Kingdom of Snow: Roman rule and Greek culture in Cappadocia by Raymond Van Dam (review)

REVIEWS 268 monarchs? What is one to make of the supposed amicable relations of Frederick II (1194–1250) of Hohenstaufen with Muslims and Jews? And what about the peasantry? Did there exist a medieval equivalent to Carlo Ginzburg’s Menocchio,8 who seems to have invented a heretical personal cosmology for himself drawing, among other sources, on the Koran? Saracens is not as broad in scope as its title suggests. But even within the narrower focus of the study, Tolan leaves some questions unanswered. Was it possible that the adversarial discourse was meant to hide a much more symbiotic reality between practitioners of the two faiths, specially in the frontier areas, as Charles Halperin argues in his “The Ideology of Silence: Prejudice and Pragmatism on the Medieval Religious Frontier.”9 The book is divided into eleven chapters; in each chapter, a number of relevant authors are studied. As such, the structure of the book recalls Hayden White’s Metahistory and, in the field of medieval history, Walter Goffart’s Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon (1988). Both works intended to break the “metanarrative ” of modern historiography and show the uniqueness of each sourceauthor . The effect on the reader is one of disjointedness and lack of an organic unity in the narrative. Tolan, however, argues for the development of a discourse over time, but the many sections and subsection in Saracens make it difficult for the reader to follow the line of continuity from one century to another . ALI ANOOSHAHR, History, UCLA Raymond Van Dam, Kingdom of Snow: Roman rule and Greek culture in Cappadocia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2002) ix + 290 pp. Raymond Van Dam considers his recent book “primarily a study of a particular region in the eastern Roman empire at a particular time. The focus,” he insists, “is on Cappadocia, not the Cappadocian Fathers” (5). I must disagree. The Cappadocian Fathers are certainly the most extensive source for fourth-century Cappadocia, and any study of this region will no doubt reveal the perspectives of these three important bishops, but Van Dam’s study does not go very far beyond their perspective in examining the contextual landscape of Cappadocia in the fourth century. The book may not be a biography of the Fathers—as it assumes a former acquaintance with Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa—but it follows their youthful studies and professional careers in a rather narrative fashion. Perhaps if the book ended with a reevaluation of Cappadocia as “a particular region,” then I would concede that it is indeed a regional study; however, it ends rather abruptly with a semibiographical summary of the relationships between the Fathers and the Emperor Julian. These relationships are the real core of the book: they show the ways in which local administrators and spiritual leaders coexist, clash, and basically learn to deal with a non-local administration—namely, the emperors 8 The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore 1980). 9 CSSH 26.3 (1984) 442–466. REVIEWS 269 of the eastern Roman Empire. Before examining these relationships, however, we must consider the purpose of the book as being one installment of a trilogy. Van Dam envisions his three books to provide a more comprehensive picture of Cappadocia; the first two books deal with the personal relationships among the Fathers and the Christianization of Cappadocian society. This book, the third one, is intended to provide a socio-geographical supplement to the overall picture. His multiple approaches to the material go beyond the usual methodology: “Patristics scholars need to demonstrate a greater awareness of the realities of Greek and Roman society, and social and cultural historians need to acquire a deeper familiarity with the potentialities of theological and ecclesiastical texts” (4). In other words, social, cultural, intellectual, theological, and political evidence must not be separated into such categories at the expense of a greater understanding of the subject as a whole. In Kingdom of Snow, Van Dam takes all these kinds of evidence into account to form an impression of “distinctly regional characteristics” (6) of...