Europe: Ancient and Medieval
for the most part, the locus of that history was to be
found not in the Holy Land but in the West. The final
loss of Jerusalem before the middle of the thirteenth
century forced the Canons of the Holy Sepulcher to
move, with the Patriarch, to Acre. Following the loss of
Acre in 1291, they transferred their seat to Perugia.
The spread of the devotion to the Holy Sepulcher
among the laity, especially through the formation of
lay confraternities of men and women; the foundation
of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher; and the growth
of houses of canonesses of the Holy Sepulcher dedicated to the education of girls belong to the period
between the early fourteenth and the seventeenth
century. Elm provides a detailed picture of these
developments, with emphasis on Germany and the
Netherlands.
He is master of the considerable and often unreliable literature dealing with the Knights of the Holy
Sepulcher. He provides a useful summary of earlier
work, with careful acknowledgement of the contributions of previous scholars in his article on "Kanoniker
und Ritter vom Heiligen Grab: Ein Beitrag zur Enstehung und Friihgeschichte der Palastinischen Ritterorden," which will prove very useful to those working on
the history of the military orders and trying to locate
the Knights of the Holy Sepu1cher in that history. In
actuality, they had no military role. Founded in the
fourteenth century, their history belongs more to that
of chivalric knighthoods than to that of the military
orders. Like most such groups, they were closely bound
up with the fortunes of the aristocracy, waxing and
waning accordingly. Their modern form has received
recognition from and been revised by a number of
recent popes. Although a Catholic order, they do have
some Protestant members.
Other sections of this book deal with the role of
women religious. "Fratres et Sorores Sanctissimi Sepulchri" studies not merely lay men and women affiliated with the order but women religious as well, a topic
that is dealt with more fully in the article on "Die
Frauen vom Heiligen Grab." Elm makes clear the
relationship of these women religious to such orders as
the Ursulines, thus tying them to the general movement for the education of women in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. Another entire section is devoted
to the history of S1. Pelagius in Denkendorf, the oldest
German priory, whose story traces the history of a
single German house during the German Reformation.
The importance of Elm's research to both medievalists and early modern scholars lies chiefly in his
profound understanding of the religious culture of
both periods. It is impossible to read these essays
without recognizing that efforts to characterize the
religious movements of the period have to take into
consideration not merely traditional and conservative
elements but also the way in which they dealt with an
ever-changing world in dynamic ways. These movements speak to us of many different responses. With
Elm's help, we can understand some of them better.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
9~9
Unfortunately, this book is not well edited. There are
too many typographical errors, and the format is not
attractive. These features detract from an otherwise
valuable work by a learned scholar.
JAMES M. POWELL
Emeritus,
Syracuse University
BRUNO LEMESLE. La societe aristocratique dans le HautMaine (Xl'i-Xll" siecles], Foreword by DOMINIQUE BARTHELEMY. (Histoire.) Rennes: Presses universitaires de
Rennes. 1999. Pp. 315. 170fr.
The wave of regional studies that restructured medieval French social history in the last generation bypassed the county of Maine. Beyond a number of
studies on individual castellan families, no work of
synthesis has replaced Robert Latouche's Histoire du
comte du Maine pendant le X" et le Xl" siecle (1910). So
it is a minor historiographical event when three major,
and quite different, studies on medieval Maine appear
within the space of five years. Daniel Pichot (Le
Bas-Maine du X e au XI/le siecle: Etude d'une societe,
[1995)) combines archaeological and documentary evidence to view society in the Bas-Maine through the
chronological and conceptual framework of Georges
Duby's 1953 study on the Maconnais. Robert Barton's
dissertation ("Power and Lordship in Maine, c. 8901100" [1997)) uses Maine as a laboratory to engage
recent debates on the nature of lordship and the
"feudal transformation" around the year 1000. And
Bruno Lemesle, adopting the insights and perspectives
recently pioneered by Dominique Barthelerny, proposes a fundamental reinterpretation of the social
order and aristocratic practices in the Haut-Maine.
Lemesle begins with a brief political history of
Maine based on the narrative sources, but he argues
that their depiction of endemic war and violence
should not be accepted uncritically. War filled only
twenty-five years of the eleventh century and often was
self-limiting, ending in negotiated settlement rather
than wholesale destruction. It was simply the means by
which counts and castle lords protected their legitimate rights, not the result of "feudal anarchy," and it
was neither the defining factor of the eleventh century
nor responsible for the restructuring of society.
Lemesle takes his critical view of the ecclesiastical
sources to the second part of his study, where he
cautions that the charters depicting conflicts with
laymen distort the wide range of relationships between
monastic institutions and aristocratic families. Counts,
barons, and knights were not so much the enemies of
monasteries as their symbiotic benefactors who sought
spiritual benefits and burial rights, who liberally endowed new communities and patronized old ones, and
who often joined communities where they had close
relatives. In his subtle analysis of sources, religious
institutions, and aristocratic families, Lemesle gives us
a far more nuanced and ordered eleventh century than
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990
Reviews of Books
the one we customarily enVISIOn, and it deserves
serious attention within the larger discussion on the
nature and extent of violence in medieval society.
The last part of the book consists of equally suggestive essays on the aristocratic family, lords and vassals,
and the exercise of power. Lemesle's analysis of the
family is particularly refreshing. Critical of medievalists' continued misuse of the term lineage to mean
agnatic descent, he constructs a more complex notion
of the aristocratic family based on the conjugal unit,
where the right of eldest son was preferential, not
exclusionary (all children received an inheritance), and
where the wife enjoyed substantial dower rights (later
defined as one-third of her husband's property) in
addition to her own dowry. Lemesle argues persuasively that the conjugal family was not new in eleventhcentury Maine but only better exposed because monastic institutions referred to it in the records they
increasingly drafted to protect their own property
rights. The evidence from Maine is entirely in accord
with practices in contemporary Anjou, and it makes a
strong case for the centrality of the conjugal family
long before the canon lawyers formalized their
thoughts on the subject in the twelfth century.
Only in his fifth chapter does Lemesle enter the lists
against the dominant paradigm of social organization:
rejecting the traditional scheme of "nobles and
knights" (he finds no evidence of a fusion of the two in
the twelfth century), he settles on "lords and vassals"
as the best way to represent relations between the
endogamous elite of castle lords and the knights, which
he sees as a diverse class of middling landed proprietors and stipendiary soldiers. He finds eleventhcentury Maine to have been highly feudalized in the
sense that fiefs with their concomitant military service,
mostly castle guard, were widely held, but the pattern
of fiefholding was more horizontal than pyramidal. All
of this is a useful reminder that feudal institutions
were formed long before they were explicated by
customary codes and exploited by the king and powerful princes. The implications of Lemesle's wellwritten, provocative study extend far beyond Maine
and the eleventh century.
THEODORE EVERGATES
Western Maryland College
JOHN B. FREED. Noble Bondsmen: Ministerial Marriages
in the Archdiocese of Salzburg, 1100-1343. Ithaca:
CorneJl University Press. 1995. Pp. xvi, 304. $49.95.
This is a social history of the "ministerial" class in a
German principality in the central medieval period,
with special reference to marriage. John B. Freed
traces the rise of the ministerial class in the archdiocese of Salzburg from serfdom through aristocratic
status to decline in the fourteenth century. One longterm reason for the decline was a new marriage
pattern, normal from the mid-thirteenth century, by
which more than one son was allowed to marry. This
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
tended to split up the family lands. The new pattern
went together with and tended to foster the rise of the
dowry, paid from the bride's side, as opposed to the
dower, paid from the husband's side. (The latter may
have been hard to enforce against the husband's
family.) As the patrimony was spread thin among more
than one son, it became important for the family of the
bride to make sure she would be provided for if her
husband died and indeed that the couple should have
the wherewithal to start a household. The prince
bishop threw his growing authority behind the new
system, even contributing to some dowries. Nevertheless, Freed stresses that the principality of Salzburg did
not follow a pattern observed elsewhere (notably
Florence), where the dower dwindled into insignificance, and the dowry became grossly inflated.
Dowries and dowers, however, are something of a
sub-plot. The main storyline is about the implications
of servile status for marriage. Lords controlled the
marriages of their serfs, even if the serfs had become
powerful nobles. Here Freed could have developed
further the comparison with England, where lords
controlled their free vassals' marriages both before
and after Magna Carta (see clause 6 of the 1215
version). What difference then did servility make? The
answer would seem to be as follows: in England a
marriage was a danger to the lord of the wife, whose
new husband might be an enemy. That could also hold
good for Salzburg. In Salzburg, however, there was
also a danger to the lord of the husband. The latter's
new wife might be a "serf" of a different lord, who
might gain control of her children and land. Serfdom
here was governed by the principle that children
normally went with the mother. So the personal unfreedom of ministeriales did make a difference.
Freed points out that the church's consanguinity
prohibition made it hard for ministeriales to find
spouses with the same lord. A solution in the thirteenth century was for the lord of of the unfree man
and the lord of the unfree woman to agree to divide
the children hetween them. In the early fourteenth
century, a different solution evolved: the wife's lord
surrendered his rights over her to the husband's lord,
but she abandoned claims to inheritance of her family's land (her dowry might be enhanced as a compensation). This is serious and interesting social history.
One is impressed hy Freed's scholarly honesty and
integrity. He does not cut corners with his tricky source
material, and he is never pretentious. Nor is he
myopic. He makes intelligent though discreet use of
social anthropology. The last chapter relates social
history to cultural history (the Rodenegg frescoes and
the poem Frauendienst). There is some subjectivity
here, but Freed has something to offer even the
medieval Germanists: notably the observation that the
lord of Rodenegg married a widow of superior social
status, just as Yvain did; and Freed's general point
about the chivalric sophistication of this parvenu class
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2000