Fortress-Churches of Languedoc: Architecture, Religion, and Conflict in the High Middle Ages (review)

186 Reviews make both social and 'ethnic' dialects 'different', thereby enforcing the prestige of the centre. A n d she has enforced splendidly Richard Bailey's stress (op. cit., especially pp. 42-47) on the relationship of dialect to the political centre, as in Richard Carew, Nashe, Heywood and Gtil. This is a most important, if controversial, study of the English language's first 'empire', one cultural, political, and above aU manipulative. J . S. Ryan Department of English University of N e w England Bonde, Sheila, Fortress-Churches of Languedoc: Architecture, Religio Conflict in the High Middle Ages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994; cloth; pp. xv, 270; 104 figures and plates; R.R.P.£100.00. In an enchanting sentence, describing a process I understand only too well, Bonde writes that she followed 'the model of the good historian of medieval architecture that I aspired to become, and began by amassing information exclusively on church buildings. I kept bumping into castles, seemingly at every turn. These castles were too big to be ignored and (I noticed with increasing annoyance) were too integrally connected with the construction histories of my churches to allow m e to omit them from m y analysis.' This is a process w e have aU too often had to face. In her case, Bonde became fascinated by a longneglected subject: the combination of military and religious elements in the fortified churches of Languedoc. Once beyond the safety of the walled towns, solitary churches in the countryside had to protect themselves from theft and pillage. It would often have been cheaper and easier, I imagine, for parishioners to fortify the church, and defend it alone, rather their whole village. The church forms of the single-nave plan—thick-waU construction, gallery passages, circular stairs, machicolation and creneUation—are shared with castles. This fusion had disappeared in the weU-poticed areas of northern France by 1150, only to return during the wars of the fourteenth century. For churches and abbeys, as for seignorial castles, a licence was Reviews 187 needed to creneUate—a privtiege that was sought after by monastic and episcopal leaders as m u c h as lay. For the coastal region of Languedoc there were additional and unexpected reasons to fortify. W e are speaking of the earlier years of the twetith century, over fifty years before the crusade against the Albigensians got under way in 1208. The king's hegemony over the south was not cemented until the crusade under Simon de Montfort, and symbolised by the construction of another fortified coastal town, Aigues Mortes in the 1240s. This coastal region suffered from attacks by Saracen pirates and private brigands, even in the 1170s. Bonde shows that the former were feared more in rhetoric than in fact, but the latter, as readers of Captain Hornblower will remember, sttil made not dissimilar incursions six centuries later. This situation gave Louis TV the opportunity to expand Capetian influence in the South. H e pursued this in many ways, some military, others more subtle. H e made alliances by advancing members of the various seignorial families to episcopal office, and then by granting them rights that actually reduced those of the local lords—a divide and conquer poticy from which the church benefited in the short term, but the monarchy in the long run. It was during the 1150s and 1160s, while Louis was being most effective in introducing his authority into the region, that the three major fortress churches discussed in this book were constructed—Maguelone, Agde and Saint Pons. Though the documents for this section have been well examined, the actual stonework has only been looked at rather than X-rayed. This is a pity. Bonde is a very experienced archaeologist with considerable on-site experience. She has a good eye for artefacts and for stratification. I would wish she had used her remarkably acute observations on the stonework itseU. A U historical evidence is Uable to falsification and forgery, and the evidence of the stonework, such as the different junctions in coursing and various quarries used, could have backed up her analysis from the documents. This is a worthy book, even though its doctoral...