A History of Medieval Political Thought 300-1450 (review)

122 Reviews readings or with the Latin where appropriate, or else the sense of words is discussed. The critical apparatus is completed by a list of proper names, containing useful biographical details, a glossary (including even a second one of variants and rejected readings), and a very helpful list and explanation of a number of key philosophical terms. A random check on the letter 'E' in the glossary indicates a very high degree of accuracy, with only two misprints: the reference for 'edifice' is III, 12( 14), not III, 2 (14), and that for 'espendre' is probably intended to be n, 7 (12), where the past participle form 'espendue' occurs, not II, 7 (2). Overall this edition lives up well to the standard of the series. It will be invaluable for further comparative study with other versions, once they are all finally published, but it should also be read in its o w n right. Atkinson's careful work allows us to do this with confidence. Leslie C. Brook Department of French Studies University of Birmingham Canning, Joseph, A History of Medieval Political Thought 300-1450, London N e w York, Routledge, 1996; paper; pp. 255; R.R.P. US$24.99, £15.99. Here is a book which will be welcomed by all medievalists. Some thirty yea ago the late Walter Ullmann wrote a well known paperback, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages. Now, one of his former research students has written a work which revisits the field for a new generation, making i t far more habitable than it has hitherto been. In doing so, Canning has provided a superb teaching tool. H e breaks the period into four chronological sections, each given the same amount of space, which respectively discuss the origins of medieval political ideas C.300-C.700, the growth of specifically medieval political ideas c.750-1050, political ideas in the high middle ages c.l050-cl290, and political ideas in the late middle ages, c.1290-1450. His approach is inevitably just and balanced, his style one of clarity and economy of expression. A particularly worthwhile feature of Canning's writing is his use of terminology from other languages, persistent enough to stimulate the able yet sufficiently restrained not to deter the slow among student readers. But it is not only students w h o will appreciate this book. It is grounded, apparently effortlessly, in a remarkable familiarity with both the sources and contemporary scholarship, much of the latter of a highly technical nature and not in English, and all medievalists will learn from its endnotes and bibliography, which are generous in the citation of continental material and obscurely-edited texts. The book is based on material provided by theologians, philosophers and jurists, which entails its paying very limited Reviews 223 attention to the political thought implicit in, say, the narratives of medieval historians, and none to the ways in which epics depict Charlemagne and romances King Arthur; w e are presented with an account which is firmly turned away from what might be thought of as the soft options. One after another, hornets' nests of recent scholarship are discussed in balanced and persuasive fashion: Ullmann's notion of a distinction between ascending and descending theses of political power, the possible survival of Germanic sacral kingship in the barbarian kingdoms, the general applicability of the word 'feudal', and the interpretation of the difficulty political theory of Marsilius of Padua, are all sensibly evaluated. At one point, Canning justly observes: 'The historian has to consider what each text meant when it was originally produced ... and what it was thought to signify in later periods of European history' (p. 7). In general, he distinguishes between the contemporary and subsequent importance of texts and doctrines with great success; it turns out that some of the staples of undergraduate teaching, such as the two powers theory of Pope Gelasius and the Unam sanctam of Boniface VIII, cast very short shadows in the periods following their enunciation. Just occasionally I wondered whether the evidence was, perhaps, being interpreted in the light of later developments. Concepts at the beginning of the period which Caning sees as thoroughly...