Eclipse of Empire?: Perceptions of the Western Empire and its Rulers in Late-Medieval France (review)

Seldom can a punctuation mark have been put to more effective use on a book cover. The title of Chris Jones's Eclipse of Empire? summarises the traditional interpretation of western European political developments around 1300 while the question mark simultaneously indicates the author's intent to argue against the accepted view. Jones, now at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, sets out to challenge the influential conclusions of an older generation of scholars (including Joseph Strayer and Robert Folz) regarding issues such as the growth of a sense of French nationalism around the time of Philippe IV (ruled 1285-1314) and the importance for Capetian legitimacy of proving genealogical links to the Carolingians. There is little doubt that the western Empire was declining in its effective authority after the reign of Frederick II Hohenstaufen (died 1250) or that French power was on the rise, a trend most famously exemplified by Philippe IV's conflicts with Boniface VIII's papacy. But this is not necessarily the way contemporaries understood developments and it is with perceptions that Jones is most fully concerned. He shows that characterisations of Frederick and his regime by French commentators did indeed shift in the decades after his demise, but that this had as much to do with domestic French issues (notably the canonisation of Louis IX) as it did with any observations on the Empire itself. French discussions of imperial interregna or the later reigns of Henry VII and Ludwig of Bavaria in the early fourteenth century also reflect a theoretical view of an ordered and hierarchical political world that contemporaries may have seen as thrown off course only temporarily, rather than permanently.

Jones is scrupulous in laying out his methodology. Claiming to be acting counter to a recent trend of more specialised case studies of political thought in the period, he aims to be as comprehensive as possible in examining the wealth of chronicle sources produced in northern France between the 1240s and 1340s. Here the tradition of St Denis is important but is placed in context rather than being left to speak on its own. Furthermore, Jones recognises the problematic impressions created by the nineteenth-century editors of the great medieval source collections (especially the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and the Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France). In choosing what to include and exclude, he argues, these editors gave a sense of this body of work as being more fixed than was in fact the case. Jones reintroduces a focus on the fluidity of the chronicle narratives and encourages his readers to consider each text as valuable in its own right, rather than simply as either an antecedent or a pale imitation of an authoritative single version. If this occasionally lends his work the appearance of a series of discrete studies in textual and manuscript tradition, nonetheless the careful structure of each chapter and the clarity of the author's prose ensure that the wider goals are never far from view. (As an aside, the only notable flaw in the book's presentation is a curiously inaccurate map on p. xxiv. The crisp prose is marred only by the oft-repeated phrase 'almost certainly' which, although indicative of admirable scholarly caution, does tend to grate after a while. Perhaps the author could have employed some stylistic alternatives.)

Attention to detail proves fruitful, as the impressively wide-ranging analysis of contemporary texts and their opinions is very effective in reducing the burdensome weight of hindsight and historiography on an understanding of what French writers thought about the Empire and its leaders. Rather than asserting the model of an embryonic 'nation-state' in opposition to the declining universalist claims of the Empire, French chroniclers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries could envisage a European polity that had room for more than...