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  • To Stagger Drunkenly in the Shadow of Peace:The Twelfth-Century Experience
  • J. K. Kitchen
Bisson, Thomas N. — The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. 677.
Flanagan, Sabina — Doubt in an Age of Faith: Uncertainty in the Long Twelfth Century. "Disputatio," vol. 17. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Pp. 212.
Balint, Bridget K. — Ordering Chaos: The Self and the Cosmos in Twelfth-Century Latin Prosimetrum. "Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts," vol. 3. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Pp. 242.

Even AS historians express misgivings over the special terms they use to capture twelfth-century lustre, most appear hesitant to relinquish the well-known catch-phrases. We still hear of "renaissance," "renewal," and "humanism," though such expressions tend to be malleable, bent by cautioning qualifications to ward off anachronism. We also find the age envisaged as one of "discoveries," including that of the individual and romantic love, again with qualifications made to warrant such usage.1 Even the temporal markers of the period, 1060-1230, seem lavish, indicating an expansiveness that the ordinary reckoning of a mere hundred years cannot contain.2 Indeed, historians refer to the era as "the long twelfth century," a neat way of saying that, as far as centuries go, this one is so special, it begins early and ends late. The twelfth century, then, is [End Page 457] magnificent, and, as C. Stephen Jaeger has noticed, we tend to like rhetoric that keeps it that way.3 Consider, for instance, the word "renaissance" in the modern scholarship on the period. Jaeger, a rare proponent for "scrapping the term," generously sums up why it persists:

The term rests — legitimately — on the argument from grandeur. And who will refute that argument? The twelfth century is a great and fascinating age, probably of the long stretch of the "Middle Ages" the period whose remarkable individuals and high accomplishments have provoked and inspired the most and best scholarship: its exhilarating intellectual life, the growth of independent schools and famed teachers in Paris, the rise of the Universities of Bologna and Paris; the great Gothic cathedrals and abbey churches of England; Gothic style in architecture, book illustration, and handcraft design; a new classicism, plasticity, and humanity in the representation of the human body in sculpture; the grand poetic-philosophical-ethical visions of Benrnard Silvestris, Alan of Lille, and John Hanville. . ... We have credited the age with the "discovery" or the rediscovery, or even the "invention," of individuality, philosophical rationalism, and romantic love.4

The list goes on. Many of us have heard it before, perhaps in a lecture hall: "Particularly striking," notes Jaeger, "is the number of university courses" bearing the title "twelfth-century renaissance." For those of us enticed by such talk, the volumes of scholars whose names and accomplishments sound as dignified as the era — think of Charles Homer Haskins or Sir Richard Southern — have enhanced our image of twelfth-century grandeur.5 Among the characteristics heralded by historians, however, we do not usually find violence identified as one of the age's common features. Of course, such an observation is not meant to imply a prevailing imperviousness to the period's capacity for brutality. On the contrary, even an undergraduate who nodded off during a class on the period's grandeur would likely be able to give an example or two of twelfth-century violence — Abelard's famous castration, for instance, or a crusade. Others keener on this span of time might also cite the destructiveness of the Norman Conquest or the truculence of the [End Page 458] Investiture Conflict or the murders of Charles the Good and Thomas Beckett.

On a small and large scale, then, the violence of this period is nothing new to us; if anything, our knowledge of its uses and our study of its multivalent interpretations among mediaeval contemporaries enable us to view it with a precision and complexity like never before.6 However, there are other accounts of violence that scholars, suspicious of hyperbole, seem reluctant to accept as an accurate gauge of the period's turmoil — at least, the first book under consideration gives that impression. This violence is less isolated...

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