Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages, 1200–1500 (review)

Given the simple but underacknowledged fact that kingship represents what amounts to the norm among forms of human governance, the volume editors’ insistence that “much like democracy in the contemporary occidental world, the intrinsic superiority of government by princes went nearly unrivalled during the Latin Middle Ages” (p. 1) is most welcome. Given, too, the tendency deplored by Bernard Guenée for historians of political thought to brush to one side the voluminous “mirror of princes” literature as “stereotyped and conventional, with no visible relation to concrete political life” (p. 3), it also is welcome that this volume, by focusing on the conception of princely virtues, serves to direct our attention to that particular literary genre.

Most of the essays emanate from a 2004 conference on princely virtues at Nijmegen and reflect careful, tenacious, and probingly analytical scholarship. They cover an impressively broad sweep of writing on the princely virtues— popular, academic, vernacular and Latin—and drawn from Léon, Castile, Great Britain, France, Italy, and the German Empire. They should succeed in drawing well-deserved attention to areas such as the unexpected thematic variety in the literature on princely virtues, changes in the ways in which the princely virtues were treated, the differing uses of the mirror-of-princes genre, and, in the later Middle Ages, to the difference in tonality between Latin treatises and those written in the vernacular.

István Bejczy reminds us that as the thirteenth century wore on, notions of political virtue in some of the works analyzed here began to reflect the imprint of an Aristotelian perspective, while Michiel Verweij, on the other hand, notes that in treatises like the De eruditione principum of William Peraldus (fl. c. 1250) it is an overriding spiritual concern that is dominant rather than anything redolent of Aristotelian ethical or political thinking. Something similar is true, says Georg Strack, of the vernacular (although not, interestingly, of the Latin) princely literature circulating in fifteenth-century Germany. Cary Nederman, moreover, underlines further the suppleness of the mirror-of-princes genre by illustrating the way in which it could sometimes serve as a vehicle for quite negative criticism of princely policies and even reach out to “equate the struggle for economic rights of the people with forms of interference with the possession and accumulation of private wealth” (p. 198).

As a whole, and as the editors plausibly claim, these essays do tend to dispel the notion that the views about princely virtue prevalent in the Middle Ages and informing the exhortations embedded in the mirror of princes literature were necessarily “standardized, stereotyped, and rigidly monolithic” (p. 7).