This would probably have been better titled as something like Joan of Arc and Her World or The High Politics of Fifteenth-Century France and Joan of AThis would probably have been better titled as something like Joan of Arc and Her World or The High Politics of Fifteenth-Century France and Joan of Arc's Role Within It or something like that—much less catchy, but more true to how this is a fairly conventional military/political history of a certain period of the Hundred Years' War and Joan's role within it, rather than a biography per se. (Joan herself doesn't appear until almost the halfway mark.)
Helen Castor is clear about this from the get go, and it is absolutely true and fair to say that with the kind of sources we have surviving from the Middle Ages, it's really impossible to write a biography that lets you "know" the person. What we can know about Joan of Arc is how people reacted to her, what they thought of her and the political uses they made of her. Castor is careful in her use of the documentary record and her overview of the political/military events is useful.
But I found myself wishing that Castor had been a tad more inventive in her approach to Joan, brought in more insights from women's/gender history, contextualised Joan more in terms of the other "prophetesses"/visionaries/heretical women of the times. (She briefly references Ermine de Reims, and although this book was published the year before Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinki's work on Ermine, that was the kind of comparative subject I was hoping to see more of. For the kind of book this is, it's fine, but I don't think this is destined to be the go-to popular study of Joan....more
An excellent argument in favour of wealth taxes, The Bettencourt Affair: The World's Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris recounts one of tAn excellent argument in favour of wealth taxes, The Bettencourt Affair: The World's Richest Woman and the Scandal That Rocked Paris recounts one of the big French social and political scandals of the '00s/'10s. The elderly Liliane Bettencourt, the world's richest woman thanks to her control of L'Oréal, gave roughly a billion euros (that is not a typo) to her much younger platonic toyboy. Liliane's estranged daughter, Françoise, objected to this and claimed that her mother, in the early stages of dementia, had been coerced to make those gifts, as well as others to conservative politicians such as then-president Nicolas Sarkozy. Court cases ensue.
Every one of the major players in this is an asshole: vapid, tedious rich people with odious friends (the Depps! one of the Turnip Toffs!), most of whom needed therapy and a hobby, and none of whom are capable of understanding the concept of "having enough."
Tom Sancton's reporting is thorough, and you get all the ins and outs of what happened, at least as much as court documents and interviews can reveal. His account of the foundation and early years of the L'Oréal company, given as a kind of prelude to the main events, is fascinating—like Chanel, L'Oréal is yet another company founded by antisemites who collaborated with the Nazis!
However, Sancton is clearly slanted in the direction of the one key party who would talk to him, which brings down the book as a whole. His psychologising is inconsistent and sometimes odd, and from a European perspective the undercurrent of valorising the super-rich is... odd. Also, I'd be fascinated to know what Sancton's definition of antisemitism is, since he insists that Liliane Bettencourt was not antisemitic "in any strict sense". Liliane Bettencourt, who never cultivated a relationship with her Jewish grandsons, boys whom she fretted might look "too Jewish"—that Liliane Bettencourt? Buddy....more
An accessible overview of the lives of three 16th-century royal women: Catherine de' Medici, variously queen-consort and queen-regent of France; her dAn accessible overview of the lives of three 16th-century royal women: Catherine de' Medici, variously queen-consort and queen-regent of France; her daughter, Elisabeth de Valois, queen-consort of Spain; and her daughter-in-law Mary, queen-consort of France and queen-regnant of Scotland (with a generous dollop of Elizabeth Tudor for good measure). Leah Redmond Chang does a good job on the whole of showing how gender and local custom shaped these women's exercise of power—the Salic Law was used in France to exclude women from succession to the throne; Mary could rule in Scotland, but not in the same ways that her male counterparts could—and in thinking about their relationship dynamics. Having Elisabeth de Valois be one of the three subjects was a smart choice. As a short-lived and conventional consort, she's one of those "well-behaved women [who] seldom make history", and Redmond Chang uses her here to do what Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was actually urging historians to do in that much-abused quote, and to give consideration to normative/non-exceptional lives.
However, some events were given surprisingly short shrift (Mary's imprisonment is passed over quickly; the St Bartholomew's Day massacre is mentioned only in the epilogue), and I felt that Redmond Chang's situation of her subjects within longer-term considerations of elite medieval women's power could have been stronger. A look through her secondary bibliography doesn't show the basic names I'd expect to find there from recent Anglophone scholarship alone on early modern queenship—Theresa Earenfight, Estelle Paranque, Elena Woodacre, Valerie Schutte, etc. Grounding her work in that would have meant that Redmond Chang didn't make statements like this, about justification being sought for Catherine de' Medici's regency: "Poring through dusty archives, [Catherine's advisors] unearthed the story of the Spanish-born Blanche de Castile [...] who ruled in [her son's] name for eight years [...] protecting her son's kingdom against rebellious barons." (193) Even setting aside the boring old "dusty archives" cliché, I blinked at the thought of Blanche, mother of the saintly Louis IX, whose image and arms crop up all over the Sainte-Chapelle, etc, being an unknown figure to her 16th-century descendants....more
A solid contribution to the steadily burgeoning body of scholarship on aristocratic women and power in medieval France. Heather Tanner focuses on the A solid contribution to the steadily burgeoning body of scholarship on aristocratic women and power in medieval France. Heather Tanner focuses on the "inheriting countesses" of Boulogne—a succession of women who inherited the comital title in their own right between the mid-12th and mid-13th centuries—and explores how they exercised their lordly power in this period of steadily centralising Capetian power. Tanner's analysis fits neatly into a developing paradigm that rejects the "exceptionalist" label for women's power and thinks about how conjugal units worked during this period. A useful case study....more
My review of The Dark Queens is probably going to come across a bit like damning with faint praise. As a "narrative non-fiction" account of the lives My review of The Dark Queens is probably going to come across a bit like damning with faint praise. As a "narrative non-fiction" account of the lives of two Merovingian queens, Fredegund and Brunhild, written by a non-specialist, it's better than I expected it to be. Shelley Puhak has clearly read the limited primary sources carefully, contextualising them with archaeological evidence and secondary scholarship, and she does try to grapple with the methodological issues of using fragmentary and opinionated sources to do medieval women's history. I could see this working well in the college classroom, not because I agree with all the choices Puhak made in narrating what she imagines of Fredegund and Brunhild's lives—there's use of imaginative "must haves" to fill in the inevitable gaps—but because I think it could be a useful springboard to get students to grapple with methodological and conceptual choices.
The "Fredegund felt this" and "Brunhild may have done that" parts did irk me, but it feels churlish to critique Puhak for them overly when she's very clear that she's not writing a traditional academic history. But what actually made me pencil the most question marks in the margins of The Dark Queens were the tired invocations of the tropes of "the women who've been written out of history"/"I never read about these women when I was younger therefore everyone must have been ignoring them"/"why don't historians write more about these women", etc.
It's undeniable that because of sexism and/or misogyny, medieval chroniclers paid far less attention to women than they did to men, and that as best we can tell those chroniclers were men. But to say that Fredegund and Brunhild were erased from history isn't true—how then would we know anything at all about them? What we have is a historiographical tradition which often caricatures these queens in service of later political goals, as Puhak touches on in her last chapter—a less sexy proposition but a more complex one to grapple with. The fact that Brunhild and Fredegund don't crop up much in history books for kids in the U.S.—nor, I would imagine, do many Merovingians, male or female—might tell us something about geographical biases in the Anglophone world, but it doesn't mean that children everywhere are ignorant of who they are.
And I'm increasingly irritated with the kind of pop history that breathlessly decries how historians! don't! write! about! medieval! women! When since the 1970s there's been a steadily widening body of scholarship (building on a foundation laid from the late 19th century on) on women in the Middle Ages, generally by women scholars. But all that careful work on medieval women and power, ethnicity, memory, patronage, religion, lordship, etc, isn't as sexy as the promise of "the women they don't want you to know about." Ironic.
Following on from his biographies of Marie of France and Henry the Liberal, Theodore Evergates turns his focus to another key figure from the medievalFollowing on from his biographies of Marie of France and Henry the Liberal, Theodore Evergates turns his focus to another key figure from the medieval Champenois: Geoffroy de Villehardouin, a key figure in the comital administration who today is perhaps best known for the chronicle/memoir he left about his involvement in the Fourth Crusade. As you'd expect, Evergates' depth of knowledge about Champagne and its medieval documentary record shines through here, while he also plays close attention to the contexts and genre of Geoffroy's book. Given the nature of the surviving source evidence, this of course can't be a biography in the more modern sense, but I think Evergates gets us as close as we can to an understanding of who Geoffroy was and the times in which he lived. ...more
Knights, Lords, and Ladies was the last work of the eminent medieval historian John Baldwin and was unfinished at his death; the book as published nowKnights, Lords, and Ladies was the last work of the eminent medieval historian John Baldwin and was unfinished at his death; the book as published now was brought to completion by another equally distinguished historian of the French Middle Ages, William Chester Jordan. It's a close prosopographical study of the aristocracy of the region immediately around Paris over the period of about a generation; a time when, Baldwin argues, this group was undergoing a period of major change. He looks at various aspects of aristocratic life—family structures, housing, use of land and other resources, involvement with religion and the institutional church—primarily through the documentary evidence but also through the use of archaeological evidence, literary sources, and material culture such as seals. Anyone who works on the elite families of this region in the late 12th/early 13th centuries will find this work an invaluable resource.
The book is definitely incomplete. Baldwin wasn't able to respond to the reader's report, and I definitely felt the lack of a conclusion that would have drawn the various strands of his study together. Yet this is still a wonderful testament to Baldwin's career and his mastery of the sources....more
Less a mere work of history than it is a meditation on it, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres starts out by walking the reader through those two famous FrLess a mere work of history than it is a meditation on it, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres starts out by walking the reader through those two famous French sites before broadening out into a more general discussion of the high medieval mind and ending with extended discussions of the thought of figures such as Peter Abélard and Thomas Aquinas.
First published in 1904 as a kind of guidebook for younger family members to bring with them to Europe, this book benefits from the fact that it was written by the kind of rich, connected nineteenth-century dude (Henry Adams' paternal grandfather and great-grandfather were both U.S. presidents) who had the means and time to spend months travelling western Europe and lingering over historic sites. Adams knows a lot about not just Mont-Saint-Michel and the cathedral of Chartres, but also many other medieval ecclesiastical buildings!
Adams also clearly felt unconstrained by the kinds of qualms that later historians would feel about making sweeping statements about their subjects. He is all wild claims ("In no well-regulated community, under a proper system of police, could the Virgin feel at home, and the same thing may be said of most other saints as well as sinners") and stuff that sounds nice and poetic but doesn't really mean anything ("The man who wanders into the twelfth century is lost, unless he can grow prematurely young") and hilarious swipes at some major historical figures (Héloise of Argenteuil was "by French standards, worth at least a dozen Abélards, if only because she called Saint Bernard a false apostle"; Abélard "taught philosophy to [Héloise] not so much because he believed in philosophy or in her as because he believed in himself").
I found this all deeply entertaining. It's not good history—not only has some of what Adams got to say here been superseded by later research, but it's all built on a whole foundation of weirdo paternalistic sexism and more than a smattering of antisemitism—and I wouldn't recommend reading it as such. For a variety of reasons, historians aren't really trained to write like Adams anymore, but I do feel a little envious about the leeway Adams had to just say fuck it and write about a vibe. If he's still to be read today, it should be for that. ...more
L'affaire des poisons was one of the more bizarre periods in the long reign of Louis XIV of France. Over a five year span between 1677 and 1682, hundrL'affaire des poisons was one of the more bizarre periods in the long reign of Louis XIV of France. Over a five year span between 1677 and 1682, hundreds of people—many of them high-ranking—were accused of poisoning, witchcraft, abortion, and infanticide, and dozens were tortured and executed as a result. As a mildly salacious bit of pop history, Holly Tucker's City of Light, City of Poison is fine—but coming from someone who's a trained academic, I expected more analysis here, particularly of the role of gender in what happened. Tucker's treatment of the sourcebase is also eyebrow-raisingly naive....more
Robert Berkhofer looks here at three case studies of forgery and its role in the identity-making of three medieval monasteries: St Peter's, Ghent's SaRobert Berkhofer looks here at three case studies of forgery and its role in the identity-making of three medieval monasteries: St Peter's, Ghent's Saint-Denis, just north of Paris; and Christ Church, Canterbury. He's particularly interested in how and why documentary forgeries intersect with historical writing. Berkhofer isn't necessarily saying anything new here—the broad strokes of many of his arguments have been said in other times and places by people (including himself) working on various aspects of cartulary studies and the history of diplomatic—but by bringing these case studies together and looking at forgeries in their own right rather than as a question to be resolved to get to the "real" history, he refocuses attention on a key aspect of how texts were used in the high medieval world. I think this will be referred to a lot by other scholars in the coming years....more
Une étude de l'histoire d'une abbaye française aux XIIe/XIIIe siècles. Il y a quelques informations utiles ici, mais je pense que ce livre est mal orgUne étude de l'histoire d'une abbaye française aux XIIe/XIIIe siècles. Il y a quelques informations utiles ici, mais je pense que ce livre est mal organisé. Il est évident que ce projet a commencé comme un mémoire de maîtrise....more
À bien des égards, c'est une histoire de l’Ordre des Prémontré plus forte que celle de Bernard Ardura, et bien sûr plus actuelle. Mais il y a de gros À bien des égards, c'est une histoire de l’Ordre des Prémontré plus forte que celle de Bernard Ardura, et bien sûr plus actuelle. Mais il y a de gros défauts. Il s'agit au fond d'un travail confessionnel, ce qui limite l'analyse de Dauzet. Par exemple, les missionnaires norbertins du Congo du XIXe siècle étaient « héroïques » ; on passe sous silence les atrocités commises par l'état belge; aucune mention du rôle de l'ordre dans les scandales d'abus religieux de la fin du XXe siècle; etc, etc....more
L'histoire de la Picardie, de la préhistoire jusqu'aux années 1980. Cette collection d'essais offre un aperçu général de l'histoire de cette région deL'histoire de la Picardie, de la préhistoire jusqu'aux années 1980. Cette collection d'essais offre un aperçu général de l'histoire de cette région de France. Cependant, le manque de citations et une approche plutôt datée limitent son utilité....more
William of Auvergne is a name I was familiar with—he was a university scholar who became bishop of Paris in the first half of the thirteenth century—wWilliam of Auvergne is a name I was familiar with—he was a university scholar who became bishop of Paris in the first half of the thirteenth century—without knowing anything about him beyond that. As Lesley Smith states, William had the kind of solid ecclesiastical career which didn't attract opprobrium from his contemporaries, and his theological writings weren't distinctive in a way that got him much attention from later scholars. In the decades and centuries after his death he was largely forgotten, a minor figure in histories written about Blanche of Castile or the university life of medieval Paris, perhaps best remembered for his role in the 1240 Trial of the Talmud.
Yet William left behind him a rich cache of writings that Smith uses here to great effect, one which gives us both a glimpse of William's personality and of the world in which he lived: the working notes of some of the hundreds of sermons which he delivered over the course of his life. While Smith is at pains to stress that we can't truly get to "know" William, that "we can only know him as he is reflected in a smoky mirror", she uses the these sermon notes and some of his other writings to cobble together a portrait of someone who is both affable and humane (fond of good wine and a dog's companionship; often sympathetic to women) and also capable of holding ideas that I find abhorrent (about Jews and Muslims, but also too about women).
Rather than writing a chronological biography, Smith uses different aspects of William's career and topics in his writings to structure her book around themed chapters such as "Language", "The Landed and the Monied", and "Death and Beyond." I could see this working really well in the college classroom and also engaging the general reader who is looking for an accessible introduction to the world of high medieval Paris. ...more
An account of the composition and history of the autograph manuscript of the infamous Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, The Curse of the Marquis deAn account of the composition and history of the autograph manuscript of the infamous Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, The Curse of the Marquis de Sade is that kind of pop history which makes plain that its author is a journalist rather than a historian. Joel Warner writes with story in mind, not meaning, and his understanding of the history of the book is not deep. The fact that in the 21st century, the scroll was caught up in the Aristophil manuscript Ponzi scheme is interesting, but I'm not sure that the two strands of the book—the present scandals and the past writings/biography of de Sade—really played off one another in a way that was interesting.
It didn't help that I listened to this in audiobook format. Why, when recording a book which is largely about French people set in France, would you hire an audiobook narrator who clearly doesn't speak French? The repeated mispronunciations were blatant and jarring—though to be fair, there were also a number of such errors when it came to English words as well....more
Constance of France lived a life which was fairly typical for women of her background in twelfth-century Europe: she entered into two marriages which Constance of France lived a life which was fairly typical for women of her background in twelfth-century Europe: she entered into two marriages which were arranged for her by her family, had children, witnessed charters, and after the end of her second marriage spent time in Jerusalem before returning to spend her final years near her birth family. Myra Miranda Bom works diligently to recover as much evidence as is possible about Constance from the contemporary sourcebase, and to place her in the context of her time.
However, there simply isn't much documentary material for Bom to work with, nor archaeological evidence (we don't know where she was buried, and the estate she purchased south of Jerusalem has never been excavated), nor even a strong historiographical tradition to engage with. Unlike near contemporaries such as Eleanor of Aquitaine or the Empress Matilda, Constance didn't attract the interest of chroniclers or of 19th-century historians. As I read, I found myself wondering who this book was for—for specialists in medieval women, much of the contextualizing information is very basic and Bom doesn't offer up any real new archival discoveries or ways of approaching her subject. The interested general reader may well find Bom's book to be accessibly written and the contextual framing new and interesting, but the price of a volume in The New Middle Ages series is surely going to put this out of reach of most such readers. ...more
Amy Livingstone's Medieval Lives uses the lives of one aristocratic family in west-central France—the lords and ladies of Beaugency—to provide an intrAmy Livingstone's Medieval Lives uses the lives of one aristocratic family in west-central France—the lords and ladies of Beaugency—to provide an introduction to some of the major events and themes of life in western Europe between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. While the Beaugency weren't a particularly prominent family, their very ordinariness (at least as far as aristocratic families go) makes them an ideal focus for this kind of book. Livingstone uses the town where they lived to explore social and economic history for instance, and some of the abbeys which they patronised to look at monastic life and church reform. I could see this working really well as a core text in an introductory course on the High Middle Ages. Livingstone writes clearly and accessibly, and the wide selection of documents in translation at the end of the book are a real boon for use in the classroom....more
This is the first biography of Christine de Pizan—a writer active in France in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and perhaps the firsThis is the first biography of Christine de Pizan—a writer active in France in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and perhaps the first woman in Europe to support herself through her work as an author—to be aimed at a general audience. Given the nature of the surviving sources, Charlotte Cooper-Davis inevitably has to focus more on Christine's work, the social contexts in which she lived and worked, and her later reception than on the details of her life proper. However, Cooper-Davis is deft at squeezing what conclusions she can from looking at things like the physical nature of the manuscripts produced under Christine's direct supervision, and seeing what this can tell us about Christine's operations as an entrepreneur. Cooper-Davis' prose is clear and accessible, and I would recommend this quick read to anyone with a curiosity about Christine and her work....more
This is a really thoughtful, methodical primer on how to approach primary source analysis—particularly pre-modern European sources—aimed at use in theThis is a really thoughtful, methodical primer on how to approach primary source analysis—particularly pre-modern European sources—aimed at use in the undergraduate classroom. Leah Shopkow does a great job in going back to first principles and walking readers through considerations such as positionality, genre, source analysis, and historiography. She takes as her example source Stephen of Fougères’ twelfth-century hagiography of Vitalis of Savigny. I think this would make a great core text in a historical methods course. ...more
The four realms of this book's title are England, Ireland, Wales, and Normandy. Colin Veach displays an admirable command of sources from Irish, FrencThe four realms of this book's title are England, Ireland, Wales, and Normandy. Colin Veach displays an admirable command of sources from Irish, French, and British archives as he assesses the scope and nature of high medieval seigneurial lordship through a case study of the rise and fall of the de Lacy family between the mid-twelfth and the mid-thirteenth centuries. Veach argues fairly convincingly that a transnational approach is the best way to understand much of the elite politics of this part of northwestern Europe during this period of some hundred years. This will probably be easiest to follow if you already have some grounding in the history of at least the Anglo-Norman colony in Ireland—the publisher could definitely have profitably included more maps. ...more
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