full
strength only when required (the reason why Britain’s wars
tended to get off to a
slow start). This is not just a conventional military history,
however, since Page
offers an excellent introduction to the social and cultural
history of the military
– something that is a notable growth area in the historiography
of the period –
and tells us much about the lives of ordinary redcoats and
ratings.
The second half of the book thinks about the wider cultural,
political and
religious contexts of these wars. This is not a history of ‘war
and society’ that just
focuses on wartime civil society, since Page makes it clear that
the influence was
two-way. War had an all-pervasive influence on domestic
culture, but it was also
fundamentally informed by its political and intellectual context.
Britain could
only pay for, recruit, locate and deploy its combatants in a way
that was acceptable
to its political system and its public sphere. It is currently
fashionable in cultural
studies of the century to emphasize that Britons encountered
war vicariously
through newspapers, plays, letters and songs, but Page is clear
