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204 Reviews Landes, Richard, Relics, Apocalypse and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989-1034 (Harvard Historical Studies 117), Harvard University Press, 1995; cloth; pp. xii, 404; R.R.P. US$55.00. Thisfirst-ratestudy has developed out of Richard Landes' Princeton doctoral work on the most important Latin historiographer at the turn of the last millennium, Ademar (988-1034). The subject-matter of the monograph is very complex, because Landes leaves no stone unturned in digging up differences in the versions of Ademar's Chronicon or Historia, in plotting the historian's movements between various monasteries in Aquitaine, and in unravelling the religio-political imbroglio that eventually bore tragedy and isolation for a cleric with strong ambitions. Despite its detail, however, the book is worth one's persistence, and a useful measure of 'half-repetition' helps the work to turn into a kind of medieval detective story. For, in something approaching a sociopsychological profile of an earlier medieval scholar, Landes demonstrates how Ademar's great energy in ordering materials about the events of his own lifetime, and in displaying promising results at his scriptorium, took him to the prestigious monastery of Limoges and heralded the possibility of an abbacy. At Limoges, however, he became protagonist for a new cultus and liturgy for St. Martial, popularly acclaimed in parts of Aquitaine as one of Jesus' disciples (indeed, as an extra apostle) and companion to Peter. It was successful opposition to this new cult, against Ademar's advocacy of it, that induced in the historian a psychological retreat, yet one in which he wrote very vigorously, one might say manically, to justify his commitment and to invoke the prospect of millennial judgement against Martial's detractors. Making matters worse for himself, Ademar, at the last, took himself on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, quite possibly out of a felt need to serve penance, and in Jerusalem he died. Landes' method of piecing together Ademar's career is particularly educative for those wishing to understand the 'first millennial generation' and its circumstances. Ademar is witness to the emergence of the Capetian rule over France after the last Carolingian king had died (in 987); and the historian takes upon himself the role of legitimating the new dynasty as a continuation of the translated imperium Romanum (see p. 149). His Chronicon, moreover, glorifies the significance of the Duchy of Aquitaine within the Frankish ambience, because Ademar sensed he could fulfil his own personal ambitions if he could foster the patronage of his local nation's Reviews 205 lord. Limoges, as it turns out, possessed both a monastery and cathedral over which William of Aquitaine, for one, sought some indirect but significant enough control. Ademar's successful scholarship got him to the same place; but, as w e have already foreshadowed, to his own detriment. It is hard for twentieth-century minds to fathom the power of relics, hagiographical developments, and new liturgies for the Mass, in the medieval West. Landes does well to take his readers into this apparently lost world, and of very great interest is his account of popular pressures for a new cult, that of the military disciple Martial, at a time when the transformation of warriorhood values into stable regional peaceableness was thought so necessary, yet a time also when the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim had mined the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (in 1009, to create a pretext for militarily reinforced pilgrimage and the Cmsades). If one were to surmise, as children of the Enlightenment like us often do, that medievals were all too ready to swallow whatever they were 'fed' about a 'widely proclaimed' saint like Martial, Landes disabuses us of our inherited prejudices. The clerics at Limoges were divided over people-based enthusiasms for the circulating 'Aurelian Legend', which took Martial as Jesus' friend, and not only as the first apostle to Gaul. What really got the cult off the ground, however, was Ademar's extraordinary defence of the new focus of devotion, through a historian's embellishment and corroboration of the Legend, and the composition of a new liturgy, and thus (underneath it all) the seizure of an opportunity to 'rise to the top'. In the...

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