Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas, 1340-1560 (review)

244 Reviews was won, yet the enthusiastic response to Autier and his perfects indicate that the doctrine was still highly attractive. The last two chapters deal with the decline of Italian Catharism and the curious case of the Bosnian Church, which was not fully proscribed until 1459. Lambert wryly observes that ' i t was an anti-climactic ending to the heroic story of European Catharism' (p. 312). The Cathars is a marvellous book and highly recommended. There are a few problems: there is no bibliography of secondary sources, so i t is necessary to comb the footnotes to source material; the 'Epilogue' (two pages) does not function effectively as a conclusion to such a dense work; and the real attractions of Cathar doctrine are insufficiently vivid, but these are minor concerns. Carole M . Cusack School of Studies in Religion University of Sydney Lowe, Ben, Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Idea 1560, University Park, Pennsylvania, Penn State University Press, 1997; paper; pp. xiv, 362; R.R.P. US$19.95, £17.90. At its more serious end, the internet can be a remarkable research t Follow up references to 'humanism', for example, and you can piece together a more or less scholarly history of this contested word from its classical usage up to the present day. However, the net can also reflect broad inadequacies in research. Search for 'pacifism' and you will find very little that is systematic, historically based or coherent. Pacifism emerges as little more than a belief held by a small group of Quakers and by Gandhi. Even amongst scholarly books there appears to be no comprehensive history of pacifism extending from Cicero's 'The worst peace is preferable to the best (or most just) war' to the present day. There has been some good work on 'war' and/or 'peace' in medieval English writings, by V. J. Scattergood, John Barnie and R. F. Yeager, amongst others, but the book under review m a y be the only broad-based study specifically on pacifism to cover the early English periods. In fact, for the medieval and Early Modern periods at least, the propaganda for chivalric glamour and holy wars is still often taken Reviews 245 as evidence that the activity of war was not questioned in early Europe, and countless theme parks, exhibitions of armour and weaponry, games and historical novels reinforce the view of war as a glorious adventure, universal and unquestioned in earlier ages. There are m a n y books on war but few on peace. It seems an indictment of the century w e are just leaving, littered as it is with a trail of wars more destructive than at any time in h u m a n history. Ben Lowe has made an admirable start in addressing this relative lacuna in the history of ideas, and his book is packed with valuable references. H e demonstrates with scholarly thoroughness that, during the middle ages and beyond, not only did European intellectual circles vigorously debate what constitutes a just war, but also that this debate was influenced by a peace discourse which emphasised prayer, humility, and good example as ways of settling conflicts. Lowe documents the existence of a rich and powerful tradition of early peace writing. Poets emerge as early English champions of peace: John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate all indicate some anti-war and pacifist tendencies, and they m a y not have been alone but rather voicing opinions, albeit 'minority' ones, that could not safely be expressed in less fictive ways. More authors could have beenbrought into evidence here. Lowe presses on rather quickly through the fifteenth century towards the early humanists, omitting some interesting French and English material, particularly the works of Alain Chartier and his several English and Scots translators, amongst w h o m was probably Sir John Fortescue himself. Chartier's Quadrilogue Invectif, a fierce debate on war between 'France', 'knighthood', 'the people' and 'clergy', remains an understudied text. As w e would expect, however, the humanists played an important educational role in the development of pacifist ideology, since they stressed Christ-like behaviour and more humane...