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  • Political Order and Forms of Communication in Medieval and Early Modern Europe ed. by Yoshihisa Hattor
  • Matthew Rivera
Political Order and Forms of Communication in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Yoshihisa Hattor (Rome: Viella 2014) 263 pp.

A collection of articles on the theme of medieval communicative devices, this volume, edited by Yoshihisa Hattori, rests theoretically at the confluence of conflict studies, the linguistic turn, and the so-called “performative turn.” Hattori has compiled papers presented at a March 2012 symposium in Kyoto. Defined broadly, communication to Hattori “generally refers to the transmission and exchange of information that is comprised of various knowledge, ideas, beliefs, intentions, thoughts, values, and norms between individuals or groups” (8). This volume includes two parts: forms of political communication, and communication and conflict based on English and French evidence. Three of the eight papers have comments. Why Hattori selected only these three is unclear. One of the best contextualized, Nobatada Zushi’s piece on legal tradition in thirteenth-century Toulouse analyzes communicative devices within the context of the Capetian Consolidation after the Albigensian Crusade.

One can intuit two themes in this volume. The first is performative communication in negotiation and in the establishment of order. Hattori’s paper examines how courtly gestures served as mechanisms of negotiation between political players. As such, these gestures become more than rote formalities. [End Page 284] Instead, they emerge as texts “readable” and knowable to the participants and onlookers. As Stollberg-Rilinger points out later in the monograph, the medieval performative courtly gesture maintained both semiotic and ontological characteristics. They served as signs, but also, as she observes, “they do something” (65 emphasis mine). Persuasive staged dramas, these gestures established personal and familial authority through the construction of proximity and distance between the emperors and political contenders (22, 24). Continuing in this vein, Gerd Althoff understands courtly ritual in the Empire as indicative of “consensual government.” This interpretation casts the political machinations of the imperial ruling families against the backdrop of their diminished prestige, a process that had begun at Canossa and continued with Barbarossa’s defeat at Legnano. Althoff’s conclusions, therefore, lend credence to Hattori’s argument that German court gestures were intended to (re)-establish central authority in the Empire by neutralizing families with imperial pretentions (35–36). In agreement with Hattori, Althoff argues that courtly ritual reinforced social stratification through the fictive construction of center-versus-peripheral power dynamics, with the emperor at the center (47).

In addition to royal and imperial courts, this volume broaches the subject of performative communication in the new consultative bodies that took shape in the High Middle Ages. Stollberg-Rilinger understands these bodies—namely, the Spanish Cortes, the French Estates-General, the English Parliament, and the Polish Sejm—as further venues of political theatre, where, through constructed gestures, order could be established and power negotiated through the reaffirmation of the feudal relationship between lord and vassal. For example, the language of “friendship” and mutual responsibility cemented notions of rank and privilege. Next, to convoke grandees from a fictive “realm” communicated the imagined existence of a “state” whose head was the would-be prince. Last, ceremony constructed inclusion and distance, two politically oppositional alternatives for the prince both to admit new players—ritualized as vassals—while creating space between his own political grandeur and the “lesser” grandeur of the princes of the realm (68, 77). Underscoring Hattori’s and Althoff’s conclusions, Sollberg-Rilinger asserts that these bodies were not mere artifice, but vital components of medieval statecraft.

Cast as performative communication to establish order, written contracts over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries increasingly reflected the growing power of monarchs. Special privileges granted in charters, as argues Atsuko Nakamura, served as a means to forge advantageous alliances for the achievement of political objectives. Convincingly, Nakamura argues that the renewal of contracts held important value in establishing patronage ties. Through contract renewal, a lord showed the beneficence of his dynasty. Therefore, the renewal of privileges created a sense of continuity, which installed order through legal consistency over time, not to mention confidence in the goodwill of the ruling family (181–183). Additionally, the issuance and renewal of contracts...

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