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The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 105-106



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Book Review

State and Society in the Early Middle Ages:
The Middle Rhine Valley, 400-1000


State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: The Middle Rhine Valley, 400-1000. By Matthew Innes. [Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, Fourth Series.] (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Pp. xvi, 316. $64.95.)

Though one would not know it from the title, everyone interested in the Carolingian church should read this book, for on the way to describing the workings of local power in the areas of Mainz, Worms, and Speyer, it offers perspectives on monasteries and bishoprics complementary to but entirely different from those provided by normative ecclesiastical texts. Innes argues, rightly, that local Carolingian governance has too often been described in terms of formal administrative and legal institutions, where counts and county and hundredal courts are seen as agents of the "central" government, such that the history of the eighth and ninth centuries is often told in terms of a turbulent but straightforward passage from effective royal power over counts to comital independence of kings. What Innes wants to do is study a local society over the course of this period to determine who local leaders were, what their relationships were with each other, within what forums they acted and interacted, and the bases, capacities, and limits of their power. What allows him to accomplish these goals are the unusually large numbers of contemporary charters from the monasteries of the middle Rhine: Fulda, Wissembourg, and above all Lorsch. Summarizing Innes' findings in a short review is unfair, since part of what distinguishes this admirable and admirably written book is its unusually adept combination of detailed analysis and generalized argument, always presented in clear, straightforward terms, the argument made all the more important because Innes thinks historiographically: he never loses sight of the questions he wants to ask, those questions always being fundamental and classic. Put briefly, his argument is that the growth and cohesiveness of the Carolingian empire rested on the strength of local networks of elites knit together by patronage, kinship, neighborhood, and interest. These networks had begun to organize themselves independently of the Carolingians in the seventh century, but the Carolingians knew how to use them, manipulating them to a certain extent but also utterly relying on them. In turn, though association with the Carolingians did restrict the political independence of local elites, it also immeasurably increased their power and wealth within their spheres of influence and the range of resources and opportunities to which they had access in other regna. The "decline" of the [End Page 105] Carolingians was therefore less the result of a seizure of power from a weakened central government by newly powerful local elites than it was the result of a structural impasse: as regna were divided and subdivided, kings were resident and proactive in the rule of localities in ways that had not been true earlier, leading to greater conflict between kings and local elites. At the very same time there was also less opportunity in other regions of the empire for losers, which made regional conflicts more desperate and violent. For readers of this journal, the most important part of Innes' argument is the role of the episcopacy as an instrument of patronage and protection on behalf of elite families, and the role of monasteries in creating, shaping, and rearranging elite networks (through foundations, grants of tuitio, and donations). Yet this bald summary does not even begin to cover an argument so insistently comprehensive that it has something cogent to say about nearly every aspect of Carolingian culture: the nature of courts, the organization of estates, the definition of renders, the meaning of gravegoods, the uses of ritual, the rationale and representativeness of charters, the nature of literacy. On occasion, Innes' urge for comprehensive argument gets the better of him: his discussion of the "feudal mutation," based upon sources and historiography he does not know well, sounds flat and dogmatic. On his own...

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