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book reviews537 make good the wrong they now admitted they had perpetrated. The ecclesiastical institutions, for once in the driver's seat, often took the opportunity to make them grovel. If the crusaders had any illusions at the time they took the cross—often fired up by a manipulative pope and clergy—the need to face practical problems must have brought them back to earth. The charters show, for example, how costly this was; although many gained prestige and some brought back important relics, Riley-Smith found only four examples of crusaders who seem to have made any monetary profit. Examination of hundreds of specific cases has, therefore, led the author to the conclusion that many of the previous theories about motivation are at best of marginal relevance. The evidence does not suggest that many were driven by material gain, colonial aspirations , or even by the need to redirect the surplus energies ofyounger members of an aristocracy suffering from a crisis of over-population. Indeed, the results might have had quite the opposite effect; the removal of figures of power and authority actually encouraged local violence rather than diverted it to the East. Many of the heroes of the First Crusade returned to find property usurped and their own families plundered, for the Church's protection of a crusader 's lands was quite ineffective. Reading this account of the departures of these closely-knit groups and the fate that met so many of them, one is reminded of the 'Pals' regiments of World War I, so different in class background and mental outlook, but also convinced that they were joining a crusade to cleanse the world of evil. One of the features of this book is the chapter on the returning crusaders—a relatively neglected subject in comparison with the vast literature on crusading motivation —but it would also be fascinating to know what happened in those localities where few of their leading young men came back at all. Did these, too, suffer from "the lost generation"? Malcolm Barber University ofReading Bernhard von Clairvaux und der Beginn der Moderne. Edited by Dieter R. Bauer and Gotthard Fuchs. (Innsbruck: Tyrolia-Verlag. 1996. Pp. 345.) A Conference held in the monastery of Schöntal in March, 1990, to celebrate the nonacentenary of the birth of Saint Bernard is the source for this valuable collection of papers. Unlike the celebrations at Kalamazoo and Rome that year, both of which brought together scholars from many nations and continents, all but one of the papers here collected are by German or Austrian scholars. The sole exception is a paper by the late and deservedly renowned master Bernardine scholarJean Leclercq,whose presence at, and participation in, all the celebrations was, of course, both mandatory and acclaimed. Space limitations prevent a detailed report on all of the papers. And so I offer my reading of a few of the papers, chosen to represent the wide range of topics treated in this valuable volume. 538book reviews Peter Dinzelbacher provides the justification for the perhaps surprising title of the collection with his "Die 'Bernhardinische Epoche' als Achsenzeit der europ äischen Geschichte" (pp. 9-53). He offers an"inescapably broad and general sketch"(p. 15) ofthe transition from the late antique/early medieval world view to the early modern (through the first half of the seventeenth century). He sees the century 1050 to 1 150 as the pivotal period in the birth ofthe "modern."That crucial century was characterized by the birth of cultural pluralism, an acceptance of the new class of townsmen as an integral part of society and as a time of greater social interaction. The period saw a revolutionary distinction between the sacred and the profane, a rationalizing of every aspect of intellectual inquiry. It exhibited a new approach to institutional reform and personal piety and the development of a sense of the individual (the ascendancy of interior motivation and individual conscience). In a survey encompassing a range of topics from climatology to vernacular literature, the specialist is bound to discover specific views with which he or she will disagree, but few, I think, would dispute the general lines of an argument which is truly a tour...

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