Saint Francis: Nature Mystic. The Derivation and Significance of the Nature Stories in theFranciscan Legend by Edward A. ArmstrongReview by: Rosalind B. BrookeThe American Historical Review, Vol. 80, No. 2 (Apr., 1975), pp. 388-389Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1850534 .

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388 Reviews of Books

terests of the estates of the Reich, which con- tinuously opposed the "great power" aspira- tions of the Habsburgs. The desires of the reformers found in the estates had not yet been clearly formulated. The insufficiency of the existing machinery for supporting Reich goals was, however, patent in the fact that only about a third of the money levy voted by the Frank- furt Diet was ever paid. As Bock poiInts out, the grand enterprise of the House of Austria was supported primarily by its own lands as well as by its credit dealings with the Fuggers, and only to a very modest extenit did it draw on the Reich.

This double volume has over two hundred pages of clear, readable narrative introduction interspersed among almost twelve lhundred pages of documentary material. The documents are subdivided into the prehistory of the Diet (roughly July 1488 to June 1489), the Diet itself, and the collection of the services and money voted at the assembly. The prehistory is treated with greater breadth than the other two sec- tions, and in this section the documents are further subdivided by topic. As with the newer series of the Reichstagsakten, the texts are rarely given in full (though some of the pro- tocols of the Diet are): rather they are sum- marized and excerpted with full bibliographical notes. In all, this will be a very useful tool for researclhers seeking to understand the fifteenth- century Reich on its own terms, and the intro- ductions by themselves constitute an excellent monograph on the political life of Central Europe in the period. One cannot be called impatient for wanting to see the rest of the volumes printed as soon as possible.

STEVEN NV. ROWAN

University of Missouri- St. Louis

JUAN CARRASCO PEREZ. La poblaci6Jn de Navarra en el siglo XIV. (Coleccio6n hist6Srica de la Universidad de Navarra, 29.) Pamplona: Uni- versidad de Navarra, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras. 1973. Pp. 703.

Ilhe major utility of this volume will be found in the 455 pages of previously unpublished dlocumeintary sources that it contains. These texts coInsist of five tax surveys, all deriving from the Archiivo General de Navarra, of parts or the whole of the kingdom of Navarre be- tween 1330 and 1366. They have been fully described and identified and laboriously prinlted.

The information they supply has been com- bined witlh that dlerive(l from five other Nav-

arrese fiscal documents of the same periocl, all previously publislhed, and distilled into a sixty- five page statistical appendix, which is the next most valuable part of the book. Much of this information is also presented graphically in the twenty-four maps integrated into the volume.

One can imagine the labor that went into the sheer collection and analysis of this material by the doctoral candidate (and this is indeed a published dissertation), but the remainder of this bulky tome is of quite uneven value. Two short sections on the population fluctuations and the social structure of Navarre duiring this period amount to about thirty-two pages com- bined. They are carefully and perhaps too cautiously done and yield some information valuable to the demographer about the effects of the Black Death, for example. They also add some interesting if highly localized, and thus particularized, data about population shifts in the fourteenth century both within the rural countryside and from the countryside toward the city. There are also some interesting figures provided on the numbers of Muslims and Jews in the kingdom and their geographical distri- bution.

The real difficulty in finding a historical con- text in which to generalize this data is not addressed. The author was hardly ready to, offer opinions as to the applicability of his find- ings outside the small, mountain kingdom of Navarre. But then it is precisely the inability of most doctoral candidates to handle suclh wider implications that makes the publication of most theses of doubtful utility. The author's brief sixteen-page essay oIn the development of historical demography and its methodological problems is little more than a survey of the literature. Similarly, his handling of his data is safe, sensible, and will add nothing that I can dletect to the methodology of demographics.

BERNARD F. REILLY

[illanova University

EDWARD A. ARMSTRONG. Saint Francis: Nature Mystic. The Derivation and Significance of the Nature Stories in the Franciscan Legend. (Her- meneutics: Studies in the History of Religions, 2.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1973. Pp. 270. $12.00.

The autlhor of this book is a naturalist, ornitlhol- ogist, and Anglican parson who has written l)ooks on bird behavior and on Shakespeare's imaginationi. Here, as before, lhe brings scientific knowledlge, great learning, anid an unusual ap-

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Medieval 3_189

proach to a well-worn theme. He is not a his- torian, but his scholarly instinct and his devo- tion to the subject make this not only a labor of love but a book from whiclh the Franciscan scholar has much to learn. He describes the tradition of animal-loving saints before Francis's time, analyzes the various creatures and types of creature that enter the biographies and legends of St. Francis, and attempts, as many have be- fore, to draw the wlhole theme together in a final chapter on the Canticle of Brother Sun.

There are many indications that Mr. Arm- strong has not a historian's approach to this subject. He is brief aind somewhat misleading on the Cathari, and fails to note the ways in which Francis propounded in thought, word, and action a direct denial of the Catlhar doc- trine that the material world was wholly evil (pp. 27, 135). Francis saw animals as God's creatures, and his treatment of them was often a parable to emphasize that the world is God's, and good. Mr. Armstrong's brief words on Joachim of Fiore (pp. 30-31, 63, etc.) are sim- ilarly superficial and ignore most of the recent literature stemming from Dr. Marjorie Reeves's seminal book. More serious, he confuses the sources, sometimes preferring the witness of the legendary Fioretti to Tlhomas of Celano (pp. 128-29) or the saint's companions (p. 42), or treating the Speculnim Perfection is as an orig- inal work; he makes little use of Francis's own writings. Yet he brings to his study an incisive and deep understanding of the natural world in which Francis lived, far beyond that normal in Francis's biographers or mere historians. He is an amateur in the best sense; his learning is genuine and wide, but it is the naturalist's patience and enthusiasm that breatlhes new life into many of these stories.

ROSALIND B. BROOKE

London

V. D. KOROLIUK et al., editors. Issledovaniia po istorii slavianskikh i balkanskikh narodov. Epokha srednevekov'ia. Kievskaia Rus' i ee sla- vianskie sosedi [Studies in the History of the Slavic and Balkan Nations. Era of the Middle Ages. Kievan Rus' and Its Slavic Neighbors]. (Akademiia Nauk SSSR, Institut slavianove- deniia i balkanistiki.) Moscow: lzdatel'stvo "Nauka." 1972. Pp. 288.

This voluime is the first sbornik of the Division for the Study of Ancient and Medieval History of the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In the brief introduction the editors signal an intensifica-

tion of interest on the part of Soviet scholars in medieval studies of the Balkan Peniinsula anti the Danubian basin. The fifteen papers that follow are dedicated to the memory of B. D. Grekov, the first director of the Institute of Slavic Studies.

Six of the fifteen papers are strictly within the realm of archeology. With no exception they are concerned with an East Slavic ethnic and cultural presence in areas that are subject to a variety of interpretations. For those who are interested in the Slavic settlement of present- day Slovakia, a good recapitulation of literature on the subject is given by C. I. Peniak (pp. 68- 77). Another six papers survey anid reassess the historical problems. G. G. Litavrin suggests in his contribution that Yaroslav with his Russes raided Byzantium in 1043 in order to restore neighborly relations that had been disrupted by the participation of some Russes in an internal Byzantine struggle (p. 221). A different inter- pretation was given recen-tly by Andrzej Poppe in Slavia Orientalia (1967). It seems that the controversy concerning the campaign of 1043 will continue because of the lack of convincing arguments or solid evidence.

Another topic that has evoked a large quan- tity of polemical literature is the problem of ethnic and political associations of the so-called Cities of Cherven/Czerwiei and of the regioni of the town of Peremyshl/Przemysl during the ninth through the eleventh centuries. These regions were assigned by scholars either to Po- land or to Kievail Rus, the division of opinion frequently reflecting national feelings on the part of the writer. However, Ia. D. Isaevich adds a new dimension to the controversy. He sug- gests a Czech component in the medieval history of the regionl and finds support for his reason- ing in the description of the Prague bishopric from io86, in which the eastern boundary of the diocese is given as running along the Bug and Styr rivers. Isaeviclh, furthermore, quotes the Chronicles of Dlugossius to show that the town of Peremyshl/Przemysl might have been founded by a Premyslid (Boleslav II). Finally, Isaevich concludes on the basis of archeological material that the whole region was East Slavic. His reasonitig would have been more convinc- ing had he broughit forward some evidence to show that the Rus political superstructure in its material culture had more in common with the local population than the military-political su- perstructure of the Poles or the Czechs.

A significant contribution to the volume is by V. D. Koroliuk, the director of the newly created Division for the Study of Ancient and

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