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Review: [Untitled]

Reviewed Work(s):

Nobilitas: Funktion und Reprsentation des Adels in Alteuropa by Otto Gerhard Oexle;Werner Paravicini

John B. Freed

The American Historical Review, Vol. 104, No. 5. (Dec., 1999), pp. 1735-1736.

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1735u r o p e : A n c i e n t a n d M e d i e v a lgiven, however, Anz fails to concentrate enough ondifferences among different types. When the conceptincludes both a guild of journeymen shoemakers in aprovincial Danish town and Stockholm's CorpusChristi guild, which began as a guild for priests andcame to include lay magnates, including the king, thequestion arise s of how meaningful their com mon cha r-acteristics really were. Anz recognizes the differences,of course, between guilds open to all and those forpeople in a particular occupation; he treats the latteras derivative and the more inclusive groups as norma-t ve.Anz does not have the sources available to give amore socially integrated account of how the guildsoperated in practice comparable, for example, to thework of Gervase Rosser for England. He could, how-ever, have chosen to give a more thorough account ofScandinavian urban and village life into which theavailable information ab out the guilds would fit. Lack-ing this, his assertion that guilds provided an indis-pensable stability to medieval society (p. 290) is onlyweakly supported. He might also have speculated orinferred beyond the evidence in front of him. Forexample, he is careful to n ote which guild statutes referexclusively to m en an d which indicate fem ale mem ber-ship. He does not, however, go the extra step ofconsidering what the presence or absence of femalemembers might imply about th e social function s of theguilds.Some guilds, Anz shows, included members of thegoverning urban elites. It would be h elpful to follow upthe implications of this finding for the larger socialcontext. How did relationships formed through theguild affect how these elites governed? Guilds dedi-cated to St. Knut flourished throughout Scandinaviaand the Baltic region. Anz suggests that, unlike otherguilds, these had form al links with e ach oth er an d thatthese links were connected with the activity of mer-chants engaged in international trade. Y et these guildswere not simply merchants' guilds. How did the in ter-national component interact with the local component,and how did this interaction affect commerce?

This is a book for specialists: those with an interestin late medieval Scandinavian ur ban history will find ituseful, as will those with an interest in forms ofcollective association in the Middle Ages. It is athorough dissertation, careful, well-grounded in theliterature as well as the sources. It d oes not, however,provide a radically new interpretation of medievalguilds, and it does not go as far as it might inelucidating the social history of medieval Scandinavia.RUTHMAZOKARRASTemple University

OTTO GER HAR D EXLE nd WE RNE R edi-ARAVICINI,tors. Nobilitas: Funktion und Reprasentation des Adelsin Alteuropa. (Proceedings of the conference, "Nobili-tas," 1994; Veroffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Insti-tuts fiir Geschichte, number 133.) Gotting en: Vanden -hoeck und Rup recht. 1997. Pp. 462. DM 98.

The thirteen essays in this collection about nobilityedited by O tto Gerh ard Oexle and Wern er Paraviciniwere delivered at a conferen ce held in 1994 in hon or ofKarl Ferdinand Werner's seventieth birthday. Theauthors concentrate on France and Germany, exceptfor Hagen Keller's piece on the role of nobles in theItalian communes an d Adeline Rucquoi's exam inationof the change from a "juridically" to a "theologically"defined nobility in fifteenth-century Sp ain. Chronolog -ically, the articles range from arti in Heinzelmann'sanalysis of how St. Augustine's historical ecclesiologyshaped Grego ry of Tours's presenta tion of the nobilityin The History of the Franks to G eorg Schmidt's studyof the role of ennoblement in the transformation ofmercenary leaders into a professional officer corpsduring the Thirty Years' War. Since I understandAlteuropa to mean, in Ot to Brunner's sense, the periodbetween around 1000 and the Fren ch Revolution, I amtroubled by the inclusion of Heinzelm ann's article andJean Durliat's reaffirmation of the existence and thepublic functions of both a R oma n an d Frankish nobil-ity in sixth-century Gaul.My reservations about the chronological limits aresymptomatic of a bigger prob lem: th e collection's lackof cohesion. Neither in his introduction nor in hisconcluding comments does Paravicini address any ofthe specific articles or the perceived similarities anddifferences in approach, definitions of nobility, orfindings that presumably emerged during the partici-pants' formal and informal discussions. The articlesare grouped in the table of contents in four categoriesthat Paravicini briefly discusses in general terms: nobleconduct; the depiction and representation of the no-bility; the continuity in the nobility's ancestry, func-tion, and self-awareness; and the legitimization ofnoble lordship. No further attempt is made to inte-grate this very disparate material, however. If there isa common theme in the articles, it may perhaps befound in Paravicini's concluding assertion that al-though the European nobility is not biologically Ro-man, its structure and its fundamental ideas-forexample, the ideal of public service or the exercise ofleisure with dignity-are. But the contribu tors do notaddress the question of whether such similarities aredue to the repeated classical revivals in Europeanhistory andlor the similar efforts at self-legitimizationby elite groups within traditional societies.This failure to integrate the contributions meansthat most scholars will read only the articles that are ofparticular interest to them. Let me comment, there-fore, about th ree articles that especially inte rested me.Rog er S ablonier asks why the local nobility in easternSwitzerland made increasing use of written instru-ments in the thirteenth century. Losses do not fullyexplain the lacunae in the documentation that make itso difficult to reconstruct, say, the genealogies andproperty holdings of a particular lineage. The answer isthat writing served only secondarily such legal pur-poses as proving property rights; instead, a cha rter was

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1736 Reviews of Booksa symbol of a connection to another lineage or reli-gious institution or itself an expression of lordship.Volkhard Huth's treatment of the pictorial repre-sentation of nobles in three historiographical or litur-gical manuscripts-the Vita Mathildis, the Psalter ofLandgrave Hermann I of Thuringia, and a hagio-graphical collection from St. Vincent's in Metz-isbased on his extensive discussions with the late KarlSchmid, who had intended to speak about th e manu-scripts at the conference. Thus Huth's piece should beread, along with the posthumous publication ofSchmid's 1961 Habilitationsschrift, Gebliit, Herrschaft,Geschlechterbewusstein: Grundfragen zum Verstandnisdes Adels im Mittelalter (1998), as the last addition toSchmid's oeuvre. The continuity in Schmid's thinkingis striking.Finally, Joseph Morsel, the only author who at-temp ts explicitly to define what is meant by the nobil-ity, asserts, admittedly provocatively, that there werenobles but not a nobility in Franconia before 1400.Although I am in no position to question Morsel's~ ra nco n ia n v idence, I would point out that scribes inthe twelfth century routinely differentiated in witnesslists between nobiles and ministeriales. Why does thisusage not indicate that the nobles themselves and theclerics who drafted the charters thought that thenobles belonged to a collectivity tha t we can label thenobility? The remaining pieces are Gerd Althoff onritualized acts of submission and reconciliation; JeanRichard on the juridical culture of the high-medievalFrench nobility; A rlette Jou anna on the nobility as theguardian of the laws during the French Wars ofReligion; Philippe Contamine on the ideal of nobleservice in late-medieval France; and Klaus Schreineron la te medieval legitimizations of noble lordship.JOHN . FREEDIllinois State UniversityGRAEMEMALL.George Chastelain and the Shaping ofValois Burgundy: Political and Historical Culture atCourt in the Fifteenth Century. (Studies in History, newseries.) Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell Press, for the RoyalHistorical Society. 1997. Pp. viii, 301.This important book significantly revises our under-standing of George Chastelain's career and achieve-ment. Th e first two chapters demo nstrate that Chaste-lain's cryptic autobiographical references were aneffort to conceal the fact that he was the eldest son ofa Francophile shipper from Gh ent who had married anobleman's daughter. The son served briefly in thearmy of Duke Philip the Good (1419-1467) of Bur-gundy after receiving t he a rts degree at the Universityof Louvain in 1432. Returning to Ghent, he pursuedshipping ventures, then left the city and the businessworld as a bankrupt in 1441. He entered the service ofPierre de BrCzC, seneschal of P oitou and an influentialcouncillor of King Charle s V II (1422-1461) of Fra nce ,before becoming a squire at the court of Philip theGood in 1446. Chastelain disappears from the record

between 1451 and 1454, but his poetry and d ram aswere gaining a court rep utation. In 1455, the year afterhis retu rn to cou rt, he was appo inted th e duke 's officialhistorian and beca me a councillor in 1457. Until 1464,when he established himself at Valenciennes, he alsoundertook diplomatic missions for the duke, and hecomposed numerous small works for declamation onpublic occasions even as he continued work on hisChronicle. His salary as court historian co ntinued untilhis death in 1475.Noting that there has been n o study of the mechan-ics of rise and fall at the Burgundian court, GraemeSmall uses prosopographical evidence to show thatChastelain's career was linked to the noble connec-tions of his mother's family and their circle, thenconsolidated by recognition of his writing ability. Al-though he came from a Flemish urban background,Chas telain identified completely with the Fre nch n obleculture of the Burgundian court, but this was due topersonal inclination and the influence of his nearlythree decades of service to the Burgundian duk es, notto a long formative period in France as was oncethought.The last four chapters concern Chastelain's work inthe context of contemporary historical writing and thecourt cultures that produced it. Small's analyticalframework is provided by the debate between HenriPirenne and his recent followers (Richard Vaughan,Walter Prevenier and Wim Blockmans, and MarcBoone), who have argued that Philip the Goo d hopedto establish an independent Burgundian state, andJohan Huizinga, who drew heavily on Chastelain'sChronicle for his view th at th e B urgundians remainedlinked fundamentally to France. Small argues that th egreat "historical moment" that occasioned Philip'sappo intmen t of Chastelain as cou rt historian was not apolicy break with France but rather the project for ajoint F ranco-B urgun dian crusade after 1453. Chas te-lain always portrayed Philip the Good as the idealChristian prince, contrasting him subtly with CharlesVII and more blatantly with Louis XI (1461-1483).Burgundian historiography, including but not limitedto Chastelain's work, emphasized the bonds withFrance. Th e French were th e successors of the Jews asGod's chosen people, but their problems with theEnglish and more recently with Philip the Good hadbeen the result of their sin and pride. Chastelain thushearkened back to a golden age when the Valois dukesof Burgundy had played the much greater part in theinternal affairs of the French kingdom that the divinenatural order had ordained. Small concludes that aBurgundian state, but not a nation-state, was takingform.Although Chastelain's Chronicle survives in sevenfragments, with substantial periods missing, internalreference s in what survives to events whose desc riptionhas been lost convinces Small that an archetype of thework th rough 1471 once ex isted, which was probably inthe possession of Chastelain's son Gonthier as late as1524. It seems to have been at least as widely read in