Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Language (review)

224 Reviews also wondered whether the patterns that she identifies from late sixteenthcentury records accurately reflect the situation during Diirer's hfetime. If images are indeed so potentially powerful, as most of the authors here have argued, then they must be controlled. Andersson focuses on censorship efforts by Nuremberg's city council between 1521 and 1527. During these years the council gradually embraced Lutheranism yet carefully sought to restrict potentially inflammatory anti-Catholic prints so as not to offend Emperor Charles V and some of their trading partners. The city's practice of 'preventive censorship' ultimately proved ineffectual as several case studies nicely demonstrate. The final two essays address Diirer's posthumous reception. Paul Miinch's 'Changing German Perceptions of the Historical Role ofAlbrecht Durer' is a succinct, highly readable overview of Diirer's Nachleben. He draws heavily on the earlier publications of Jan Bialostocki, Mathias Mende, and Jane Hutchison. Irena Zdanowicz recounts the history of Australian interest in Diirer. This includes the National Gallery of Victoria's gradual collecting of his art and an intriguing literary debate in Melbourne during the mid-1940s. Diirer and His Culture might be best characterised as a book around but not strictly about the Nuremberg master. His art provides a starting point for a truly stimulating tour of a few of the cultural issues that preoccupied his contemporaries and later audiences. Unlike most symposia volumes, every single article here raises interesting interpretative or methodological issues. This is one ofthose rare occasions where I wish the authors had been given even more space for expanding their ideas. O n e added bonus is the very useful bibliography of writings on Diirer from 1971 to 1997. Eichberger, Zika, and their colleagues are to be commended. Jeffrey Chipps Smith Department of Art and Art History University of Texas at Austin Given, James B., Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, Resistance in Language, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1997; cloth; pp. xiii, 255; R.R.P. US$39.95. Reviews 225 In his latest book, James Given examines the working of the inquisition in southern France between 1275 and 1325, a period when inquisitorial techniques had been fully developed, and for which both theoretical procedures and their practical application are thoroughly documented in extant manuals and registers. While some of the content of Given's book will be familiar to those acquainted with the vast literature concerning medieval heresy, his approach in Inquisition and Medieval Society is new and provides an unassumingly theorised but nuanced account of inquisitorial activity and the sometimes unexpected, indeed unwanted, outcomes of the inquisitors' labours. The title of Given's book invites comparison with Foucault, and in fact Given considers both power and the inquisition itself in Foucauldian terms. Inquisitorial power, as discussed in Inquisition and Medieval Society, resided in and emanated from m a n y loci, ranging from the individual to the various contexts of community and government within which individuals lived. These diffuse power nexuses are grouped as follows: the technologies of power over heretics and their society developed and implemented by the inquisition and its inquisitors; the resistance to and use of those technologies by individuals and groups in Languedocian society; and the structures of that society which constrained and encouraged the power of the inquisition. While Given describes the work of the inquisition as largely repressive and thus negative, he also analyses its political activity in materialist terms as a labour process whereby the members of society and their ideas were re-formed into new groupings, and orthodoxy was commodified. Given's first section, T h e Inquisitors and their Techniques', examines the complementary technologies of documentation, imprisonment and punishment. In a fascinating chapter somewhat reminiscent of Clanchy, w e learn h o w the development of archives, indexing and cross-referencing allowed the inquisitors both to build up detailed cases against their suspects over a number of years, and also to produce inquisitorial manuals which then aided the production and reshaping of 'truth', 'making concrete the ideas, fears, and fantasiesf that resided only in their o w n minds'. Similarly, imprisonment was used creatively and purposefully as an interrogation technique, rather than as a means...