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2008 16 (3)

© 2008 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

looked far for evidence that the presence of the fourth-century Roman
army in a region was rarely a barrel of laughs for the locals.

Although Ward-Perkins periodically stops to inform us that the Roman

system was not necessarily a pleasant one for many, again balance is not
maintained. Invariably he slips back into giving us the clear impression
that in judging a civilization he places the ability to construct colonnaded
facades around lofty amphitheatres ahead of the custom of having
people publicly torn apart by wild beasts in those buildings for the
simple crime of being born on the wrong side of the Rhine; that the end
of the availability of a decent quality dining service outweighs the
termination of a system of exploitation that, while it provided access
to well-made pottery, reduced countless individuals to lives of abject
wretchedness. This is very much the view from High Table. I remain
unconvinced that we can weigh up humanity’s collective happiness or
misery in one period and compare it with that in another, even less so
that these things can be judged by the quality of their material remains.
Many people had a very bad time of it in the fifth century; many others
did rather well, nice crockery or no. Ward-Perkins ends by warning us,
correctly, not to take things for granted in the modern world, although,
of course, when placed against the other half of his argument, the
inevitable implication is dangerously xenophobic: beware unwanted
immigrants. If western civilization collapses he, I and you, dear reader,
will indeed have an unimaginably bleak time; millions of others will be
dancing in the streets. The forty-six well-chosen illustrations are nicely
reproduced in black and white. For me, the problem with this book
was that the same could be said of its argument.

University of York

GUY HALSALL

Representations of Power in Medieval Germany, 800–1500. Edited
by Björn Weiler and Simon MacLean. International Medieval Research
16. Turnhout: Brepols. 2006. xvi + 352 pp. ISBN 2 503 51815 X.

Happily, there is no need here for the commonplace lament of reviewers
of essay collections about the collection’s diversity. This collection’s
subject is well framed by the editors’ introduction, and actively pursued
by (nearly) all the thirteen authors. Its subject is not power itself, but
its representations in medieval Germany. The collection is relatively
unconcerned with the actual, concrete experience of power, and in this
regard differs from that co-edited in 2005 by Robert F. Berkhofer III,
Alan Cooper and Adam Kosto. Instead, it seeks to recapture the patterns
of publicity, or modes of articulation, of which power is the subject:

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Early Medieval Europe

2008 16 (3)

© 2008 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

patterns expressed by a broad range of media – words, entire texts,
images, concrete objects and gestures – and deployed deliberately, even
strategically.

All this makes for a subject which is specifiable and important, but

also difficult and elusive. Things are further complicated by its framing
in terms of two big issues. One is Germany – understood as a region
of medieval Europe which until recently has escaped careful attention
by scholars who think and write in English, but has been the subject of
an important historiography by scholars who think and write in German.
As an encounter between two academic worlds, the book (aptly dedicated
to Timothy Reuter) inevitably engages with currently pressing problems
of German and Austrian historiography, above all the recent move away
from an ‘old’, or traditional, brand of ‘constitutional history’ (Verfas-
sungsgeschichte), toward a more anthropological, social, prosopographical,
and network analysis. One result of this engagement is a strongly
centralizing emphasis: the agent to whom ‘representation’ of ‘power’ is
ascribed is consistently the ruler, or someone acting in the ruler’s place.

The second big issue framing the book is an anxiety concerning the

precise nexus between ‘representation’ and the phenomenon being
represented; that is, ‘power’ itself. This reflects the current importance
of the challenge aimed at just this nexus (though with respect to ritual,
not power) by Philippe Buc’s Dangers of Ritual (2001); a challenge here
doubly pertinent because it was aimed, in part, at Gerd Althoff, a
crucial participant in that cross-cultural scholarly encounter. Buc’s
challenge is interpreted mildly to mean that different ‘representations’
of reality vary, along lines which are themselves a fruitful area of
enquiry – a point illustrated by Hans-Werner Goetz with an elaborate
epistemological diagram, in his study of the Astronomer’s treatment of
Louis the Pious. Simon MacLean puts the insight to excellent use as he
traces out the variation (or ‘contestation’) between the meanings in a
sequence of narratives about an episode in which the young Charles the
Bald ostentatiously rejected his royal office; while David Warner,
switching metaphor, refers to that variation as ‘polyvocality’. Yet, Buc’s
challenge rumbles in the book, as if there were some doubt about the
reality of its subject. An intriguing ambiguity in a collective response to
an ambiguous book.

Despite this conceptually problematized terrain, the authors tread

upon it by means of one common approach. Each author develops one
case study in ‘representation’ by selecting a specific example of the
publicity, or articulation, of power. The examples chosen include specific
events, described by one narrative source; longer or recurrent sequences,
presented by one or more narrative sources; material objects or pictures;
and entire caches, or archives, purposefully assembled for purposes of

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Book reviews

Early Medieval Europe

2008 16 (3)

© 2008 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

‘representation’. Thus, in an excellent study, Eric Goldberg’s essay
hinges on one material object – a belt, woven of fabric and marked with
a written inscription – which was, simultaneously, a gift from Queen
Emma, a statement made by her, and a very particular written record.
Through this object the queen expressed to its recipient a specific message
about her position, and displayed, asserted and reinforced her power.
The essays oscillate around the book’s core subject in two directions.
First, they vary on the exact location of the publicity, or articulation,
of ‘power’. To some authors, the crucial terrain of ‘representation’ is
affective – the feelings, perceptions, or emotions related to ‘power’. To
others, that terrain is cognitive: the fact of thinking about ‘power’, and
the formalized outcome of such thought, namely learned ideas about
‘power’.

The articles may be grouped into three categories. Five authors – Eric

Goldberg, Simon MacLean, John Freed, Björn Weiler and Chris Jones
– stay fully on subject. Warren Brown, Mikhail Bojcov, and, perhaps
above all, Sverre Bagge, invoke power and its representation as organizing
concepts, but move onto other, related subjects. Goetz and Berhnard
move into formal, learned thought, in tight, well-constructed essays
about verbal concepts and categories related to politics, governance, and
community (res publica, for example), between the later Carolingian
period and the twelfth century. Overall, this is an impressive, challenging,
and fundamentally coherent set of essays.

In the book’s course, those initial anxieties concerning ‘representation’

disappear. The need to respond to, or even invoke, Philippe Buc affects
exclusively (some of) those colleagues who work on the Frankish period
and its close aftermath. Like Dangers itself, the sense of danger seems
lodged in early medieval history. Second, this book is an important
event in introducing medieval Germany to a world of scholarship
conceived in English. Some of the articles make available for the rest of
us, and for our better students, important moments of Germany’s
history, analysed and presented innovatively and lucidly. Let me note
here Brown’s article on the resonances of works for royal and imperial
office within the Freising cartulary as a beautifully readable resource for
anyone interested in Carolingian politics. Also, at long last Weiler’s
treatment of Frederick II’s depictions of his visits to various parts of
Germany as part of the repression of a revolt by his son Henry, restores
medieval German kingship to its full intelligibility.

This introduction to Germany also works on a more abstract, difficult

level: translation. One of the book’s most important insights occurs
right at the beginning, when Goetz identifies accurate transmission of
meaning as the crucial challenge in the introduction of one scholarly
community to the work of another. What is meant, of course, is not

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basic language competence, but the task of bridging very different
scholarly vernaculars (the awkward non-correspondence between
Verfassungsgeschichte and constitutional history as but one example), so
that the ultimate, shared understanding refers to truly comparable
phenomena. I am not sure how far this book actually moves us toward
a solution, but, very importantly, the problem is raised.

Finally, the book is an example of another resonance between these

two great historiographies. The quest to understand, in English,
heretofore relatively unknown parts of medieval Europe, mirrors the
long legacy of reassessments of fundamental concepts and categories:
post-Carolingian succession; order and disorder around ‘the year 1000’;
statecraft and its alternatives; lordship, feudalism and the fief; violence;
and now, ritual. This intellectual restlessness among medievalists
who think and write in English is surely one context for the second life
– in that language – of Gerd Althoff’s ‘rules of the game’: as an organ-
izing construct, an intuitively attractive shorthand for human practice,
and a focus of contestation. To borrow a phrase from feminist histori-
ography, this encounter between scholarly cultures is good to think
with.

University of California, Riverside

PIOTR GÓRECKI

Insignis sophiae arcator: Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of
Michael Herren on his 65th Birthday. Edited by Gernot R. Wieland,
Carin Ruff and Ross G. Arthur. Publications of the Journal of Medieval
Latin 6. Turnhout: Brepols. 2006. xiv + 304 pp. $50.00. ISBN 2 503 51425 1.

Michael Herren has been one of the luminaries of the study of medieval
Latin: he has shed light on many areas of the subject, as is shown by
the extremely useful bibliography which forms the final piece in this
collection. Some of texts and issues on which he has written are the
subject of articles included here: among them Aethicus Ister and Aldhelm,
as well as questions relating to Hiberno-Latin. On Aethicus, Danuta
Shanzer provides a characteristically learned, nuanced and witty piece:
she notes, but does not fully subscribe to Herren’s seventh-century date
for the text, before offering a reading of the work as a parodic Reiseroman,
not unlike the Vita Apollonii of Philostratus, or the fictional hagiography
of Jerome. She makes no claim to solve many of the central questions
posed by the text, listing them in the conclusion to her article; but her
central contention comes as close as any yet offered to coping with
the crucial problem of the mixture of learning and humour which
characterizes the text. Carin Ruff offers a splendidly clear analysis of