The Languages of Gift in the Early Middle Ages (review)

Many of the contributors to this volume have been working together for decades, collectively examining early medieval European history, primarily on the basis of charter evidence. Their greatest triumph, The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (New York, 1986), created a paradigm shift in how historians think about early medieval social relations. This volume is less earth-shattering, but it is solid and wide-ranging.

David Ganz shows how eucharistic offerings during the Latin mass provided an opportunity to display the social differences among members of congregations who were hugely diverse in wealth, status, and power. Leslie Brubaker studies a tenth-century mosaic in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople that shows Constantine I and Justinian I presenting models of the church and the city to the enthroned Virgin and child. The replacement of the actual donor of the image (a tenth-century ruler) with portraits of illustrious past emperors “makes the link between imperial legitimacy and the Virgin manifest; and . . . makes visible the legitimacy of imperial power itself” (61).

Fouracre surveys the changing use of the term beneficium. Beginning as a general term for a personal favor with the expectation of reciprocity, it came to designate those permanent, heritable secular holdings that would, by the eleventh century, also be known as fiefs. During the twelfth century, foedum replaced beneficium as the label for this type of landholding arrangement; beneficium continued to be used to designate a church living. Throughout the period, the term expressed the tension between “wishing to give” and “not wanting to alienate, in order to maintain the recipient in a state of endless reciprocation” (88).

Ian Wood proposes a new way to look at the monasteries of Wear-mouth and Jarrow, generally considered to be a single community founded by Benedict Biscop. Wood argues that Wearmouth, founded by Biscop on land given to him by King Ecgfrith, was seen by many as a family monastery, whereas Jarrow was a completely separate royal foundation established by Ecgbert with no input from Biscop. The two houses were combined only at a later date.

Janet Nelson surveys Charlemagne’s gifts to the Church, his diplomatic gift exchanges, and the annual gifts that he exchanged with his noble fideles to demonstrate that “what mattered was not just the gifts themselves . . . but the audience before which they were given. . . . The setting mattered too in the sense that the specific political context affected the meaning of the gift” (147).

Ann Christys rethinks the story of the queen of the Franks who sent gifts and an offer of marriage to the Abbasid caliph. The incident is known from copies of the queen’s letter transmitted in a variety of Arabic letter collections. Christys first shows that the queen’s letter is “a spoof” and then uses the letter to explore the Arabic terminology for gifts (162). Rosemary Morris studies gifts made between monks on Mount Athos during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Because monks were forbidden to have personal property under canon law, Athonite monks who participated in the land market often disguised sales as gifts.

Chris Wickham draws attention to launegild, a legal characteristic of gift exchange in those parts of Italy that followed Lombard law. First attested in the seventh century, launegild was a compulsory counter-gift, which could range enormously in size and value, and which “was seen as necessary to stabilize the gift” (197). Wickham suggests that launegild injected a social dimension of trust into what otherwise would have been “not very ‘gifty’” transactions (215). However, launegild vanished in the twelfth century with the development of effective city tribunals that could enforce contracts even in the absence of personal trust.

Davies examines tenth-century charters from Christian Iberia and concludes that between the “two poles of sale [for a price] and gift for no consideration there were many different kinds of transactions” (229). Yet, those who recorded the transactions had to utilize either sale format or gift format...