Europe: Early Modern and Modern
progression to greater professionalization. A nice companion piece is Daniel Klerman's essay on the knowledge of juries. That jurors were self-informing from
their familiarity with people and places at issue in
criminal trials has long been seen as explaining the
passive role of judges and the minor role of evidence
and evidentiary rules. Klerman argues that thirteenthcentury juries were self-informing in contrast to those
in later centuries, but he also finds that they at times
took evidence, learned of things from what happened
in court, and adjusted their verdict accordingly. Klerman's is a carefully devised argument calling on several
types of sources.
Mulholland argues that manorial courts retained an
informality, speed, and ease of access that made them
viable alternatives to the royal courts of common law
well into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, until
royal courts recognized copyhold and thus coopted a
major part of manorial courts' business. The weight of
customs of the manor, she claims, gave these courts an
internal rationality, while they were also receptive to
written evidence and sophisticated argument. R. H.
Helmholz looks at English ecclesiastical courts, making the case that at least for England, in contrast to the
continent, church trials were more open and familiar
to people and the role of writing was less prominent
(although still greater than in common law courts).
Against the reigning notion of active judges directing
procedures and drafting judgments in canon law
courts, Helmholz finds that ecclesiastical judges "had
neither the cohesive judicial institutions nor the ability
to shape legal doctrine that their common law counterparts enjoyed" (p. 109). In essence both Mulholland
and Helmholz are intent on showing that their courts
meet Jaconelli's criteria of rationality, publicity, and
independence.
The remaining four essays consider trials on the
continent. Taken together they are not nearly so
comprehensive as the four that deal with England.
Their subjects are not as broad, chronologically or
thematically. Interestingly, these four authors are all
historians, whereas the first four are all associated with
law schools, and three of them were not participants in
the Manchester conference.
Jeffrey Denton looks at only one trial, one that did
not even happen-the proceedings initiated by Philip
IV to try Boniface VIII, even posthumously, for heresy. Denton makes it clear that a charge of heresy was
crucial, as popes were not subject to judgment of a
court for less than that. His is a sound essay, but by its
nature it can contribute little to the general theme of
the history of trials. William G. Naphy's discussion of
sodomy trials in Calvinist Geneva between 1555 and
1665 is somewhat better geared to that end. He finds
the interesting result that, given a scale of "natural"
values, defendants would confess to lesser offenses
(i.e. simple fornication, touching) rather than leave
themselves open to more serious charges (i.e. bestiality, ejaculation). Against charges of same-sex acts, men
would admit to previous contact, even criminal, with
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1301
women. His conclusion that "the participants in these
trials reveal themselves to be very acute observers of
human behaviour and development and, perhaps, surprisingly modern" (p. 141) may not convince all readers.
The last two essays consider Venice, a legally peculiar continental jurisdiction. Mary Laven focuses on
the 1614 trial of a nun, Laura Querini, for repeated
violation of her vow of celibacy with a young nobleman. The context for her remarks is not the history of
trials but the genre of micro history and criticisms of
the use made of forensic records, not just for their
reliability and typicality but for narratives of selfexpression. Laven makes a good case that Querini,
interrogated both by the patriarch of Venice and the
civic magistracy that protected convents, as defendant
in the first and witness against her lover in the second,
was exceptionally self-revealing, giving details of her
actions beyond what was needed to answer questions
or frame legal arguments. She was conventional in
some responses, but "the space of the trial provided
nuns with an opportunity to speak to the outside
world" and they took advantage of it. Pullan, a distinguished historian of Venice, provides an introduction
to the translated text of the inquisition proceedings
against Giorgio Moreto, a sailor, charged in 1589 with
apostasy for becoming a Jew in order to marry his
sweetheart. Pullan describes the composition of the
court, civic oversight of it, and the situation of the Jews
in Venice. Moreto's offense was to ignore the Holy
Office's order that he avoid the ghetto, after his
nocturnal visits aroused suspicions.
These micro historical continental essays avoid generalization, but they also necessarily leave the reader
facing large voids. No one examines simple trial process before a podesta of an Italian city, perhaps the
essence of civil and criminal procedure there. No one
looks at a German territory before and after the
"reception" of Roman law. None of the continental
essays takes on the broad sweep one finds in Daniel
Lord Smail's The Consumption of Justice: Emotions,
Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423
(2003). In sum there is an unevenness in this collection: English pieces dealing with themes of professionalization, jury competence, and publicity versus continental pieces dealing with themes of narrative,
defendant strategies, and identity. Different readers
will take from their reading very different results.
THOMAS KUEHN
Clemson University
JONATHAN HART. Comparing Empires: European Colonialism from Portuguese Expansion to the SpanishAmerican War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003.
Pp. xiv, 192. $59.95.
This book is the third study by Jonathan Hart of
European expansion and empires. Ideally the three
should be read as a whole, and indeed Hart refers back
to his previous two books and forward to projected
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2004
1302
Reviews of Books and Films
new ones. In Representing the New World: English and
French Uses of the Example of Spain (2001) and
Columbus, Shakespeare, and the Interpretation of the
New World (2002), he studied texts and images to show
the complexity of French, English, and Spanish reactions to their encounters with New World people and
places. These widely praised books very skillfully "unpacked" familiar works such as William Shakespeare's
The Tempest, and Christopher Columbus's representations of New World natives.
The focus in these first two books was essentially on
the responses of France and England to Spanish
accounts of the Americas. In the present book, more
players are introduced-the Portuguese, the Dutch,
and even citizens of the United States-and the geographic scope is widened to include Asia as well as the
Americas. Nevertheless, Britain, Spain, and France,
and their relations in the Americas, remain prominent.
A major theme is the way the Spanish accounts
permeated British and French consciousnesses long
after Spain had lost most of its influence in the
Americas. Hart's analysis is explicitly comparative, and
a sophisticated examination of the validity of comparison as a heuristic device is scattered throughout the
book. Portugal, as the first European state to expand
overseas, receives detailed attention. Hart's central
technique is to analyze a carefully selected series of
texts (and indeed the footnotes are something of a
bibliographer's delight, with their discussions of various published and manuscript versions of the works
under discussion). As to the validity of this sort of
technique, he writes that "One of the reasons I have
chosen a close examination of texts is that I thought it
best that the reader of my book experience this
dimension of textual messiness ... Critical distance is
necessary for history to have a shape but too much
leaves history without a texture" (p. 101).
Readers of Hart's previous books will expect further
sophisticated disentangling of contemporary texts, and
indeed there are many examples here. Several struck
me as particularly successful. Pedro Vaz de Caminha,
a member of Pedro Alvares Cabral's fleet and one of
the first Europeans to reach Brazil, wrote a well-known
account of what he saw, and this is expertly analyzed,
as is Luis Vaz de Camoes's great epic poem, The
Lusiads. Richard Hakluyt the younger's compilation is
investigated to show how he used Spanish and Portuguese sources to encourage Britain to look to the
Americas. Spain's lingering influence on the English
and French in North America is revealed in William
Bradford's History of Plimoth Plantation. In the concluding chapter, "From Portugal to the United States,"
the fifteenth-century account of Portuguese explorations by Luis de Cadamosto is foregrounded.
Any reader will be impressed by Hart's erudition,
and his stimulating comparisons and analysis. What
disappointed me is a quite shoddy and careless presentation of his material, and a host of careless errors.
Several paragraphs run on for over a page and include
a jumbled mass of unrelated material (e.g. pp. 18-19,
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
53-54, 121-23). Obscure and ungrammatical sentences, and misplaced commas, are rife. Some material
is repeated (e.g. pp. 53, 55).
Factual errors abound. "Ahmad-Ibn-Madjid (sic)"
did not guide Vasco da Gama to India (p. 17). The
voyages of Bartolomeu Dias and Gama did not transform "the commerce among Africa, Asia and Europe"
(p. 122). Dias variously rounds the Cape of Good
Hope in 1487 and 1488 (pp. 14, 17, 22, 27, 54, 122). In
the fifteenth century, Venice and the "Muslims" cooperated in the spice trade (p. 36). Similarly, contact and
trade between the Mediterranean and "the East" did
not stop after Marco Polo (p. 56). "Ormuz (sic)" was
captured by Persia and the English in 1622, not 1650
(p. 128). Goa is not located on the Malabar coast (p.
134). Hart writes concerning The Lusiads "That the
eastern Turks are mentioned seems to mean that one
of the desires expressed is that the power of the
Portuguese king be turned in [sic] a crusade against
Islam" (p. 73), thus ignoring a long previous history of
Luso-Muslim hostility.
Names are often hopelessly garbled, apparently because the author transposed contemporary spellings
into his own text. Thus we have Malindi and Melinde,
Chillora (for Kilwa), Zaffalle or Zofala (for Sofala),
Calichut (for Calicut), Guzerat and Guzerate (for
Gujarat), Combaia (for Cambay), and Candi (for
Kandy). The inhabitants of this last-named kingdom in
Sri Lanka are called "the Candi." Alfonso de Albuquerque becomes "Alphonse D' Albuquerque," and
Fernao Peres de Andrade is garbled as "Ferdinand
D'Andrcade." And so on. As a historian, I do not think
it is pedantic, or antiquarian, to expect more careful
fact checking and editing. However, one could argue
that none of this has much impact on the author's main
objectives as outlined above, which are successfully
achieved. Hart's book will have many readers; they
must make their own judgments.
MICHAEL PEARSON
University of Technology,
Sydney
BENNO TESCHKE. The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics,
and the Making of Modern International Relations. New
York: Verso. 2003. Pp. xii, 308. $35.00.
Passionately if not altogether conclusively argued, this
book rejects a commonplace of European history: that
the treaties of Westphalia not only closed the Thirty
Years' War but also inaugurated a new international
order driven by the interaction of territorial sovereign
states. The administrative and military governments
organization of European monarchies after 1648 distinguished these polities quite sharply from the feudalized structures that preceded them. For his part,
Benno Teschke maintains that domestic "social property relations" and the "competition for income" that
followed from them shaped the interaction of the
highly personalized polities of continental Europe
down to 1789 and even beyond. Dynastic monarchies
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2004