One of the more glaring gaps in The uses of literacy in Carolingian Europe, edited by R. McKitterick in 1990, was Lombard Italy. The present volume, hatched under the wings of Professor McKitterick (who read the whole manuscript, according to the second sentence of acknowledgements in the book), written by a compatriot, fills this gap at least formally. The subject is potentially of greatest interest in that in Italy at that time the spoken language of the native population was still closer to written Latin than in Francia, and thus written Latin material then had a greater potential 'public' than in any other countries in Western Europe. The situation was, however, complicated by the politically dominant Lombards, the history of whose rule provides the rough chronological framework of the present study.
The work is attractively laid out: one third (chs. 1 and 2) preliminaries, then four thematic chapters, on law, charters, inscriptions, and manuscripts respectively. However, in presenting a general image of this period as "the darkest of Dark Age Italy owing to the poor survival of written evidence" (so the flyer), an image he subsequently proves to be mistaken, the author hardly articulates the communis opinio of informed scholarly circles, at whom, presumably, the book is aimed. Since he is dealing with Italy as a whole, not the Lombard kingdom, a mere glance at volumes 1, 3 and 4 of E. A. Lowe's CLA, providing 355 manuscripts or manuscript fragments before 800, shows an impressively rich amount of material even as far as this type of source is concerned. This genre of sources is not adequately discussed in 40 pages allocated to manuscripts.
"If cards are to be laid on the table, then I confess to an empiricist approach in the following study.... This study does not pretend to offer any precise definitions of literacy, but rather attempts to understand the different uses of literacy in Italo-Lombard society." (6) This study thus shares with McKitterick's book what they call a dislike of theory in favour of pragmatism, and in this respect it would have been preferable if this book had been called something like 'written documentation from Lombard Italy'. The key term 'literacy' is used in very questionable applications; as it stands, the book lacks a focus, and without clearly defined concepts of the terms of reference, it is hard to come up with results that will satisfy the traditional historian. (to give one example: "Their [mercenaries] own experience of literacy may have been limited to telling secretaries what to say and say it in the appropriate manner.", 71) However, it may be doubted whether this was the aim of the author. Yet to show that the existence and production of written documents requires literacy of sorts (but by whom and in which frameworks?) does not need 300 plus pages of text.
In fact the author investigates what generations of scholars before him from various disciplines and various nationalities have investigated, and his bibliography (the listed bibliography lacks at an estimate half of the works cited in the notes, and the selection is altogether arbitrary) is indicative of apparently wide-ranging reading [however, to quote Felix Genzmer's unscholarly propagandist lecture of 1938, "Rache, Wergeld und Klage im altgermanischen Rechtsleben" on wergeld (p. 116, n. 56) is unfortunate, to say the least; one can only hope that Everett had not read it.] He likes to see himself as an iconoclast with regard to the lifetime works of scholars such as Bischoff, Bognetti, or Lowe, let alone the philologists of the Lombard language. His own results, however, are methodologically questionable, to say the least.
Of the four thematic chapters the substantial ch. 5 on the charters (pp. 197-234) is an only slightly modified version of an article by the author published in Studi Medievali in the year 2000. He dismisses in an off-hand manner Paul the Deacon's statement that Liutprand was litterarum quidem ignarus (Historia Langobardorum VI, 58; see 196 and note 144 with wrong ref: 1989, not 1998). On the other hand, he is the only scholar known to me who offers a date (ca. 736, p. 251) for the death of the Irishman Cumian in Bobbio. The pope in the 740's was Zacharias, not Hadrian (321), and the latter died in 795, not 785 (297).
The oddities of this study are many. The Lombard language is virtually abolished in ten pages (100-110). The author emerges as the creator of new words both in English (*evangelary [85] twice, not listed in the OED; 'Gospel book', ? from German Evangeliar, *physionomics [of using pen and parchment] [131]; *discorrelation, [201]) and Latin (scientia saeculare [49]; *interpretex as a nominative to interpretem [110-111], corr. interpres; *pronuntio ['declaration'] [142, 183]; maiordomi as pl. of maiordomus [194]; *offersio [212]; *arengae (sg) [212, 222ff.]; does one face here the infectious influence of Lombard Latin?). The use of spell-check in German, surely available at Cambridge University Press, would have saved the author perhaps half of the dozens of errors in titles of publications in German; the present reader has encountered stunning mistakes in German names (Bernard Bischoff [301, 303, a manifestation of Cambridge oral culture?], Braesecke, Bruholzl, Bielart [recte Bieler, 281 n. 19] Muhlberger in three different spellings!; see also Gailbraith) and titles of books and articles ( 101, n. 2 with five mistakes). What does one make of terms like 'extremely monotheistic'? (94), or of 'highly apocryphal' (287) or of the term 'paperwork' when it had just been claimed that charters were written on papyrus instead of parchment? (194).
Here are some passages that lighten the labour of reading this book:
"Rumination on numbers is further frustrated by not knowing the population of Italy in this period." (68).
"Whether a word is labelled Gothic, Frankish, Lombardic or something else often seems to depend on its sole use by one of these groups to the exclusion of the others. This is rare, and attempts at word-prance through the thickets of Old High German with little certainty, and sometimes with a little too much modern ideology." (104)
[on charters] "Their grammar and orthography is far from classical, suggesting adaptive interplay with the linguistic environment in which they worked." (209)
One wonders who is responsible for "even...a half-trained palaeographical eye" (213).
What is a script "in generic terms sitting somewhere in that thorny distinction between half-cursive and pre-Carolingian minuscule scripts"? (216)
"Palaeography, for all its philological knowledge, precision and legitimate claims to the use of scientific methods, also depends upon fairly subjective aesthetic considerations and a sense of intuition. It is not an exact science, nor should it pretend to be." (279)
"This marginal nod to Aripert II provides an interesting and near contemporary counterpoint to the mixed picture painted by Paul of this colourful king." (288)
There are misrepresentations of the position of other scholars: Wright 718 [for 722] (149); Dold 700 [for ca. 660], (168).
The book emerges as a display of the personal discovery of the author that our records of the past are fragmentary and that for this very reason our grasp of the past is necessarily incomplete. ("we can only guess"[70]; "we have no idea" [71, 86]; "we do not know" [78f.]; "we can only wonder" [86]; "educated guesses" [187]; for a cluster of such expressions see p. 193.)
In sum, this book is seriously misleading for people who are not familiar with the sources or the rich literature in the field. This volume is no credit to the editors of this most respectable, if generally somewhat traditionalist, series.