Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities by Timothy Reuter (review)

REVIEWS 317 seen whether scholars will be able to address these questions without reintroducing the element of Christian power that Raz-Krakotzkin tabled in his efforts to read Jewish creativity in the context of Christian society but not wholly dictated by it. The Censor, the Editor, and the Text is two books at once: a thorough depiction of censorship in early modern Jewish and Christian print culture, and a compelling model of Jewish-Christian interaction—one that acknowledges the avenues of exchange while it refuses to deprive either community of the responsibility for determining its own course. Through skillful analysis of the sources, Raz-Krakotzkin proposes a rich perspective on the construction of Jewish canon and identity, a perspective ready to be questioned and explored. JESSICA ANDRUSS, History of Judaism, University of Chicago Timothy Reuter, Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006) xix + 483 pp. In October 2002 early medieval scholarship lost an important member of its community with the untimely death of Timothy Reuter. Reuter’s body of scholarship covered a wide range of topics from dispute settlement, nobility, ethnicity , kingship, ritual, and the emergence of the state. Beyond this, Reuter is one of the few early medieval historians to write in English about medieval Germany , and his works are critical components of undergraduate and graduate education in medieval history. Yet his likely largest contribution to scholarship was Reuter’s ability to bridge the German and English speaking historical worlds, having studied with Karl Leyser at Oxford, spending twelve years at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich, and having been the chair of Medieval History at the University of Southampton. Janet Nelson points out that this capacity to straddle different worlds translated into Reuter’s scholarship when he combined secular, ecclesiastical, social, political, ritualistic, and legal themes throughout his career from his doctoral dissertation to the present body of essays. At the time of Reuter’s death, he was working on creating a collection of his articles, essays, and book reviews, and after he died his good friend and colleague Janet L. Nelson completed the project. The book is as Reuter planned it, and only one selection, a historiography of medieval political ritual, which Nelson speculates might not have been written upon his death, is missing. Reuter’s major contributions from English and German books and journals are included in the volume including his article from Past and Present’s feudal revolution debate. Aside from collecting together Reuter’s work into one convenient and beautifully edited work, half of the book, eleven pieces, were previously inaccessible to English language scholars. Nelson has translated seven of Reuter’s German articles on a range of topics from the emergence of the state in the early Middle Ages, violence in Salian politics, to symbolic acts in the Becket dispute. Chapters 1, 6, 9, 15, and 21 were previously unpublished, and in this review I focus on these chapters. Reuter’s goal in compiling a collection of his essays was to provoke scholars into leaving “nationalist nominalism” in favor of more discriminating histories. This concern is central in the first section of the book, which focuses on methodology and historiography and also less explicitly in the two following sec- REVIEWS 318 tions on symbolic language and political structures. The title article of the book, which was Reuter’s inaugural lecture as chair of Medieval History at the University of Southampton, begins by discussing the perception of medieval historians as benign, often uninteresting members of the academy and British society . Reuter argues that the medieval period was when many European nations first came to be, thus the period is critical to understanding contemporary national identity. Yet for Reuter this approach has a serious pitfall: the nationcentric approach to history, which deters historians from comparative studies and led to “European models” that are often representative of one region. For example, the “feudal revolution” was composed by French historians writing about France supplemented with a couple of studies by French medievalists on the Mediterranean. Thus highly localized terminology and models inhibited the assessment of the relevance of these models outside of France. In this address, Reuter presents two means...