BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 899

Adam J. Kosto considers the use of hostages in late-thirteenth-century

Occitania as an early expression of representation, based on geography as
well as estate. Alfonso III of Aragon demanded that hostages for Charles of
Salerno include not only princes, nobles, and burghers, but also English
(Gascon), French, and Provencal nobles and burghers.
Two essays discuss the issue of growing consolidation of political power.
Nathaniel L. Taylor charts the history of the house of Guifred the Hairy from
the tenth to the twelfth century. The family, who became the Counts of
Barcelona, moved from a comital power that was considered "private, heri-
table, and divisible property" (138) to primogeniture and consolidation.
Elizabeth Haluska-Rausch documents a similar process affecting widows
near Montpellier. From the late tenth to the early thirteenth century these
women lost first the ability to succeed to independent political power and
eventually guardianship of their children in all but the domestic sphere.
Simon R. Doubleday laments the loss of the historical voice of the power-
less, and yet Alan Cooper records a few protests of ordinary jurors in
Domesday Book; Carol Symes records activities of thirteenth-century Arras
jongleurs, and Alan Friedlander describes individual signs of thirteenth- and
early-fourteenth-century Languedoc notaries.
Many of these authors have heeded Professor Bisson's counsel to analyze
the exercise of power in medieval localities. The collection, for example, also
contains Stephen P. Bensch's essay on the efforts of the Counts (ca. 1080-
1140) to control minting in Empuries; Paul Freedman's account of a charter of
Count Oliba, who developed the Truce of God; and Bruce L. Venarde's
contribution that Robert of Arbrissel, d. 1116, demonstrated eccentric behav-
ior but was not an early feminist.
The theme of the book provides a provocative means to consider niedieval
topics with fresh techniques and insights. This reviewer's fear, however, is
that some of this valuable knowledge will languish unread because the
appropriate students will lack access to detailed databases.
John W. Dahmus
Stephen F. Austin State University
Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early
Modem Europe. Edited by Ian Hunter, John Christian Laursen, and Cary
J. Nederman. Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate,
2005. xii + 210 pp. $ 99.95 cloth.
In their introduction to this collection of articles, the editors express their
intention to chart transformations in the social construction of heresy from
the Middle Ages to the early modem period. This is a timely goal insofar as
there has been a recrudescence of heresy research in the past few decades.
The majority of this recent research has been of the synchronic variety. It is
thus mostly concentrated on specific moments in the longand lugubrious
history of heresy within Christendom. Accordingly, transhistorical and/or
theoretical assessments of this subject have been few and far between. Any
endeavor to study heresy in diachronic and nomothetic perspective would be
a welcome addition to the scholarly literature (for a review of this literature,
see Jacques Berlinerblau, "Toward a Sociology of Heresy, Orthodoxy, and
Doxa," History of Religions 40 [2001]: 327-51).
900 CHURCH HISTORY
While the volume excels in many areas, it does not entirely succeed in this
regard. This is not a reflection on the thirteen essaysalmost all of which are
of very high quality. What is missing is a conclusion that culls all of the
insights to be gleaned from these highly specialized chapters. Its absence
leaves the question of longitudinal transformations in heresy somewhat
obscured. It does not, however, detract significantly from the overall useful-
ness of this collection. The individual articles provide the diligent reader with
all of the necessary raw materials for preliminary theorizing about this issue.
Momentarily, I will briefly summarize some of the broader themes which
emerge from the detailed case studies.
The contributors focus on a variety of different periods starting from the
eighth ceritury CE. and moving forward roughly one thousand years. A
cluster of very interesting essays examines Reformation figures who engaged
in a transvaluation of once maligned heretics. This new, positive assessment
of medieval deviants that emerges during the German Enlightenment is
clearly anchored in Protestant ideological assumptions. The authors of these
essays (Thomas Ahnert, John Christian Laursen, Ian Hunter, and Sandra Pott)
do an exemplary job of identifying nuances and tensions among those who
might be labeled "revisionist heresiographers."
Elsewhere, three contributors (Paul Antony Hayward, Sabina Flanagan,
and Constant Mews) look at the period prior to the "Golden Age" of Church
persecution of heretics (I would place this Golden Age from roughly the
thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries). These essays sketch out the inchoate,
ambiguous, and contradictory thinking about heresy that existed before
discussions of the subject proliferated, assumed the form of dogma, and
congealed. Of especial interest is Flanagan's examination of some very blurry
distinctions made between madness and heresy in the age of the Fourth
Lateran Council.
Most of the articles focus on Germany and England. A few look at France.
Little is said about Italy (though Cary Nederman and Gisela Schluter tan-
gen tially touch on the subject). It might have been helpful to devote some
time to pre- and early modern Italy with its wealth of resources on heresy.
The work of Carlo Ginzburg and the Microstoria school come to mind as
examples of secondary literature about heresy that may have illuminated the
questions discussed in this volume (see, for example. Carlo Ginzburg, The
Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller [New York:
Penguin, 1982]; and Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, ed., Microhistory and
the Lost Peoples of Europe [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1991]).
After reading through the fine essays in this collection, one can, in fact,
think more coherently about the theme found in its title. Three major struc-
tural preconditions for transformations in conceptions of heresy are noted.
First, the period from the Middle Ages to early modernity marks the rise of
the nation state and the demise of empire. Second, we could point to the
deregulation of religious markets that characterizes Latin Christendom at the
end of the Middle Ages. It was then that an always contested religious
orthodoxy/monopoly gave way to competing Protestant orthodoxies. As a
consequence, in early modernity a great degree of political, psychological,
and even physical space was opened up for doctrinal and ritualistic dissent.
Third, the entire period is characterized by an increasing secularizationone
that is both cause and effect of the two variables mentioned above.
BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES 901
These structural shifts surely played a role in some of the transitions
explored by the contributors. To begin with, a clear discursive shift is evident.
In the early Middle Ages discussions of heresy were sparse, elliptical, and not
tremendously rigorous. In the later Middle Ages the problematic is rational-
ized; detailed and well-thought-out policy statements, so to speak, are ad-
vanced by ecclesiastical specialists. These were geared at dealing in a "hands-
on" fashion with assorted social deviants. By the time of the German
Enlightenment, however, quasi-academic historical studies of heresy emerge.
Their writers insisted upon their own "impartiality," though the degree of
anti-Catholic invective that saturates these works is impossible to miss (see
Laursen).
Another transhistorical change concerns the demystification of "ortho-
doxy." In premodernity, a facile equation of orthodoxy with Truth is discern-
ible (see the discussion of William of Ockham by Takashi Shogimen). In early
modernity, by contrast, a dogged refusal to see religious orthodoxy as iso-
morphic with some type of Truth is evident. Rather, orthodoxy is increasingly
understood in terms of the dynamics of power. Its potency lies not in its
proximity to any Truth, but in its ability to monopolize the legitimate use of
violence (towards the defense of an im-Truth).
Lastly, one begins to see a reevaluation of heresies. For Protestants of early
modernity the despised heretics of old were often stumbling toward Truth, or
at the very least bravely combating a despotic Church. For later Enlighten-
ment thinkers, the heretical imperative, with its emphasis on dissent and the
challenge it issued to dogma, signifies what is best in Occidental civilization.
Even today this conception is in vogue, though perhaps a value-neutral
orientation toward heretics may be preferable.
Jacques Berlinerblau
Georgetown University and Hofstra University
Marguerite de Navarre: Mother of the Renaissance. By Patricia F. Cholakian
and Rouben C. Cholakian. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
xxxiv + 413 pp. $40.00 cloth.
As Rouben Cholakian points out in the preface, no up-to-date English
biography exists of one of the most important figures of the French Renais-
sance, Marguerite de Navarre. Barbara Stephenson's 2004 The Power and
Patronage of Maguerite de Navarre (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate) is a study of
Marguerite's patronage based on a close reading of her letters, but it is not a
biography. As a historian of late medieval and Renaissance France, I was very
excited as I began to read Mother of the Renaissance. Unfortunately, at least for
historians, there are some major problems with this work.
Following upon Patricia Cholakian's earlier work, the book frames Mar-
guerite's life around a reading of her Heptameron as autobiography. While we
can gain insights about a person from his or her writing, it is something else
to present it as fact. The authors argue that Marguerite is the protagonist of
the fourth and tenth novellas and believe that the courtier Bonnivet at least
attempted rape (as did Amadour in novella ten). This is speculative in the
extreme, as we can see throughout the book in the authors' repeated use of
words such as "we are inclined to believe," "may well have been," "it seems
to us," and so forth. Scholars must necessarily make conjectures based on
evidence, but the degree to which the authors do so here is troublesome.