Politics and Power in Early Medieval Europe: Alsace and the Frankish Realm, 600–1000 by Hans J. Hummer (review)

REVIEWS 237 bringing tangible proof to bear on the question of Anglo-Saxon right to power. Subsequently, Hill shows how through the various historians—Hill begins with Polydore Vergil and moves through the usual suspects (Rapin, Lockman, Smollet, Hume, and Turner)—the English empire manifested itself completely as the choicest cultural mix of monarchy and democracy, gleaned from AngloSaxon roots: It became “the ultimate Anglo-Saxon compromise” (142). Hill’s argument is well supported but straightforward—he is not concerned with any political implications of Anglo-Saxonism or far-reaching consequences that bleed into the nineteenth century and beyond. Far from making a broader claim about the comprehensiveness of a complex historical movement, The Anglo-Saxons leans more toward a positive reading of Anglo-Saxonism to the modern world. Hill paints with relatively broad strokes, concentrating on the historical reputation of the Anglo-Saxons. All in all, he generalizes that the Anglo-Saxons have fared well in history. While not disagreeable, this position seems almost too conciliatory at times, and Hill often appears to favor a path of history that looks back from end to beginning rather than fleshing out a more dialectical and, subsequently, torrid, engagement with history. But, as he states in the introduction, the book is concerned more with the phenomena of “AngloSaxon ” than any subsequent conclusions, and to that end, it succeeds. Although much of the material in the book has been covered before in sundry ways, the book does a fine job of clearly presenting the historical appropriation of England ’s past. Moreover, the packaging remains fairly comprehensive in scope: the appendix contains key figures of Anglo-Saxonism (those “who have left their mark on Anglo-Saxon studies in one way or another before the advent of a myriad of scholars in the twentieth century” [191]), and the thirty-five plates are useful additions to the text. Quite likely the most up-to-date resource of historicism during this period and with an extensive bibliography, Hill’s work will undoubtedly be useful to any analysis of Anglo-Saxonism. MICHAEL MODARELLI, English, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Hans J. Hummer, Politics and Power in Early Medieval Europe: Alsace and the Frankish Realm, 600–1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005) xiv + 299 pp. The Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought series continues to offer its readers valuable and thought-provoking monographs in the field of early medieval history. Hans Hummer’s book is a noteworthy addition to the work of historians focusing on the regional history of the Medieval West, particularly during the Carolingian period. He goes beyond purely regional history and, in a rare example of a study providing equally well in terms of analysis and synthesis , examines the early medieval archival heritage of the Alsatian monasteries in both its implications for the social history of the region and for the political and cultural history of the Frankish kingdoms in general. Hummer ambitiously brings together two schools of thought that have concentrated on either the government, in its embodiment in various institutional structures—military, ecclesiastical, judicial, political, etc.—or the lack of government and the compensatory mechanisms for social organization and creating viable power structures. Essential for his method is, in his own words, the deemphasizing of “the distinction between lay and ecclesiastical interests” REVIEWS 238 (7). The obliteration of this distinction turns out to be a move both solidly supported by the conclusions of numerous modern works (by B. Rosenwein, P. Geary, or W. Brown, to name a few) and exceptionally beneficial for the structure of Hummer’s book and for the rich content of the many chapters. Hummer is not interested in just particular aspects of the power structures, like their economic basis, social mechanisms, or political implications; in fact, this is a book covering a multitude of possible connections between what can be termed political authority—the power bestowed on, and by, the Frankish kings and territorial power-holders—and what was the spiritual authority, in all its possible expressions, of the monastic institutions of the period. The thematic and topographical focus of the whole study is the monastery at Weissenburg, in the northern end of Alsace in the diocese of Speyer. The...