Charters and the use of the written word in medieval society (review)

Reviews 241 Greenblatt was personally and professionally prompted to try and account for Shakespeare's power to disturb us still at these levels. The starting point for his book was exploring the Jewish kaddish, prayers for the dead, which, 'scarcely knowing how to pray', Greenblatt tells us, he undertook for his o w n devout father. He was moved by, and moved to write about, Hamlet's 'magical intensity', regrettingthat 'my profession has become so oddly diffident and even phobic about literary power, suspicious and tense, that itriskslosing sight of- or at least failing to articulate - the whole reason anyone bothers with the enterprise in thefirstplace' (p. 4). A brief review cannot do justice to the scholarly range, poetic attentiveness , and sheer critical grip ofthis thrilling book; niggles about minor slips would be an impertinence. It is one of those all too rare works of criticism which make you want to cheer in gratitude, for Greenblatt articulates with enviable elegance and intelligence Shakespeare's complex capability of being, as Keats put it, 'in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts'. Robert Easting School ofEnglish, Film, and Theatre Victoria University of Wellington Heidecker, Karl, ed., Charters and the use of the written word in medieval society, Turnhout, Brepols, 2000; pp. xi, 253; cloth; R R P EUR50.00; ISBN 2503507719. One needs to be wary of the titles of edited collections. Frequently they can be entirely misleading and, unfortunately, this is the case in this instance. The volume contains some ofthe proceedings from two meetings, 'Charters: the development of writing in medieval society' (Utrecht, 29 April 1999) and 'Charters and the use of the written word' (Leeds, 12 July 1999), both organized by the Utrecht Pionier Project Verschriftelijking. Karl Heidecker contributes a short and rather disappointing 'Introduction' which actually says very little. For some unexplained reason he has decided to elaborate his o w n contributions to the meetings, whatever they may have been, and to publish them separately as a monograph. This volume is left much the poorer for the decision to do so. The result is an uneven volume, heavily inclined to Northern and Eastern Europe and to the peripheries of medieval Latin Europe in general. Even Heidecker appreciates and acknowledges this, almost apologetically. The preferred explanation, that ' . . . for simple reasons of logistics . . . [it was not 242 Reviews possible]... to cover all of Europe' reads weakly since no attempt has been made to do so. Only one contribution is concerned with Italy, and that with the marginal issue of Milanese court procedures for handling documents as proof, and none with Occitania or Iberia. The title of the volume is seriously misleading. Another annoying feature of the volume is that the contributors remain unidentified by institution or in any other way. This can be revealing, for example in the paper 'Towards a reappraisal of Carolingian sovereign charters'. This consists ofbibliographical notes and a series of methodological observations and questions which currently occupy the author in the preparation of his thesis, to none of which are any answers or fresh insights provided. Reports on work in progress can occasionally be useful but much more often it would be far better to wait for the results before going into print. David Postles's paper on 'Country clerici and the composition of English twelfth- and thirteenth-century private charters', even though it appears not to have been contributed to either of the two original meetings, is nevertheless an interesting and welcome addition to the volume. However, as with many of the other contributions, it suffers from lack of any real attempt to engage the relationships which existed in the Middle Ages between charters as forms ofproof of contract and the various modes of making of contract, especially orally. The same comment can be made of Philippe Depreux's otherwise very interesting contribution: 'The development of charters confirming exchange by the royal [i.e., Carolingian] administration (eighth-tenth centuries)'. In fact this is an overall weakness of the entire volume. There is a pretence to engage the relationships between the oral originality and the surviving written texts which to us must be the reality, but these relationships are inadequately explored. In some of the contributions the jargon of...