The English Noble Household 1250-1600: good government and politic rule (review)

164 Reviews appreciation of the nature and purpose of love that leads Meisami to devote about three quarters of her book to romance and love. Her third chapter equates romance with the language of experience and in chapter four the character as mord emblem rotates around the romance. Chapter five describes romance as mirror, predominated by allegories of kingship and justice. The ideals of love which form the principd theme of the ghazal (short lyric) arerightiyseen by Meisami as a 'distinctively Persian genre that has no exact counterpart in Arabic*. Her sixth chapter, on ghazal, discusses the dlegories and symbols of Sa'adi (d. 1292) and Hafiz (d. 1389), both from Shiraz. She deds with Hafiz in depth and points out that his ghazals 'do indeed function as a mirror, but a mirror of transcendentd truth, rather than of historical realia' (pp. 284-5). What makes Meisami's book interesting to Western readers is her comparative approach. She says, 'Important parallels exist between medieval Persian literature and that of the West, parallels that cannot be considered the result of 'influence' but must be viewed as common responses to similar cultural circumstances', (p. 310). S. A. A. Rizvi Austrdian National University Mertes, K., The English Noble Household 1250-1600: good government and politic rule, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988; pp. x, 235; 17 plates; R.R.P.£19.50. Recovering the past from a sensitive interpretation of surviving laundry lists used to be a standard historical joke but Dr. Mertes has in this book shown just how much can be reconstructed about the institution of the household on the basis of household accounts and also what their limitations are. This is a useful addition to our information on the subject since, while the importance of the aristocratic family andfamilia in the Middle Ages has been widely acknowledged, its internd structure has been, for the most part, neglected. Her skilful use of these accounts provides a useful taxonomy of the domestic institutions of the nobility. She has looked at an impressive number of accounts from households of dl sizes and periods, although her rigid adherence to an examination of the narrowly defined 'household' account has caused her to overlook, particularly for the sixteenth century, some useful sources of information on households costs and structures; for example, the first accounts taken by the Augmentations for the dissolved monasteries and the more loosely structured accounts covering a wide range of items kept by some gentry families. Medievd and early modem formal household accounting practice, moreover, is an artificid construct for convenience of audit rather than precision of practise and creates some insoluble problems of interpretation in the absence of other sources of information. Because not all types even of the lord's household Reviews 165 expenditure are included, absolute conclusions about the internd structure of the household are difficult Mertes has problems in defining a household .and its internal departmentdization since a range of relationships could be subsumed under the single term 'servant'. This particularly dfected a peripatetic master or mistress whose household servants might be located in various scattered residences. She makes heavy weather of the problems of the specialisation of } function of individual servants and of the relationship between the dignity of particular servants and their place in the chdn of command. Mertes shows that household servants (who were predominandy m d e ) had a wide range of socid backgrounds and that household service was a career which might lead to improved social status. Some lords preferred to employ relatives while others evidently avoided it. The Familia was clearly in many ways as important as the family (which was often fostered out). She uses anthropologicd models to discuss the importance Of good lordship as opposed to kin structure and the role of religion as a binding force in the community of the household. The accounts shed an ambiguous light on the significant relationship of household and council, of servant and the 'fee'd' counsellor; and on the internal judicid power of the lord over his household. The latter is rather unsatisfactorily dismissed as quasi juridicd, which almost certdnly sets aside the most important element in the whole institution of the household. Because they...