The standard dictionary of Latin gives under fama "talk of the multitude like rumour, either as relating or as judging,...renown, scandal." The present volume helps to discover what the value of this term was in medieval Europe. The volume contains altogether nine contributions, divided into three sections, which deal with subjects which can roughly be subsumed under the term fama with its quite diverse meanings. With the exception of Chris Wickham, the contributors are from American universities, a mix of established and younger scholars, which is always welcome. (Not so welcome is reference to forthcoming publications.) In more than one respect these are attempts at histoire de mentalite, in bringing new questions to largely familiar sources. Also, the investigation goes beyond the written word and includes pictures to a substantial extent. The time-span of the book is the millennium after the fifth century, and the areas covered are Italy, Spain, France, England, and Germany. (It is a pity that neither Scandinavia nor the Celtic societies are included because these also provide valuable source material, especially in the areas of wergelt and of honor, where reputation is actually priced.) In general the sources used are available in print. (At least in the case of Bowman the edition used of the Visigothic ecclesiastical law is not the best one available, and in the transcript of the sources a whole line was skipped, p. 102 note 15, and the ref. is 382D, not B, as I found when I could not make sense of the source as printed, and the word cannonum does not, to my knowledge, exist in medieval Latin.) This is not the case in the contribution by Sandy Bardsley who draws on archival material, and it remains unclear how she can quantify the sources presented. Passing reference--but not more--is made to modern scholars from other fields, in fact household names, Pierre Bourdieu from sociology, and Clifford Geertz from anthropology, but with the exception of F. R. P. Akehurst who expresses surprise that the legal system of medieval France is fundamentally different from that of present-day America (see esp. p. 90) the scholars stay largely within their discipline and time-frame.
The challenge of investigating the topic of fama is well stated by Chris Wickham: "All societies are structured not only by rules, which people can be taught, and which can be policed, but also by a much less clear body of knowledge about how these rules can be negotiated and bent, about how far one can go before people think one has gone too far, and about which people can get away with more and which with less. Fama is the best guide we have in this period to these quasi-rules, what Pierre Bourdieu has called habitus" (26). How can the distant scholar grasp these grey zones? A very substantial part of the answer is his or her understanding of fama in the material whether or not this term occurs explicitly. This, in a way, provides substantial freedom but also liberty which can lead to rather arbitrary scholarly dispute: Colette Beaune and the concept of nacion which that author sees rising, given in a very narrow special sense, only in the late fifteenth century which Lori Walters sees already in Christine. At one stage, while drawing on that same French author, she goes much further than her (and too far to my mind) in writing: "The comparison that Christine makes between Charles and Louis IX is her most telling one, for she elevates the image of her patron, and that of the monarchy in general, by placing the king in a direct line to Christ by way of St Louis" (131; see on this the French original of 1985 at p. 152). Walters's style is somewhat mannered: 'exemplarity', 126 'to meld' 130, 'to foreground' 136. The editors appropriately, in this respect, refer to Christine's text as "richly imbricated," (213). Her presentation of John of Salisbury's Policraticus (not indexed) as the "founding text of the medieval mirror tradition" (119f) needs qualification. I am thinking of the seventh-century Irish De XII abusivis saeculi and its numerous Carolingian derivatives.
It is somewhat surprising that the editors of the volume, who had the idea of investigating this topic in the first place, should figure merely in the brief introduction and in the conclusion. On the other hand, they go well beyond the findings of the individual scholars as in the following statements: "The moral condemnation and legal regulation of talk, as Bardsley has suggested, typically served to control the speech of women and other social subordinates and inferiors. Such regulation, not a natural feature of human societies, should probably be interpreted as historically constructed and linked to state-building and to encroaching patriarchy" (212); and: "Today, talk still seems to operate influentially and more or less without challenge in everyday life, mirroring somewhat the earlier medieval situation. In the larger public or political sphere, however, talk is officially denigrated. Thanks to the essays here, we can hope to trace the beginnings of that suppression and re-channeling of talk" (214).
The elegantly produced book with detailed index contains, nevertheless, surprising blunders: on p. 169 the British Museum still figures in place of the British Library; on p. 220 Charles G. Nelson is presented as a specialist in the Nibelunglied! All in all, the rich harvest presented here makes the present reader for one ask for more.