This is an important and welcome book. First and foremost, Brown here surveys a tremendous literature on medieval violence, which has grown exponentially in the last couple of decades. Many edited volumes and narrow studies have appeared but, until now, no monographic overview. Brown not only wrestles this burgeoning scholarship into synthetic shape; the value of his work lies, second, in digesting it into a teaching text. His book neatly complements document collections like Dan Smail and Kelly Gibson's Vengeance in Medieval Europe: A Reader (UTP, 2009), and it far outstrips the analytic ambitions of, say, Julius Ruff's Violence in Early Modern Europe 1500- 1800 (Cambridge UP, 2001), with which instructors of courses on medieval violence have had to make do as a very imperfect (and tangential) ersatz. This is the book that finally allows us to teach medieval violence without having to reinvent the wheel. A third merit is the text's accessibility: it summarizes for undergraduates such classic narratives as the depravities of the Jacquerie (270-71, vividly depicted on the cover, too), glosses terms (e.g., capitulary, 47), and invokes present-day parallels to salve the exposure to medieval alterity (Wikipedia provides a contemporary example of violent self-help, 296-97n11). Finally, Brown's willingness to put forth his own interpretations, crystalline and sometimes polemical, does both students and scholars an enormous service. There are many points, both large and small, on which his presentation or conclusions might be hotly contested, without in the least detracting from Brown's cardinal scholarly achievement.
Two 'theoretical' chapters bracket sequential discussions of Merovingian, Carolingian, and turn-of-the-millennium Francia, Thietmar's Germany, Galbert's Flanders, High Medieval England and Saxony, and Froissart's France. With evident regret but realistic circumspection, Brown leaves aside many facets of medieval violence: Magyars and Mongols, martyrs and pogroms, and much else besides (23). Domestic Secular Political Violence in Medieval Europe North of the Alps might have been a more accurate, if less catchy, title; excluded are warfare, 'a-political' (e.g. religious, sexual, or domestic) violence, ingroup-vs.-outgroup clashes, and the Mediterranean arena.
Brown's overarching thesis is that violence in the European Middle Ages was seldom 'medieval' in the pejorative sense dominating the popular imagination (as in Tarantino's "I'ma get medieval on yo' ass"). Medieval people's violent conduct was constrained, rather, by normative frameworks. Brown highlights two: the traditional warrior code of a self-sufficient aristocracy, "legitimating a violent response to personal injury or insult," and the top-down norm of a hierarchical monopoly on coercive force, "subordinating the use of violence to the needs and interests of the ruler" (12). Brown sees both norms as enduring in competition throughout the Middle Ages. It is never entirely clear whether he envisions continuity sensu stricto or independent evolution of analogue norms: he credits Charlemagne with first fully articulating the Weberian idealtype, and thereafter refers to such a framework as 'Carolingian'--but the term 'neo-Carolingian' does also pop up on occasion, without explanation (215, 256, 292). The major historical shift Brown identifies (taking seed in Henry II's England, Eike von Repgow's Germany, and late Capetian France) involved the appropriation of top-down institutions by those seeking to further their partisan ends, a process that inadvertently bolstered princely claims to supremacy: "As in England so too in France: if one sought justice from the royal courts, one legitimized the courts' claims to regulate violence and delegitimized violent self-help" (258; cf. 213 and, for Germany, 224). Still, despite some promising false starts, Brown leaves the triumph of the State to the early-modern and modern eras.
Some chapters are outstanding: Brown's treatment of the late tenth century, for instance--the setting for both the so-called Peace of God movement and one of the most productive recent debates among medieval historians, the "Feudal revolution" controversy staged in Past and Present in the 1990s and recently rekindled by Thomas Bisson's The Crisis of the Twelfth Century (Princeton UP, 2009)--takes a sensible machete to the thicket of contradictory interpretations that have overgrown this patch, clearing tracts of it back to productivity. He observes, e.g., how a 1023 peace oath "[p]articularly empowered [to punish crimes and avenge wrongs] the very people whose behavior the oath aimed to regulate" (119)--a nice send-up of the Peace councils' labors, still often idealized by historians. Coming to the Sachsenspiegel, Brown dispenses sage advice (alongside reproductions of the beautifully illustrated Wolfenbüttel manuscript and many close readings): "As with all normative texts, it is seductive; it entices us to see its provisions as a systematic representation of reality." This caveat is immediately followed by a striking example of the text's irrealism--to redeem himself, an outlaw must best a foreign king in a formal joust--illustrating Brown's point that this mirror reflects the real world in metaphor only (232). Similarly salutary is Brown's drawing of the reader's attention to how the manuscript strips the texts it preserves of any contextual markers, touting them as timelessly true: "Frederick [II] himself is thus genericized into a symbol of an eternal emperor" (230).
The book's production values are good. Outright typos are rare (only six caught my eye: 19, 140, 158, 191n34, 198, 199), syntactic infelicities infrequent and not insurmountable (e.g., "shires" and "county" disagree in number, 201). Notes appear at the end of individual chapters. The index, inevitably, leaves much to be desired: many entries are incomplete (e.g., Sichar of Tours, 39-41, 57-58), idiosyncratic (e.g., 'judicial combat/duel' is indexed, but not 'duel' or 'single combat' per se, 143), or absent (e.g., no 'custom,' 'intercession,' 'anger' or other emotion terms). Awkwardly intrusive epigrams make the introduction a little choppy; other chapters read fluently. Brown maintains an analytical voice almost throughout, though some of the later chapters do occasionally devolve into anecdotage whose payoff is not immediately discernable (e.g., 272-76).
As noted earlier, the criticisms I have are, on the whole, more in the spirit of (productive, I hope) polemicizing than condemnation pure and simple. The broadest charge to level at Brown is that, for all his focus on violence, he remains reluctant to theorize the phenomenon he studies--though, in fairness, no other historian fares better by comparison (cf. my "Did Rannveig Change Her Mind?" Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 1, 2005). "Our understanding of war," Barbara Ehrenreich lamented some fifteen years ago, "is about as confused and unformed as theories of disease were roughly 200 years ago" (Blood Rites, 1997, 2). What was (and is) true of war is doubly true of violence more generally. Historians routinely treat 'violence' as transparent in a way none today would dare treat other terms of the art--say, nation, race, family, gender, ideology, or emotion. Such abstractions all now have, or are fast acquiring, histories; all are routinely picked apart and have their internal mechanics examined, in the process also laying bare historians' conceptual models (see, e.g., 28n48). Not so violence. We focus on its interactions with an external context of political, cultural, economic and other institutions, but are content with, at best, a dictionary definition (6) and a breezy assumption that we all know violence when we see it. To his credit, Brown goes out of his way to unsettle this complacency: "When we use the word violence to capture [historical phenomena], we are uniting them under our own heuristic umbrella" (7; cf. 232). But he, too, leaves unexplored the heuristic logic behind this classificatory scheme.
In contrast, 'feud' does receive consideration but is then eschewed as too variously defined to be profitable (15-16, cf. 96n99). While this may seem sensible, saving Brown from having to make often hair- splitting declarations of scholarly allegiance and sparing novice readers the need to delve into arcane debates, it divests Brown of a critical--arguably, the single most critical--theoretical category for identifying, synthesizing, and interpreting medieval violence. He thinly dissects, for instance, the milieu of Gregory of Tours and the Pactus Legis Salicae as one in which "people took violent revenge for perceived wrongs[, making] no effort to hide their actions; on the contrary, they advertised them as widely as possible" (57). Regardless of one's precise definition of feud, minimalist as Guy Halsall's or expansive as Paul Hyams's, it seems a little precious to refuse the label 'feuding society' to those who so routinely and enthusiastically dramatized vengeance-taking. Brown quite rightly steers his readers away from a notion of "constituted authority" monopolizing executive power (e.g. 58, 61; cf. 295), but by staying aloof of any alternative generic label, he obscures the distinctive, consistent logic underpinning community, institutions, and the structured application of harmful force. Merovingian Francia is not, after all, sui generis, as he himself shows: Charlemagne's efforts to impose what looks an awful lot like "a claim to a royal monopoly on legitimate violence" only make sense in the context of a mighty wrestling with an enduring culture of feud, what Brown coyly describes as "the norms of honor and vengeance" (76, 82). Such norms reappear again and again throughout the Middle Ages (e.g. 126, 155, 185-87, 206-13).
Studiously avoiding the f-word is meant to fortify Brown against the fallacy of imposing an imprecise model on a complex reality. But speaking only in tortuous circumlocutions--e.g., "Froissart's knights were not that different from their predecessors in earlier ages.... They fought to display their prowess, to gain power, and to make money. They fought to take revenge for insults ... and to assert or protect what they thought were their rights" (280)--sometimes distracts Brown into another type of fallacy, misrepresenting a model as a straw man: "to say that the threat of violence was always processed through [rituals] does not do justice to the evidence. Thietmar does not show us 'peace in the feud.'... Thietmar reports a great deal of very real and often deadly violence" (156, my emphasis). In the model here apostrophized, however, ritual is never the antithesis of violence. Max Gluckman does not imagine ritualized violence as pure posturing; rather, it cradles both peace and, importantly, feud. This is not to say that the model is beyond criticism or that Brown does not make useful observations about how real, potential, stylized and raw violence all interacted in the Ottonian era. His swipes at a Gluckman impostor, however, cannot but detract from the vigor of his insights.
Similarly, Brown gives a superb, point and counterpoint summary of the norms operating in Galbert of Bruges's narrative of the murder of Count Charles the Good. He reveals, on the one hand, Galbert's overt ideology: "violence among the magnates, especially when it harms the peasantry, is illegitimate. The count [may] and in fact should use violence to punish wrongful violence and keep it from continuing" (176-77). On the other hand, Brown teases out participants' expectation that the rules of feud would apply: "This is an entirely typical guerra involving magnates and their followers" (177). Brown's counterpoising of a clerical author's Carolingian model of violence with the traditional model espoused by arms-bearing aristocrats is judicious and illuminating. But he then loses his grip on this delicate equilibrium, again fumbling it by confusing theory with history: "the Erembalds thought they had the right to employ violence to prosecute their grievances with other magnates.... They also assumed that Count Charles would play according to the same rules" (177). Yet the point is precisely that the arriviste Erembalds did not neutrally 'think' or 'assume' their right and ability to prosecute feud as a static reality; they were, rather, dynamically attempting to alter reality by asserting their right and ability to implement a specific, familiar theory of violence. The knight who refused to duel with an Erembald because the latter was of servile status (175) likewise did not merely describe objective conditions: he tried to shape circumstances by putting forward a particular interpretation. Brown elegantly deflates "Galbert's efforts to ... claim [the legitimacy of the Bruges burghers' participation in violent politics] as customary and ancient" (184); the Brugers, however, like the Erembalds, were not simply fibbing when they labeled novel rights 'ancient': they were, instead, proposing one possible model for understanding their world, striving to anchor a tenuous hold on power and legitimacy by assimilating themselves to a favorable (and genuinely customary) theoretical framework for making sense of violent conduct.
What these examples flag is the ground Brown loses by rejecting rather than embracing feud as an elastic, versatile normative template that skilful practitioners could finesse to their needs. From the perspective of a reader steeped in the Icelandic sagas, several other junctures suggest themselves where recourse to Norse materials could have helped Brown a good deal. (Perhaps it still isn't too late to hope that they will, in a revised edition!) Brown privileges "particular periods in particular places that...are representative, or for which the sources are especially good" (23); the sagas certainly fit this last bill, and--despite their geographic remoteness and an air of periodization-defying weirdness--they are also, I would maintain, particularly representative of a wider world of ordinary violence, charting in detail the anatomy of feuding norms so prevalent throughout medieval Europe. Brown's reading of Salic Law, for instance, would have been vastly enhanced had he held it up to Grágás and Njáls saga (cf. William Ian Miller's Eye for an Eye, Cambridge UP, 2006, esp. 104-29).
Brown periodically seeks to reassure his readers (suspicious, perhaps, that not everything the medieval sources relate should be taken on faith) that "[i]n order for an author to persuade, what he depicted had to be something that could plausibly have happened" (139; cf. 8, 88, 155, 228). Precisely this argument has been advanced, these thirty years and more, in defense of saga historicity: even if non è vero, their fiction would only have been considered ben trovato if it chimed closely with cultural commonplaces. It is a strong argument, but hardly impregnable--especially as many narratives that won acclaim in the Middle Ages do seem to strain to the breaking point any notion of adherence to realism. Brown would have benefited from consulting recent scholarship on saga verisimilitude, where refinements of this rough criterion are considered (e.g., Ralph O'Connor, "History or Fiction?" Mediaeval Scandinavia 15, 2005). Such scholarship might also have prompted him to reconsider subsidiary facets of his methodology: when Thietmar of Merseburg relates recurring narratives of Althoffian deditiones, for instance, might these not raise suspicions of a topos at work more readily than they confirm "a ritual pattern understood by his society at large" (145)? Literary constructions can all too easily masquerade as structured social reality, a point Philippe Buc, in a book Brown parleys with extensively, rides hard (The Dangers of Ritual, Princeton UP, 2001).
(An ancillary point: it is difficult to tell, in Brown's presentation of deditio, quite what is the point of ritualized rebellion. The monarch gains an opportunity to display both authority and magnanimity, but the rebel seems at best to return to square one, with few lasting bruises, it is true, but with little to show for having aired his grievances, either. Such futility may cast doubts on the rationality of the political exercise; more pertinently, it begs the question of the role violence played in maneuvers on such culture- specific checkerboards.)
It should be clear that the ability of this book to provoke such reflection is to Brown's great credit, even if this reader, at least, remains skeptical about some of his choices and critical of others. Violence in Medieval Europe is certainly not the book I would have written, but it is a book I am thrilled to see in print for its many direct and often subtle contributions, as well as for furnishing a platform for further debate, both in the classroom and beyond it.