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Reviews of Books
some 7,000 surviving manuscripts from the Carolingian
period gave him a panoramic view of a cultural legacy
now scattered in libraries all over the world, from
Bloomington, Indiana, to Mount Sinai. Analysis of
scripts and texts, never an end in itself for Bischoff,
served as a platform for his original and fundamental
contributions to early medieval cultural and intellectual history. Michael Gorman's fine translations of
seven of Bischoff's most important Carolingian essays,
graced by detailed indexes (including one of 937
manuscripts), will make his achievement accessible to
a wider audience of scholars and students.
Bischoff and Gorman have used the opportunity
presented by the appearance of these essays in translation to further refine them bibliographically and to
revise earlier hypotheses. Thus improved, these English versions represent Bischoff's last words on their
subjects. The first essay, "Manuscripts in the Early
Middle Ages," surveys manuscript production up to
the period of the Carolingian reforms. "Manuscripts in
the Age of Charlemagne," "The Court Library of
Charlemagne," and "The Court Library under Louis
the Pious" focus on the first and second generations of
the reform movement. "Libraries and Schools in the
Carolingian Revival of Learning" studies manuscript
books in their institutional contexts. "Palaeography
and the Transmission of Classical Texts in the Early
Middle Ages" presents the clearest statement in these
essays of Bischoff's methodology and might better
have opened the collection. The final essay, "Benedictine Monasteries and the Survival of Classical Literature," underscores how monastic schools appropriated
pagan literature for new ends.
Each essay juxtaposes textual traditions, script types,
and the histories of individual manuscripts in support
of Bischoff's hypotheses on the work of writing centers
and the effects of royal patronage and monastic study.
As the revisions of the essays suggest, Bischoff was an
honest enough scholar to revisit and rethink his earlier
work. Readers doubtless will continue the process of
modifying his conclusions here and there, because the
palaeographer's eye when it contrasts, for example, a
"heavy and energetic minuscule" with a "firmly controlled minuscule" (p. 82) sometimes performs as a
subjective instrument. But those modifications and
advances will take place within a cultural landscape
whose essential features Bischoff first mapped out.
JOHN J. CONTRENI
Purdue University
PATRICK J. GEARY. Phantoms ofRemembrance: Memory
and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1994. Pp. xiv, 248.
$29.95.
The central theme of Patrick J. Geary's book is so
compelling that one is immediately embarrassed not to
have thought of it before. He argues that medieval
historians now look at the eleventh century as a
watershed, a sharp break with a chaotic late-Caroling-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ian period, largely because most of our information
about the early Middle Ages is filtered through the
chronicles and cartularies composed in the eleventh
century, and the historians and compilers working then
saw their own era as a significant new beginning. Thus,
Geary's book is directed more toward recent debates
about the "mutations" of the year 1000 than toward
scholarship on medieval perceptions of the psychology
of remembrance or the transition from orality to
written record.
Focusing on three geographic areas disparate in
culture but all possessing a good collection of primary
sources-northern France, the lower Rhone, and Bavaria-the author sets out to show how people of the
eleventh century perceived and described their predecessors. (In spite of the title, the real focus is the
beginning of the second millennium, not the end of the
first.) Because new dynasties were established in all
these regions in the eleventh century, the powerful
families who had ruled them in the tenth century were
ignored or forgotten. As Sharon Farmer has argued in
the case of saints' lives from Tours, the past is contested territory (Communities of Saint Martin [1991]).
Geary demonstrates that "those who could control the
past could direct the future" (p. 6). Thus, medieval
chroniclers did not simply record earlier events in a
mechanical way; rather, they attempted to create a
vision of the past that could influence decisions and
events in their own time.
Most of the book is a thoughtful and gracefully
written discussion of how what we now consider the
primary sources on which to build our own histories of
the past were originally compiled. For example, Geary
reminds us that cartularies, which historians generally
treat as sources of factual information about land
ownership and family relations, were originally put
together as much for sacral reasons, to commemorate
the dead whose gifts were listed in them, as for
administrative purposes. Similarly, he points out that
modern historians cannot selectively choose which
parts of a chronicle to consider "accurate" when the
medieval chroniclers themselves considered political
events and the appearance of visions as equally significant. The monk Arnold of Regensburg, for example,
recorded not just information about his monastery's
property but also about the mile-long dragon that he
and his companions met. Geary's refusal to draw
distinctions that have been assumed by modern scholars but which would have made no sense in the
eleventh century, such as between archival records and
hagiography, or between history and sacred myth, is
one of the great strengths of this study.
The book is so good overall that its weaknesses are
especially irritating. There is a fair amount of repetition; the brief regional histories in chapter 1, for
example, cover much the same material given again in
chapter 5. The argument that women were especially
important in preserving family memory (chap. 2) is not
altogether convincing; illuminations reproduced from
the Warmund Sacramentary (pp. 55-59) clearly show
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women's role in the processes of death, burial, and
mourning, but not necessarily in memory. An assertion
of women's central importance in remembering the
dead (p. 52) is followed immediately by a discussion of
death scenes in which the chroniclers described the
roles of men, not women. Geary treats the names given
to women in a family as an important part of that
family's collective memory, without noting that women-and their names-moved between patrilineally
defined "families." His assertion that eleventh-century
monks deliberately destroyed records of their past in
order to hide inconsistencies or forgeries (chap. 4) is
troubling, given his own convincing arguments that we
should not assume modern ideas of "historical accuracy" were even held by men of the time. Certainly there
would have been little motivation to preserve records
of a "past" that seemed less and less relevant every
time the "past" was re-created, but this is not the same
as recognizing something as potentially embarrassing
and then intentionally covering it up.
All this said, Geary's book is unusually important.
Its discussion of how memory not only records hut also
shapes the past is necessary reading for any medievalist.
CONSTANCE
B. BOUCHARD
University of Akron
C. STEPHEN JAEGER. The Envy of Angels: Cathedral
Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 9501200. (Middle Ages Series.) Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press. 1994. Pp. xvi, 515. $39.95.
C. Stephen Jaeger has produced a fulsome study of a
largely unknown era in the history of ideas and higher
learning in the Middle Ages. His goal is to investigate
the blank space between late-tenth-century monastic
learning and the universities of the twelfth century. He
notes that the cathedral schools of the eleventh century left no monuments for us to peruse but they may
be known through the enthusiastic praise of those who
came out of them. Cathedral schools produced students who had acquired Mores along with Letters and
who valued that heritage. Jaeger argues that eleventhcentury schoolmen cultivated Latin but produced a
charismatic rather than an intellectual culture (p. 4),
one more in the line of ancient oral models of learning
than the emergent written models of the well-documented era that followed. Indeed the twelfth-century
schoolmen's attempt to recapture the earlier charismatic learning of their predecessors and teachers
produced the "envy" of Jaeger's title, where "gains in
knowledge, reasoning, success in disputation and in
proof" (p. 218) were understood to have exacted a
price: manners lost out to letters. In a sweeping
statement, Jaeger asserts that a "'heroic age' when
philosophy was inseparable from presence passed
away, and was supplanted by an age of texts, often
highly impressive, refined, and sophisticated, but created out of 'envy,' lacking the force and vitality of what
had preceded" (p. 14).
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
This attempt to ground the learning of the twelfth
century in the context of its immediate past is a bold
and brilliant interpretation. It will create controversy
in regard to Jaeger's general premises and over particular points as well. Although the work concentrates
on learning north of the Alps, it directs attention
toward the links between German and French centers
of learning that are difficult to trace. Jaeger pays
particular heed to the origin and spread of the long
didactic poem "Quid suum virtutis?" and to the identities of Master Manegold, teacher of William of Champeaux and Anselm of Laon, and to Honorius Augustodunensis and, of course, Hugh of St. Victor. Brun of
Cologne receives credit for the institutional framework
of the Ottonian renaissance that linked cathedral
school to court culture ensuring the survival of Old
Learning, but Jaeger does not go on to identify
Cologne as the major transmitter of this learning to
twelfth-century French schools and universities. Instead he pinpoints Liege as the center of diffusion of
Brun's model of teaching.
Jaeger sees numerous influences emanating outward
from the cathedral schools of the eleventh century.
The schools not only formulated the new curriculum
but their values also came to define civilized behavior
and in so doing influenced lay society and courtly
culture. His bold claims and his willingness to conjecture about figures and questions where little is known
mark this study as a departure from much of the
literature on medieval learning. Jaeger also presents
us, however, with serious erudition, and his work raises
the intriguing question of whether critical literary
analysis can compensate to a degree when only tantalizing fragments of information and brief glimpses of
an era remain.
SUSAN MOSHER STUARD
Haverford College
OLIVIA REM IE CONSTABLE. Trade and Traders in Muslim
Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian
Peninsula, 900-1500. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval
Life and Thought, fourth series, number 24.) New
York: Cambridge University Press. 1994. Pp. xxiv, 320.
$59.95.
This is the first work to deal comprehensively with the
long-range commerce of Muslim Spain from the tenth
to the twelfth century. On the basis of many hundreds
of bits of data gleaned from a broad spectrum of
Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Latin, and vernacular Spanish
sources, many of them unpublished, and with the help
of the extant physical evidence, Olivia Remie Constable deals methodically with the ports, shipping, and
routes that served Muslim Spain's commerce; describes the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian merchants
who propelled it; discusses the modes of governmental
intervention in their activities; and finally surveys in
great detail the commodities they imported and exported. The thoroughness of approach may best be
exemplified by the manifold types of evidence adduced
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