Negotiating Secular and Ecclesiastical Power (review)

228 Reviews participation through the Zitti, from w h o m emerged the new Jesuit Schools, and from 1577, through new Marian congregations which spread through all classes ofNeapolitan society and developed foreign evangelising activities. In 'Corpus Domini: Ritual Metamorphoses and Social Changes in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Genoa', Claudio Bernardi provides an exciting account of unruly Genoese confraternities that continued under civic rather than ecclesiastical control into the early nineteenth century. Angelo Torre, 'Faith's Boundaries: Ritual and Territory in Rural Piedmont in the Early M o d e m Period' examines the attempts of the episcopacy to regulate the fragmented diversity of practices in rural Piedmont, and its strategies to transform the traditional Pentecost suppers into eucharistic devotion. Konrad Eisenbichler closes the volume with 'The Suppression of Confraternities in Enlightenment Florence', a discussion of various attempts to control confraternities, and ultimately of Lorenzo Mehus's treatise Dell'origine, progresso, abusi, e riforma delle confraternite laicali, the document whichjust Grand Duke Peter Leopold's suppression of confraternities throughout Tuscany in 1785. Ironically, it was this act of suppression that ensured the preservation of the Tuscan archives studied here, and made much of this volume possible. Nerida Newbigin Department ofItalian Studies University ofSydney Teunis, Henk, Andrew Wareham and Amoud-Jan A. Bijsterveld, eds, Negotiating Secular and Ecclesiastical Power (International Medieval Research 6), Turnhout, Brepols, 1999; board; pp. xii, 196; 5 b/w illustrations, 8 maps, 2 tables; R R P EUR40.00, B E F 1614.00; ISBN 2503508723. One of the enduring themes for medieval historians in Western European countries has been the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical power. For the most part this has been conceptualised in national and institutional terms, under the general rubric of 'church and state'. T w o basic lines of approach laid down in the later nineteenth century proved very influential with subsequent historians. In Germany, Bresslau and Steindorff emphasised the fundamental incompatibility between the principles on which the medieval German empire and the Roman Church were founded, and identified the Gregorian Reform as Reviews 229 the crucial manifestation of this clash of views. The other approach developed at much the same time in Britain. Stubbs and Maitland and their successors focussed less on 'ideological' conflicts and more on legal and administrative controversies, particularly that between Archbishop Anselm and Henry I. It was not until the 1930s that the focus began to shift towards different ways of conceptualising secular and religious power in medieval society. Beginning with the work of Marc Bloch, there has been a steady growth of interest in exploring the social dimension of this topic, drawing on anthropological and sociological approaches to the nature of power in pre-industrial societies. Key areas of investigation have included horizontal relationships at a local and regional level (rather than vertical relationships at a national level), the role ofnegotiation (as opposed to conflict), and the mechanisms and structures (including religion) which served to integrate societies. The role of monasteries as instruments of social integration has been one of the recurrent themes. This collection of papers from the Leeds International Medieval Conference provides a good illustration of current approaches and interests in this area. Based on a close reading of the primary sources, the contributors focus on social mechanisms for articulating, negotiating and settling disputes. The context is provided by Henk Teunis's valuable, if sketchy, 'historiographical introduction', which looks at some of the major contributors to this topic since the later nineteenth century. In thefirstofthree sections, several types ofmedieval texts are considered as 'tools of power': episcopal and comital charters in northern France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Guibert ofNogent's account of a communal revolt against the bishop of Laon in 1112, a monastic narrative of the finding of the relics of St Bertin in 1050-52, and the history of the liberties of the abbey of Bec-Hellouin. The second section gives three examples of the role of kinship, secular and religious, in the development and maintenance of landed estates: the bishops of East Anglia in the earlier eleventh century, three Anglo-Norman noble families in the later eleventh century, and thefraternityof Ramsey Abbey in the earlier twelfth century. The final...