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Pre-Gregorian Mentalities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

Timothy Reuter
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Type
Review Article
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The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , July 1994 , pp. 465 - 474
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 Leyser, Karl, Rule and conflict in an early medieval society: Ottoman Saxony, London 1979, 1.Google Scholar For a similar contrast see also Mayr-Harting, Ottoman book illumination, ii. 183.

2 See most recently Althoff, G., ‘Ķonfliktverhalten und Rechtsbewußtsein: die Welfen in der Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts’, FrühmiUelalterliche Studien xxvi (1992), 331–52Google Scholar, and ‘Demonstration und Inszeniérung. Spielregeln der Kommunikation in mittelalterlicher Öffentlichkeit’, ibid., xxvii (1993). For west Francia the recent study by Koziol, G., Begging pardon and favor: ritual and political order in early medieval France, Ithaca 1992, should also be notedGoogle Scholar.

3 Fried, Johannes, Die Formierung Europas, 840–1046, Munich 1991, 154–8Google Scholar, though Fried has a much broader spectrum of work in mind, not all of which would fit into the category approved above.

4 Althoff, , Amicitiae, 37–9, 54–68Google Scholar.

5 Lebensordnungen des 10. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart 1984, 2 vols paginated as oneGoogle Scholar, republished in full in a single-volume paperback, Munich 1992.

6 Our debt to the publishers is rather less, because the footnotes have been dropped at their insistence and replaced by brief chapter bibliographies and references to the sources for the most important episodes discussed. This seems all the more regrettable in that Fichtenau's footnotes are helpfully primary rather than heavily secondary. Moreover, any space saved has simply been squandered on self-indulgently ugly typography of the kind produced by people more interested in design than in books. The index is also much less full than that in the original, especially as regards subject matter, and it occasionally conflates two persons into one: the entry for Balderich confuses Balderich, bishop of Liège, with the Westfalian count of the same name, and that for Thangmar does not distinguish between Otto I’S half-brother and the biographer of Bernward of Hildesheim, for example.

7 Here again some criticism must be made in passing of the presentation, though there are no aesthetic grounds for complaint. The volumes look and feel superb; the difficulty lies in using them. The plates are interspersed among the text but the footnotes relegated to the back of each of the two volumes. Since many of the illustrations are referenced not just by the immediately juxtaposed text, this means a great deal of page-turning and inserting of book-markers if one wishes to follow the argument closely. The work would actually have been easier to use, though no doubt less aesthetically pleasing, if the text had been placed in one volume and the bibliography, plates and footnotes in another (which would also have saved the duplication of bibliographies). The reproductions, both in colour and in black and white, seem to be of very high quality, though this reviewer, who is not so far as he knows colour-blind, was unable to distinguish the two shades of blue in colour plate i referred to in vol. i. 45.

8 Mayr-Harting, , Ottonian book illumination, ii. 99Google Scholar.

9 Ibid. ii. 183.

10 For a twelfth-century example see Bonne, Jean-Claude, ‘Depicted gesture, named gesture: postures of the Christ on the Autun Tympanum’, History and Anthropology i (1984), 77–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Though the recovery of fragments of a ninth-century Turonian Bible at Trier whose existence had already been posited (Mayr-Harting, , Ottoman book illumination, ii. 209–11Google Scholar) shows, as with parallel examples of sources whose existence was first deduced by nineteenth-century Quellenkritik and which later did indeed turn up in manuscript form, that such methods are not to be dismissed out of hand.

12 However, the method applied to these by current American Icelandic specialists – in effect, to treat the world depicted by the sagas as if it were real – bears a strong resemblance to the way Althoff, Fichtenau and Koziol handle more familiar tenth-century Latin sources. See Wickham, C., ‘Problems of comparing rural societies in early medieval Western Europe’, TRHS 6th ser. ii (1992), 221–46, at pp. 238–40, for discussion and bibliography, and below n. 18Google Scholar.

13 As noted by Wickham, , ‘Problems’ 244Google Scholar.

14 This is the central thesis, stated with far more subtlety and power, of Tellenbach, G., Die westliche Kirche vom 10, bis zumfriihen 12. Jahrhundert, Göttingen 1988Google Scholar, now translated by this reviewer as The Church in Western Europe from the tenth to the early twelfth century, Cambridge1993Google Scholar.

15 Koziol, , Begging pardon, 307–8Google Scholar, has a helpful discussion of the inherent ‘polysemy’ of rituals and ceremonies; but much of this is necessarily lost to us.

16 On these see Althoff, , Verwandte, Freunde und Getreue, 111–13, and more extensively in Amicitiae, 75–81, 88–96Google Scholar.

17 Richer, , Historiae iii. 71, ed. Latouche, R., Paris, 1937, 88:Google Scholar the eagle was by custom turned towards the kingdom against which the king possessing Aachen was making war; Thietmar of Merseburg, , Chronicon iii. 8, ed. Holtzmann, R., Berlin 1935, 106Google Scholar: the eagle was by custom turned towards the kingdom of the king possessing Aachen.

18 ‘It does not follow from this that every detail must have occurred as Widukind depicts it. But the account must be taken seriously as the statement of a well-informed observer’: Althoff, , Amicitiae, 92 n. 286Google Scholar; ‘Whether the entire story is fiction, or only its combination with the anecdote concerning the death plot, is unimportant’: Fichtenau, , Living in the tenth century, 27, and, in vein, similar, 126, 248, 386, 416Google Scholar. See also Koziol, , Begging pardon, 117Google Scholar:‘Robert Latouche, Richer’s editor, believed that none of this really happened; but that hardly matters. What matters is that this is how Richer wanted the event to be remembered. This is how it should have happened.’

19 And indeed in such things as charters, law codes and ordines, which we must also learn to treat as forms of literature with their own rhetorical conventions. The old distinction between objective and subjective types of source – nowhere leaned on more trustingly than in that offshore island many of whose high and late medievalists are still all too prone to suppose that ‘record evidence’, once the discrimen veri et falsi has been made, will tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth – looks less and less plausible and helpful.

20 Fichtenau, , Living in the tenth century, 173, 176, 179, 385–6Google Scholar; Althoffl, , Verwandte, Freunde und Getreue, 81, 115–16, 131, 172–3, 199Google Scholar.

21 Deutschland-Frankreich: die Geburt zweier Nationen, Cologne 1990, passim, esp. pp. 421–4 on Widukind, and pp. 564, 589-93 on Richer.

22 But see also Leyser, Rule and conflict, 75–107, for an attempt to see Christomimetic rulership in a broader context.

23 Mayr-Harting, , Ottonian book illumination, i. 65 and n. 26Google Scholar, referring to Thietmar, , Chronicon vii. 1, 396Google Scholar, who describes Henry’s reception by twelve senators, ‘quorum VI rasi barba, alii prolixa mistice incedebant cum baculis’. This may be an allusion, as Mayr-Harting thinks, to depictions of Christ in Majesty with the apostles; but it may equally refer to Aaron and Moses (cf. Psalm cxxxii. 3, one of the Vulgate’s rare references to beards), or to both, or to something else entirely.

24 Thietmar, , Chronicon vii. 8, 406Google Scholar.