England and the 12th-Century Renaissance (review)

288 Reviews men's and women's business so that certain areas such as ecclesiastical, maritime and temporal offices are ignored. H e also does not distinguish in his tables between cases initiated in the court and cases where the petition concerns the production of material needed in another court or the enforcement of a judgement rendered elsewhere. H e probably exaggerates the extent to which the Masters were making law, but he provides a useful insight into the flexibility with which judgements were made and enforced in individual cases. Sybil M. Jack Department ofHistory University of Sydney Thomson, Rodney, M., England and the 12th-century Renaissance (Variorum Collected Studies Series CS620), Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998; cloth; pp. xiv, 344; 3 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. £55.00. Collections of reprints such as the Variorum Series must balance two potentially inimical aims. O n the one hand they can provide a convenient resort for medieval scholars w h o need, say, to consult a critical edition of Geoffrey of Wells' work on the childhood of St E d m u n d (paper IX), or the satirical verse of Berengar of Poitiers (XIII), the stemma for the transmission of Plautus manuscripts (XVI), the diffusion of a little-known astrological text, (XV) or, indeed, the provenance of Mss. Rawl. C. 562, 568-9 (IV) but whose libraries lack, for instance, such obscure periodicals as Antichthon (paper XVI) or even (as is not unusual in the present climate) mainstream journals such as Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch (paper XI), Scriptorium (III, XVII) or Revue Benedictine, (V, VI, VIII). However, suc volumes are presumably also expected to provide a more general audience with a collection which hangs together by addressing some sort of c o m m o n theme (apart, that is, from its biographical or historiographical interest as the work of a particular person.) The intellectual coherence of a single scholar's preoccupations and their elaboration over time might in some instances provide such a satisfying whole. Despite the apparently miscellaneous nature of the topics mentioned above, this is the case with Professor Thomson's book whose nineteen 289 papers represent almost thirty years of meticulous scholarship (but by no means all ofThomson's output since it omits his thirteen papers on William of Malmesbury published together in 1987). Thetitlethat Thomson has chosen for the volume gives a hint of h o w the papers, often highly specialised, sometimes esoteric, relate to wider cultural themes, notably that of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance and medieval humanism. However Thomson's approach to such abstractions is firmly grounded in the material and anchored in particular localities. By studying manuscripts, principally from Benedictine monasteries in Southern England, tracing their travels, and reconstructing their monastic readership, he is able to build up a comprehensive picture of the state of learning at the time. According to Thomson it is only in the light of such detailed studies that wider cultural movements such as the Twelfth-Century Renaissance can properly be assessed. Accordingly, in what is arguably the most important essay in the collection for the general reader, Thomson is in a position to provide a revisionist alternative to Sir Richard Southern's assessment of England's place in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance as essentially 'a province or colony of the French "intellectual empire"'(XIX, 4). Here, after faulting Southern's methodology as 'impressionistic without being either representative or complete' (XIX, 11) he gives prominence to the two particular aspects of culture that he has made his own, monastic study of the literature of pagan R o m e and book production—both, it m a y be said, very much connected with the large English Benedictine houses which unlike those on the Continent, maintained their importance as centres of learning during the twelfth century. Thomson's engagement with Southern, both in this particular essay, and by extension in the collection as a whole, invites comparisons between the two historians and their methodologies. Indeed, in his brief Foreword (p. ix-x), Thomson makes reference to their differing views of what was essential to medieval humanism. But perhaps more telling than his preference for the central role of grammar as opposed to...