[SCA-AS] [Fwd: TMR 08.01.13 Anton, The Rural History of Medieval European Societies (Hoffmann)]

Thu Jan 17 13:03:55 CST 2008

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Subject: TMR 08.01.13 Anton, The Rural History of Medieval European
Societies (Hoffmann)
From:    "The Medieval Review" <tmrl at indiana.edu>
Date:    Thu, January 17, 2008 10:09 am
To:      tmr-l at indiana.edu
         bmr-l at brynmawr.edu
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Alfonso Anton, Isabel, ed. The Rural History of Medieval European
Societies: Trends and Perspectives. The medieval countryside,
vol. 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Pp. viii, 310. $65.90. ISBN 978-2-
503-52069-8.

    Reviewed by Richard C. Hoffmann
         York University
         medfish at yorku.ca

Medievalists wishing to learn what specialists think about the lives
and histories of most medieval people, the rural agriculturalists who
supported the rest of medieval society, will find value in this book.
 After an editorial introduction, six separately-authored essays treat
recent historical writing on rural life in six medieval countrysides.
 The collection originated as special issues of the Spanish journal,
Historia Agraria, revista de agricultura e historia rural, for
2003 and 2004. Now the papers appear in English translation, with
updated bibliographies and an added contribution on Poland. Though
promising rich bibliographic and historiographic dishes, the menu
leaves much hunger unsatisfied. Chapters follow no common plan, lack
explicit comparative context, and except for that on Poland refer not
at all to others in the package.

The Spanish historical sensibility that Isabel Alfonso brings to her
editorial task provides a refreshing change from the Anglo- or Franco-
centric perspective of most writers with more than local pretensions
regarding medieval agrarian history.  Her introduction summarizes the
approaches of her authors but says little about the substance of their
findings.  Contributors differ in the relative role they attribute (or
attention they pay) to developments within medieval rural history as
compared to longer agrarian histories, the national historical
discipline, or larger cultural or political influences.  Alfonso
observes different engagements with such concepts or constructs as
"peasant" or "feudalism," noting how in most national discourses the
latter "seems now to have lost its explanatory power" (11).  Likewise
many practicing historians now seem more inclined to question and
revise received interpretive opinion.  Effects of academic
institutions and organizations interest some authors.  More at least
touch on the place of medieval agrarian history in the broader
academic enterprise, worrying whether it should be considered an
independent field of enquiry, a part of general medieval studies or
social history, or even risks vanishing from scholarly consciousness
altogether.

But no topic Alfonso highlights is fully treated in all of the
contributions.  Diversity of approach prevails and should be
appreciated but it here comes at the cost of integration.  Six
separate essays remain trapped in their national compartments while
the absence of two essential others (the Low Countries and
Scandinavia) goes regrettably unremarked.  And as a reader enters the
essays, more differences soon emerge.

Two highly-respected rural historians, Christopher Dyer and Phillipp
Schofield, discuss medieval England.  (The chapter title refers to
"Medieval Britain," but after some pages about Anglo-Saxons, I counted
but one reference to Scotland and none to Wales.)  Probably because
England is blessed with lively present-day scholarship in the agrarian
field, this chapter's mere fifteen year retrospect is the shortest in
the book.  A reader unfamiliar with the essence and details of Michael
M. Postan's interpretations which so set the tone of a generation's
debates and which remain the object of much recent revisionism, will
not learn them here.  In recompense this chapter successfully raises
the broadest range of topics: lord-peasant relations before 1100,
agricultural technology, commercialization, peasant culture and social
relations, the late medieval crisis, and transition to a "modern"
rural world.  The authors show how simple dichotomies and universalist
explanations (whether Postan's or Robert Brenner's) have simply failed
to survive empirical tests.  In English academic circles medieval
agrarian history is plainly alive and well, perhaps because, as Dyer
and Schofield affirm, those who do it are confident that the verbal
and physical remains left from the Middle Ages can inform us about
objective and subjective worlds of that past.  Considered only as a
bibliographic guide, this overview is a rich gift to graduate students
or to a professor who needs to update introductory lectures on
medieval rural life.  Its thin temporal depth and refusal to suggest
future directions threaten, however, quick obsolescence.

Benoit Cursente takes a twenty-five year perspective on a French rural
history he sees dominated by personalities and institutions. As Paris
and other northern centers famous for their adherence to the Annales
school abandoned agrarian history for the social anthropology of
elites and religion, scholars in the south assumed leadership,
especially showing greater interest in historical use of the
burgeoning mass of data unearthed by France's unequaled financial
commitment to rescue archaeology. In exploring the role of the
castle, the parish church, and the household in shaping rural life,
such writers as Pierre Toubert, Pierre Bonnassie, Charles Higounet,
and later Monique Bourin integrated material evidence with written
records of social structure. Newer scholars revive interest in
processes of change, whether those arose from markets, technology, or
the habitus of work. Cursente is not uncritical of his
compatriots' long-standing Gallocentrism, but worries more about
protecting the turf of a distinctive medieval period against a
longue duree which merely situates it between late antiquity
and early modernity.

Thirty years in the rural history of medieval Spain are covered by
Jose Angel Garcia de Cortazar and Pascual Martinez Sopena, who write
very much for an audience of insiders.  Like Cursente, their approach
is historiographic, tracing the importance of French models
(geographic and Marxist) for Spanish historians during the 1960s-80s,
followed by a period of testing the concepts against regional-level
data, which has most recently broadened out into a wider range of
territories within Spain and a new openness to international and
individual approaches.  Whereas an older generation of scholars had
focused on landed estates, especially the well-documented monastic
properties, new work looks at management practice, regional elites,
settlement structures, and agro-pastoral production. It begins to be
aware of "ecohistory" (in English more commonly known as environmental
history).  Some of this diversity bothers the authors, for it
challenges their apparent belief that one correct approach will yield
one agreed body of historical truth.  Yet they lament the weak
development of economic history and archaeology in the medieval
Spanish countryside and worry greatly that poor funding will inhibit
creation of the necessary interdisciplinary research teams.

Luigi Provero fills a real gap with his efficient overview of forty
years of agrarian studies on the Italian Middle Ages. In the 1960s an
interest in the rural world inspired by research of Cinzio Violante
and Emilio Sereni finally penetrated the long-standing mythic
identification of Italian scholarship with the city-state. There
followed three successive periods of changing thematic focus: on
seigneurial power and communal domination from works of Giovanni
Tabacco; on Pierre Toubert's concept of incastellamento and its
testing against both written and archaeological records; and finally a
more social-historical approach to stratification and community shaped
by work of Chris Wickham. Provero thus gives to research by non-
natives more attention than do his fellow contributors. After forty
years Italian medieval studies no longer lags in investigating the
rural world, but remains weakly integrated and neglectful of long-term
structures and issues of economic production.

It takes a chapter nearly twice as long as others for Julien Demade to
handle aspects of the medieval rural history written in German since
the 1930s. Compared to the other contributions, this one is skewed by
the author's devoting a very large first segment to attacking the
(reasonably well-known) National Socialist backgrounds of the core
group of scholars in this field up to the 1960s. Demade blames the
influence of these men for an excessive focus on the role of lords (as
if lords were not part of agrarian history). Yet at the same time
Demade declines to confront the substance of those writers' claims for
the central influence of Herrschaft in structuring the medieval
German countryside. More informative for readers is a subsequent
overview of some less political approaches: Wilhelm Abel's Postan-like
interpretation of a late medieval agrarian crisis and telling
criticisms of it; new work on social stratification which explodes the
stereotypes of a unified village community (Gemeinde) and a
uniform group of peasants (Bauer); and research by the Swiss
Roger Sablonier that reintegrates lords into the dynamics of rural
society by the end of the medieval period. Demade displays a curious
lack of interest in medieval scholarship under the DDR and a certain
(self-contradictory?) wish to criticize German scholarship for lacking
the uniformity of approach of the French. For all this, however, he
most importantly highlights the loss to German social science of its
once vital historical dimension and contribution to medieval agrarian
studies, and the simultaneous intellectual stagnation of traditional
medieval history in Germany. As a result, other disciplinary
settings now yield most innovative work in the field. Like Cursente,
Demade appears more concerned for the self-definition of
historiographic institutions than for the state of knowledge about the
agrarian past.

In the one essay making explicit reference to others in this
collection, Piotr Gorecki, an American historian of medieval Poland,
finds the great strength of Polish historiography on medieval rural
life in its long continuity and cumulative evolution of key themes.
His essay has a distinctive organization, taking as its starting point
the treatment of the countryside in a new synthesis by medievalist
Stanislaw Szczur. [1] Szczur's agrarian themes of early medieval
princely power over all Polish country people, the rise of lordship
and changing agrarian economy, and of immigration and ethnic
relations, Gorecki then traces back through writings on Polish history
during the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.  Gorecki
demonstrates how attention to these very issues has refined
understanding while integrating with the tradition wholly new evidence
from archaeology and other disciplines.  This continuity was
interrupted but unbroken by war, politics, destruction, and the
sometimes tragic personal circumstances of individual Polish
historians.  Gorecki contrasts to the negative stance of Demade how
recent Polish historians engage creatively with traditional and new
interpretations by their German counterparts (what he calls the
"redomestication of the Germans in medieval Polish historiography"
[279]).  While showing continued consensus around, for example, the
notion of medieval convergence between Polish and western forms of
agrarian life, Gorecki identifies the weak connection between these
analytical themes and past lived experience, so highlighting an issue
barely adumbrated in the chapter on England and elsewhere ignored. Yet
this chapter declines to follow the English, German, or Italian ones
into the changing rural world of later medieval centuries.

Having worked through the individual chapters, what of the book?  Weak
overall editorial control and lack of a substantive editorial
conclusion leave a whole less than the sum of its parts.  The intended
audience is hard to identify.  Only fellow rural specialists will
sympathize with laments over the state of a rarely chic field.  Only
those at home in Spanish or English faculty lounges will catch the
insider references.  Graduate students can and should eagerly absorb
the bibliographic riches, but specialists in historiography or the
sociology of knowledge will surely wonder why institutions are so
important in some narratives and quite absent from others.  Unequal
historiographic depth means different chapters will have to these
different readers quite unevenly enduring value.

At the substantive level, the disjunction between essays which
concentrate on historiography (the history of history writing) and
those setting out the present status questionis is especially
clear in the juxtaposition of the German chapter with those on Poland,
Italy, or England, making the latter much more useful to medievalists.
 Uneven topical coverage from country to country is an inescapable
truth of different academic cultures, but these variations are nowhere
adequately expressed, analyzed, or balanced. Uneven temporal coverage
is less excusable: in none of these countries is rural history of
either the earlier or the later Middle Ages absolutely ignored, but
this cannot be learned from some essays. Such irregularity poorly
supports the comparative assessment of present knowledge, areas of
disagreement, or necessary future directions which should be a
principal reason for producing a book like this one. Overemphasis on
national/native language scholarship further fails to take proper
account of contributions by outsiders: not just English writers to the
history of rural Spain (e.g. Thomas Glick, R. I. Burns) or France
(Thomas Bisson, Constance Bouchard), but also French scholars writing
on Germany (Ph. Dollinger) and Germans on France and Italy. Here is
where the absence of Belgian and Dutch historians leaves a great
lacuna in understanding of both medieval France and Germany.

Should however, a reader open The Rural History of Medieval
European Societies with historiographic intent, the gaps and
distortions both conceptual and institutional are unsettling. How
soon some people forget. Both the structures of historical study and
the themes pursued in the medieval countryside were in the DDR and in
People's Poland for forty years deeply affected by self-conscious
Marxist-Leninist ideologies and by quiet resistance to those
ideologies. Chapters in this book explore none of this. Nor is the
role of Marxist thought in setting agendas or basic assumptions among
French, Italian, and English scholars so much as whispered. The
editor's introduction rightly observes the different place of
interdisciplinarity in rural history of, for instance, England,
France, and Spain, but not how this variation is grounded in both the
formal and the informal institutions of national academic cultures.
If this volume is meant to help encourage collaboration and new
departures, such questions and models need to be surfaced at both
national and European levels.

From one perspective, then, here is a collection much less than it
might have been, almost deceptive in what is not discussed,
disappointing in its reluctance to synthesize even pro tempore
(which is all legitimate scholarship can and should ever claim). From
another equally valid point of view, however, here is a hoard of
riches, gathered harvests of top-notch scholars, and some hints at
what each does and does not accomplish. In each chapter I found at
least one new item relevant to my own special interests. The English
chapter will serve a decade of students, the Italian and the Polish
inform the next scholarly generation. Indeed no PhD candidate in
medieval rural history (economic, cultural, environmental, social,
etc.) should be exempt from digesting the whole book. And if Medieval
Studies is really about all sorts of medieval lives, none of whatever
academic rank who pretend to be "medievalists" should forego this
opportunity to see what colleagues in several countries can show about
conditions of life for most western Europeans who lived during the
Middle Ages.

Notes:

1. Stanislaw Szczur, Historia Polski: redniowiecze [History of
Poland: The Middle Ages] (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2002).

-- 
-- Jenne Heise / Jadwiga Zajaczkowa
jenne at fiedlerfamily.net