Michael Edward Stewart

Graphic Signs of Identity, Faith, and Power in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages eds. by Ildar Garipzanov Caroline Goodson, and Henry Maguire (review)

writings on simony and other divergent theological views, and probes the idea that he believed that separating ‘the wheat and the tares’ was too dangerous, too difficult, and that there were ‘other sheep’ (p. 153). Part III, ‘Legacy to the World’, is comprised of three chapters that consider the afterlife of Hus. The first argues that he was not a significant presence (as inspiration or rallying point) of the later Hussite Crusade, and questions whether that might be in part because he was radically opposed to violence and killing. The second considers Hus in the light of heretical predecessors and subsequent Reformation heroes like Martin Luther. The six-hundredth anniversary of Hus’s death at Constance in 1414 was the occasion that sparked many of Fudge’s essays, and a half-millennium has passed since Luther’s ‘Ninety-five Theses or Disputations on the Power of Indulgences’ were nailed to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, the start of the Reformation, which changed Christianity irrevocably. Chapter 10, ‘The Seven Last Words of Jan Hus’, situates the words Hus uttered as he left the prison and walked to the stake, and leaves readers in no doubt of the great faith Hus possessed, and his absolute trust in God. Fudge’s final chapter, ‘Politicizing the Legend of Jan Hus: Problems and Perspectives’, is a historiographical study that reveals fault-lines and fissures in Hus scholarship that persist to the present day. This is a lively and readable study, filled with surprises (unusual subjects of research, original methods to get close to Hus’s ideas and context, and new conclusions). It will be of interest to scholars of late medieval heresy and Church politics, and those interested in Luther and the Reformation. It is warmly recommended. carole m. cusacK, The University of Sydney

Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West by Philippe Buc (review)

Like Robert Bartlett, Julia Barrow contrives to give the impression that the destruction of monasteries during the first Viking invasion was a rhetorical topos invented by twelfth-century writers, because monasteries wanting a narrative of continuous tenure that connected them to their saintly founders needed to explain why they had no account of their history in the eighth and ninth centuries. Unlike Bartlett, Barrow omits to mention that the destructiveness of the Vikings – whether there was in fact a monastic holocaust in early Anglo-Saxon England – is the subject of ‘a long and stilllively controversy’ (p. 23). Historians, one might have thought, have least to gain from promulgating the view that the written record consists of rhetorical fictionalisations of the past, in which nothing can be said to have actually happened. To describe Alfred the Great as making ‘a fleeting reference’ to the Vikings’ destruction of monasteries, their treasures, and their books, misrepresents the devastation his preface to Cura pastoralis is intended to address. Nor does Barrow mention, for instance, the late ninth-century inscription in the Codex Aureus of Christ Church, which records its purchase from Viking raiders by an ealdorman of Surrey. No alternative explanation for the discontinuity of early Anglo-Saxon monastic history is adequate to explain the extent to which the written record has been lost. Much of what we know about early Anglo-Saxon England derives from manuscripts that survived only on the continent. Many of the sources of Anglo-Saxon writings identified by Fontes Anglo-Saxonici are not extant in copies made in England, and so on. The paucity of eighthand ninthcentury accounts of Viking destruction of monasteries, in other words, is part of the evidence that it actually happened. There is, likewise, a paucity of accounts of the devastation of monasteries by Danes in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and of the depredations of the Normans. All three, however, figure in Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s compositions for the nuns of Barking in the 1080s, which might perhaps have suggested a somewhat different argument if Barrow had included them in her study.

Review of 'Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration' by Jonathan Arnold

The Medieval History Journal, 18, 1 (2015): 166–191  system, and I believe is fully supported by the evidence. Rather, I am not so sure about her revisionist assault on the existence, or lack thereof, of long-distance trade. Indeed, there is simply too much evidence—written and unwritten—outside of the sources that Hansen marshals to make her argument that point in the other direction. Yet, in saying so, I also know that it now also has to be proven. And that oddly enough is why this is such a great book. It will not only teach anyone who reads it—be they neophyte or expert—a great deal about the Silk Road, but it will also force all of us to really think again about what the Silk Road was actually all about.

Book Review: Jonathan Arnold, Theoderic and the Roman Imperial RestorationArnoldJonathan, Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014, pp. 340.

The Medieval History Journal, 18, 1 (2015): 166–191  system, and I believe is fully supported by the evidence. Rather, I am not so sure about her revisionist assault on the existence, or lack thereof, of long-distance trade. Indeed, there is simply too much evidence—written and unwritten—outside of the sources that Hansen marshals to make her argument that point in the other direction. Yet, in saying so, I also know that it now also has to be proven. And that oddly enough is why this is such a great book. It will not only teach anyone who reads it—be they neophyte or expert—a great deal about the Silk Road, but it will also force all of us to really think again about what the Silk Road was actually all about.

Book Review: Jonathan Arnold, Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration:

The Medieval History Journal, 18, 1 (2015): 166–191  system, and I believe is fully supported by the evidence. Rather, I am not so sure about her revisionist assault on the existence, or lack thereof, of long-distance trade. Indeed, there is simply too much evidence—written and unwritten—outside of the sources that Hansen marshals to make her argument that point in the other direction. Yet, in saying so, I also know that it now also has to be proven. And that oddly enough is why this is such a great book. It will not only teach anyone who reads it—be they neophyte or expert—a great deal about the Silk Road, but it will also force all of us to really think again about what the Silk Road was actually all about.