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  • Making Early Medieval Societies: Conflict and Belonging in the Medieval West, 300-1200 ed. by Kate Cooper and Conrad Leyser
  • Michael E. Stewart
Making Early Medieval Societies: Conflict and Belonging in the Medieval West, 300-1200. Edited by Kate Cooper and Conrad Leyser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xi plus 281 pp. $99.99).

An exceptional essay often raises as many questions as it answers. I found each paper in this volume—based on the 2005 conference, "The Peace and the Feud: History and Anthropology 1955–2005"—innovative and thought-provoking. Deftly interweaving disparate methods, time-periods, and regions, the monograph produces a fresh vision of a millennium of Western European history.

Using the anthropologist Max Gluckman's mid-twentieth century work as a pivot, Conrad Leyser's introduction offers three primary goals. First, how do social orders stay together in places where central authority has weakened or faded altogether? Second, how does internal feuding represent not as a sign of disorder, but as a symbol of social vigor? Third, how does Christianity's enduring social authority help to explain the post-imperial West's birth and eventual rise?

Kate Cooper reconsiders the impact of Constantine's conversion to Christianity in 312 on the Empire's social and power structures. Rather than employing the top-down approach favored in most scholarship on imperial Christianity, Cooper contemplates the role of public and private social networks in these developments. Arguing that the late Roman government was more reactive than active in its policies towards the fourth-century church, Cooper proposes that the increasing puissance of bishops stemmed primarily from the "informal relationships between bishops and prominent landowners" (27). Yet, a shift to collective property ownership by the Church led to a rivalry between bishops and lay landowners for social and political authority.

While Cooper's significant reshaping and indeed positive twist on Edward Gibbon's notorious suggestion that Christianity led to Rome's "fall" is enticing, future work on this topic will need greater interaction with the ancient sources and recent scholarship on the complex military, political, and stratified social networks within the imperial West and fifth and sixth-century Ostrogothic and Byzantine Italy. Indeed, Cooper will need to explain why the rise of bishops and communal property ownership in late antiquity did not lead to similar political and social "collapse" in the East.

The later empire's notoriously quarrelsome bishops serve as the next chapter's foundation. Infighting amongst Christians, which has commonly been seen as a weakness in the later Roman Empire and the post-imperial West, is revealed as a key to social endurance. David Natal and Jamie Wood explain that dispute [End Page 160] lay at the heart of bishops' establishment of their authority in regions where central control had lapsed. Confirming links with imperial and central Church authorities allowed these bishops to gain the upper-hand in local disputes and to re-establish order.

Chapter 3 shifts to Frankish Gaul and Bishop Gregory of Tours's late sixth-century history. Countering current consensus, Helmut Reimitz finds in Gregory's criticisms of the Merovingian kings a censoring of their "futile" attempts to adopt Roman models of rule. Gregory therefore offers a post-imperial vision of a Gaulish Christian identity that rejected the use of "Frankish or Roman identities as a focus for social and political integration (76)."

Martin J. Ryan avers in chapter 4 that Bede may have held a more optimistic vision of eighth-century Anglo-Saxon England than is commonly supposed. Bede believed in the cooperation between church and state, but insisted that Churchmen should avoid secular politics, since only God could bestow or revoke a king's authority. Bede saw violence as an essential tool of kingship. Channeled properly, secular violence could assist in establishing Bede's vision of an ideal Christian community.

Chapter 5 returns to Frankish Gaul to investigate how the decentralized and economically weak Merovingian Kingdom managed to rule a large territory with minimal dissent. Periodic feuding, for Paul Fouracre, lay at the heart of Merovingian stability. Factional conflict helped to alleviate tensions and redistribute power without insurrection. Moreover, their right to attend the yearly assembly provided the magnates scattered throughout...

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