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.
Benoît 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 durée which merely situates it between late antiquity and early modernity.
Thirty years in the rural history of medieval Spain are covered by Jose Angel García de Cortázar and Pascual Martínez 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 Górecki, 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, Górecki then traces back through writings on Polish history during the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Górecki 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. Górecki 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, Górecki 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.
1. Stanislaw Szczur, Historia Polski: redniowiecze [History of Poland: The Middle Ages] (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2002).