Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000-1500 ed. by Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl (review)

BOOK REVIEWS769 Remensnyder's argument unfolds graduaUy and carefully.After exploring the question of real versus legendary in Part One, she turns in Part Two to the founders that southern French monks chose, often in defiance ofchronology,to have first established their houses. Perhaps surprisingly in a period in which kings were distant and shadowy figures, the monks of the period between about 1000 and 1200 chose by preference to attribute their foundations to CIovis , to Pippin the Short, and to Charlemagne. Clovis represented a link between Roman and Frankish rule; Pippin the Short could subsume any authentic deeds of Kings Pippin I and II of Aquitaine into a much more glorious context; and Charlemagne was, by the late eleventh century, Unked expressly with the epic king of the chansons de geste. Some monasteries, by positing a series of barbarian invasions and refoundations,were able to have aU three kings memorialized as their founders.These kings were often given connections to relics of Christ, such as pieces of the True Cross or the richly developed accounts of the Holy Foreskin, which connected Frankish monarchs with the King of Kings. In PartThree Remensnyder turns to the context that inspired monks to recreate their origins, the starting points that defined their monasteries. She argues that foundation legends were used especiaUy as weapons in conflicts, not in general with lay aristocrats or local bishops, as might be expected, but rather with other monasteries. From the eleventh century onward, she suggests, as monasticism became more hierarchically organized, monks often struggled to maintain their identity in the face of incorporation, often unwilling, into a monastic order.A foundation legend that defined their separate existence, supported by the might ofa glorious king (or in some cases a glorious ifequaUy legendary pope), was a useful tool in that struggle. Only in the thirteenth century, when (with the Albigensian Crusade) the Capetian kings of France began to appear in the south, did royal figures have to be dealt with in the present, rather than being past creators and defenders of Uberty. Constance B. Bouchard University ofAkron Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000-1500. Edited by Scott L.Waugh and Peter D. Diehl. (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1996. Pp. vüi, 376. $59.95.) This collection provides an exceUent sampling of current study of the tensions and controversies from the eleventh century onward between the reviving secular and ecclesiastical rulers of Europe, on the one hand, and minorities and movements of dissent, on the other.The authors and editors dialogue intelUgently with each other, and, taken as a whole, the book, and presumably the 1991 UCLA conference which was its origin, display careful organization. Unfortunately ,the introduction,apparently in ignorance ofa large body ofcriticism, 770BOOK REVIEWS accepts the late John BosweU's assertion that the treatment of"homosexuality" (an anachronistic term) shifted (p. 4) "from tolerance to aggressive hostiUty during this period" (it is the idea of an earUer tolerance which causes the greatest problems). Part I contains six articles on "Heterodoxy, dissemination, and repression." In the first R. I. Moore applies to the Gregorian reform views he has long been developing , seeing in consolidation of seigneurial authority, Uterate clerical culture , and new communities resulting from the revival of the economy, three factors central to the growth and suppression of heresy.An exceUent contribution is marred by the occasional cheap shot (see pp. 23-24) and too singleminded concentration on power categories. Two fine case studies foUow, the first, by Peter D. Diehl, describing how reluctance to prosecute heresy -was overcome in thirteenth-century Italy; and the second, by James Given, examining the inquisition in medieval Languedoc in order to understand how the drive for conformity accommodated itsetf to local power structures. Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, using Durand of Huesca as an example, trace the dissemination of sermon models from the schools to preachers. Always, as ClUford R. Backman shows (but one could wish for more precision in some of the claims made) in the case ofArnau deVUanova,pragmatic considerations influenced ecclesiastical judgments. On aU sides, as Anne Hudson explains for the Lollards in a clear U not particularly theologicaUy alert exposition, preaching...