France in the Middle Ages 987-1460: from Hugh Capet to Joan of Arc (review)

160 Reviews For Dronke this is not just a matter of grotesque or paradoxical content, but also of form. Alternation of prose and verse involves shifting perspectives. The essence of the genre is found in the opportunities which the fluctuations of form and style provide for relativizing and undermining. Having so defined 'Menippean elements', Dronke begins by finding them in three prosimetric texts not usually read this way: Aethicus Ister's Cosmographia, Notker's Life of Gallus and the late-twelfth-century Petronius redivivus, a work which he shows not only echoes its acknowledged model, but also Boethius's Consolatio. This sets the scene for his enterprise, in which he is simultaneously open to Menippean ironies lurking in the prose and sensitively responsive to creativeness in the verse, always with his eye on the point of their combination in a particular text. Chapter two begins with an interesting collection of beginnings where prose deflates the pretensions of verse. Menippean wit is then reclaimed for Martianus Capella and finally poetry's role in Boethius's Consolatio is explored. In chapter three Dronkefirstjuxtaposes some poets' lives (Greek, Irish, Icelandic, Provencal) which combine prose and verse, briefly touches on the Greek Alexander romance and Apollonius of Tyre and discusses Aucassin et Nicolette, a work 'profoundly Menippean in spirit' (p. 77). In chapter four he focuses on works in which the author appears as a firstperson protagonist. These skeletal summaries cannot convey the deftness with which links and similarities are traced within the prosimetric tradition. In fact, it is its very focus on that tradition as a tradition that gives this book its originality and its powerful claim for our attention. F. Muecke Department of Classics University of Sydney Duby, Georges, France in the Middle Ages 987-1460: from Hugh Capet to Joan of Arc, trans. Juliet Vale, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993; rpt.; paper; pp. xxviii, 331; 10 maps, 6 genealogical tables, 30 plates; R.R.P. AUSS45.00 [distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin]. Readers of this book will recognize the unmistakeable Duby stamp: intuitive ex cathedra statements that seem to take one into the heart of the fabric of the times, blinding terminological revelations and an avoidance of mundane political narrative. H e will annoy devotees of the early Middle Reviews 161 Ages, for he believes that 'it all began' in the tenth century A.D., or, at best, in the Carolingian 'great leap forward' (p. ix). Then too, this book will make us realize that what we used to think of, under the influence of Duby's earlier writings, as 'the history of medieval Europe' is very much, now, the 'history of medieval France'. See p. 259 for the relevance of the thesis that the history of France equalled the history of Europe. Duby's stated aim in the present work, 'to document the way in which the state gradually emerged from the feudal system', 'the gradual evolution of power relationships', is an approximate theme for the book. However, this seems to entail some reasonably opaque extensions: the account of the origins of the village in chapter five, which is dreary and hard to follow, and the remarks on p. 33 on 'much greater stress (being) laid on the couple'. Attempts at concrete illustration do not seem as deft as those sewn, for example, into R. W . Southern's Making of the Middle Ages. W e do not really feel the use of Ralph Glaber (p. 1) and too often the visibility of the text being used is lost in Duby's own prose; for example, pp. 69ff. In the case of the ten-page use of Galbert of Bmges, the reader would better advised to go straight to the quite accessible translation by J. B. Ross. In fact, we lose a sense of the concrete, despite some dazzling 'concrete' statistics, such as the thiry-six castles in the Charente during thefirsthalf of the eleventh century! The story tells of the emergence of government from the 'mafia', pactand gang-ridden disorder of the 'feudal' tenth and eleventh centuries. The account of the 'Peace of God' movement is very good. The first step in the rise of the Capetian monarchy is dated by Duby...