ReviewManuel Álvarez Tardio and Fernando del Rey Reguillo (eds.), The Spanish Second Republic Revisited. From Democratic Dreams to Civil War (1931-1936), in European History Quarterly,

European History Quarterly

43(3) 519–597

! The Author(s) 2013

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DOI: 10.1177/0265691413493729

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Book Reviews

Manuel Alvarez Tardio and Fernando del Rey Ruguillo, eds, The Spanish Second Republic Revisited:

From Democratic Hopes to Civil War (1931–1936), Sussex Academic Press: Brighton, 2011; 320 pp.;

9781845194598, £55.00 (hbk); 9781845195922, £22.50 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Alejandro Quiroga, University of Newcastle, UK

The Spanish Second Republic remains one of the most fiercely debated periods oftwentieth-century European history. The democratic era that preceded the Civil Warwas a time of intense popular mobilization, profound social changes and deep cul-tural transformations. In the space of five years, the Republic witnessed the rise andfall of left- and right-wing governments, the involvement of women for the first timein mass politics, education, agrarian and labour reforms and revolutionary upris-ings. The volume under review aims at analysing the political history of the SpanishSecondRepublic, not as the antechamber of the Civil War, but in its own right. Afterall, the tragic outcome of the Republic was not set in stone when democracy wasproclaimed in April 1931. The Spanish Second Republic Revisited takes a fairly clas-sical approach to the subject matter and concentrates on political history of the mosttraditional sort. Thus the contributors mainly deal with high politics, political par-ties, electoral campaigns and ideological disputes. These topics have already receivedconsiderable historiographical attention but the editors of this volume seek to pro-vide a new ‘scientific and distanced approach’ able to overcome ‘the conceptual dis-tortions generated by the Civil War of 1936–1939 and the Franco dictatorship thatemerged from it’ (6). According to Manuel Alvarez and Fernando del Rey, thesedistortions have led since the 1990s to the emergence and consolidation of a neo-Francoist historiography, written by journalists and devoted to reproducing a numberof myths created under the military dictatorship, and a pro-Popular-Front interpret-ation, that idealizes the work of leftist governments during the Second Republic.The Spanish Second Republic Revisited set itself the task of overcoming both trendsof this politicized and ‘militant history’ and producing an ‘honest and rigorous’ ana-lysis free of ‘myths, condemnations and self-interested manipulations’ (7).

For all its intentions to revisit the history of the SecondRepublic, the drawback ofthis work is that it contains very little original research. Most of the chapters in thisvolume are syntheses of works published years ago – in some cases, such as JoseManuel Macarro’s study, more than a decade ago. More importantly, many of thecontributors’ understanding of the Second Republic are not very far from that of theneo-Francoists. In the last years the neo-Francoists have regurgitated one of

the central myths of the military dictatorship, namely that the coup that started thecivil war was directed not at a democratic regime but at a leftist government con-trolled by revolutionaries. The implication here is that the military coup was neces-sary to prevent a revolution led by the Popular Front government. Unsurprisingly,the myth of the revolutionary agenda of the Popular Front is reproduced in the bookunder review, among others, by Stanley Payne, Professor Emeritus at the Universityof Wisconsin, who has publicly backed the ‘innovative’ work of the neo-Francoistjournalists. Similarly, Luis Arranz questions the democratic credentials of theSecond Republic and concludes that by the spring of 1936 the government hadreduced ‘constitutional legality to nothing’ and taken a revolutionary path (36).

Some of the contributors seem to have something of a Cold War mentality. As aresult, the different groups of the Spanish left are portrayed as revolutionaries,either potentially or regardless of what they said or did; whereas conservativesarrive on the scene as defenders of social order and victims of their political oppon-ents’ violence. In the words of Roberto Villa the ‘illegal actions’ of the left againstthe centre and right parties became ‘one of the driving forces of the insurrection inJuly 1936’ (129). Manuel Alvarez too portrays the Catholic right as a casualty ofthe left. He accuses left-wing scholars of being biased for taking anti-fascistapproaches when analysing the CEDA (the Catholic party winner of theNovember 1933 elections) and advocates a ‘scientific’ analysis instead (76). YetAlvarez has no qualms in taking the words of the right’s leaders at face value todenounce the exclusivist policies of the left. Painting the conservatives in a flatter-ing light also requires a very selective memory, so he ignores the facts that theCEDA leaders funded the military conspiracy against the Republic, mediatedbetween different rightist groups to back the rebels and instructed their provincialorganizations to join the military as soon as the rebellion began.

Not all chapters seek to apportion blame. TimRees has written a solid analysis ofthe Spanish Communist Party’s mixed position – neither fully revolutionary norwholly republican – and Gerald Blaney’s chapter competently shows how the con-spirators’ views became paramount within the Civil Guard in the months before themilitary uprising. Nevertheless, the volume as a whole does not greatly advance ourhistorical understanding of the Republic. The editors are right in pointing out that aless idealized scholarship of the Second Republic is needed. Yet the book’s ‘revision’of the period is too close to the neo-Francoist mythology for comfort, nomatter howoften the contributors insist on the scientific and empirical character of their work.

Klaus Bade, Pieter C Emmer, Leo Lucassen and Jochen Oltmer, eds, The Encyclopedia of Migration

and Minorities in Europe from the 17th Century to the Present, Cambridge University Press:

Cambridge, 2011; xxix + 768 pp.; 9780521895866, £125.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Peter Gatrell, University of Manchester, UK

This is the English-language version of a mammoth book that first appeared inGerman in 2007. Around a quarter of the total is devoted to a series of country

520 European History Quarterly 43(3)

overviews and to a conceptual chapter which discusses aspects of the migrationprocess and migration regimes in early modern and modern Europe. This chaptersprings no great surprises, arguing that the First World War was a watershed indrawing a clear line between citizens and immigrants, but it provides a clear over-view of continuity as well as change over time. The authors argue that more atten-tion should be devoted to the long-run process of migrant groups’ accommodationwith host societies, which has been neglected by modern scholars, who (it is argued)unjustifiably dismissed some of the insights of Robert Parks and the ChicagoSchool. They appear agnostic about the significance that should be ascribed tothe role of the nation-state in the new millennium; and they somewhat controver-sially downplay the importance of diaspora as a distinct concept and process in itsown right (diaspora does not merit an entry in the subject index). Among thecountry surveys, mention should be made of the impeccable essays by FrankCaestecker on Belgium and Luxembourg, Leslie Page Moch on France, SylviaHahn on Austria, Marc Vuilleumier on Switzerland, and Frank Golczewski onUkraine, all of whom cover a lot of ground without being glib or superficial.Holm Sundhausen in particular provides an excellent synthesis of populationmovements in the Balkans during the early and late-modern era. Each authoralso incorporates valuable statistical material.

The bulk of this encyclopedia is given over to close on 250 short, informative ifsomewhat descriptive entries on a multitude of different topics. The editors had theinspired idea of contacting scholars working in migration history and getting themto propose contributions on topics of their choice rather than dictating topics inadvance. The result is a wonderfully eclectic pot-pourri of essays, many of themcovering case-studies of migration over several centuries. It will probably come asno surprise to most readers to find entries on Huguenots in Europe since the six-teenth century (by Matthias Asche), prisoners of war in Europe in 1914–1922 (byJochen Oltmer), foreign forced labourers in Nazi Germany (by Ulrich Herbert),and the pieds-noirs in France (by Jean-Jacques Jordi). But particularly welcome arethe contributions on more obscure topics – such as Hungarian coppersmiths inwestern Europe in the nineteenth century, Peruvian female domestics in Italy sincethe end of the twentieth century, British war brides in Norway since 1945, Chineserestaurant owners in the Netherlands and Germany, Walloon straw hat makers inthe Netherlands, Alpine chimney sweeps from the sixteenth to the early twentiethcentury, and English peripatetic comedians in Europe in the early modern period.Most regions and countries are well represented in this section, although the Balticreceives surprisingly little attention, apart from an article on Estonian and Latvianrefugees in Sweden after the Second World War. There is little sign of Romamigrants, who are briefly mentioned in a short but fascinating piece by LeoLucassen on the bear leaders (ursari) from Bosnia who migrated to westernEurope in the late 1860s. Many of the entries provide English-speaking studentswith a good sample of work that is otherwise only available in a foreign language,such as Klaus Weber on German merchants in Cadiz and Bordeaux from theseventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Klaus Gestwa on itinerant merchants in

Book Reviews 521

nineteenth-century Russia, Jens Thiel on Belgian deportees in Germany during theFirst World War, Helge Heidemeyer on refugees from East Germany in the FederalRepublic, Detlef Muller-Mahn on Egyptian sans-papiers in Paris since the 1980s,Sandra Gruner-Domic on Cuban labour migrants in East Germany, and BirgitAmmann on Kurdish refugees in Germany. Most authors have done a good job ofproviding basic data on numbers and demographic change over time.

This weighty tome takes up a lot of space on the bookshelf, and it is not acriticism of the editors to suggest that a venture such as this demands an onlinepublication that would open up the possibility of including new entries and updat-ing existing ones, as well as facilitating better cross-referencing. There is a usefulindex but no list of the numerous tables scattered throughout the Encyclopedia, orof the maps and photographs, which are disappointingly few in number. But itwould be churlish to end on a critical note: for anyone teaching courses in migra-tion history this is a very valuable resource to recommend to librarians, and theeditors can reasonably claim that they have provided a solid and imaginative plat-form on which others can build.

Nandor Bardi, Csilla Fedinec and Laszlo Szarka, eds, Minority Hungarian Communities in the

Twentieth Century, trans. Brian McLean, East European Monographs: Boulder, CO, 2011; xii +

859 pp.; 9780880336772, £55.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Tomasz Kamusella, University of St Andrews, UK

This sumptuous clothbound volume is exquisitely produced to a high standard inan age of rather shoddy print-on-demand. Despite its bulk, it opens easily and staysopen at the required page. Any surprise about the quality of the production isdispelled when one learns that it was manufactured in Hungary with the financialsupport of seven Hungarian cultural and arts institutions and of MOL, theHungarian oil and gas company. I can only wish that the editors had not bowedto the strictures of the Anglo-American publishing industry and had included theannotations, photographs, primary sources, statistics and the dictionary of terms,all of which are present in the Hungarian original (1).

In the Preface the volume is announced as inaugurating an as yet nameless seriesthat aspires to present a comprehensive survey of the history(ies) of the variouspeoples of East Central Europe. This is a laudable goal, earlier taken up by Peter F.Sugar and Donald W. Treadgold in 1974, when they commenced their 10-volumesurvey series, ‘A History of East Central Europe’, which still lacks the two crucialvolumes on the twentieth century. I fear that a similar fate of permanent incom-pleteness may await this new series, too, taking into consideration that this volumeof almost 900 pages is devoted to the Hungarian minorities in the twentieth cen-tury, who amount to 2.5 million people. In order to maintain this level of detail, theplanned series would have to devote around 80 volumes of the same size to about200 million inhabitants of East Central Europe in the twentieth century alone.A Sisyphean task, indeed, and what about the earlier centuries?


I would not be unduly surprised if the volume under review turned out to be thefirst and last in the projected series (though I hope at least for a survey on theRoma who outnumber Hungarians in Transylvania, amounting to about 10 millionin the whole of Central Europe, and on whom there is much less reliable informa-tion available than on the Hungarian minorities). The landscape of CentralEuropean historiography is now littered with uncompleted overambitious projectsaiming at an idealistic comprehensiveness which seems to be taken straight fromJorge Louis Borges’s story ‘The Library of Babel’.

The team of almost exclusively ethnic Hungarian scholars (though many ofthem come from, or are active in Hungary’s neighbouring states – for exampletwo of the volume’s three editors, Fedinec from Ukraine and Szarka fromSlovakia) provides a thorough overview of the social, political, cultural andethno-linguistic history of the Hungarian and Hungarian-speaking minorities inthose areas taken from Hungary at Trianon in 1920. The subjects are analysedthrough the lenses of the changing lattice of international minority regulations, andof states and regimes in the Danubian basin. The chapters are divided into chrono-logical sections that cover the breakup of Austria-Hungary (1918–21), the interwaryears (1921–1938), World War II (1939–44), the communist takeovers in EastCentral Europe (1944–48), the time in the Soviet bloc (1948–89), and the post-communist years up until immediately after the ‘big bang’ enlargement of theEuropean Union (1989–2005). Although there is inevitably some overlap betweenthe contributions, and a different degree of comprehensiveness in their references,this is not a great problem for the volume as a whole, because in reality it is areference work that hardly anybody will read from cover to cover.

The volume constitutes a useful corrective to how the twentieth century lookedfrom the viewpoint of a Hungarian minority group in a specific region at a giventime, and on how such groups influenced Hungary’s foreign and domestic politics,including the country’s relations with the neighbouring states and internationalorganizations. The grudge at the dictate of Trianon and the post-1945 decisionsis palpable, for example: ‘our German brethren suffering a similar fate [atVersailles]’, (61); as is the notion that the unity of the Hungarian nation will beattained by ‘breaking borders down through EU integration’ (464). It is also rathersympathetic to the ethnically justified enlargement of Hungary at the expense of itsneighbours during World War II. On the whole, however, the volume manages tomaintain a cold even-handedness. It also usefully includes in its purviewHungarian-speaking Jews and Roma, Hungarian communities across the world,long-established communities of Hungarian-speakers outside historic Hungary(Csangos) and, among other topics, information on language contact, multilingual-ism and the emergence of new varieties of Hungarian among the Hungarian minor-ity groups. The volume includes an atlas of 29 maps, potted biographies of theimportant personalities mentioned in the book and a bibliography extending to60 pages, in which Hungarian-language titles, and titles in Romanian and in Slaviclanguages are usefully appended with English translations. Despite some minorerrors, such as 1775, instead of 1772, given as the year of the first partition of

Book Reviews 523

Poland-Lithuania (614); or ‘Sahy’ instead of ‘Sahy’ (721), undoubtedly caused bythe complicated and multidirectional tasks of translation and editing, this volumewill remain for years to come the starting point for researchers working on theHungarian minorities and the countries of their residence.

Mark R Barnes, The Spanish-American War and Philippine Insurrection, 1898–1902: An Annotated

Bibliography, Routledge: Abingdon, 2010; 413 pp.; 978041599571, £100.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: John Tone, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

Mark Barnes has produced a much-needed bibliography covering the period inwhich the United States conquered its first overseas empire. There are other goodbibliographies of the Spanish-American War, such as Donald Dyal’s, but most ofthem, as well as most general works on the subject, focus on the naval and landbattles of 1898 with little attention to the immediate post-conquest period andother topics. Many focus on one theatre of operations, usually Cuba. Readers ofBarnes will be delighted that his work does not suffer from these deficits and thathis book can serve as the initial stop for anyone interested in a broad range oftopics associated with America’s first overseas war of imperial expansion. Forexample, events in Puerto Rico, which typically receive little mention, are amajor focus for Barnes. He has a personal connection to Puerto Rico, and healso worked with the Puerto Rico State Historic Preservation Office for severalyears. This allowed him to discover fresh sources and perspectives on this longneglected part of the story, such that anyone wishing to begin a project on thePuerto Rico campaign will find Barnes extremely useful. Researchers interested inthe Philippines will likewise be aided by the lengthy sections covering the Manilacampaign and the Philippine insurrection. And the chapter on domestic Americanissues arising from the war constitutes an excellent point of entry for understandingthe American response to empire, discussion of the implications of the combat rolesof African Americans, and other fascinating topics.

No bibliography is complete and each is shaped by the politics and approachesof its author. In my view, this bibliography, though timely and useful (I have foundit to be so), is limited by Barnes’s understanding of the causes of the war withSpain. Barnes states it as a given that America declared war against Spain in 1898out of humanitarian concern for Spain’s colonial subjects, especially in Cuba. Thisis like saying that the United States invaded Iraq out of concern over SaddamHussein’s treatment of Iraqi civilians. In both cases, the real causes of war weremore complex, with humanitarian concern being one among several impulses lead-ing the United States to commit itself to a war of conquest. In the case of theSpanish-American War, outrage against Spain’s treatment of Cuban civiliansplayed an important part in manufacturing a groundswell of opinion favourableto an invasion of Spanish territories overseas. There can be no doubt of this.But it is also true that powerful American interests viewed the conquest ofSpanish territories in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines as desirable and


even inevitable – part of America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’. The project for Americanexpansion at Spain’s expense was hardly a secret, and it was a decades-old projectby 1898. In fact, the United States inherited it from Britain’s ‘Grand Design’ goingback to the days of Cromwell. More recently, American officials had been seekingquasi-sovereign power to monitor and intervene in public health in Havana,San Juan and other Spanish colonial cities since 1881. Manufacturers eyedSpanish territories as markets and sources of raw materials. American politicianswanted a victorious war in order to mobilize voters disgruntled over the deeprecession of the 1890s. The military and foreign policy community, which had acertain kind of vision for America’s future, thought in geopolitical terms about theneed for coaling stations and posts overseas, including command of the approachto Panama and a base in the Philippines from which to gain access to China. Theinsurgents, especially in Cuba, did their utmost to coax American intervention, andtheir role in ‘causing’ the American declaration of war against Spain was no smallthing. In other words, the list of causes for America’s war against Spain is verylong, and it is probably best to view American outrage over Spain’s treatment of itscolonies as just one among many causes. Indeed, it is not inappropriate to viewexploitation of the American humanitarian impulse as a pretext for war more thana cause, just as we today view American concern for Iraqi civilians and the Bushadministration’s fabrications about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as pretextsrather than causes for the American war of conquest in 2003.

Why does this matter? The selection of sources in Barnes’s bibliography is notthe best starting point for understanding the root causes of the Spanish-AmericanWar, because the underlying causes are not foremost in the author’s mind. This willbe a significant limitation for some researchers. On the other hand, the strengths ofBarnes’s approach are also obvious and make it a work of significance that shouldform part of any library concerned with American imperialism and US relationswith the former Spanish colonies.

Christopher F Black, The Italian Inquisition, Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 2009; 336 pp.;

9780300117066, £40.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Elena Bonora, University of Parma, Italy

Christopher Black’s The Italian Inquisition aims to offer a critical and interpretativesynthesis of work on the history of the Roman Inquisition, the Holy Office, createdin 1542 and directly controlled by the Pope. Rather than outline the developmentof the Holy Office, its internal organization and its goals, Black presents the historyof the inquisition as a collage, assembling ‘images’, ‘impressions’ (225), stories andinformation taken from a rich secondary literature, and from his own randomresearches in Italian archives.

An effective synthesis ought to highlight some actual and crucial issues. How far,for example, were the cardinals of the Holy Office able to influence the main deci-sions of the Church, and act independently of and even against papal policy?

Book Reviews 525

How far were the Holy Office and its representatives, scattered throughout Italy,able to work against the line adopted by the Council of Trent, and against thepower granted to the bishops by the Tridentine reforms? What part did the HolyOffice play in shaping Italian social, religious and cultural life, and how was thisdifferent from other Catholic countries? This could have brought out the specificfeatures of Italian Catholicism, thereby providing the rationale for the subject ofthe book – the Italian, rather than the Roman inquisition.

However, instead of discussing problems, clarifying contexts, and offering plaus-ible periodizations, the book just offers a colourful patchwork of ideas. Thesesometimes rest on outdated historical theses and approaches, such as the HolyOffice’s scepticism concerning witchcraft, the notion of the inquisitor as a mediator,the use of quantitative analysis in order to measure repression, and the allegedrespect for legal procedures of the inquisition’s courts. Although his bibliographymentions numerous recent studies dealing with such issues as the control of sanctityand superstitions, the links between the sacramental practice of confession and theinquisition, the social conflicts which were fuelled by the inquisition courts andtheir members, the problem of the transmission of norms and prescriptions fromcentral to peripheral courts, and the conflictual relationships between the HolyOffice and the other Roman congregations of cardinals, as well as those betweenthe inquisitors and the bishops, Black does not always seem aware of their newfindings.

Of course, the point is not to choose between more or less revisionist interpret-ations, more or less critical of the Church’s repressive apparatus. The point is thatthe book’s attempt to ‘measure’ the degree of repression of the inquisition’scourts – often with the aim of minimizing it – and quantify what the documentsdo not consent to quantify or simplify by using tables, tends to lead towards ananalysis that neglects key issues debated by the more recent historiography on theinquisition, and the post-Tridentine church.

As for the censorship, to which Black quite rightly devotes considerable space,the wish to narrow down and restrict the scope of coercion prevents the authorfrom taking full account of the extent and pervasiveness of Roman censorshippolicies, which are amply attested by recent historiography. Instead, he devotesattention to quantifying prohibited titles listed in the indexes and confiscatedbooks, and enumerating the ‘targets’ of the censors who, after all, ‘were not mind-less fools’ (202). He also reaffirms the inefficiency of expurgatory censorship (163onward), and gets rid of self-censorship as a phenomenon which cannot be histor-ically assessed (207, 259). The problem of preventive censorship is addressedthrough the case of Galileo Galilei which – according to the author – wouldhave been resolved more ‘softly’ if the aged scientist had ‘worked more patientlywith Riccardi [maestro del sacro palazzo] over the final presentation’ of the Dialogosopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, ‘but this might have meant a few more years’work, and the old, sick Galileo was anxious for the final publication’ (175).

Black almost totally ignores the devastating consequences of Roman censorshippolicy on Italian culture. Tacit and massive manipulation of texts by means of


expurgation was particularly severe in Italy. It was made even worse by the factthat – unlike in Spain, for example – no official index of expurgation was everpublished by Rome, nor was there any clarity in the Regole which were included inthe indexes of prohibited books. This left authors, printers and readers in a state ofcomplete uncertainty. The norms were expressed in general and generic terms, andthis obliged them to resort to personal negotiations with the ecclesiastical autho-rities. Similarly, Black does not look at the impact of the Roman church’s inter-vention in reorganizing entire areas of knowledge, which affected scientific andlegal works, as well as the way history could be written. Nor does he considerthe disappearance from the Italian market not only of individual works which hadbeen banned, suspended, or never published, but also of entire literary genres suchas satire and humanist dialogue.

The concern of the book is to show that the inquisitors ‘followed fairly clearrules and guidelines, without being dictators’ (256); that the inquisition was alsocommitted to re-education, persuasion and conciliation as well as punishment; thatthe number of its victims was much lower than previously thought, and that afterall, things could have been much worse. The book misses an important opportunityto acquaint English-speaking readers with a body of historical work which it men-tions but does not use adequately. Above all, it fails to account for a field ofresearch which derives its value and dynamism from the sorts of questions it con-tinually raises, rather than from reassuring labels and pre-packaged interpretations.

William Caferro, Contesting the Renaissance, Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford, 2010; viii + 253 pp.;

9781405123693, £61.50 (hbk); 9781405123709, £22.99 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Brian Jeffrey Maxson, East Tennessee State University, USA

William Caferro’s Contesting the Renaissance offers an historiographical synthesisof the major topics currently debated by scholars of the European Renaissance.The book is arranged around seven thematic chapters, each containing an impres-sive summation of basic historical content as well as over a century of specializedand often-times contradictory historiography. It is that rare book, one that willappeal to novices and experts alike: its balance between brevity and depth willappeal to scholars who want to brush up on topics outside their particular sub-specialty, while the book will also appeal to students who are striving to learn thefoundational arguments made about Renaissance Europe over the past 150 years.

Each of the book’s seven chapters is structured around the meaning and applic-ability of the term ‘Renaissance’. The initial chapter examines the enduring ques-tion of periodization itself, tracing the history of the ‘Renaissance’ from Petrarch tothe present, with special emphasis on the twentieth century. Chapter 2 looks at‘Individualism’, a concept crucial to Jacob Burckhardt and one that has found newlife – if in revised form – in the recent scholarship. The scholarly investigation ofthe position of Renaissance women and conceptions of gender, an historiographyborn largely in the 1970s and one that continues to prosper, occupies Chapter 3.

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Chapter 4 turns to humanism. Here Caferro points to the centrality of humanismto debates about the Renaissance, although there is much less emphasis in thechapter on the ever fewer and increasingly insular nature of the study of intellectualhistory among modern scholars. Chapter 5 focuses on scholarly debates over thestate of the Renaissance economy and its impact on contemporary political, cul-tural and social developments. Chapters on politics and faith/science – with par-ticular emphasis on long-lasting debates over the rise of the modern state, forms ofgovernment, the role of secularism, and the relationships between humanism,magic and science – round out the slim volume.

As Caferro himself points out, a book of this nature can never hope to be allinclusive or to satisfy all readers. Scholars will quibble about the space given insuch a short book to older works at the expense of more recent scholarship. Otherscholars will point to what is left out, such as the visual arts – certainly a sea ofscholarship of daunting proportions, but also one that has become more tied to thebroader field in recent years. In general, Caferro focuses more on the arguments ofothers than he does on making his own historiographical interventions or sugges-tions, which is both a strength and weakness of the book. Caferro’s even-handedtreatment makes for smooth reading and offers an impressive summary of anenormous amount of material. Yet, it also leaves it up to the reader, with littleguidance, to determine which debates should fade from the historiographical fore-front and which ones are in need of a further injection of scholarly time andresources.

The problems of periodization underlie every chapter of the book. Caferroshows how scholars inconsistently apply the terms medieval, Renaissance andearly modern depending on their subfield and geographic focus. The problem ismore significant than just a choice of words: scholars considering themselves stu-dents of the ‘early modern’ period rather than the ‘Renaissance’ start their studieswith different assumptions, engage with different historiographical traditions – andthus different historical questions – and subsequently reach conclusions that aredifficult to bring together. Scholars of Renaissance economic history, for example,tend to focus on Italy, study the effects of the Black Death on wages, and look atthe relationship between the economy and cultural production. Scholars studyingeconomics in early modern Europe, by contrast, tend to look at northern Europe,proto-industry, and the development of the centralized state. The temporal foci ofthe two basic groups of scholars often overlap, but their studies engage with dif-ferent paradigms and scholarly expectations.

Beyond divisions in subfields, the inconsistent application of periodizationschema brings other problems. For example, historical categories create chasmsbetween contemporaneous events. Joan of Arc was executed in 1431, two yearsbefore Sigismund was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome in 1433. Threeyears later the city of Florence was crowned by Brunelleschi’s dome. Meanwhile,the Hundred Years War was drawing closer to a conclusion north of the Alps, evenas, in a different historiographical world, Leonardo Bruni continued to work on hisHistory of Florence. Caferro’s book does not offer solutions – if such answers even


exist – to bring divergent scholars and their historiographies together. However,Caferro has compiled an admirable book that clearly shows what many of thepresent categories are and how they came to be. It is up to the book’s readers todecide what to do about it.

John Callaghan and Ben Harker, British Communism: A Documentary History, Manchester

University Press: Manchester, 2011; vi + 304 pp.; 9780719082108, £70.00 (hbk);

9780719082115, £18.99 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Irina Suslina, Voronezh State University, Russia

British historiography has the great merit of producing numerous sourcebooks,which can be essential tools for other researchers in the field. John Callaghan andBen Harker’s collection is the first such book specifically on the history of theCommunist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

Its intended use as a textbook, the authors’ own ideas about CPGB history, theparty’s own ideology and practice, and its place within British political life and theinternational communist movement have all helped shape the book’s content,structure and selection of documents. These various aspects are considered in anintroductory essay, survey pieces in each of its 12 chapters, and more than 150diverse source documents, mainly from party publications and the archives. Theyreflect key problems of CPGB history over its 71-year existence, as it responded tosocio-economic, political and ideological factors both within Britain andinternationally.

The collection is structured both chronologically and thematically. Chapters 1and 5–8 are devoted to the party’s domestic politics. Its basic ideology wasderived from Bolshevism, and Chapter 1 contains excerpts from various leadingparty figures outlining the Leninist conception of imperialism, the nature of asoviet state, and the principles of democratic centralism on which the party wasbased. Chapter 5 deals mainly with the Communist International’s (CI) so-called‘Third Period’ (1928–1935), with excerpts from party documents and those of the6th CI congress (1928) which show that first the CI, then the CPGB began toadvocate a policy of ‘class against class’, which led the party into ‘ultra-leftisolationism’ (107). The Popular Front period (1935–1939) is the subject ofChapter 6, in which, following Hitler’s rise to power, an anti-fascist front wascreated. It embraced the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the Socialist Leagueand left-wing groups within the Labour Party, but the leading role was played bythe CPGB, which strengthened its position within the labour movement. Thischapter contains excerpts from CI secretary Georgi Dimitrov’s report to the 7thCI congress (1935), as well as articles by R. Palme Dutt and John Strachey.Chapter 7 looks at the CPGB’s political line between 1939 and 1947. Up tothe German-Soviet Pact of 23 August 1939, the CPGB had supported an anti-Hitler coalition of Britain, France and the USSR, and a struggle on two frontsagainst the Men of Munich and fascism. After war had broken out and the CI

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declared it to be imperialist, there were disagreements in the party CC, with thenew line being opposed by the General Secretary Harry Pollitt and the DailyWorker editor J. R. Campbell. Once Germany had attacked the USSR, the CIand CPGB considered the war to be a people’s war. These changes of line areillustrated with excerpts from party manifestos, Central Committee (CC) declar-ations, and Pollitt’s pamphlets. The discussion and adoption in 1951of the partyprogramme The British Road to Socialism, which argued that socialism could beachieved without ‘revolution’ or ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (171) is the sub-ject of Chapter 8, while Chapter 9 looks at the crisis of 1956 followingKhrushchev’s secret speech to the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU)20th congress and the events in Hungary. This led to a massive loss of membersand the emergence of the first ‘new left’ journals like The Reasoner. Chapters 11and 12 look at the final decades, when divisions within the party deepened. A keymoment was the adoption of a new version of the party programme in 1977,which the orthodox Leninist opposition regarded as ‘left social-democratic’ (247).Growing disagreements between the modernizers and their opponents ended inthe party’s dissolution at the end of 1991.

The authors argue that the CPGB was of interest to the CI because of ‘Britain’simperial position and the strength of its Labour movement’ (4). These questions areexamined in Chapters 3 and 10. Indeed, the party retained significant influence in thetrade unions, and, through them, the Labour Party, right up to the 1980s. Within theCI, it had responsibility for ‘promoting communist influence throughout the Empire’(3), in the belief that anti-colonial movements ought to be pro-Soviet.

Despite its small size, Callaghan and Harker argue that the party’s influence wasenhanced by the role it played in the intellectual life of the British left, and by theappeal of a socialist ideology which looked to a Soviet-style model of state econ-omy. The party attracted writers, artists and academics, particularly during thePopular Front period. Some of the historians who came together in the CPHistorians’ Group were influential in British historiography in the 1960s and1970s (Chapters 5, 6 and 8).

Relations between the CPGB and the USSR are considered in Chapter 2.Support for the USSR was obligatory for all the CI’s affiliates, and the authorspoint out that the ‘Russian’ line was supported even where it was of ‘dubious valueto the national ‘‘sections’’ of the Comintern’ or was ‘actually destructive of localpolitical opportunities’ (4).

It would have been good if the authors had included, for example, some sourceson the Maoist groups within the party, or on the reactions of rank-and-file mem-bers to the 1956 events, or on the ‘Moscow gold’. There are also a few typos.Overall, though, these do not detract from the high scholarly level of this work.Every historian understands the problems in selecting sources, and can appreciatethe great amount of work the compilers have done. This publication will not onlyserve as a sourcebook for students, but also for professional historians working onthe party’s history – not least in Russia, where many of the sources in this book arenot readily available.


Elisheva Carlebach, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe, Belknap

Press: Cambridge, MA, 2011; xi + 292 pp.; 9780674052543, £25.95 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Matthew Shaw, British Library, London, UK

‘My subject came trundling to me on a wooden library cart’, begins ElishevaCarlebach in this beautifully produced, well illustrated and expertly written historyof the Jewish calendar in early modern Europe. This mode of delivery underscoresthe materiality of the almanacs, calendars and manuscript sifre evronot (earlyJewish calendar manuals) that are her source material: paradoxically, their survivalin modern research libraries (of which the bibliography speaks of extensive use inNorth America and Europe) serves as a mute reminder of their ephemeral nature.Carlebach demonstrates that although the written and printed representations oftime were often discarded once they had served their annual purpose, their objectwas an important one, something that testifies to the role of human time in thecreation and contestation of identity. A ‘system of accounting for time’, she notes,is ‘one of the most crucial cultural moments a human society can create’ (5), andshe argues that while calendars often appear to offer static versions of such systems,they are continually under the process of change, correction and contestation. Theearly modern period, which encompassed the creation of the Gregorian Calendarand the French Republican calendar, offers to the historian examples of particu-larly striking and sudden changes in timekeeping that help to reveal social andcultural structures and tensions. It was a period of heightened awareness of theconstructed nature of timekeeping, in which Europe offered a variety of calendars,religious years and methods of astronomical calculations, and it is against thisbackdrop that Carlebach provides a rich study of Jewish calendar culture, inwhich a range of calendar formats embodied the complex interaction betweenChristians and Jews. She explores what calendars meant for Jews, and how theyserved to articulate their difference ‘as minorities within an often unsympatheticworld’ (3).

Beginning with a detailed overview of the genesis of calendars in the medievalperiod, the Jewish traditions of timekeeping (and their physical forms) are thenplaced within the wider context of the conflicts that surrounded time in the earlymodern period, notably the consequences of Pope Gregory XIII’s reform of theJulian Calendar. She notes astutely the adaptability of Jewish calendar culture,remarking that ‘esoteric’ systems of knowledge were especially useful duringmoments of crisis, since it could be claimed that things were known all along(19). Calendars also served as useful didactic and polemical instruments, and theexpansion of print ensured that calendars of all kinds, whether simple ‘shepherds’calendars’ or sophisticated tools for merchants and clerics, carried importantmeanings about the nation or religious belief. The French Republican Calendarperhaps displayed its colours most obviously, but other systems also carried theirown implied sets of meanings and worldviews. The contrast between such cosmo-politan claims and the ambiguities of everyday life is aptly illustrated with sensitivediscussion of the practicalities of print and parallel scribal culture: investigating

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printing errors, official censorship (notably in Prussia) and a host of anti-Christianbarbs half-hidden in texts, both real and in the eyes of suspicious Christian autho-rities. Calendars also speak of a ritual and mercantile year, and the clues to cal-endar culture provided in the textual evidence of almanacs and other temporalgenres are brought vividly to life in chapters on festivals, fairs, markets and mer-chant time. Holy Days often provided the excuse for anti-Jewish violence, leadingto regulations in many towns that Jews stay indoors during these times, notably atEaster. Such regulations, Carlebach notes, then became a further excuse for vio-lence against a people marked out as different. These differences were also empha-sized by the rituals of the Jewish people themselves, with the Tequfah drawingespecial notice by Christian authors. Human time, the book emphatically demon-strates, is always about such cultural definitions, and the concluding chapter onchronology shows how the inclusion of chronographs – useless for all practicalpurposes – served as a ‘witness to Jewish passage through time’. Carlebach hasdone a similar service to the cultural history of timekeeping, and one that will beuseful for students of the early modern period in general.

Nazan Cicek, The Young Ottomans: Turkish Critics of the Eastern Question in the Late Nineteenth

Century, I. B. Tauris: London, 2010; 320 pp.; 9781848853331, £59.50 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Bedross Der Matossian, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA

The ‘Eastern Question’, coined by European powers in the nineteenth century,came to denote the diplomatic and political problems posed by the decline of theOttoman Empire. The historiography on the Eastern Question has been mostlyEurocentric, addressing the diplomatic history of the Eastern Question withouttaking into consideration the Eastern actors of the Question, that is, the MuslimTurks. One of the major actors to emerge during the height of the EasternQuestion was a group known as the Young Ottomans who became extremelycritical of the Tanzimat reforms in general and the Ottoman Porte’s handling ofthe Eastern Question in particular. Nazan Cicek’s The Young Ottomans aims atproviding a fresh analysis of the Eastern Question from the perspective of theYoung Ottoman opposition. By situating them in the context of the EasternQuestion, Cicek aims at diverting the discussion away from the ‘rather over-examined ideological affiliations of the Young Ottomans towards their inad-equately analysed assessments of and conviction about some controversialissues’ (10). These controversial issues include the Cretan insurrection of 1866–69 (which was a watershed for the formation of the Young Ottoman movement)(76), the crisis in the relationship between the Muslims and the non-Muslims inthe nineteenth century coupled with the economic ascendancy of the latter, theincreasing foreign intervention in the affairs of the Empire, and the dire financialsituation of the Empire. In addition, the book sheds new light on the relationshipbetween the Young Ottomans and the Turcophile British Orientalist group, theUrquhartities.


In her book, Cicek rightly argues that during Tanzimat reforms the relationshipbetween the Ottoman reformists and the Great Powers was not monological innature but rather dialogical (in the Bakhtinian sense) and was a period duringwhich the Powers and the Porte were in continual dialogue (17–19). In this dia-logical relationship, the Young Ottomans believed that they had to take mattersinto their own hands in order to avoid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire bydespotic reformers Ali and Fuad Pasas. Hence, she discusses in depth the impact ofthe Tanzimat reforms and their role in shaping the psyche of the Young OttomanTriumvirate (Namik Kemal, Ziya Bey and Ali Suavi). Cicek traces their journeyfrom the establishment of the Patriotic Alliance ( _Ittifak-i Hammiyyet) to their exilein Europe. She furthermore demonstrates how the Young Ottomans thought ofinstituting a parliamentary system as a panacea for all the problems facing theempire. They believed that once usul-u-mesveret (constitutional regime) was intro-duced, ‘all the abuses would gradually come to an end, and so too would theseparatist tendency of the non-Muslim’ (125).

Despite its fresh insights, the book has some minor shortcomings. First andforemost, Cicek discusses the Young Ottomans by concentrating on the threedominant figures. In doing so, she marginalizes other non-dominant actors ofthe movement who might not have been ‘the brain team and the public face’(40), but whose writings and reflections could have shed additional light on theYoung Ottomans’ perceptions. These include Halil Serif Pasa, Memhed Bey,Ebuzziya Tevfik and Agah Efendi among others. Second, despite the fact thatCicek tends to quote extensively from the Young Ottomans’ press, be itHurriyet, Muhbir, Ulum or Tasfir-i Efkar, the reader does not get a sense ofwhat the public thought of them during the period under study. Third, Cicektends to extrapolate the impact of the Tanzimat reforms on the economic conditionof the non-Muslims in the Empire through the lens of the Young Ottomans. At theend of the day it was only a substantial minority among the non-Muslim groupsthat benefited from the economic changes. Finally, it would have been great ifCicek had dwelt a bit more in the introduction on the dilemmas that theYoung Ottomans faced from comparative/global perspectives. Despite the factthat she touches upon the Seiky �osha group in Japan during the MeijiRestoration, it would have been more fruitful to discuss in a bit more detailtheir attack on Westernization and their call for ‘preservation of national essence’(kokusui hozon).

Overall, Cicek has made an important contribution to the field by overcomingthe ‘authority syndrome’ (7) and delivering a fresh analysis of the salient features ofthe Eastern Question. The book demonstrates the political stance of the YoungOttomans on the very legitimacy of the modernization/Westernization in the nine-teenth century engineered by despotic statesmen. The book will be useful for everygraduate student, scholar or historian who is interested in exploring differentdimensions of not only the Young Ottomans and the Eastern Question but alsoof late Ottoman intellectual and political history, the dialogical nature between theEast and the West, and finally understanding issues of modernization/

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Westernization in non-Western societies in the nineteenth and the early twentiethcenturies.

H Floris Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-Century

Breakthrough, Amsterdam University Press: Amsterdam, 2010; 832 pp., 66 b/w illus.;

9789048512737, E85.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Benita Blessing, University of Vienna, Austria

With this meticulously researched, almost 800-page tome on the development andestablishment of modern science, H Floris Cohen promises nothing less than anentirely new understanding of the Scientific Revolution (xiii). As part of this under-taking, he proposes that the traditional narrative that explains the origin and con-cept of modern science must be replaced by a new geo-political, historicalparadigm. In this vision of a revolution in the story of the Scientific Revolution,Cohen takes on the world. He starts with his rejection of some of his own earlierwork on the subject and moves on to textbook publishers, current scholarship, theuniversity system of knowledge dissemination, Western ignorance of the rest of theworld, worldviews – including a ‘caring Deity’ or ‘Someone or something’ – andthe ‘modern ways of life’ that offer creature comforts that science seems to threa-ten (737–8).

At the heart of Cohen’s argument is that a Scientific Revolution was neither aninevitable development in scholars’ examinations of the world, nor was it a coin-cidence of timing or place that the Scientific Revolution occurred in the West. Hepoints to three ‘transformations’ in thinking that helped lay the groundwork for alater Scientific Revolution: the Greek mathematical contribution, their ‘speculative’mode of inquiry, and the ‘specifically European-colored’ drive to bring togetherdescriptions of the world and apply these insights practically (xv–xvi). Breakingdown these transformations into six further ‘revolutionary transformations’ in themid-seventeenth century, Cohen insists on a view of the Scientific Revolutionthat, rather than being lumped together as one moment in history, must be ana-lysed according to these six separate episodes in order to understand the resultingprocesses that comprise what we call in a short-hand fashion the ScientificRevolution.

There is little to criticize in terms of Cohen’s breathtaking coverage of the globalhistory of science. His fascinating discussions of how the ordering of knowledgeinfluences scholars’ research into phenomena allow him to illustrate, for example,how Chinese scholars looked to chi’i in their investigation of sympathetic resonancein the 1st century CE (39): the actual material of musical instruments and thedirection that wind carried sounds permitted scholars to differentiate between dif-ferent musical timbres. Cohen leads the reader through these examples of howsocial and cultural paradigms brought about not only knowledge, but how culturesconceived of and used of this knowledge, without romanticizing one culture asbeing of more or less value than another.


Cohen is likewise merciless in his judgement of ‘incidental’ and ‘marginal’ pur-suits, just as he praises often under-appreciated scientific breakthroughs. The endof the Golden Age, we learn, ushered in a series of ‘ever more hackneyed ideas’about the world – mercifully, he sighs, ignored in the larger picture of scientificdevelopment (89). He also criticizes scientific hypotheses of thinkers he includes fortheir necessary contributions to the Scientific Revolution, such as Copernicus,whose interpretation of the heliocentric hypothesis was important and ‘his onlypoint really’ worthy of mention (111). Descartes traded in ‘double-think’ (423),while Richard Lower’s work on the regulation of dogs’ breathing led to break-throughs in ‘significant reinterpretations’ of the connection between mind and bodythat pushed demonic possessions away to make room for scientific findings aboutmadness and Thomas Willis’s rational explanations of hysteria as separate fromuterine health (471).

The scope of the book is also its downfall. A book that requires five pages in thepreface about ‘Major questions here resolved’ (xxix–xxxiii) in order to provide anecessary spoiler for the reader loses much of his audience. The fact that Cohennotes that the nature of the subject ‘could have made [the book] longer still’ pointsto a failure to criticize scholars for their un-nuanced views of the ScientificRevolution; nuance is hard to find in a book half the size of this one. The‘Users’ guide’ is less a suggestion for how to approach the book, or what audienceshould be interested in this topic, than it is an explanation of how to acceptCohen’s ideas before embarking on his analysis (xxxiii–xxxviii). Indeed, Cohencreates many problems of contemporary scholarship on the history of theScientific Revolution, only in order to single-handedly solve them. He lamentsthat much of the inaccuracy of the historiography and history of the ScientificRevolution stems from poor translations, causing him to put the documents intheir original form next to his translations on a public website (xxxviii). If the mainreason for an inaccurate and incomplete ‘big picture’ approach to the history ofscience rests on ‘faulty translations’ by even ‘authoritative’ works, Cohen’s chal-lenge to the reader to examine his own translations will not resolve any problems ofhistorical knowledge in the profession. Such needless scapegoat-strawmen detractfrom the book’s analysis of belief systems, political developments, and how thesetwo areas of human experience interact to bring about paradigm changes.

And yet: the book is a compelling read, written in a language accessible to bothprofessionals and readers interested in the history of science, in particular, and ofmuch of the world in general. The many illustrations, graphs and tables bring thehistorical debates to life, while the exhaustive lists of sources after every chapterwould make this book usable even as a key text in a variety of graduate and evenmotivated undergraduate seminars on the intersection between knowledge, science,politics and everyday life. His concluding sentences about the need to go beyondthis book’s findings and ‘face upright’ the lessons of the Scientific Revolution offerperhaps the only kind of ending for such a book (739): as students of science, wehave a responsibility to understand its origins, and to continue the quest for know-ledge about this world that only science can offer us.

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Edward Corp, The Stuarts in Italy 1719–1766: A Royal Court in Permanent Exile, Cambridge

University Press: Cambridge, 2011; xi + 416 pp., 27 illus.; 9780521513272, £60.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Stephen Brogan, London, UK

Edward Corp is one of the most eminent historians of the exiled Stuarts and theirJacobite courts, having published books on James II’s royal court at SaintGermain, just outside Paris, and on James III’s first one at Urbino in northernItaly. His new book on the ‘permanent exile’ of the Old Pretender is a valuableaddition to these earlier works, and like them it is sensitive to architecture, spatialorganization, images and culture, as well as to politics, religion and administration.The book has a chronological structure within which thematic chapters addressimportant subjects such as the relationship between James and his court and thepapacy, the Stuarts’ role as patrons and consumers of Italian culture, especiallymusic and opera, and the commissioning of portraits and printed images.

Corp’s book is lucid, engaging and well organized, containing much new mater-ial that shines light onto the world of the exiled Stuarts in Italy. Whilst it is wellknown that James III occupied the Palazzo del Re (the Royal Palace) in Rome anda country house in Albano, both lent to him by the papacy, much confusion hassurrounded the location of the Roman palace because historians have often said itwas the new Palazzo Muti on the Piazza della Pilota, whereas Corp establishesbeyond doubt that in fact it was the Palazzo Muti on the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli.This matters because Corp then goes on to explain how the building and thearrangement of rooms within it were important aspects of life at court – for exam-ple, a private staircase leading to the king’s apartment meant that EnglishProtestants could pay their respects to James without necessarily being seen todo so, while for the same reason English spies were sometimes uncertain whichEuropean ambassadors were spending the most time with the king.

Corp devotes space to the religious life of the exiled Stuarts, explaining that bothJames and his wife Clementina were devout Roman Catholics. One of Corp’s mostintriguing discoveries concerns James’s practice of the royal touch, the religioushealing ceremony at which monarchs of England and France touched people whohad scrofula in order to heal the sick of their disease, in imitation of Christ. Duringthe Restoration Charles II and James II both performed this act on an unprece-dented scale, with well over 100,000 people being touched between 1660 and 1688.James II continued to practise royal therapeutics when exiled in France, as did hisson in Italy. Corp explains that when in Rome, James III held healing ceremoniesin the Chapel Royal on the last Thursday of each month, giving each scrofulousperson a silver touch piece coin to commemorate the ceremony. Not surprisingly,Italians who had scrofula travelled to James’s court to be touched, but so didRoman Catholics and Protestants from Britain and elsewhere in Europe. Corpcould have said a bit more about the broad appeal of the royal touch, as well asJames’s rationale for practising the ceremony. The broad appeal suggests a prag-matic desire for a cure for scrofula, a form of tuberculosis that often resistedmedical treatments, but it also speaks to us of the mindset that expected kings to


be sacral. When English and French kings touched the scrofulous it was usual tothink that they also healed the body politic because those who had scrofula werethought to bear the collective sins of the nation – but James III could not claim tobe healing a body politic because he was exiled. The rationale for his practice of theceremony seems to have been political and altruistic in that it asserted his right tothe English throne and contrasted him with the Hanoverians who did not touch thesick, while it also demonstrated James’ Christian benevolence towards those whohad scrofula.

Corp’s book suggests that the exiled Stuarts were not doomed to failure while atthe same time managing to avoid being too sympathetic. He maintains that Jamescould potentially have been restored to his British throne up to the failure of the1745 uprising, which explains why the papacy and the French government hadgiven him so much financial support up to then. The failure of the ’45 demon-strated once and for all that the Hanoverians were firmly established on the throne,meaning that the Stuarts had no real chance of a restoration; consequently Jamesbecame depressed and withdrawn which reinforced the perception that he was aspent force. As Corp says in his conclusion, ‘time is the great enemy of dethronedroyalty’.

Katherine Crawford, The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance, Cambridge University Press:

Cambridge, 2010; 295 pp., 21 illus.; 978052176989, £50.00 (hbk); 978052174950, £18.99 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Sara F Matthews-Grieco, Syracuse University in Florence, Italy

Katherine Crawford’s approach to the history of French attitudes toward sexual-ity – between the invasion of Italy in 1494 and the end of the Valois dynasty withthe advent of the first Bourbon king, Henri IV – is multi-disciplinary. The authorexamines the integration or transformation of ideas from Renaissance Italy andClassical Antiquity with regard to sexual behaviour and the various ways in whichhumanists, poets and political figures adapted imported notions to French societyand culture. Crawford demonstrates a wide knowledge of contemporary culturalcurrents in her use of disciplinary areas such as astrology and philosophy, poetryand literature, medicine and Renaissance notions of gender. In an introduction thatposits the basic equation between sexuality and ideology in this period, she pointsout the ambivalence with which the Italian peninsula was viewed in transalpineEurope. On the one hand, the artistic talent of Cinquecento Italy was much indemand in royal circles. On the other hand, Italy itself was seen as a geographicarea characterized by vice and sexual corruption, notably the vizio nefando (homo-sexuality). The volume begins with an exploration of the ways in which Frenchculture appropriated and transformed certain classical myths, notably that ofOrpheus. The homoerotic undercurrents in this Antique tale are replaced, in trans-alpine treatments, by the promotion of hetero-normative, marital values andOrpheus emerges as an ideal husband, distinguished by exemplary self-control.Crawford’s following chapter on astrology responds nicely to recent work on the

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importance of this ‘science’ and the role played by court astrologers in RenaissanceEurope, putting emphasis on its practical use in sexual matters. Heavenly config-urations were believed to impede or promote love and procreation, and were con-sidered important in the process of mate selection, with astrologers regularlyconsulted for the calculation of propitious moments to celebrate marriage andconceive children. Astrology was also used in the political promotion of theroyal family. In sixteenth-century France the ruler was not only seen as beingthe bodily incarnation of the kingdom, but heirs born under favourable starswere also considered a guarantee of a prosperous and healthy nation.

One of the more pervasive influences of the Italian peninsula on French notionsof love and sexuality was Florentine Neoplatonism (notably the writings ofMarsilio Ficino). However, this intellectual current presented the problem that itwas all too easily interpreted in terms of homo-erotic notions of love and desire.French Neoplatonists were thus to transform the strong homo-social bias of ItalianNeoplatonic thought into a heterosexual and generative formula, effectivelyre-gendering the philosophic model. The resulting formula of transcendent, hetero-sexual love was to give rise to a new form of flowery literary expression that theauthor calls ‘bad’ poetry. This novel poetic form proposed ‘love’ as an emotionaland physical state that contested the Petrarchan tradition of chaste desire: theFrench concept of love advocated consummation as a form of ‘honesty’ andfirmly equated masculinity with active heterosexuality. Despite its concession tocarnal delights, this new tradition of aestheticized love poetry deliberately distin-guished itself from the more sexually explicit, scurrilous verse that dealt above allwith sexual failings and transgressions such as sodomy, lesbianism, venereal dis-ease, cuckoldry and impotence.

The author’s reconstruction of the triumph of heterosexual values in FrenchRenaissance culture concludes with a chapter on royal politics and the significanceaccorded to the King’s sexual appetites. Traditionally legitimated by a virile andsexually productive monarch, royal authority was destabilized by the later Valoiskings who not only were unable to produce heirs, but whose sexual identity wasseen as being far from stable. Francois I, whose virility and potency were flauntedat court and in art, was nonetheless accused of being ‘feminized’ by his sexualescapades and fascination with amorous conquest. Henri II’s long affair withDiane de Poitiers was also seen as excessive female influence, especially as bothDiane and Catherine de Medici were repeatedly accused of meddling in politics.Henri II’s three sons all failed to produce heirs, and as a result the Valois sexualreputation became seriously compromised. The language of sex assumed an evenmore polemical and political role: Henri III was accused of being a sodomite, andhis personal sexual disorder was seen as being a direct cause of the nation’s socialand political disorder. Henri III’s successor Henri IV not only renewed the royalbloodline as the first Bourbon king, but also re-constructed the royal persona interms of sexual potency and generative fertility. Was the long shadow of the Valoismonarch responsible for Henri IV vaunting his legitimate heir – the future LouisXIII – and his illegitimate son Cesar de Vendome, son of the royal mistress


Gabrielle d’Estrees, in a family portrait engraved by Leonard Gaultier in 1602?Henri IV pursued a practice that Kathleen Crawford has dubbed ‘the politics ofpromiscuity’, according to which the King’s authority was confirmed not only bydemonstrations of heterosexual, virile prowess, but also by the subordination of hisamorous attachments to his military duty.

The originality of Crawford’s approach to the understanding of sixteenth-century French sexual culture lies in her multi-faceted approach to rhetoricaluses of gender, love and normative (or transgressive) behaviour in various areasof cultural expression. The subtlety of her analysis and her persuasive scholarshipunequivocally compensates for what at first appears to be an anthology of separateessays in disparate cultural areas. While the volume largely concentrates on elitesources and discourses, it nonetheless contributes an unprecedented analysis of thecultural meanings of gender and sexuality in Renaissance France. This ambitiousand convincing volume also has the merit of providing material for scholars andstudents in a variety of disciplines and, last but not least, is to be particularlycommended for its strategic use of visual sources.

Jorg Echternkamp and Stefan Martens, eds, Experience and Memory: The Second World War in

Europe, Berghahn: Oxford, 2010; 332 pp., 21 maps; 9781845457631, £75.00 (hbk);

9781782380931, £22.00 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Anne Fuchs, University of Warwick, UK

This volume, which is the English translation of a 2007 German collection, explorescontinuities and discontinuities in the experience and memory of the Second WorldWar across Europe. The 16 chapters present diverse case studies from Luxembourg,Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany (FRG and GDR),Poland and the USSR/Russia in order to ‘transcend the bias of national history aswell as the predominance of Western Europe’ (258). However, the aim is not toprovide a homogenous interpretation of the European experience of the war butrather to illuminate the commonalities and differences that influence historical con-sciousness to this day. Accordingly, Benoıt Majerus highlights the significance of thememory of World War I and of Westforschung for the German occupation of theBenelux countries during World War II, and Piotr Madajczyk shows that in Polandindependence completely overlaid the memory of World War I. Since the 1990s,Polish collective and official memory of the traumas of WorldWar II has undergonemajor shifts in the light of the open reassessment of the role of the Soviet Union. Bycontrast, Sergei Kudryashov illuminates the continuity between the Soviet andRussian memory of World War II: here the heroic notion of the Great PatrioticWar serves to cover over the vast economic inequality of the present. GabriellaGribaudi shows that Italian collective memory is in transition: the national dis-course of the Risorgimento, which emphasized the partisan war against Fascismand the German invaders, is now being fractured by hitherto repressed personalmemories, including the mass rapes of women on the Gustav Line. According to

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Filippo Focardi, however, Italian collective memory continues to remember theItalian occupation of the Balkans in terms of a benign rule in spite of historicalevidence of sweeping repressive measures. While John Ramsden andMark Connellydeal with the myth of the Blitz and the prominence of the Second World War inBritish discourse, Pierre Le Goıc tracks the experience of aerial bombing in the townof Brest in two ego-documents. Philippe Buton analyses post-war voting patterns toshow how the French Communist Party benefited from the myth of the Resistance.Dietmar Suß, Axel Schildt and Dorothee Wierling analyse in three chapters thepersistence of the air war and of victim discourse inWest and East Germany respect-ively. However, while one can agree with Richard Bessel that the history of the warhas become, ‘in large measure, a history of its victims’ (231), the case of GreatBritain in particular throws doubt on his conclusion that we have witnessed ‘aturn away from the glorification of war’ (230). The jingoism of the recently unveiledBomber Command Memorial in London’s Green Park is a case in point. While thevolume would have benefited from a more focused engagement with the mediatiza-tion of the Second World War, as a whole it offers a multifaceted perspective on thememory of World War II in much of Europe today.

Larry J Feinberg, The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florence, Cambridge

University Press: New York, 2011; xii + 203 pp., 76 b/w illus.; 9781107002395, £55.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Brian Jeffrey Maxson, East Tennessee State University, USA

Larry J Feinberg’s The Young Leonardo: Art and Life in Fifteenth-Century Florenceoffers a visual analysis of Leonardo da Vinci’s artistic production prior to the artist’sdeparture from Florence to Milan around 1482. The book has a chronological,biographical focus; nevertheless, Feinberg also weaves in an overarching argument– despite the unfinished nature of most of Leonardo’s oeuvre, Leonardo was instru-mental in creating the ‘High Renaissance’ style through innovations in the portrayalof landscape, organization of space, and depictions of human emotion (183).Feinberg is to be commended for including so many finished and unfinishedworks from Leonardo’s early period, now scattered across multiple countries,some even in private collections. This bookwill appeal to a broad audience, althoughit is much heavier in its emphasis on art than life in fifteenth-century Florence.

The book is made up of 28 short chapters that collectively offer an artisticbiography of Leonardo da Vinci over his first 30 years of his life (1452–1482).The first few chapters contain basic descriptions of life and politics in midQuattrocento Florence. Lacking specific sources on Leonardo, Feinberg uses thiscontext to paint a probable picture of Leonardo’s earliest upbringing and experi-ences, first in Vinci and then in Verocchio’s workshop. The chapters dedicated toLeonardo’s time in the workshop explore themes ranging from his inability to freehimself from flawed contemporary paradigms about the organs of the body to hisprobable homosexuality. From Chapter 12 on works from Leonardo’s pen, brushand perhaps even chisel become more abundant in the historical record. Hence, the


remaining chapters tend to focus on a single work of art or a specific theme fromLeonardo’s notebooks. For example, Chapter 12 examines the Virgin and Childwith a Carnation (c. 1476–78), with much of the discussion focused on the Virgin’semerald brooch and fifteenth-century conceptions of that stone. Unfinished workslike the Madonna of the Cat (c. 1478–80) receive a chapter, as do well-knownportraits such as the Portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci (c. 1478–80) and the Portraitof Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with an Ermine) (c. 1485). Each chapter situates the pieceof art in a context of ideas or studies present in Leonardo’s notebooks or probablefifteenth-century conceptions of a part of a piece of art. The book’s final chaptersshift towards arguments about Leonardo’s impact. Chapter 21 argues thatLeonardo’s unfinished Adoration of the Magi created a new ‘High Renaissance’style of art through its joint focus on the expressions of individuals and how theyall fit together in the composition. Subsequent chapters discuss Leonardo’s innov-ations, with the ‘spiraling form of contrapposto’ (162) so common in mannerist artof the sixteenth century, attribute GiorgioVasari’s famous tripartite periodizationscheme to Leonardo, and claim that Leonardo created the ‘new genre of half-length, beautiful-lady pictures’ by handing out some of his preliminary sketcheson the topic in the early sixteenth century.

Feinberg has assembled a beautiful book that attempts to correct several commonmisconceptions about Leonardo da Vinci, while also giving readers a taste of fif-teenth-century Florence. It is copiously illustrated and a delight to read. However, toan historian, the book seems far more dedicated to examining Leonardo’s earlyartistic style and works than establishing the context in which Leonardo lived andworked. For example, Leonardo’s relationships with other Florentines are hinted at,but usually through the lens of artistic influences. Leonardo’s father appears repeat-edly in the book, but usually in cameo appearances related to the probable origin ofan artistic commission. The vibrancy and social fabric of Florence in the 1460s and1470s likewise makes appearances – often in fascinating pages devoted to dissecting aportion of a painting or drawing – but these snapshots add up to a book more aboutLeonardo’s early artistic production than Leonardo’s interactions with the worldaround him. The reader without a background in the history or art history ofRenaissance Florence will find in this book a welcoming introduction to the pro-duction and some styles of Renaissance art in the later fifteenth century. Specialiststoo can find here an introduction to the early artistic production of Leonardo daVinci, but they will undoubtedly seek out more specialized studies to fill inLeonardo’s social context as well as for details on particular works of art.

Eva Giloi, Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany, 1750–1950, Cambridge University

Press: Cambridge, 2011; 422 pp., 35 illus.; 9780521761987, £66.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Heidi Mehrkens, University of St Andrews, UK

Porcelain tea cups and golden snuff boxes not only equipped the average nine-teenth-century royal household, but, from a certain perspective, can also be

Book Reviews 541

understood as carriers of political messages, closely linked to the representation ofthe dynasties. Either held in high esteem as a subject’s inherited family treasure orpublicly presented in a museum’s collection to satisfy visitors’ demands, royal relicswere often to be found in the public sphere, far from the cupboards and privatestudies of the royal families. Here the ‘social life of things’ contributed to shapingimages of monarchy.

Eva Giloi has written a dense reception history of monarchy through materialculture that helps to illuminate aspects of the cultural history of monarchy.Focusing on the Hohenzollern dynasty, the study analyses the circulation of objectsas well as of their symbolic narratives in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Prussiaand twentieth-century Germany: how did contemporaries collect and consumeroyal memorabilia? To what extent were these objects used to express attitudestowards political authority? Under what circumstances did private objects of devo-tion turn into a national heritage? The book offers an innovative perspective on therelationship between subjects and rulers and highlights specific expressions ofPrussian-German ‘loyalism’ or, in the words of Hubertus Buschel, nuances of‘the subjects’ love’ (Untertanenliebe).

The reader gets to know various groups dealing with relics while offering, nego-tiating, or refusing certain narratives linked to them in order to breathe meaninginto the social framework of the monarchy. Mainly, the study examines middle-class and noble relic collectors and their mutual – sometimes symbolic or evenimagined – relationship with monarchs. The burgher who owned a fluteFrederick the Great had played on could be saved from financial ruin by sellingit. Equally important, it could serve as an object of admiration for the family andtheir guests. Moreover, in offering the relic as a gift to a monarch, the donatoractively shaped or even constructed royal legends, not always corresponding to thepolitical myth the monarch himself intended to invoke. This was the case withQueen Luise’s relics given to Wilhelm I, creating the narrative of a sentimentalmother-son-dyad that survived even the death of the German Emperor. Giloi pro-vides an insight into how the Hohenzollern princes comparatively slowly turned toactively moulding the royal image by using press, photography or spectacles to gainpublic support for their regime – their last monarch Wilhelm II being the first toundertake this with enormous energy.

The developments in consumer and leisure cultures made it easier to access theworld of collecting royal memorabilia as well as to approach the increasingly visiblemonarch. The emergence of mass media, accompanied by profound changes invisual culture and technology, fostered a celebrity culture. The social practice ofcollecting and consuming (royal) goods can be understood as an increasing part ofthe everyday life of the middle classes; in the 1870s it had become common behav-iour to buy a signed photograph of Wilhelm I for one’s private album.

Giloi also introduces the directors of museums as protagonists in the circulationof material culture: in buying and collecting objects and presenting them to create asentimental or martial cult of the monarchy. The Berlin Kunstkammer orHohenzollern Museum were important scenes of exhibiting royal myths on behalf


of the ruler on the throne. It can be shown how visitors accepted or rejected thepresentation of objects according to their attitudes towards sovereign power.

This elegantly written work, overall an excellent piece of scholarship, clearlyfocuses on nineteenth-century history; its source base is particularly rich for theperiod after 1850. Readers should not be misled by the title stretching the researchto 1950 – the period after 1914 is merely addressed in a concluding chapter. Thebook’s merit lies in examining how the middle-class public as well as the monarchyacted in order to exert influence on the royal image. The Sonderweg theory, statingthat in the nineteenth century the German middle classes were manipulated fromabove in order to repress democratic reform, has been widely debated since the1980s. Many scholars now argue for the nobility rather tending to imitate themiddle classes than for a German bourgeoisie hindered in their social, economicand political progress by spinelessly imitating the nobility. Underpinning this studyis the view that neither a ‘feudalization’ of the bourgeoisie nor a ‘bourgeoisifica-tion’ of the aristocracy alone can explain in detail this highly complex relationship.Using both perspectives can be a useful approach in order to better understand thelong-lasting charisma of the monarchy.

Maarten Van Ginderachter and Marnix Beyen, eds, Nationhood from Below: Europe in the Long

Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2012; 268 pp.; 9780230272477, £55.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Eric Storm, Leiden University, The Netherlands

Belgium is a good example of the failure of an elite-driven nation-building projectdirected from above. When the country became independent in 1830, its elitesactively began to create and disseminate a national identity in the favourable cir-cumstances of fast economic growth and a threatened national existence.According to the elite-driven cultural constructivist paradigm, which was dominantuntil recently, this should have been a huge success. But, in the end, it was not. As aconsequence, the Belgian editors of Nationhood from Below argue that in order tounderstand the workings of the nation-building process during the long nineteenthcentury historians should pay more attention to the ‘popular impact of nationaliz-ing policies’ (6). Although Eric Hobsbawm asked more than twenty years ago whatthe nation meant to ordinary people, we still know very little about ordinarypeople’s appropriation of territorial identities.

In the first introductory section, John Breuilly discusses some of the conceptualproblems that must be addressed when ‘writing the social history of nationalism’(24). He especially argues for distinguishing motivational from structural nation-alism. The rise of mass politics in the second half of the nineteenth century, forexample, increased the awareness of the nation as the main frame of reference.Even socialists, who in general strongly opposed motivational nationalism,accepted the national framework. Thus, while motivational nationalism positsthe interest of the nation as the ‘objective of particular actions’, structural nation-alism takes the nation merely as a ‘cognitive framework within which to perceive

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interests’ (34). Therefore, the masses do not have to become jingoistic (motiv-ational) in order to accept the nation-state as the legitimate political authority(structural nationalism).

The most interesting part of the book consists of four historiographical surveyson Spain (by Fernando Molina and Miguel Cabo), Italy (Ilaria Porciani), Austria(Laurence Cole) and Great-Britain, France and Germany (Van Ginderachter).These contributions show that the top-down constructivist approach has recentlybeen supplemented by a fast growing number of regional and local studies.Historians have also tried to study the popular responses to war, colonialismand migration and the role of workers, peasants, women and religion in thenation-building process. However, the main conclusion drawn in this section isthat although recent case studies have sought to revise the existing image of alinear, top-down nationalist socialization process by focusing on the intermediatingrole of regional and local elites, we still have a very fragmented view of how thelower classes responded to the nationalist claims. And this remains the case despitethe five detailed case studies presented in the second half of this book.

In fact, the articles in the last two sections – on the domestic and the externalother – are rather conventional studies which mainly adopt a social historyapproach. Miika Tervonen looks at the ‘gypsy question’ in Finland, SaartjeVanden Borre and Tom Verschaffel study Belgian migrants living in Lille, Jean-Francois Chanet examines various strands of French patriotism during the Franco-Prussian War and Antoon Vrints is concerned with analysing the social tensionsthat emerged in Belgium during the First World War. In general, these authorsanalyse how different social groups identified themselves with the national com-munity. In most cases they present some interesting clues about the nationalistattitudes of certain social groups. For instance, Vrints shows that since food short-ages affected the Belgian towns much more than the rural areas during the Germanoccupation, the urban population identified more with the nation state than theircompatriots in the countryside. However, since in these case studies individualsgenerally do not enter the picture, the resulting image remains rather blurred.

The main exception to this is the article by James Brophy on popular nation-hood in the German Rhineland during the first half of the nineteenth century. Byusing a wide variety of primary sources, such as folk calendars, popular songs and(newspaper and police) reports on liberty trees, charivaris and other forms ofpopular political agitation, Brophy presents a fascinating picture of some radicalpopular demands for (national) citizenship. However, these demands did not neces-sarily mean a call for German nationalism. Brophy points out that when Belgiumcelebrated its independence, workers and artisans from the neighbouringRhineland area participated in the festivities and also claimed constitutionalnationhood. As a result, Brophy concludes that ‘Citizenship ideals during thefirst half of the nineteenth century circulated as a transnational phenomenon inwestern Germany, without any definite state moorings’, and that ‘ordinaryRhinelanders encountered right-bearing citizenship as a portable skill set’(163–4). In this way, the French – who had annexed the Rhineland between


1795 and 1813 – were not necessarily considered more foreign than the Prussians orBavarians. In the end, however, it is not totally clear if we should interpret thisdemocratic defence of the sovereignty of the nation without clear national bound-aries as Breuilly’s motivational nationalism. Nonetheless, except for this article, thereader seems to learn more in this book about nationhood from ‘in between’ than‘from below’. Consequently, the book as a whole should be seen principally as aninspiring incentive for further research.

Anne E Gorsuch, All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin, Oxford

University Press: Oxford, 2011; 222 pp., 18 illus.; 9780199609949 £60.00 (hbk); 9780199677931,

£24.99 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Sally West, Truman State University, Kirksville, MO, USA

All This Is Your World expands upon Anne Gorsuch’s earlier work on Soviettourism in the anthology she co-edited with Diane Koenker, Turizm: TheRussian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism (2006). Herewe see a fuller exploration of the topic from the perspective of Soviets in the 1950sand 1960s, as Khrushchev pried open the rigid xenophobia of the late Stalinist era.Tourism, with its implications for increased mobility and international con-tacts, constitutes a natural and enlightening window into the process ofde-Stalinization, reflecting the tenuous yet hopeful opening of Soviet society inthe Thaw period. The increase in Soviet travel was not just about the transitionfrom Stalinism, however, but also a part of the international surge in tourism afterthe Second World War.

Gorsuch structures the book in multiple layers, setting the stage first with a lookat domestic tourism under Stalin (1947–53), before exploring the new freedomsto travel to ‘our abroad’ (exemplified here by Estonia), then beyond Soviet bordersto Eastern Europe, and finally to the capitalist West. She ends with a chapter ondepictions of tourism and tourists in post-war Soviet film.

One of the strengths of this book is that it successfully ties the subject of tourisminto the changing political context of the post-war decades. Patriotic tourism underStalin attempted to counter the foreign influences of the Second World War byencouraging citizens to visit memorials to Soviet victories or to tour Moscow as the‘heart of the socialist motherland’. In also advertising exotic dreams of luxurycruises in the late 1940s, Gorsuch argues, the state could offer the promise offuture rewards for its weary people more safely than through consumer goods,whose absence was ‘easily noticed on local shelves’.

The state’s defensive concern for political safety is a consistent theme through-out the book, despite Khrushchev’s greater willingness to take the risky strategy ofallowing Soviet citizens to travel abroad. Estonia was seen as ‘a space of safelySovietized Western difference’, and travellers to Eastern Europe as well as the Westwere carefully schooled beforehand in how to respond to the experience of foreigncultures. As Gorsuch points out, this represents a key difference with Western

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tourism; tourists anywhere might take the time to learn about what they would seein advance, but not all were officially taught how to feel about it.

All This Is Your World offers two fascinating chapters on tourism in WesternEurope. The first focuses on tourism as performance – not with the more usualemphasis on cultural sites as performative, but in the sense of tourists themselves asperformers. ‘Growing up Soviet was not enough to ensure a proper performance’,Gorsuch notes, so would-be travellers to the West had to attend pre-trip seminarsfor training of up to two days on what they would see and how they should behave.Such preparation, continued surveillance by trip leaders while abroad, and thedeliberately difficult bureaucratic obstacles to receiving permission to go in thefirst place all meant that Soviet tourists were a highly select, privileged group.

The other chapter on travel to the West focuses on tourism as consumption, ofsights, lifestyles and goods. Despite the struggle to find free time in the heavilystructured tours, and despite the lack of hard currency meted out to Soviet trav-ellers, shopping for souvenirs and clothes, or basking in the cafe culture of Paris orRome were central to the tourist experience. Yet Gorsuch argues against the stereo-typical Western view that Soviets’ ideological convictions were automaticallyundermined by exposure to West European standards of living. While this didhappen on occasion, the author’s survey of memoir literature finds rather thatforeign experiences tended to enhance, rather than challenge their lifelong beliefs.Those elite few who were allowed outside the Eastern bloc were selected for theirstrong support of the regime, and travel abroad only reinforced their elite status ontheir return. This would change by the 1970s, when consumer disenchantment inthe Brezhnev era shaded the contrasts between East and West more starkly.

In some ways All This Is Your World offers few surprises. Anyone familiar withthe Soviet Union knows that the country’s tourist industry was strictly controlled,political and scripted. Yet the book’s contribution lies in its ability to put us insidethe Soviet experience of post-war tourism, with all its frustrations, hopes andrewards. In this it is a rich read. Only one aspect struck this reader as lacking inthe section on travel within the Soviet Union: the omission of the Russian experi-ence of their own East. A discussion of tourism in Central Asia, for instance, wouldoffer intriguing contrasts with the opening of travel in Estonia. No doubt this wasbeyond the scope of the present study, but it is to be hoped another scholar willpick up that thread from this fine book.

Dan Healey, Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917–1939,

Northern Illinois University Press: DeKalb, IL, 2009; 262 pp., 7 illus.; 9780875804057,

$40.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Francis King, University of East Anglia, UK

In this fascinating study, Dan Healey goes beyond the ‘axiomatic’ view that Russiaexperienced a liberating ‘sexual revolution’ in 1917, to be followed by retrenchmentand reaction under Stalin (3). By looking not at the utopian ideas of figures like


Aleksandra Kollontai, but focusing instead on where sex and sexuality met Sovietstate power head on, Healey presents a much richer and more nuanced picture ofhow sexual questions were really affected by the revolution and its aftermath. Infive chapters, dealing with doctors, psychiatrists, definitions of sexual maturity,rape and intersex states, he sheds light on the wider world of Soviet sex throughthe prism of forensic medicine.

The dethronement of the Russian Orthodox Church as the authority on questionsof sex after the revolution created a gap which was largely filled by medical profes-sionals – a stratum which had long sought to augment its own prestige and author-ity. Although very few doctors in Russia were Bolsheviks, or even Marxists, theirworld view on questions of medicine and society chimed with those of the new rulers,and they contributed to and reinforced what Healey identifies as the dominant‘technocratic, rationalizing’ approach to sex questions within the Soviet state (9).

The power of medical professionals – mainly doctors and midwives – was greatlyboosted by the abolition of an age of consent and its replacement by ‘sexualmaturity’ as the criterion for full sexual citizenship. The rationale was largely anattempt to accommodate the very different patterns of maturation and sexualmores across Soviet territory, but, as Healey shows, it resulted in a lot of uncer-tainty and medical examinations. In cases of sexual assault, where it was importantwhether the alleged victim was a minor, medics and police ended up resorting tothose old staples of patriarchy: virginity tests and reports about the victim’s ‘repu-tation’. The chaotic, ramshackle nature of the early Soviet state also did not helphere; the overwhelming impression the reader gets from the cases Healey cites is ofthe arbitrariness of police and forensic procedures, especially in the provinces, andthe chance nature of Soviet justice in sex crime cases.

Psychiatry had not enjoyed a very high status under Tsarism, and psychiatristswere keen to establish their professional credentials under the new regime.Although they broadly succeeded in this, their forensic services were largely limitedto giving an opinion on whether a defendant was of sound enough mind to be tried.They were rarely called upon for expert views on questions of sexual psychology ordesire – the latter, as Healey shows throughout the book, was almost completelyabsent from Soviet discourse.

It was only in relation to hermaphrodites that the question of desire could not beavoided, as doctors had to find criteria for deciding what sex should be ascribed totheir intersex patients. Indeed, unlike in the West, where doctors examined thegonads to determine someone’s ‘true’ sex, Soviet doctors were more interested indetermining and reinforcing the ‘social gender’ of their patients, which could not beestablished without reference to sexual psychology (163–4).

One important part of the story which largely falls outside the remit of Healey’saccount is the whole question of sexual hygiene and disease – venereal diseases,already epidemic in early twentieth-century Europe, had become an enormousproblem in Soviet Russia after seven years of war and revolution. It would beinteresting to explore how far this problem, and the need to address it, contributedto the medicalization of sexual questions around this time.

Book Reviews 547

The overall picture which emerges from this book is of an attempt to modernizeand medicalize the Soviet state’s approach to questions of sex, against a backgroundof great legal, cultural and moral uncertainty. The relatively freer 1920s, and therelatively more repressive 1930s set part of the context, but Healey has rendered aservice in showing some of what lay beyond the familiar ‘revolution-reaction’ binary.

Henry Heller, The Birth of Capitalism: A Twenty-First Century Perspective, Pluto Press: London, 2011;

305 pp.; 9780745329598, £17.50 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Willie Thompson, South Shields, UK

One of the first texts in the publishers’ series ‘The Future of World Capitalism’,Heller’s volume is a strikingly impressive achievement, not least on account of theamount of theoretical ground it covers effectively in its 305 pages. As the titlesuggests, it is not a historical narrative of how capitalism came to be establishedbetween the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as the dominant mode of pro-duction, but a discussion and evaluation of the leading explanations by Marxistscholars of the reasons for its emergence.

There is no disagreement among these theorists that capitalism was predatoryfrom the start of this process, and that it grew and flourished on the basis of intenseand often brutally coercive labour exploitation. They all totally reject the argumentsof capitalism’s apologists that its ferocity and ruthlessness have been greatly exag-gerated or that its world-transformative achievements were obtained at minimalsocial cost. The Marxists’ controversies concern the precise nature of the economicmechanisms and forms of exploitation which produced the historical outcome.

The debate was initiated over sixty years ago with the publication in 1946 ofMaurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism, a work of great depthand insight, which in the words of one commentator ‘pushed economic historybeyond economics’ in an interpretation which endeavoured to explain the emer-gence of capitalism in England out of the pre-existing feudal economy, concentrat-ing on the class relationships involved. The specifics of Dobb’s approach werecontested by the American Marxist Paul Sweezy, who argued that his interpret-ation was insufficiently attentive to the significance of long-distance trade as asolvent of feudal relations and economic basis for capitalist growth. Sweezy alsoargued that rather than feudalism crumbling under its own contradictions, insteadit was overwhelmed by its more dynamic and economically effective capitalist rival.

The debate, with growing sophistication and more extensive research, has con-tinued down to the present, with the principal contenders on the respective sides beingRobert Brenner, who largely endorses Dobb’s approach, and Immanuel Wallersteinwho favours an interpretation with greater attention to the world systems of pro-duction and exchange relations. Brenner’s co-thinker, EllenMeiksins Wood, in add-ition focuses on a part of the specifically English agricultural economy as the startingmotor for world capitalism, namely tenant farmers obliged by economic necessity to‘set in train a new dynamic of self-sustaining growth with no historical precedent’.


In exploring this controversy, Heller’s range of reference and depth of perceptionis most remarkable. He makes no bones about his own Marxist affiliation and hisconviction that the purpose of this discussion is not simply academic enlightenmentbut making a contribution to the socialist revolution which he hopes is still in pro-spect. The opening of one chapter begins, ‘This chapter expounds the classic Marxistview of the English and French Revolutions as bourgeois and capitalist’ (104), andlays emphasis on the role of the state, which he suggests Brenner underestimates.

Heller expounds the divergent viewpoints very clearly and effectively and inimpressive detail, and is balanced and fair in his judgements of their respectivestrengths and weaknesses (some of the latter he attributes to disillusionment withthe revolutionary hopes of the 1970s). On the whole he inclines more to theWallerstein position, while acknowledging that its theoretical opponents havealso made invaluable contributions to our understanding.

Heller also deals with the vexed issue, which has come increasingly to the fore-front in recent decades, of whether the fact that modern capitalism developed inwestern Europe was due to its intrinsic capacity for doing so in that region of theglobe, or whether it might equally have done so in some other part of the world, sothat the western precedence was purely contingent and accidental. He acknow-ledges that up to the eighteenth century, possibly as late as 1800, Asia, particularlythe Chinese Empire, was ahead of Europe both economically and technologically,but points out that thereafter there was a process of ‘rapid coming from behind andleaping ahead . . . it was the very backwardness of the West that gave it an advan-tage’ (167). Postcolonial theory, he suggests, in its dismissal of Marxism as beingEurocentric, is the child of neoliberalism.

If one shares the author’s basic theoretical outlook and political sentiments then,leaving aside any scepticism regarding his hopes for the future, there is not much tocriticize in this volume. One reservation, however, might be that, though the authordoes not ignore it, he does not sufficiently stress the importance of the admittedlyslow development of artificial power sources in place of the natural ones of wind,water and muscle. It was the ability, beginning in the late eighteenth century, ofwestern technology to release the energies locked up in fossil fuels which set cap-italism on a different course from the one it started with and gave us, for better orworse, the world we inhabit today.

However, that hardly detracts from the merits of this volume and it is one to bethoroughly recommended.

Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth Century History, Cambridge University Press:

Cambridge, 2011; viii + 230 pp., 44 b/w illus.; 9780521870962, £53.00 (hbk); 9780521691437,

£17.99 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Anna Clark, University of Minnesota, USA

Dagmar Herzog is well known for her previous work on the history of sexuality,especially Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany

Book Reviews 549

(2005), which is one of the most important books on twentieth-century sexuality.Her new book is a useful survey of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe morebroadly. While drawing on her own primary research, mainly from her previouswork, she is able to take advantage of a broad sweep of new and forthcomingsecondary work by many scholars on Europe.

This book is part of the Cambridge series ‘New Approaches to EuropeanHistory’, a format with advantages and disadvantages. The book is written in afairly abstract and general style, necessary given the limited number of pages avail-able to cover this enormous topic. Unfortunately, the publishers of the Cambridgeseries apparently allow notes only for quotations in the text, not for the sources ofanalyses and research, although each chapter ends with an extensive and usefulbibliography. As a result, students and scholars might find it difficult to find whichmonograph originated which important idea discussed in the text.

The twentieth century began with the eruption of three major issues focusing onsex: prostitution, birth control and scandals about homosexuality in high places.All these scandals, Herzog interestingly points out, revealed that sexual pleasureand marriage were not linked very closely in the culture of the twentieth century.During the interwar period, sex reformers, psychologists and religious reformerstried to remedy the situation with the ideal of companionate marriage. Even theCatholic Church modified its position to see sexual pleasure within marriage as apositive good in creating love and affection (as long as a couple remained open tothe possibility of procreation). But these reformers, as well as feminists and eugeni-cists, faced a backlash from fascists and religious conservatives. However, as in Sexafter Fascism, Herzog argues that many Nazis in fact celebrated sexual pleasure forAryans. The common notion of Nazis as sexually repressive derived from sixtiesradicals such as Herbert Marcuse who wanted to free society by freeing sexualdesires. In her new work, Herzog adds to this insight about sex and politics bydiscussing how sixties radicals also criticized traditional socialism as sexually andpolitically repressive, most notably in the Yugoslav film WR: The Mysteries of theOrganism.

Unlike many histories of sexuality, Herzog pays great attention to issues ofgender and reproduction. She demonstrates that it was not just enlightened expertswho facilitated the liberalization of laws on birth control and abortion; rather,social movements pressured governments even in the early 1960s. A few yearslater, feminists pointed out the hypocrisies of sixties radicals who demandedsexual pleasure yet exploited women. Feminists forced society to confront rapeas a crime of violence not sexuality. Herzog is innovative in her attention to theproblem of sexual violence and coercion, especially during wartime, such as themass rapes inflicted by Nazi and Soviet soldiers during World War II and itsimmediate aftermath in Eastern Europe and occupied Germany, and during thewar in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

As Herzog demonstrates, throughout the first sixty years of the twentieth cen-tury, homosexuality became more visible and more rigidly defined; perhaps as aresult, persecution also intensified. However, like many historians of modernity,


she exaggerates the extent to which men in earlier periods could have sex with maleyouths, soldiers, or effeminate men without their own masculinity being threatened.After all, blackmail was a huge threat to such men in the Victorian age.Nonetheless, her discussion of the more modern threat of AIDS in Europe isinsightful.

Although Europe today seems very sexually liberal, Herzog reveals that sex stillinspires political controversies. Today, as she shows, gay rights and gay marriagehave become a marker of progress in the European Union. In fact, the EuropeanUnion has pressed eastern European countries to adopt sexually liberal policies asa condition for admission, inspiring in turn a conservative nationalist backlash.Her analysis is particularly good in discussing the strange phenomenon of right-wing anti-immigrant politicians who claim to be defending gay rights against fun-damentalist Islam. Herzog points out that this erroneously characterizes all Muslimmigrants to Europe as religiously conservative.

The book is very strong on reaching out beyond the usual Britain/France/Germany axis to cover Eastern Europe, Spain and Italy. To be sure, the discussionof the sexual revolution in Bolshevik Russia could have been more extensive givenits influence over sex reformers in the interwar period, and Swedish sex reformmight have been more closely linked to the welfare state. Of course, choices have tobe made in surveys such as this one and everything cannot be covered; Herzog hasdone a masterful job in her brief survey.

In the end, Herzog asserts that ‘sex has been even more than a relay system forrelations of power’ (220). Her book demonstrates that sexuality is fundamentallyintertwined with other relations of power, such as religious power, Nazism andcapitalism, but also that it has its own dynamics of power and pleasure.

Christopher H Johnson and David Warren Sabean, eds, Sibling Relations and the Transformations of

European Kinship 1300–1900, Berghahn Books: Oxford, 2011; 356 pp., 11 illus.; 9781845457693,

£55.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Margareth Lanzinger, University of Vienna, Austria

In 2007, David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher and Jon Mathieu produced avolume on Kinship in Europe. This latest book on sibling relations, edited bySabean with Christopher Johnson, is closely related in terms of its fundamentalconcepts and themes. The editors of these two volumes have played a key role inestablishing the importance of kinship history. The earlier book set out a chron-ology which involved two marked transitions in European kinship history, and thischronology provides a structural framework for the present volume: the changetowards predominantly vertical relations between the middle ages and the earlymodern era, and then towards strong horizontal relations at the turn of the nine-teenth century.

In addition to an introduction, the volume contains two parts, each comprisingsix contributions. In the first part, which concentrates on the late middle ages and

Book Reviews 551

early modern era, the configuration of siblings, in particular of brothers, but also ofbrothers and sisters, is determined by their access to property succession and inher-itance, and to alternative sources of wealth – above all the dowry. BernardDerouet, to whom the volume is dedicated, studies this in detail by means ofsystematic modelling and contextualization. The prospects before siblings tendedto be shaped by inequality as a result of family politics that increasingly favouredundivided property succession. Karl-Heinz Spieß highlights the various forms ofresource distribution according to the constellation of siblings, their structuralposition within the family, and the resulting mutual dependencies. MichaelaHohkamp analyses the married sister of a brother as a specific relationshipfigure within the aristocracy, particularly in terms of her continuing connectionsto her birth family, and the power of her intermediary role. Large age gaps andearly education in various courts created distance between siblings, while geograph-ical separation also motivated them to stay in contact by letter. Sophie Ruppelexamines the intensive correspondence amongst four groups of siblings within thecourt society of seventeenth-century Germany. Here she emphasizes age-basedhierarchy as a structural feature. Benjamin Marschke uncovers the fragile succes-sion, until now concealed by the image of established primogeniture, in the Houseof Hohenzollern from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the eight-eenth century. The potential for sibling conflict can be seen especially in the step-brother constellation at the time of the succession of Friedrich III/I (1657–1713).Gerard Delille dedicates his contribution to a structural analysis of the effects ofprimogeniture – which established itself in the course of the early modern era – onthe existence of branch lines, that is, on whether younger brothers could also getmarried.

The second part of the volume, which stretches from 1750 to 1900, focuses onsiblings’ closeness and the ‘emotional underpinning’ of the kinship system (16).Interpreted as a consequence of intensified sibling relationships, this was at thesame time characterized by an increasing number of marriages between cousins.The number of horizontal connections additionally rose due to marriage ties andoverlapping friendship networks. This is the topic of both Christopher H.Johnson’s contribution, which examines relationship networks, sibling relations,marriages between cousins and forms of sociability in Breton Vannes, and that ofRegina Schulte on Johann Gustav Droysen and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy inBerlin’s Protestant-Jewish milieu. Both are based on the evaluation of letters as apreferred source for the topic areas mentioned above. Sibling closeness often bor-dered on incest or even crossed this line – at least in literary representations. RuthPerry compares the configuration of this theme in Scottish ballads, which in thenineteenth century envisioned the consequences much more drastically than everbefore. Her interpretation that incest had become more shameful could be coun-tered with the question as to whether sibling incest had not simply become morereal due to the emotional charge of this relationship and was therefore to bewarded off with the help of chilling fables. David Warren Sabean writesabout two novels from the end of the eighteenth century which focused on


brother–sister relationships and how they impacted on the respective marriagerelationships. Proceeding from the image of the sister-in-law as a ‘virtual sister’,and from the 1835 English legislation that forbade the marriage of a widower withthe sister of his deceased wife, as well as from relevant debates, Mary Jean Corbettfocuses on literary interpretations of this drama-like material. Leonore Davidoff’scontribution examines the relationship of William Ewart Gladstone, one of themost influential political personalities in nineteenth-century Britain, with his sistersAnne and Helen, a relationship that she characterizes ‘as a striking, if somewhatextreme, case of the role of gender in sibling dynamics’ (290). In this respect, theinterrelations between siblings is particularly well suited for tracing constructionsof masculinity and femininity and concepts of the self.

The conceptual link between this volume and the earlier one necessarily leads tovarious repetitions. However, the importance of the focus on sibling relationships –hitherto a neglected research field – as a key topic for understanding Europeankinship patterns can only be underlined here. The volume is clearly dominated bynoble, bourgeois and intellectual milieus, made accessible in particular by writtencorrespondence, which can hardly be transferred in this form to artisan-industrial-agrarian contexts. Even though the volume does not follow a ‘unitary thesis’, thetransition from vertical to horizontal relationships that characterized the progres-sion from the early modern period to modernity nevertheless prevails. At times, thequestion arises as to whether, despite everything, parental – in particular paternal –power and authority does not remain central in a biaxial relational structure.

Carina L Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and the Mexicans,

Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2011; xvi + 323 pp., 32 illus.; 9780521769273,

£60.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Surekha Davies, Western Connecticut State University, USA

The sixteenth century saw Europe’s dominance of the Aztec empire, and itsattempts to contain the Ottoman empire at its borders. This important bookargues that in order to understand European responses to Mexicans andOttomans, we must examine how they were shaped by the Reformation.Drawing widely on such sources as cosmographies, proto-ethnographies, prints,Kunstkammer inventories and diplomatic correspondence, Carina L Johnsonreveals the ways in which Mexican and Ottoman civilizations, initially viewed asequal to, though different from, Europe, were later seen as inferior on the basis oftheir religious practices.

After an introduction surveying information networks and the production ofknowledge about New World and Ottoman peoples, six chapters and a conclusionexplore European conceptions of Mexicans and Ottomans in the Habsburg lands inthe long sixteenth century. The book is in two parts; Chapters 1–3 explore‘Categories of Inclusion’. Chapter 1 argues that, until the early sixteenth century,European categories for describing and analysing culture facilitated religious

Book Reviews 553

relativism. Diverse customs including idolatry were seen as evidence of attempts toworship the true God. The earliest accounts of the Aztec empire initially empha-sized its civility, but by the 1520s, German editions began to concentrate on humansacrifice and idolatry. Parallels between Mexican practices and Abrahamic coven-ants were now seen as signs of error. Similarly, while writings around 1500 haddescribed aspects of Turkish culture with admiration, during the 1520s, MartinLuther and other Reformed authors emphasized the idolatry of the Turks and itsparallel with that of the Pope. Implicitly, calls for defence against the Turk werealso calls to resist Papism.

Chapter 2 tracks the inclusion of the Mexicans within the Habsburg court’s idealof universal monarchy – a global Habsburg empire made up of religiously andculturally diverse client states. Mexican nobles who visited the court of Charles V,as vassals demonstrating the extent of the empire, were initially received favourablyand maintained at court. Chapter 3 offers an impressive analysis of Habsburgtreasure, gift giving and symbolic display. It argues convincingly that the dis-appearance of most Aztec objects from Habsburg collections was not the resultof indifference to them on aesthetic grounds, but on changing attitudes towardstreasure, and European notions of ‘materiality, sacrality, and rulership’ (98).

The book’s second part, ‘Experiments in Exclusion’, excavates the paths throughwhich, in the wake of the Reformation, Mexicans and Ottomans were cast asinferior on the basis of religious practices. Descriptions of these practices, as wellas the moral implications drawn from them, underwent a shift; circumcision amongEthiopian and eastern Christians, for example, once ‘a sign of Abrahamic coven-ant’, became ‘the failure to be truly Christian’ (149). Chapter 4 investigates writingabout Hungary and the Balkans, the contested border zone between Ottoman andHabsburg lands, in order to trace changes to conceptions of ‘Turks’ and Christians.Descriptions of go-betweens – particularly captives and renegades – who crossedthe border zone offered Christian writers limited cases with which to articulatecultural differences between Habsburg and Ottoman empires, religions and cul-tures. Responses to the Turkish embassy to Frankfurt on the occasion of theelection of Maximilian II as Holy Roman Emperor are the subject of Chapter 5.Pamphlets and other texts about the embassy highlighted cultural differencesbetween the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, and between Christian andMuslim cultures.

Cultural hierarchies are revealed not just by explicit written descriptions but alsothrough material culture and the classification of objects. Chapter 6 exploresEuropean responses to Ottoman and Mexican objects by tracing their presencein Kunstkammern and cabinets of curiosities. The inventories of successiveHabsburg emperors in the sixteenth century show a shift from collections conceivedas sacral and secular treasure, to symbols of sovereignty and diplomatic exchange,to encyclopedic microcosms of the world in which idolatrous and therefore lesserpeoples dwelled beyond Europe. By the late sixteenth century, Ottoman andMexican objects in imperial collections were ‘signs of material rather than territor-ial possession’ (237).


A particular strength of this book is the way it sheds light on both theReformation and on European responses to cultural diversity. By showing howideas about non-European religious practices and beliefs inflected writing aboutdivergent practices within the Christian church, as well as the reasons why ethno-graphic descriptions arguing for religious relativism became untenable in the wakeof the Reformation, this book foregrounds the fundamental interconnectionsbetween European history within and beyond the borders of Europe. Johnsonmakes excellent use of an enormous amount of archival and printed sources inmultiple languages, building a nuanced and convincing argument. Her book isessential reading for scholars of the Reformation, cultural encounters, Europeanempires and material culture.

Henry Kamen, The Escorial: Art and Power in the Renaissance, Yale University Press: New Haven,

CT, 2010; xv + 291 pp., 26 colour illus.; 9780300162448, £25.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: James Casey, University of East Anglia, UK

Historians of state building in early modern Europe have become increasinglyaware of the role of the arts as political propaganda. Given the precarious balanceof military strength in the decentralized polities of the time, successful princes hadto make use of the theatre of power, investing in cultural splendour as a way ofconsolidating their hegemony. One of the most dramatic manifestations of thisstrategy was the great palace of the Kings of Spain, the Escorial. Built betweenabout 1563 and 1584 by Philip II to commemorate his victory at Saint-Quentinover the French, it was a complex of buildings incorporating a monastery, a splen-did library and art collection, a mausoleum housing the remains of Philip’s fatherand successors, and a royal court. Seen by the tourist of today, it stands four-square in somewhat remote countryside to the north-west of Madrid, impressivelyforbidding, uniform and vast. It seems to embody the newfound power of themonarchy of Spain at the outset of the Counter Reformation.

Henry Kamen is well known for his revisionist stance in several areas of Spanishhistory. In this new book he turns a critical eye on the court of Spain under PhilipII, questioning the familiar image of the Escorial as a symbol of absolutism. Henotes that Spanish court ceremonial tended to play down the majesty of the royalpersonages. Their residence, the Escorial, bore some of the marks of a ruralretreat. It lay in secluded countryside, its grim facade smoothed by gardensdesigned for a monarch who was never happier than when among plants andflowers. Power was certainly on display in some of the paintings which wouldgreet the visitor, especially in the significantly named Gallery of Battles. Butthese militarist images were a later addition, far from the mind of Philip II, whoseems to have preferred to collect Italian and Flemish pictures of pastoral ormythological or religious scenes, notably failing, meanwhile, to celebrate hisown victories or exploit the tradition of the monarch as war leader against theinfidel.

Book Reviews 555

Henry Kamen seeks to explain the enigma of the Escorial, at once a private anda public space, in terms of the world view of its founder. Contrary to the familiarpicture we have of him, Philip II is portrayed here as a cosmopolitan prince, wellacquainted with the society and culture of Germany, the Netherlands and England,which countries he visited or resided in as a young man between 1548 and 1559.Though a poor linguist (who could however communicate in Latin with non-Spanish speakers), he was alert and sensitive to the natural and urban landscapeof the north, impressed by palaces which had no real equivalent in the alcazares orfortresses of the medieval Iberian frontier. His return to Spain in 1559, often seenas a kind of retreat to the bastion of the Counter Reformation, was far fromrepresenting a closure of the country to foreign influences. Rather, it markedthe birth of a golden age of Spanish culture and learning, much of it centred onthe court and stimulated by continuing contact with Europe. The building of theEscorial was only one part of the process of amplifying and beautifying the net-work of existing royal houses in and around Madrid. But there was no attempt tocreate a proto-Versailles: the Escorial never became the permanent seat of govern-ment, nor was it used to overawe or intimidate visitors by its magnificence. It seemsto have been conceived of primarily as a house of God, of prayer and study, ofrecreation of mind and body, where the king could seek the inner strength heneeded for the task of governing.

Much of the material presented here will no doubt be familiar from the author’sprevious biography of Philip II. Indeed, it tends to be the figure of the king ratherthan (as the title would lead us to expect) the palace of the Escorial as such whichoccupies centre stage. The author does extend his survey to include the reactionsaroused by the building among the Spanish people as a whole, bringing out theextent of opposition to the project at a time when the Spanish treasury was literallybankrupt and demanding higher taxes. One cannot help wondering how far thecourt caught the imagination of the cultural elites. The title of the present workrefers to the Renaissance generally, with Philip II serving as a kind of bridge to acosmopolitan Europe, whereas the Renaissance in Spain is a more problematicconcept, which would require a deeper enquiry into Iberian traditions and values.These caveats apart, an enthusiastic welcome can be extended to Kamen’s newbook. Insightful and enlightening, if at times controversial, it deserves a wide read-ership for its thought-provoking approach to the cultural and political hegemony ofone of Europe’s most enigmatic rulers. Once again Yale is to be congratulated onproducing such a handsome volume at so reasonable a price.

Tom Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust, Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2010; xiv + 321

pp.; 9780719074493, £17.99 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Steve Hochstadt, Illinois College, USA

So much has been published on the Holocaust, especially during the past fewdecades, that the historiography is rapidly multiplying. Tom Lawson structures


Debates on the Holocaust by isolating eight issues over which scholars have dis-agreed, and then tracing the historiographical development of each debate as achapter. Through this focus, Lawson is able to persuasively demonstrate thatfundamental sources of conflict lie outside the study of Holocaust documents.Rather, ‘fundamental questions of moral and political identity, nothing less thanexistential questions about the human condition’ (3) shape historical debates.More than most historiographical treatments, Lawson situates Holocaust writingswithin the larger Western context, stressing shifts in the historical profession,such as the changing influence of social history and post-modernism, andworld political events, including the end of the Cold War and the Rwandangenocide. This allows him to develop persuasive explanations for why writersabout the Holocaust debated particular issues. Each chapter confirms that‘History (whatever the role of documentary evidence) is about now as well asthen’ (186).

Lawson thus finds the argument between functionalists and intentionalists to bemore than rival historical explanations of the Holocaust; they are positions aboutthe construction of historical metanarratives, ‘the purpose of historical explanationitself’ (74). This debate was influenced by questions of personal responsibilityraised at the trials of perpetrators. Then the two warring Holocaust metanarrativesbroke down after the end of the Cold War with more open access to easternEuropean archives and the growing realization that there was no longer oneHolocaust historiography, but many differing national narratives.

The debates about bystanders and what they should or might have done differ-ently were informed by the politics of the late twentieth century and critical choicesabout the responsibility of those who see genocide occurring. Lawson points outthe anachronistic elements in the often emotional arguments about whether theAllies should have done more to prevent or interrupt the Holocaust, such as bybombing the rail lines to Auschwitz. In 1944 a planned genocide of millions was notyet comprehensible to policymakers or to anyone else, except the Nazis themselves.Lawson does not try to exonerate the Allies for indifference to what they did know.He does, however, place too much weight on the polemic presented by WilliamRubinstein in The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies could not have SavedMore Jews from the Nazis (London 2000), which is not scholarship, but specialpleading.

Lawson demonstrates in every chapter the great strides made by Holocaustresearchers in grasping what happened by their inclusion of an ever wider basisof sources. Yet he worries that the importance of the changing present in thedevelopment of Holocaust historiography might have deleterious consequences:‘The Holocaust thus becomes reduced to the terrain on which a much widerdebate about who and what we are is conducted’ (226). I would argue the opposite.The Holocaust is not only a historical subject, but also a contemporary one. If ourdebates about ourselves and our societies continue to be reflected through debatesabout the Holocaust, that ensures both further engagement by historians and itscontinuing relevance to contemporary life.

Book Reviews 557

I have two complaints about this book. More superficially, it needs copy editing.Lawson’s punctuation is idiosyncratic, inconsistent, and often wrong, such asbeginning sentences with ‘But,’ or using semi-colons instead of commas to separatesubordinate and main clauses. The useless ‘as such’ appears hundreds of times,occasionally twice in the same sentence. These weaknesses do not detract from theclarity and logic of his arguments, but do impair their readability. My secondobjection is about Lawson’s exclusion of one of the fundamental debates aboutthe Holocaust: was the Holocaust exclusively about Jews? From the beginning, heequates the three concepts: Holocaust, Shoah and the genocide of the Jews. Thethoughtful discussions of how ‘the Holocaust has been constructed, and recon-structed, in the post-war world’ (5) do not address whether Gypsies, the handi-capped, Soviet POWs, Catholic intellectuals, Polish elites and Belorussian peasantsshould be considered victims of the Holocaust.

His argument for excluding historiographical disagreements about the ‘exclusiv-ity’ of the Holocaust as the ‘universal signifier of the Nazi campaign against theJews’ is that he is a ‘prisoner of [his] sources’ (8). Although Lawson himself believesthat ‘the term Holocaust should include all victims of national Socialist extermina-tionist policies’, he apparently feels alone in this contention. Lawson’s claim thathistorians ‘overwhelmingly’ apply ‘Holocaust’ only to Jews is not an accuratedepiction of the modern historiography. Throughout the book, he treats historieswhich place the murder of the Jews into contexts in which others died, too. The firstwork of historical scholarship that Lawson discusses, Philip Friedman’s This WasOswiecim from 1946, analysed Auschwitz as part of Nazi mass murder of Jews,Christian Poles and Soviet POWs. Historians today approach the Holocaust with avariety of definitions of its scope. Why not treat this issue as a debate to beanalysed?

Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, trans. Jeremy Noaks and Lesley Sharpe, Oxford University

Press: Oxford, 2011; 1072 pp., 31 b/w illus.; 9780199592326. £25.00 (hbk); 9780199651740,

£14.99 (pbk)

Robert Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich, Yale University Press: New Haven, CT,

2011; 336 pp.; 9780300115758, £25.00 (hbk); 9780300187724, £12.99 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Paul Bookbinder, University of Massachusetts-Boston, USA

Peter Longerich’s biography of Heinrich Himmler and Robert Gerwarth’s biog-raphy of Reinhardt Heydrich are important new studies that shed light on thecareers of these two men and on their relationship to each other. The two booksmake clear how crucial they were to the most radical programmes the Nazis carriedout and their centrality in the unleashing of the Holocaust. The two studies gainmuch by being read together; it is interesting to see Longerich’s perspective onHeydrich and Gerwarth’s perspective on Himmler. The two biographers agreeabout most key matters, and Gerwarth quotes Longerich’s earlier work on suchcritical issues as when and how the systematic mass murder programmes began.


Both of these works are impressively researched. Longerich’s book, however, isthree times the length of the Gerwarth study and much more densely packed withinformation.

Both authors dismiss the idea that Heydrich was the brain behind Himmler andthat their relationship was competitive. Both conclude that Himmler made his owndecisions and that his relationship with Heydrich was a cooperative one. AsGerwarth states, ‘While their relationship was hierarchical in nature, it wasbased not on subordination but rather on a close collaboration – on a feelingof mutual understanding and the pursuit of a common goal’ (52). Himmlerwas truly distressed at the assassination of Heydrich and felt that he had lost hisclosest associate. Both Longerich and Gerwarth conclude that the two men werefriends.

While many historians have viewed Himmler as a rigid romantic ideologue withdreams of recreating a medieval kingdom, neither Longerich nor Gerwarth see himthat way. As Longerich writes, ‘he [Himmler] was first and foremost a highly flex-ible and adaptable politician who knew how to legitimize whatever policy headopted by dressing it up with appropriate ideology’ (264–5). By comparison,Heydrich was less flexible. Longerich does acknowledge some constants inHimmler’s Weltanschauung: the restoration of some kind of ‘Germanic Reich’that would colonize the east; and strong hostilities toward Slavs and particularlyJews. Himmler’s leadership style combined a ‘fatherly’ friendliness towards thosehe commanded, a gentle admonishment for minor infractions and draconian pun-ishments for those who disobeyed or failed in their important tasks.

Heydrich looked to Himmler as his ideological guru and worked to putHimmler’s ideas into action. He lacked Himmler’s friendliness and operated byinstilling fear in his subordinates, although he gained their respect through hisfanatical physical fitness, hard work, and effective leadership. Both men impressedHitler by their zealousness in rooting out enemies within Germany, crushing resist-ance in the occupied areas, and striving to create a new Germanic empire.Longerich believes that by the end of the war Himmler was clearly the secondmost powerful man in the Nazi state. Gerwarth argues that Heydrich wasmoving towards the top of the Nazi hierarchy before he was assassinated.

Himmler and Heydrich’s racial beliefs are carefully examined in these studies.Himmler created a detailed system of racial categorization for the men who wererecruited for the SS and the women whom they would marry. He also set up racialcriteria to decide who in occupied Europe could be Germanized and who wouldneed to be resettled or eliminated. Himmler’s policies played a role in determiningwhether or not an SS man would be punished for having sexual relations with awoman in an occupied country and whether a child in these countries should betaken from his or her family to be raised as a German. Heydrich applied thesepolicies as chief occupation official (Protector) of Bohemia and Moravia, territoriesto be incorporated into a greater German Empire.

The two biographies present interesting accounts of the early lives of Himmlerand Heydrich which do not appear to presage their later roles as the leaders

Book Reviews 559

responsible for the radicalization of the Nazi programme and the policies of sys-tematic mass murder. Typical of so many SS officers, these men did not come fromdeprived backgrounds or abusive families; they were born into comfortable middle-class homes and were well treated by their families. Because they were too young,neither of them participated in combat in World War I, although Himmler joinedthe military in the last days of the war. He was involved in the activities of theFreikorps at the war’s end and joined the Nazi Party early in the post-war period.Economic crises, political turmoil and right-wing propaganda during the Weimaryears radicalized both men; however, Heydrich remained apolitical for much of theWeimar period and joined the Nazi Party only in 1931 with the encouragement ofhis wife Lena von Osten, an ardent Nazi.

Both men had grown up as Catholics but rejected the Church and became itsenemies. Until his later twenties, Himmler dealt with sexual repression and purit-anical standards of personal behaviour. His bitterness about this aspect of his earlylife determined many of his policies about the sexual activities of his SS men andthe reproductive policies for the future empire he hoped to help create. His sexualfrustrations continued into his middle twenties and contributed to his hostilitytoward the Catholic Church, which he judged was run by orders of men whowere repressed and inclined toward homosexuality, imposing their ‘perversions’on Catholic male youth. Heydrich lacked Himmler’s early, repressed behaviourand ruined his promising naval career as a result of a sexual liaison. Disgracedand at a loose end, he was rescued when Himmler recruited him in 1931 to createthe Sicherheitsdienst (SD), an intelligence service of the SS. There is only a modestamount of material about the personal lives of the two men in the years of Nazipower. Both men were away from their families a great deal, and Himmler travelledobsessively. Both wives, Margareta Himmler and Lena Heydrich, felt abandoned.Himmler established a relationship with his secretary, Hedwig Potthast, with whomhe had two children. Heydrich’s wife believed that her husband had many affairs,but there is no evidence.

Both Longerich and Gerwarth dwell on the key roles Himmler and Heydrichplayed in Hitler’s acquisition and maintenance of total power. Longerich positionsHimmler as the man who enabled Hitler to exercise his position as dictator throughthe employment of state terror. He traces Himmler’s skilful rise in stages to hiscontrol of the repressive police apparatus in Germany and his development andcontrol of the concentration camp network, first in Germany and then in theoccupied areas, where his elaborate system of racial categories was implementedto re-Germanize much of Europe and eliminate inferior peoples, particularly Jews.Gerwarth traces Heydrich’s role in helping Hitler in a similar fashion and hisdevelopment into what his wife called a ‘hangman’.

Among the disturbing aspects revealed in these studies is that neither man hadany moral scruples about inflicting pain, suffering and ultimately death on thosewhom they defined as ‘subhuman’. Both talked about values such as duty andloyalty and, most strikingly, decency; however, as in so many areas during theNazi period, these words were redefined to mean the opposite of what they had


meant previously. Himmler, who considered himself anstandig (morally upright),did not hesitate to rely on men like Oskar Dirlewanger, Curt von Gottberg andOdilo Globocnik, whom Longerich characterizes as ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’,to implement his policies. Conduct that included looting, sadistic atrocities, rapeand murder typified the crimes of people Himmler and Heydrich regularly recruitedand whose behaviour they excused as necessary when dealing with ‘subhumans’.Himmler most clearly demonstrated his lack of humanity when he urged his SSmen to murder Jewish children, asserting that they could not be allowed to grow upto be avengers.

Both Himmler and Heydrich had plans for Eastern Europe that included bring-ing about the deaths of 30 million Slavs in addition to the mass murder of Jews.When Heydrich became the Protector of occupied Bohemia and Moravia in add-ition to overall leader of the centralized police apparatus, the Reichsicherheitsamt(RSHA), he supported the ‘hunger plan’ of Dr Herbert Backe, the State Secretaryin the Reich Ministry of Economics, which called for an engineered famine thatwould lead to the deaths of 30 million ‘useless mouths’ in the western Soviet Union.Heydrich’s plan for Bohemia and Moravia called for the Germanization of abouthalf the Czech population and the eventual ‘thinning out’ of the rest by slavelabour and starvation. Longerich puts forth a thought-provoking argument thatthe deportation of German Jews in the autumn of 1941, which was carried out infull view of the public and revealed to the world press, was intended as a warning tothe United States about what would happen if the US went to war with Germany.This warning was meant to undermine the Jewish conspiracy that Hitler, Himmlerand Heydrich believed dominated America.

Among the more problematic conclusions that both historians reach is theirbelief that there was no clear plan for the murder of all Europe’s Jews until thespring or summer of 1942. Although the plan to murder all European Jews may nothave been promulgated until 1942, Gerwarth cites Longerich on the timetable andpath to the Final Solution, indicating that, by 1941, both Himmler and Heydrichhad developed plans for, and Heydrich had initiated actions that resulted in, themurder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Thus the Final Solution of 1942 wasonly the systemization of the processes Himmler and Heydrich had begun a yearearlier, along with the building of fixed killing centres – developments of degreerather than kind.

Howard Louthan, Gary B Cohen, Franz AJ Szabo, eds, Diversity and Dissent: Negotiating Religious

Difference in Central Europe, 1500–1800, Berghahn: New York, 2011; 264 pp.; 9780857451088,

£50.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Graeme Murdock, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Central Europe had the most diverse of religious landscapes during the early modernperiod (Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Utraquist, Bohemian Brethren, Lutheran,Anabaptist, Calvinist, Unitarian, Greek Catholic, Jewish andMuslim communities).

Book Reviews 561

The 11 essays in this important volume shed new light on relations between thesediverse communities in the Holy Roman Empire, Habsburg monarchy and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The significance of the history of religion of earlymodern Central Europe to the history of tolerance and intolerance should be obvi-ous. And yet, as Howard Louthan observes in his introduction, many Anglophonehistorians have been content to write about religious tolerance as a gift firstgranted to the world by English-speakers on either side of the Atlantic. Louthansuggests that highlighting how the churches, states and communities of CentralEurope negotiated religious differences is not merely a matter of shifting our geo-graphic focus to the east. Analysis of religious life in Central Europe also addsgreatly to our understanding of the chronology of the history of tolerance – onestriking theme which emerges in this volume is the upswing of confessional tension inthe eighteenth century. Essays in this volume in addition consider how religiousdiversity wasmanaged within different states andwithin local communities, allowingthe reader to think about the varied role of elite and popular opinion in supporting orundermining experiments in religious pluralism.

Several authors caution against a purely confrontational model of relationsbetween discrete confessional communities. Bridget Heal suggests that our recentfocus on the notion of confessionalization has tended to draw attention away fromthe pluralism that existed within confessions and from peaceful relations betweenconfessions. David Luebke analyses the extent to which confessional loyaltiesundermined shared ideas of towns as sacred societies. Luebke finds that peoplein late-sixteenth century Westphalian towns often seemed to value good neighbour-liness as highly as they prized religious uniformity. Urban authorities also workedto accommodate religious diversity and were concerned with maintaining concordin order to sustain the political autonomy of their towns. Petr Mat’a highlights thecomplex and shifting pattern of religious loyalties within Bohemia’s nobility.Bohemian law protected two creeds from 1485, and this religious environmentwas further complicated under the impact of sixteenth-century reform movements.Mat’a argues that the idea of noble families being firmly aligned to a single churchremained more notional than real. He queries the depth of confessional conscious-ness among many nobles and argues for the persistence of trans-confessionalaccommodation between Bohemian nobles during the sixteenth century.

Patterns of local religious accommodation could break down for a variety ofreasons. Paul Knoll explains how Poland’s religious diversity of the sixteenth cen-tury was based upon the assertion of noble rights and a lack of royal coercivepower. As political conditions changed, religious minorities came under evergreater pressure to conform. The 1596 Union of Brest also disrupted previouslypeaceful relations between Catholics and Orthodox in Poland. Mikhail Dmitrievassesses the bitter confrontations of the early seventeenth century betweenOrthodox, Uniate and Catholic communities. A Uniate archbishop was brutallymurdered by an Orthodox crowd in 1623 and hundreds of Uniate clergy were killedduring the Cossack uprising of 1648. Tom Brady suggests that in the Empirepolicies of brute coercion slowly gave way to intensified regimes of regulation


and surveillance of religious minorities. In Strasbourg, as Debra Kaplan explains,Jews were subject to ever tighter restrictions imposed by the Lutheran city autho-rities. A 1639 order that Jews entering Strasbourg should be searched at the citygates was maintained into the eighteenth century. However, in the Habsburg mon-archy both surveillance and brute coercion continued to be employed in efforts toeradicate religious minorities. Regina Portner details the policies pursued by MariaTheresa against rural Lutheran communities in Upper Styria and Upper Austria.Austrian Lutheranism was sustained by a clandestine book trade and vibrantbook-reading culture. A Bavarian Jesuit reported in 1753 that after spendingonly 18 months in the village of Purgg in Upper Styria he had discovered some700 heretical books. Houses of correction were set up where Protestants weresubjected to religious instruction at their own expense. Those who resisted weretransported east to southern Hungary and Transylvania. The children of deportedfamilies were kept in orphanages or sent to work as domestic servants in Catholichouseholds until they reached the age of majority and could choose to convert orjoin their families in the east. Joseph’s reign saw a change in Habsburg religiouspolicy and some limited rights of private worship were granted to Lutheran,Calvinist and Orthodox communities. However, as Ernst Wangermann pointsout, we should not be fooled into thinking that Joseph’s reign marked any funda-mental break from the ambition of his predecessors to eradicate heresy from theHabsburg monarchy.

Lucio Magri, The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller, Verso:

London, 2011; viii + 434 pp.; 9781844676989, £30.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Toby Abse, Goldsmiths, London, UK

Since this curiously titled book is not about the German garment industry, it seemsbest to begin by explaining that the Tailor of Ulm is a character in a Bertold Brechtpoem, a German artisan who built a machine that he thought would enable men tofly. The tailor’s machine crashed to the ground, killing its inventor who had beenchallenged by the local bishop to use it. Brecht explains that centuries later men didindeed learn to fly. This story was invoked by Pietro Ingrao in 1989 to justify hiscontinued commitment to communism when the Italian Communist Party (PCI)leader Achille Occhetto was urging the party to change its name. The analogybetween attempts at building communism and attempts to create a flying machineis at the centre of Magri’s argument in the book.

Lucio Magri (1932–2011) was not a professional historian but a journalist andpolitical activist who was, for two periods of his life (1958–69 and 1984–91), amember of the PCI. The PCI’s history, or to be more exact the PCI’s historybetween 1944 and 1991, is the principal subject of the Tailor of Ulm, the subtitleof which in its original Italian edition (2009) was ‘Una possibile storia del PCI’rather than the slightly misleading ‘Communism in the Twentieth Century’ used inPatrick Camiller’s excellent English translation. Despite Magri’s long involvement

Book Reviews 563

with the PCI, his account is in no sense an official history of the PCI, unsurpris-ingly, given his expulsion in 1969 as part of the leadership of the Manifesto groupand his subsequent 15 years of involvement in what he retrospectively called‘extremism’. On the other hand, although there are occasional explicitly autobio-graphical references and some reliance on an insider’s knowledge of the party’sleading personalities and internal processes, the book cannot be seen as a personalmemoir in the same vein as Rossana Rossanda’s rather more widely acclaimedwork, The Comrade from Milan (2010), despite their shared experience in theManifesto group.

Whilst Magri has a marked inclination to ‘counterfactual’ history, as he himselfmakes clear on several occasions in the text, this work is far less polemical inrelation to the PCI leaders than his earlier writings might have led specialists inthe history of Italian communism to expect – only Achille Occhetto is treated withoutright contempt. The book was written in old age, after Magri had withdrawnfrom active politics and ceased to be a member of any political organization, so itshows as much detachment as he could ever muster. Nonetheless, it has a very clearviewpoint, that of what might best be described as left Eurocommunism (thoughthe Eurocommunism of Pietro Ingrao, rather than that of Enrico Berlinguer).Despite this, Ingrao himself is criticized on occasions, whilst what Magri calls‘The Second Berlinguer’ of 1980–84 receives quite sympathetic treatment(326–47). Magri had clearly read more widely than most political activists, evenmaking some, albeit limited, use of material from both the Italian state and PCIarchives, as well as drawing on both primary and secondary printed works, but thebook lacks the referencing and bibliography of an academic work, so it is notalways clear on what sources he is relying when discussing matters far outsidehis direct experience.

The book is at times very illuminating – for example in foregrounding LuigiLongo’s reservations about the Historic Compromise in the 1970s – but it is some-what uneven. This is partly because of its highly ambitious attempt to contextualizethe history of the PCI within the broader economic, social, cultural and politicalhistory of Italy, the history of the world communist movement, particularly SovietCommunism and, to some extent, the general course of world events in the twen-tieth century. Although it would have been foolish to write a history of the PCIwithout some reference to the history of the CPSU and USSR, it is hard to beconvinced that Magri’s grasp of such matters is anything like as strong as hisknowledge of trends in Italy’s economy, society, culture and politics between1960 and 1991, the topics which form the real heart of the book.

While this book is not a personal memoir, its judgements are very much col-oured by Magri’s own political biography. Although the older Magri seems to haveachieved greater critical detachment from his late 1960s enthusiasm for Mao’sCultural Revolution than Rossanda has ever managed, one still feels that Chinais being judged by a different, and much more lenient, yardstick than the SovietUnion. Given Magri’s belief that the PCI was not sufficiently consistent and vocif-erous in condemning the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslavakia in 1968, a belief


which was the main trigger for his expulsion, it is revealing that he still seeks todefend the PCI’s endorsement of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Thisstance, in turn, flows from his reluctance to make any major criticisms of PalmiroTogliatti – under whose influence the young Magri had left the ChristianDemocrats for the PCI in 1958.

Laura Manzano Baena, Conflicting Words: The Peace Treaty of Munster (1648) and the Political Culture

of the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Monarchy, Leuven University Press: Leuven, 2011; 282 pp.;

9789058678676, E39.50 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Rene Vermeir, Ghent University, Belgium

Over the past few decades the negotiations that led to the 1648 Peace of Munsterhave been the subject of thorough historical investigations. However, anyone whobelieves that they have read everything that can be said about the talks thatbrought an end to a conflict that lasted eighty years should pick up LauraManzano’s book and think again. Manzano uses an original approach and suc-ceeds in presenting the peace process from a new point of view.

The aim of her volume is to analyse why the Peace of Munster was signed,considering, says the author, that it went against the declared political and tran-scendental goals of both the Spanish Monarchy and the Dutch Republic. Sheargues that the political-ideological undercurrents in Spain and in the rebelliousprovinces were – in essence – such that a treaty was inherently impossible, andthat it was therefore quite remarkable that The Hague and Madrid neverthelessreached an agreement. Internally, the debate was conducted in both states througha wide range of media such as pamphlets, treatises, private or political correspond-ence and plays – all of which present similar, congruent arguments. According toManzano, these articulations expressed widespread assumptions and political beliefsystems, understood as a set of values defining the self-positioning of a polity andits room for manoeuvring in the political arena, and they served to conditionpolitics.

In order to reconstruct the value systems of both sides, Manzano analyses theirrespective understanding of concepts such as ‘rebellion’, ‘tyranny’, ‘authority’,‘sovereignty’ and ‘religious coexistence’. The ways in which Spanish and Dutchdivergent convictions regarded these terms had an impact on how the negotiationswere carried out – to the point, according to Manzano, of endangering their suc-cessful outcome. In this sense, her approach is similar to that employed inNederlandse begripsgeschiedenis, a series of five works about fundamental conceptsin the history of the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of the Netherlands pub-lished by Amsterdam University Press between 1999 and 2009.

However, we must question whether the religious-ideological framework thatManzano so minutely mapped, was indeed the expression of an important socialundercurrent that could not be ignored, or if it was simply a reflection of an offi-cial creed. This can certainly be asked with regard to the Spanish, since in the

Book Reviews 565

Spanish-Habsburg world, unlike in the Dutch Republic, the press was strictlycontrolled and both official censorship and self-censorship weighed heavily onpublic discourse. Confronting the political rhetoric employed at the time withthe concrete positions taken at the negotiating table may have shown that ideasand deed did not always coincide. This is perhaps one of the weaker aspects of thisbook: Manzano has not always paid sufficient attention to the insights provided byprevious research and as a result she sometimes fails to recognize the problemsinherent in her own assumptions.

Manzano’s contention that the Spanish Monarchy was not prepared to negoti-ate on the issue of public worship for Catholics in the Generality Lands and in theUnited Provinces as a whole – effectively the opposite stance from that of JonathanIsrael (170, 223) – and her firm emphasis on the religious aspect on the part ofSpain more generally does not stand up to scrutiny. If, for example, the author hadpaid more attention to the negotiations that led to the Twelve Years’ Truce and itsimplementation, and the concessions that Philip III had already made regardingthe position of Catholics in the Republic and the Generality Lands, she may haveproduced a more nuanced assessment of the role that religion played in the Spanishcamp. Manzano appears to be unaware of the work done by W. Eysinga on theTwelve Years’ Truce. Nor did she employ the results of other recent studies on theTruce and on the final phase of the Eighty Years War and the parallel peace talks inher analysis – truly a missed opportunity.

There is now clear evidence that the Spanish struggle to protect the interests ofCatholics in the Republic and the Generality Lands was not conducted for the sakeof the one true faith alone. In 1637, when the head of the church in the SouthernNetherlands expressly called on Madrid to accept a religious compromise, so thatthe many Catholics in the Generality Lands could enjoy minimal rights, Philip IVand his first minister Olivares did not even consider it. Olivares’s confidant andfactotum in Brussels, the chief-president of the Privy Council, Pierre Roose, madeno secret of the fact that he was resolutely opposed to religious toleration in theRepublic, precisely because it would cause the hatred that northern Catholics hadfor the Calvinist authorities to weaken – and by extension, their support andsympathy for the Spanish cause.

The deciding factor in Spain’s policies concerning war or peace with theRepublic is undoubtedly the Spanish monarchy’s desire to preserve its greatpower status. The successive governor-generals that ruled the HabsburgNetherlands since 1621 – including some prominent scions of the House ofHabsburg – experienced the negative consequences of this policy at first hand,especially after France appeared on the battlefield in 1635. Without exception,they advocated the conclusion of a peace treaty, even though that would requirefar-reaching concessions from Spain, but Madrid refused to listen until, of course, itwas too late.

Although this book is certainly not overly long, its arguments might have beenstrengthened had certain aspects been more concisely presented. At times, theauthor devotes many pages to discussing aspects that have already been extensively


covered in previous studies by other researchers, such as Poelhekke and Israel.Nevertheless, this does not distract from the essence of this work, namely, theanalysis of the religious-ideological context in which the Munster peace negoti-ations took place. The book constitutes an innovative and valuable addition tothe insights that previous studies focusing on military, political and diplomaticaspects have provided. Laura Manzano’s study allows us to reconsider knownfacts and developments from a new perspective, and that is its merit.

A Lynn Martin, ed., Alcohol, Violence and Disorder in Traditional Europe, Truman State University

Press: Kirksville, MO, 2009; ix + 269 pp.; 9781931112963, $48.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Angela McShane, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK

Lynn Martin’s book Alcohol, Violence and Disorder in Traditional Europe is ahighly enjoyable read, and a fruitful one in many ways. Seeking to demonstratea very clear thesis drawn from contemporary doubts about the links between alco-hol and violence, Martin takes this modern analytical lens to three areas of earlymodern Europe – England, the Italian States and France – through the findings ofa large swathe of published primary and secondary literatures (though these tend toprivilege England rather heavily). The chapters proceed like a series of clearlyorganized, well-expressed and highly entertaining lectures on key topics, eachone drawing material that spans from 1300 to 1700. On the one hand, as Martinargues, this offers the benefit of a ‘longue duree’ perspective, and certainly it servesto provide more than sufficient material for the purposes of the book, but on theother, it may imply to student readers that little changed over what was actually along and traumatic period of immense social and cultural transformation.

The first chapter deals with the modern sociological literature and offers social-scientific substance to the premise of the investigation. The second then identifiesearly modern moralists as the key culprits in constructing a direct link betweenviolence and drunkenness (though not alcoholic drink per se). In the third chapterMartin brings together a disparate array of statistical analyses, arguing that thesedemonstrate how the Italian states, which did not see themselves as having a prob-lem with drunkenness, in fact imbibed more alcoholic drink per capita than acountry like England, which was seen to have a destructive relationship withdrink. Here, though the figures are used imaginatively, it seems at least problematicthat unsystematic figures collated from such very different places, and for verydifferent reasons could be used in this way. Nevertheless, in his next chapterMartin ably demonstrates that alcohol could in fact have a very positive role insociety, and so he turns in the next two chapters to lay ‘blame’, if such we can callit, for disorder not on alcohol – which was consumed, moment by moment, in vastquantities across Europe and so could not possibly be linked causally to violence –but at the environments in which alcohol was usually drunk, and at those landlordsand landladies who failed to police behaviours and consumption adequately.Next, Martin points out that his own research into printed court records from

Book Reviews 567

two English counties (Warwickshire and Essex), suggest drunkenness was rarelylinked to violent crime as recorded. (It might, however, be remarked that low-leveland domestic violence, not leading to death or grievous bodily harm, was unlikelyto show up in records such as these.) Though disorderly acts carried out by drun-ken people are indeed to be found in the records of England, France and Italy, asMartin illustrates, they appeared to be remarkably few in number, and starklybring into question any clear relationship between excessive alcohol consumptionand violent or disorderly crime. The final substantive chapter usefully compares theregulatory systems in place in some Italian states, in France and in England up to1700, and shows the anxiety of authorities to enable sufficient access to nutritiousdrink for all, a concern that far outweighed that of aiming to restrict consumption,which was largely left to individuals, landlords and local authorities, and their verydifferent views on the question of ‘excess’, or drunkenness.

The use of visual material in the book is sometimes disappointing, though per-haps some images were added only as an afterthought. Martin’s interpretations ofballad woodcut images are particularly questionable: for example, a political satireon Shaftesbury is described and interpreted as ‘a tavern scene’ (113). Other satiricalimages (157) are also described as if they are uncomplicated ‘photographs’ of placesand events, rather than being artistic concoctions, with implied meanings. Onewoodcut image is said to depict a woman confronting her husband in an alehouse(165), another the signing of a marriage contract in a tavern (100), yet, to myknowledge, neither appeared in a ballad context that would convey these particularmeanings. Image evidence only makes a minor contribution to the discussion,however, and so this does not detract from the overall success of the book.

Martin’s argument and his synthetic, comparative approach, have not only(once again) made a valuable contribution to the growing literature on alcoholstudies, he also offers a model of what can be done once even more archivally-driven investigations into early modern European production and consumptionpractices emerge (of the quality of B Ann Tlusty’s study of Augsburg (Bacchusand Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany, 2001) or BeatKumin’s of the southern German and Swiss States (Drinking Matters: PublicHouses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe, 2007)). The limitedscope of the European geographies dealt with by Martin, as he says himself, espe-cially in relation to Italy, are to some extent a feature of the dearth of such sys-tematic work being done on this important topic, and should act as a clarion call toresearchers across all the regions of Europe to fill this important gap.

Peter McPhee, Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life, Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 2012; 299

pp., 32 illus.; 9780300118117, £25.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Noelle Plack, Newman University, Birmingham, UK

With over one hundred biographies of Robespierre published to date one might askis there anything new to say about this divisive figure? The short answer is yes.


Peter McPhee’s telling of this extraordinary life is like watching Robespierre in 3Das he moves through the drama, violence and exhilaration of the FrenchRevolution. In a sense, much of what has been written about Robespierre beforenow seems like a stereotype as McPhee’s narrative presents a more human portraitof the man. Far and away one of the most complete and complex pictures ofRobespierre ever produced, McPhee’s biography will stand as the definitiveaccount for many years to come. One of the main reasons for this is because ofMcPhee’s deep and multi-faceted understanding of the context in whichRobespierre lived. Indeed, one of the main contributions of the book is to placeits subject in the world of late eighteenth-century France and to try understand hislife moving forward rather than looking back in hindsight. This is a monumentalchallenge as Robespierre has been seen as the first modern dictator, likened even toMao, Stalin and Hitler. McPhee successfully heads off these preposterous parallelsby producing a biography securely rooted in the milieu of the ancien regime andrevolutionary France.

Most biographers spend relatively little time on Robespierre’s early life, forget-ting that his upbringing shaped the man he would become. In contrast, McPhee hasprovided the rich context for his life and thought: the social, cultural, political andeconomic forces with which Robespierre grappled as he matured. The openingchapter presents a full and detailed discussion of Arras, the town in northeasternFrance where Robespierre was born and spent the first 11 years of his life. McPheeprovides a different reading of Robespierre’s early life to many biographers whoclaim that the death of his mother and absent father scarred him. In this accountwe meet a serious, obedient and determined young boy who was raised by caringrelatives and who spent much time in his grandparents’ brewery amongst its work-ers. We also learn much about Robespierre’s adolescence at Louis-le-Grand, theelite secondary school in Paris, where he received an education steeped in theclassics, history and moral philosophy. There is significant space devoted toRobespierre’s legal career in Arras from 1784 to 1789 before he was elected as adeputy for the Third Estate. This serves to underline the powerful shifts that weretaking place in French society and the context in which Robespierre was develop-ing his core values; specifically that a healthy society is founded upon civic andpublic virtue and that a social order based on birth is inherently unjust (38–9).

Robespierre inspires such passionate feelings on both sides of the political spec-trum that it can be difficult to disentangle fact from fiction. While the generaltrajectory of Robespierre’s life is well known, McPhee succeeds in bringing clarityto many of its details with new research. The effects that friends and family had onRobespierre’s physical, emotional and psychological well-being are charted.McPhee is also honest about his blind spots and shortcomings. There is a realsense of drama and an unravelling of Robespierre’s rational judgment as the trau-mas of late spring 1794 produced a genuine decline in his physical and mentalhealth. Because the link between Robespierre and the Terror is so strong,McPhee is keen to underline that Robespierre was but one person. The NationalConvention and the Committee of Public Safety did not adopt all of his proposals,

Book Reviews 569

thus it is wrong to ascribe all of the excesses of the Terror to this one man. What isalso brought to the fore is that after his death in July 1794, people scapegoated himfor all of the horrors of the Year II and his ‘name became the repository for theguilt of all consciences’ (225). McPhee has skilfully produced an untangling of whatactually occurred during Robespierre’s lifetime and what posterity has done to hisreputation. This is an insightful and valuable contribution, particularly in our age,which has been dominated by the discourse of ‘terror’.

Every biography, of course, says as much about as its biographer as it doesabout its subject, and in McPhee’s hands, Robespierre’s story becomes about thehuman costs of the French Revolution on all sides, but also about its fundamentalachievements. McPhee seems to share Robespierre’s passion for democracy, beliefin the core principles of 1789 and that the Republic’s visceral response to itsenemies during 1792–94 was a vital necessity. In his book Living the FrenchRevolution (2006), McPhee was concerned with the dramatic, profound anddirect impact that the Revolution had on the lives of ‘ordinary’ people – thenine-tenths of the population who inhabited France’s farms, villages and smallmarket towns. In this engaging biography, we get the reverse. This highly accessibleand beautifully written book is a real tour de force and does justice to the trulyrevolutionary life of its subject.

Robert Muchembled, A History of Violence: From the End of the Middle Ages to the Present,

Polity Press: Cambridge, 2012; vi + 377 pp.; 9780745647463, £60.00 (hbk); 9780745647470,

£19.99 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Stuart Carroll, University of York, UK

How bizarre that a history of violence should not once mention the Holocaust. Thereason for this is explained by the working title of the original French version,La fabrique des jeunes. Muchembled is principally concerned with youth culture inWestern Europe and the manner of its transformation by the civilizing process andthe coercive discipline imposed by the state. ‘Seven centuries of spectacular decline’in homicide rates from the high middle ages was the result of a ‘slow culturalevolution’ which involved the taming of male aggression and rise of the bloodtaboo. Following Freud, Muchembled sees violence as a primal urge that requirestaming or overcoming. Social and self control means sublimating our desires andexplains our continuing fascination for tales of blood: Muchembled dedicates awhole chapter to crime fiction.

Muchembled is aware that the traditional chronology of the civilizing processhas recently been called into question, especially by medievalists. The statistics alsoshow that one of the biggest historical falls in the homicide rate came at the end ofthe middle ages. He dedicates an excellent summary (Chapter 4) to the recentresearch. However, most of the book is dedicated to the early modern periodand to the claim that the fundamental transformation of the blood taboo can belocated to the end of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries.


He argues that this was the result of the criminalization of homicide following thesixteenth-century judicial revolution and the ‘offensive’ launched by state andchurch against juvenile delinquency from 1500 to 1650. According to him, therewas a ‘sharp fall’ (243) in the number of homicides from the end of the sixteenthcentury, which is discernible in the 1580s (23), this was a response to state repres-sion and a more punitive attitude to homicide (137, 143–5).

However, the evidence does not support this assertion and Muchembled’s gripweakens the farther he travels from the region of Northern France that he knowsbest. For example, we know that homicides rates increased in England in the period1580–1630. Even so, there was, as Muchembled admits (162), no judicial onslaughtagainst murder here: 87 per cent of executions were for non-violent crimes, usuallytheft. Italy, which despite its cultural preponderance in this period gets little men-tion, continued to have very high homicide rates, but murderers were rarelyhanged. In Bologna, the courts issued over 2500 death sentences between 1613and 1673, but only 316 or 12.6 per cent of these were carried out. We see a similarpattern in Germany: in Bavaria, two-thirds of those executed were convicted ofproperty crimes, a rate that was consistent from the sixteenth to the eighteenthcenturies. In Cologne, 75 per cent of those executed between 1568 and 1617 werethieves. The 168 recorded homicides in the bishopric of Westphalia between 1580and 1600 resulted in only one execution. The evidence from across Europe is over-whelming: the courts continued to be lenient to killers who pleaded provocation.Muchembled’s argument rests largely on figures compiled from the records of theParlement of Paris from 1575 to 1604. But these are not contextualized. While along section is dedicated to largely bloodless French peasant revolts (a comparisonto the German Peasants’ War, or the millions killed in peasant revolts in Chinawould have been instructive), he makes little mention of religion. Muchembleddoes not explain why the intensity of inter-communal religious violence inFrance was matched only in Ireland. Surely the homicide rate must have increasedin 1572 when 10,000 Protestants were murdered in the Saint Bartholomew’sMassacre? Rising rates of execution in France thereafter are evidence not of thecontrol of violence but its spiral, as armed gangs roamed the countryside and ordercollapsed, which required exemplary punishment. Muchembled is also at a loss toexplain why French duels were so numerous and so bloody, a pattern that began asearly as the 1520s.

Accounting for the long-term decline in homicide rates in Western Europe isrelatively straightforward. The difficult task is to explain the peaks, troughs andregional differences that are masked by the headline figures. The decline was notslow, continuous and uniform: it plunged steeply, as in the fifteenth century, onlyto spike again during Europe’s religious wars. These fluctuations are difficult toaccount for and will require more sophisticated analysis than Muchembled is ableto offer. His lack of curiosity about French distinctiveness is not helped by hisreliance on stereotypes: the English are ‘isolated’, Prussians ‘bellicose’ and Italians‘touchy’. The context matters because during periods of severe civil unrest, asRandolph Roth has shown, all forms of homicide, not just political killings, are

Book Reviews 571

likely to increase. As recent events in Iraq and Syria have reminded us, civil warprivatizes violence, ensuring that, even when peace is restored, homicide rates canremain stubbornly high for generations.

Thomas O’Connor and Mary Ann Lyons, eds, The Ulster Earls and Baroque Europe: Refashioning

Irish Identities, 1600–1800, Four Courts Press: Dublin, 2010; 420 pp., 30 illus.; 9781846821851,

E55.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Eamon Darcy, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

The events of 4 September 1607, when two leading Irish nobles Rory O’Donnelland Hugh O’Neill left Ireland and fled to Europe, proved a pivotal turningpoint in Irish history. From an English colonial perspective it freed vast sectionsof Irish land for appropriation; yet, when looking from the Continent, theirmigration, called the ‘Flight of the Earls’, emphasized links between IrishCatholics and their co-religionists in Europe. This collection of essays seeks touse this event as a lens through which we can view the experience, perceptionand shaping of Irish people, their outlook and their identities in the earlymodern period.

The first section – entitled ‘The Labyrinth of Baroque Europe’ – sketches thesometimes frosty and insincere receptions the earls received as they travelled theContinent. Joseph Bergin blames wider European issues of state building andconfessionalization for their treatment. Colm Lennon teases this argument outby retracing the diplomatic struggles between England and Spain over the earls.In the face of such pressures, how did they lobby European powers for support?Leading figures, most notably Hugh O’Neill – the earl of Tyrone – spoke openly oftheir desire to defend the Catholic Church in Ireland. Religious persecution, how-ever, was only one factor in the spectrum of causes of migration from Ireland (andScotland). Chapters by David Edwards, Steve Murdock and Richard Marks(although this chapter is confusingly placed in a section entitled ‘SelfPreservation and Refashioning’) show the range of reasons why Irish andScottish people went to Europe.

Section II, ‘Making the Irish Catholic’, begins with Bruno Boute’s chapter andshows how Peter Lombard (the newly appointed archbishop of Armagh) hadactively supported Hugh O’Neill’s armed insurrection in the name of theCatholic faith in the 1590s; however, recognizing that this rather militantpolicy did not fit Paul V’s views on Anglo-Papal relations, Lombard performeda volte-face and subsequently proposed a more moderate path for the tolerationof Catholicism in Ireland. Without doubt, wider European politics shaped eventsand causes pursued in Ireland, a theme discussed throughout the book. Europeanconcerns with Catholic and Jesuit education after the Council of Trent alsoshaped the curricula implemented in various Irish colleges on the Continent,and some evidence has survived that helps us recapture Irishmen’s experiencesthere. One chapter provides a list of materials related to Ireland in the Strahov


Abbey Library in Prague, while another details the painstaking process throughwhich the Irish college in Salamanca was slowly constructed into a definedcampus. An interesting piece by L. W. B. Brockliss makes some important cav-eats, however. Despite the radical changes in clerical education Brockliss down-plays the influence of these continentally trained clerics in Ireland, first suggestingthat many Irish priests had never visited the Continent, and secondly, that thosewho had rarely wanted to return. Finally, Brockliss points out that French Jesuitteachers in the light of peasant opposition subsequently dropped their attempts toeducate the laity and argues that this too may have been the case in Ireland. Hischapter is more suggestive than demonstrative, but provides some food forthought.

The third section, ‘Ireland in the baroque imagination’ shows how the widerContinent was aware of the heated religious climate in Ireland. A mural in aBenedictine church in Germany commemorated the massacre of Benedictinemonks in a Limerick monastery during the Desmond rebellions. These GermanBenedictines drew parallels between their own experience and the religious perse-cutions experienced in Ireland during the 1570s and 1580s. One Irishman, WalterButler, would gain notoriety for the portrayal of his role in the assassination ofAlbrecht von Wallenstein, duke of Friedland in Friedrich Schiller’s Wallensteintrilogy of 1799.

The fourth section, ‘Self-preservation and Refashioning’, inter alia detailssocial attitudes invested in the Irish and Latin languages (Grainne MacLaughlin) and shows how exiled poets drew upon memories of Ireland on theContinent (Ruairı O hUiginn). The main emphasis throughout this section is thatIrishmen had a distinctive European identity that was both a product of, and anattempt to break away from the troubles of the Atlantic Archipelago. Forexample, Jason Harris’s article shows that Scottish authors on the Continentappropriated Ireland’s reputation as the island of saints and scholars for theirown homeland, thereby illustrating the vibrant European dimension to Irishhistory.

This book is not without its faults, however. Like any edited collection of essays,some chapters are stronger than others. That said, it brings a fresh perspective tokey themes of Irish history and not just to the causes and course of the flight of theearls. Consequently, the title of the book is problematic; perhaps it should havebeen Refashioning Irish Identities in Europe, 1600–1800. This book discusses muchmore than the Ulster earls, and contextualizes the experience of Irish (and Scottish)men on the Continent within the wider issues of European intellectual and politicaldevelopments. There is a hint in this volume that the tired Anglo-Irish prism thatdiscusses the ‘civilizing’ of Ireland should be viewed within wider European intel-lectual and political developments. Recent years have produced book titles such asMaking Ireland British and Making Ireland English, one wonders could there be anargument forMaking Ireland European? Nonetheless, The Ulster Earls and BaroqueEurope is a riveting collection of essays that greatly enriches our understanding ofearly modern Ireland and Europe.

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David Onnekink and Gijs Rommelse, eds, Ideology and Foreign Policy in Early Modern Europe

(1650–1750), Ashgate: Farnham, 2011; 332 pp., 5 illus.; 9781409419136, £70.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Jeremy Black, University of Exeter, UK

Despite the title, this interesting and valuable volume is largely devoted to theAnglo-Dutch moment. Three essays range elsewhere. Presenting the Spanishimperial system as an ideological model, Ana Crespo Solana asks how far thesituation changed in the late seventeenth century and with the arrival of Philip Vin 1700. Her somewhat harsh approach does not accord with the more recenttendency to emphasize positive aspects of the reign of Carlos II. Instead, there isa general suggestion of failure:

The arrival of the new dynasty meant the appointment to the Spanish government

of responsible ministers who fought to establish a new centralised system of gov-

ernment: however, the problem of reforming the old, obsolete Spanish system of

monopoly was not resolved, precisely because of the zeal to maintain the image of

the empire. (242)

Benedict Wagner-Rundell considers the Polish dimension, arguing that debatesover foreign policy were an extension of internal politics and ideological con-flicts – an unsurprising view. Solange Rameix assesses clerics and war in Franceand England during the Nine Years’ War, providing an account of just wartheory that is alive to a particular context. Unfortunately, most of Europe isleft out.

The other contributions focus on Britain and the United Provinces and indicatethe extent to which ideological considerations played a major role both in theirforeign policies and in public debate about these policies. Each of the contributionsis of interest, although those that are more narrowly focused offer more in terms oforiginality.

The organization of the essays does not reflect any chronological progression.Steve Pincus uses Robert Molesworth’s Account of Denmark (1693) to clarify theWhig/Tory divide on foreign policy in the 1690s, while also providing a longer-termcontext. Gary Evans considers how debates over recent history reflected and sus-tained Whig and Tory agendas on foreign policy. In a lengthy and well-consideredpiece, Doohwan Ahn presents the dynamic of more distant historical parallels in thecase of Classical Athens. David Onnekink briefly surveys the ideological context ofthe outbreak of the Dutch War in 1672, while Stephane Jettot assesses ideologies ofinterests in English foreign policy during the reign of Charles II from the perspectiveof diplomat MPs who confronted contrasts between royal and national interests.Henk van Nierop brings in the visual dimension with a consideration of Romeyn deHoogle (1645–1708), one of the most prolific artists of the day. In 1672, he lentsupport to the Orangist cause. Gijs Rommelse looks at mercantilist ideology inAnglo-Dutch relations during the era of the three Anglo-Dutch wars of the seven-teenth century. He argues that a perceived interest of state interest or raison d’etat


and the introduction of associated vocabulary helped shape an ideology of mercan-tilism. English mercantilists are presented as creating an ideological connectionbetween economic issues, patriotic pride and national interest, with the concept ofnational interest becoming the ideological vehicle that cemented political cooper-ation between economic interest groups.

Andrew Thompson brings in the balance of power, although without discussingmuch of the recent relevant literature. In analytical terms, the balance of power andthe related concept of natural interests can be criticized as ambiguous and mislead-ing, but, in practice, their very flexibility ensured their value, both because theycould be applied widely and because they could readily serve differing politicalviews. The concept of balance reflected concern for stability, the fascination withmechanistic structures and forces, and, in general, the conduct of politics as a zero-sum game.

Wout Troost assesses William III’s ideas on foreign policy, demonstrating acommitment to the containment of Louis XIV. The collection lacks a real attemptto explain the situation at the European level, let alone to look for comparisonswith other parts of the world, notably China, for which there is an importantliterature on strategic culture. Torcy, the experienced French Foreign Minister,argued that passion often overruled interest in causing conflict. This collectionprovides some indications of why, but there is much still to cover, not leastabout goals and contingencies.

Kenneth Pennington and Melodie Harris Eichbauer, eds, Law as Profession and Practice in Medieval

Europe: Essays in Honor of James A. Brundage, Ashgate: Farnham, 2011; 435 pp., 12 illus.;

9781409425748, £75.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Thomas Kuehn, Clemson University, SC, USA

James Brundage has enjoyed a long, distinguished and prolific career as a scholarand teacher of medieval canon law. Across more than half a century Brundagepublished important studies on jurisprudence and the development of the legalprofession, crusades and the law of war, and the canon law relating to sex andmarriage. Twenty of his students and colleagues here offer their essays on thesevarious areas of study in tribute to their friend and mentor. Unsurprisingly, in avolume touching on so many different themes and containing so many papers, theresults are uneven. Essays on fairly narrow topics sit side by side with discussions ofbroad issues. What unites them all is the strength of the meticulous attention tosources by all the authors. And perhaps that is indeed the most fitting form ofhomage to Brundage.

The first section of seven papers on medieval legal and constitutional thought isemblematic of the volume as a whole. Olivia Robinson combs thirteenth-centuryepiscopal registers for evidence of disputes regarding loans from bankers to Englishbishops. Her paper is followed by Thomas Izbicki’s on the fifteenth-centuryDominican theologian Juan de Torquemada’s views of witches. His is a very

Book Reviews 575

different subject, but delivered with the same close reading of sources as employedby Robinson. The late James Powell explores Innocent III’s ideas for secular gov-ernment in the papal states and Sicily. Brian Tierney offers an illuminating readingof John Locke that is critical of a Straussian perspective on him. Charles Reid’sessay deals with twelfth- and thirteenth-century canonists’ opinions of just war.Kenneth Pennington considers feudal oaths of fidelity and homage from canonists’points of view, and James Muldoon explores differences between Hugo Grotiusand John Seldon on rights of access to the seas and the extension of jurisdictionfrom the shore into the water.

The second section (‘Schools, the English Church, and Texts’) is even moreeclectic. It opens with a gem by Edward Peters in which he argues for a recon-ceptualization of the relations between legal humanism and scholastic law acrosstwo centuries. There follow papers by: Patrick Zutshi on Cambridge’s status as astudium generale (generally acknowledged as such long before John XXII’s letterof 1318 conferring that status); Richard Helmholz on regulating the number ofproctors in London ecclesiastical courts, primarily on the evidence of a brief earlyTudor tract; Peter Landau on a collection of twelfth-century decretals in anEnglish Cistercian monastery; Elizabeth Makowski on fifteenth-centuryChancery suits by cloistered nuns; Marjorie Chibnall on Orderic Vitalis’s atten-tion to canon law; and Michael Gervers and Nicole Hamonic, whose combinedeffort finds evidence of social conflicts in the reign of King John by carefulstatistical study of the language in charters composed during the Interdict(1208–1214).

The third section on ‘Law, Sex, and Marriage’ begins with Charles Donahue’sargument for the distinction between the Bolognese twelfth-century civilian,Johannes Bassianus, and a more obscure Bolognese canonist named Bazianus.As he studies Bazianus’s positions on marriage during the time canon law on thesubject was swiftly evolving, Donahue yields insights on a shifting area of law andthe context in which a decidedly second-rate talent sought solutions to emergingproblems. Richard Kay looks at ninth-century visions of Charlemagne suffering inhell for his concubinary relationships, which had a place in the canonistic argumentfor the singularity of marriage. Glenn Olsen studies erotic imagery in Occitanianand Provencal Romanesque churches that attempted to display the disorders ofunbridled lust, yet did so in a provocative manner rejected by the more austereGothic style that followed.

The final section carries two papers revolving around the crusades: JonathanRiley-Smith’s reconstruction of some legislation of the Templars, whose archivehas been lost, and Robert Somerville’s on the papal legate, Adhemar of Le Puy, ofthe First Crusade. There is, in short, something of interest in this volume for a widevariety of medieval historians and some early modernists as well, and not just thoseconcerned with canon law or even law more generally. Brundage’s own work hadan impact over that broad a spectrum of fields, so in that sense too this volume isan apt homage to him.


Gareth Pritchard, Niemandsland: A History of Unoccupied Germany 1944–1945, Cambridge

University Press: Cambridge 2012; 250 pp., 2 maps; 9781107013506, £60.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Martijn Lak, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Following the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945, some partsof the (former) Third Reich were not immediately occupied by the victoriousRussians, Americans, British or French. One such unoccupied enclave was thewestern Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains), located between the East German provinceof Saxony and contemporary Czechoslovakia. Situated between the US and Sovietlines, it contained no major cities or towns, but still had a population of around500,000 natives and refugees. Completely cut off from the rest of the country byAmerican and Russian road blocks, this stretch of land was called ‘Niemandsland’or ‘No Man’s Land’.

Gareth Pritchard has written a fascinating study of this seemingly forgottenstretch of land. The Russians and Americans did not really seem to care muchabout the area, which more or less meant that its inhabitants were left to fend forthemselves. Niemandsland was confronted with enormous problems in the lastdays of the Reich and after the Nazis were finally defeated. As the population ofthe western Erzgebirge was predominantly urban, it could not feed itself on its own.Therefore, ‘the food situation went from difficult to catastrophic’ (58). Even whenthere was food available, it was seldom possible to cook it. Economic activity wasseriously disrupted ‘and then ground almost entirely to a halt’ (59). As in otherparts of Germany, the infrastructure was in shambles and the area was flooded byrefugees that had fled the vengeful Red Army.

As neither the Russians nor the Americans as yet occupied the westernErzgebirge, there existed a power vacuum. It was filled by so-called ‘antifascistcommittees’ (antifas) that took matters into their own hands and were presentthroughout Germany. Though they differed greatly in size and composition, theyshared some characteristics. Firstly, they were inclusive and not fractured alongclass, political or confessional lines. Secondly, the committees were often led bypeople that had experienced the horror of the Nazi regime themselves, havingbeen persecuted for years. As a consequence, ‘they were thereby stamped with avisceral determination to eradicate all traces of Nazism in Germany forever’ (8).The antifas were politically diverse, but in most cases the driving force was pro-vided by Communists.

When the antifas took over power, they first had to restore public order, whichhad collapsed during the final days of the Third Reich. Once that was settled, theyput themselves to solving all the other problems of Niemandsland, briefly describedabove, which Pritchard correctly calls ‘tasks of Herculean proportions’ (95). Themost pressing was feeding the population, as grown men’s weight had dropped to 40or 50 kg, a situation repeated many times over after the war in the rest of Germanyas well. Fortunately for the antifas, Niemandsland still possessed an apparatus ofgovernment, ‘the structures of local government had not disintegrated’ (71).Moreover, the antifas also started to disarm former Wehrmacht personnel.

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So how effectively did the antifas rule Niemandsland? According to Pritchard,given the circumstances, they did very well, which was truly remarkable. A com-plete breakdown of public order was prevented, huge piles of weapons were takenfrom Wehrmacht troops, tens of thousands of refugees and the local populationwere organized, fed and accommodated and ‘protected from the depredations ofbands of unsurrendered troops. . . Indeed, many of them [the antifas] had sufferedfar more than the ordinary citizens, since for many years they had been ruthlesslypersecuted and harassed by the Nazis’ (117–18).

Still, the relations with the local population were not particularly sound. Theantifas returned from their Nazi prisons ‘to pull the country back from the abyssand lead the way forward to the promised land of socialism’ (177). But most inhab-itants, Pritchard analyses sharply, did not see it that way, showed no repentance fortheir past actions and did not rally behind the antifas, which enraged them. This wasa true contradiction: the new rulers wanted to win the hearts and minds of thepeople, but at the same time despised and mistrusted them. Therefore, ‘their rulewas paternalistic, repressive, and deeply resented by the mass of the population. Bythe time the Soviets took control of Niemandsland at the end of June [1945], it wasalready well on its way to becoming an antifascist dictatorship’ (178).

Pritchard has written a thoroughly researched, well-composed account of aforgotten episode of German post-war history. He gives chilling accounts of thelast days of Hitler’s would-be Thousand-Year Reich in the western Erzgebirge,with roaming SS fanatics randomly shooting people who tried to make peacewith the advancing Allies. The author has a great eye for detail and has succeededin writing a book that sometimes reads like a thriller. Niemandsland fits in well withthe growing amount of titles that have appeared recently on the final days of theThird Reich, such as the books by Ian Kershaw, Richard Bessel and ChristianGlossner. Pritchard’s book is of the same quality and can easily hold its ownamong these authors.

Sonya O Rose, What is Gender History?, Polity: Cambridge, 2010; 208 pp.; 9780745646145, £45.00

(hbk); 9780745646152, £14.99 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Matt Cook, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

Providing an introduction to gender history is a complicated undertaking. The fieldhas, of course, had its own complex trajectory as a subdiscipline – with roots andinfluences to be traced via women’s history, the history of sexuality, social historyand history from below, and also through history’s linguistic and cultural turns.But it also has a wide reach. Which strands of historical investigation are notinflected by gendered assumptions and understanding?

Rose meets this challenge in this short, accessible book. She provides awell-judged overview of the field and illustrates its twists and turns through anaccumulation of engaging examples – chiefly, but by no means exclusively, fromnineteenth- and twentieth-century British and North American history. By the


closing chapter we have had a whirlwind tour of the key historians, works, debatesand controversies that have shaped this field and our understandings of the rela-tionship between gender, history and the past.

The book begins with a survey of the emergence and development of genderhistory and the challenge it posed to historians in their thinking about power andsocial relations. The field has been marked by a reflexiveness and theoreticalacumen which has had an impact on the discipline as a whole. Rose providescogent summaries of sometimes complex ideas and also the response to them. Inrelation to Joan Scott’s landmark essay ‘Gender: A Useful Category of HistoricalAnalysis’ (1985), for example, Rose not only explains Scott’s thesis but also detailsconcerns about her advocacy of a shift in focus away from women’s history. Laterin the book she shows how the materiality of the body and the recent turn to livedexperience and biographical approaches in gender history-writing trouble Scott’semphasis on discourse and discursive productions of the self. In this and otherinstances themes and arguments develop across the book. It deserves a cover-to-cover read – not least because it exemplifies so effectively the art of historiograph-ical review and overview.

Chapter 2 focuses on the body, demonstrating how histories of gender andintersecting histories of sexuality have illuminated the complex relationshipbetween scientific knowledge and social and cultural context. Rose shows herehow war, empire, and localized social, political and economic circumstances inflectthe way people understand their bodies, gender and sexualities. She delves into thedifference class and race can make in the third chapter, and the ways these othercategories of historical analysis shaped understandings of gender in the past – andvice versa.

The fourth chapter is devoted to men and masculinity. Rose demonstrates howhistories of colonialism, empire and race are opened out further when an analysisof masculinity is brought into the frame. John Tosh is pre-eminent amongst thehistorians discussed here, and, as with Scott, Rose effectively outlines the debateand critique his work has spawned. The penultimate chapter shows how gender hasbeen integrated into areas of historical knowledge where it had previously seemedirrelevant – military, economic and political history not least.

Finally there is a welcome overview of the different approaches historians havetaken to gender history – from a focus on space and place in Judith Walkowitz’spath-breaking research on London to Michael Roper and Timothy Ashplant’sadvocacy of psychoanalytic and biographical approaches to gendered subjectivitiesin the past. This last chapter touches further on some of the intimate sourceshistorians of gender have taken seriously – amongst them diaries, letters and photo-graphs. There is perhaps a little more to be said about the problems and possibi-lities associated with these materials and the ways different historians have tackledthem, using, for example, approaches pioneered in literary theory and criticism.Indeed, although the interdisciplinary dimensions of gender history are implicit inthe book in the deployment of scholars working in anthropology, sociology, lit-erature and other adjacent disciplines, this key facet of the field might have been

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discussed more directly. This is a minor caveat though: What is Gender History?provides a brilliant overview of the field and yet does not oversimplify. It is top ofmy reading lists for undergraduate and postgraduate students alike.

Nadine Rossol, Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany: Sport, Spectacle and Political Symbolism,

1926–1936, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2010; xiii + 226 pp.; 9780230217935, £50.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Erik Jensen, Miami University, USA

In Performing the Nation, Nadine Rossol highlights continuities in German polit-ical representation that transcended the historical divide of 1933, and, in so doing,she challenges the notion that the Nazis invented the mass spectacle. Instead,Rossol insists, the Weimar Republic pioneered the use of elements that we associatewith the Nazi period, such as moving bodies, innovative use of space, an emphasison national community, and the inclusion of spectators in the performance. Rossolalso suggests that the office of the Reichskunstwart, a new state position created in1920 to coordinate the Weimar Republic’s self-representation, prefigured the Naziregime’s propaganda ministry. Although the Reichskunstwart had far less powerand far fewer resources at his disposal than the Nazi ministry later would, thecreation of this office illustrates the efforts undertaken by the republic to win thehearts and minds of its citizens.

Indeed, one of the greatest strengths of Rossol’s study is its depiction of thegradual evolution in the scale and assertiveness of the Weimar Republic’s self-celebration. Political factionalism in the new republic prevented even the establish-ment of a national holiday, but commemorations to mark the signing of the con-stitution on 11 August 1919 had emerged by the mid-1920s as occasions on whichto celebrate the post-war democracy. Initially dependent entirely on the privateinitiative and funding of local mayors and the Reichsbanner veterans groups, theseearly ceremonies consisted of an ad hoc array of parades and gatherings. Not until1929 did the state organize an event to mark Constitution Day and to foster anemotional attachment between its citizens and itself, but this ceremony anticipatedmany elements of later Nazi festivities, including the organization of thousands ofindividuals into a living flag. The state continued this aesthetic practice in thefollowing year’s ceremony, which highlighted the withdrawal of the last foreigntroops from the Rhineland and similarly featured thousands of individuals, thistime representing various German rivers, who called in the climactic scene on‘father Rhine’ to join them in celebrating its liberation.

The Nazi regime simply built upon the performative foundation that theWeimar Republic had already laid, and Rossol argues that even the NurembergRallies displayed only ‘limited’ aesthetic originality (103). Thingspiele, which com-bined ostensibly ancient Germanic traditions with political rituals, movement, andchoral singing, proved more innovative, but they were also apparently short-lived,having reached their apex in the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Olympic Gamesand quickly fading from official favour thereafter.


Rossol’s study provides another important example of the continuities thatlinked the Weimar Republic and the Nazi regime, and she incorporates a greatdeal of material in this book that will be of value to cultural historians of theperiod. Her emphasis on 1936 as marking a decisive turn in German festive prac-tices seems puzzling, though. Rossol argues that post-1936 festivities were more‘traditional’ in their approach, but her descriptions of the 1938 Breslau sportsfestival and the 1939 premiere performances at the Loreley Thingspiel arenaseem thoroughly in line with earlier productions, and she notes that the NaziParty rallies in Nuremberg actually grew in size between 1934 and 1938.

More importantly, Rossol does not show how or if the spectacles between 1926and 1936 actually influenced feelings of attachment to the two political systems. Infairness, Rossol states in the introduction that she will look only at the intendedmessages of the various celebrations, rather than at how spectators read thosemessages. However, some of her own documentary evidence points to the ineffect-iveness of these mass gatherings, and she should have explored this all-importantissue further. Goebbels withdrew support for Thingspiele, for instance, in partbecause they had shown, in Rossol’s words, ‘unsatisfactory results’ (112). Rossolalso notes that the 1939 performances filled only half of the available seats. Thismight have been simply ‘festivity fatigue’, something about which Goebbels wor-ried, but even the very first spectacles that Rossol examines in her study – sportscompetitions in 1925 and 1926 – registered deficits because of low attendance.Moreover, Rossol argues that the Weimar and Nazi spectacles had no impact onthe aesthetics or the themes of local and regional celebrations at all.

Rossol rightly notes in her conclusion that mass spectacles have fallen intodisfavour in the post-war era, with the exception of certain totalitarian regimesand, interestingly enough, the opening ceremonies of Olympic Games. Perhaps,however, they were never in public favour in the first place, at least not among themajority of Germans living in the 1920s and 1930s. Did this decade of mass spec-tacles – which disappeared with few lasting traces other than some propagandafootage and some very deeply ingrained popular associations on the part of uslatter-day observers of the Nazi regime – simply represent an attempt to engage thecitizenry that never really caught on. Perhaps whatever popularity and legitimacythe two political systems did enjoy owed very little to the spectacles staged in theirhonour. It is a question worth addressing.

Teofilo F Ruiz, A King Travels: Festive Traditions in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain, Princeton

University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2012; xv + 356 pp.; 9780691153575, £52.00 (hbk);

9780691153582, £30.95 (pbk)

Reviewed by: James Casey, University of East Anglia, UK

Communal celebration is a feature of the world we have largely lost. Recentlyundergoing a revival with royal marriages and anniversaries, it can hardly competewith the centrifugal tendency of holidays to become something private – a flight

Book Reviews 581

from colleagues and neighbours rather than a closer union. Ritual festivity, how-ever, played a key role in the fashioning of hierarchy and community in the past,linking scattered populations in a way that is no longer so necessary in masssocieties where the fragmentation of individual units has become the pre-conditionfor ever tighter integration into the anonymity of the market economy. One thinks,for example, of the splendour of the great courts held by medieval kings atChristmas or other times of the year, where through display of wealth or of couragein tournaments or of generosity and commensality, the moral authority of rulerscould be maintained.

A distinguished historian of medieval Spain, Professor Ruiz has drawn attentionfor some time to the seriousness of the topic of fiesta, too often dismissed as mar-ginal. But how can we neglect a topic on which our ancestors spent so much of theirtime, wealth and energy? This new book is an analysis of the significance of festivecelebration for relationships of power. Ruiz examines the variety of interpretationsput forward in the European context, before turning to the Spanish evidence. As inthe rest of Europe it would appear that tournaments and knightly sports were a keyfactor in the political strategy of the past. They were all part of the world ofchivalry, an ideology which straddles the middle ages and the early modernperiod, becoming, paradoxical as it may seem, ever more popular with thespread of printing and a commercial middle class.

While cautioning us against any clear contrast between medieval and modern,Ruiz notes the increasingly elaborate nature of the accounts in chronicles andelsewhere of such communal celebrations. Were they indirectly reflecting a processof social change? Questioning the conventional view that demonstrations of wealthand power reinforced authority, he points rather to the ‘reciprocity’ of advantagewhich rulers and local elites might find in such ritual displays. Part of the charm ofhis book is the ‘thick description’ of individual festivities which help the reader toappreciate the complexity of the topic and the subtle nuances required in order tointerpret the evidence. Thus, the long journey of King Philip II through the Crownof Aragon in 1585–1586 is explored in detail, and the author uses it to demonstrateboth the continuity of the royal entry from the Middle Ages and the need of rulersto travel, even in this new bureaucratic age, despite the appalling circumstances ofhealth and weather. There was a continuous round of entertainments, both secularand religious, in which Philip was expected to take part, none of which could beseen as a clear victory for royal authority as such.

The problem was that such celebrations often involved some invention of trad-ition, which aroused disputed or contrasting interpretations of what one was com-memorating. An interesting chapter of the book entitled ‘From Carnival to CorpusChristi’ looks at the desire of the authorities to supervise such public gatheringsrather than leaving them to the anarchy of the street. Though this was already trueof the middle ages, perhaps one may see a slight shift of emphasis as regards two ofthe greatest communal celebrations, Carnival and Corpus Christi. The CorpusChristi pageants, increasingly patronized by the authorities, spoke of the equalityof man, but only beyond the grave when uprightness of character would count for


more than lineage or station in life. Should this be dismissed as opium for thepeople? It no doubt drew some of the sting of older Carnival celebrations in whichthe rich were mocked, at least for a day. Mockery in safe doses could act as anantidote, but it was always unstable.

During the Renaissance and beyond, the crown and the nobility tended towithdraw from active participation in such spectacles. True, the idiom which intheory governed the body politic remained much the same, comprised of notionsof chivalry and honour, of personal courage and generosity of spirit, all thosethings for which the literature of chivalry now took the main responsibility.Though the author does not go so far forward in time, it would be interestingto trace the rather different attitude to fiesta which becomes apparent in theEnlightenment, not least in the classic essay of Jovellanos (1796). Here thepreoccupation with the idleness of the worker and the fear, both economicand political, of leaving him with too much time on his hands, raises a newaspect of an old question. In conclusion one may recommend the present studyas a labour of love – a detailed and interesting introduction to that colourfulworld of chivalry which, as he confesses, has captivated the author sincehis youth.

Ben Shepherd, Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare, Harvard University Press:

Cambridge, MA, 2012; viii + 342 pp., 22 maps and illus.; 9780674048911, £29.95 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Marko Attila Hoare, Kingston University, London, UK

Historians have had much to say about the complex, messy structure of the ThirdReich. Contrary to its self-image as a smooth monolith under the Fuhrer, the Reichwas divided into the often antagonistic fiefdoms of its various high- and middle-ranking officials – military, party, SS and other – who possessed considerableleeway to pursue their own agendas, often at variance with one another. Indeed,historians of the ‘functionalist’ school link the emergence of the Holocaust withsuch competing initiatives. In extending this structural analysis to the Wehrmacht’spolicies in occupied Yugoslavia in 1941–1943, Ben Shepherd’s intelligent andthoughtful study of Nazi German military terror plugs a significant analyticalhole in the existing literature.

Shepherd focuses not on the policy of Hitler and the top Nazi leadership inBerlin, but on the Wehrmacht commanders who presided over the anti-insurgencyoperations in German-occupied Serbia and in the so-called ‘Independent State ofCroatia’ (NDH), which included most of Croatia and all of Bosnia-Hercegovinaand was under joint Italo-German control. He highlights differences between thepolicies of individual commanders, which he interprets in the light of their personalhistories. He attributes a particular propensity toward draconian measures to thosecommanders who had served during World War I in the Austro-Hungarian Army,with its bitter enmity toward Serbia, or for long periods on the Eastern Frontagainst Russia, with its brutalizing effect on participants.

Book Reviews 583

Major-General Walter Hinghofer, commander of the 342nd Infantry Division inoccupied Serbia, for example, had served in the Austro-Hungarian Army on theEastern Front from 1914 until 1917. When the Wehrmacht’s suppression of theanti-Nazi uprising in Serbia was reaching its bloody crescendo in autumn 1941,Hinghofer and his division actually exceeded the repressive measures stipulated byLieutenant-General Franz Boehme, the Plenipotentiary Commanding General inSerbia. Much the same could be said about Brigadier-General Fritz Niedholt andMajor-General Emil Zellner, commanders of the 369th and 373rd InfantryDivisions in the NDH respectively: both had served for long periods on theEastern Front during World War I – Zellner had also participated in theAustro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia – and both were responsible for exceptionaldegrees of brutality during the anti-Partisan campaigns. As Shepherd points out,the traumatic effect on German soldiers of the trench warfare on the Western Frontduring World War I has long been noted by historians, but the effect of service onthe Eastern Front has been comparatively neglected, though it was the war in theEast that helped to exacerbate German and Austrian racial hatred of Slavs andperceptions of entire populations as being the enemy.

Shepherd contrasts the aforementioned commanders with those, likeHinghofer’s successor Brigadier-General Paul Hoffman, whose harshness remainedwithin the guidelines stipulated by their superiors, and who were ready to combineit with a measured political strategy. Thus, while Hinghofer’s extremism inclinedhim to retaliate even against the Germans’ anti-Communist Serbian collaborators,Hoffman attempted to restrict repression against sections of the population thatwere not actively engaged in resistance activity or unlawfully possessing weapons.This was not a division between doves and hawks, but between those who keptwithin already draconian rules and those who exceeded them. Similarly, the oft-cited revulsion among Wehrmacht commanders at the savagery of the Croatianfascists (Ustashas) was a reaction against its disorganized character, not itsmurderousness.

Thus, Shepherd portrays a disjointed German system of repression where thedegree of brutality varied according to the policies of individual commanders andthe influences of other elements – above all Italian and Ustasha. He suggests thatexcessive brutality was counterproductive for the Germans, and that they mighthave enjoyed greater success in defeating the partisans if they had shown morereadiness to collaborate with the anti-Communist Serb Chetniks, who would havebeen receptive.

A few old canards have crept into the book. References to the ‘centuries-olddivide-and-rule tactics of Ottoman and Habsburg rulers’ (73) and to a ‘centuries-old Muslim-Christian enmity’ (150) are cliches. It is untrue that Yugoslavia suf-fered 1.75 million dead in World War II (1); the real figure was just over a million.It is also untrue that Operation Barbarossa was delayed by the Germans’ Balkancampaign of spring 1941 (72): as historians such as Martin van Creveld and BryanFugate have argued, the delay arose from logistical problems unrelated to theBalkans. Shepherd overstates his case for German hostility to the Serbs when he


writes that ‘Of all the regions of occupied Yugoslavia, it would be Serbia thatwould be saddled with the lowliest position’ (77); Serbia was at least permitted adegree of statehood and autonomy in the Nazi order, unlike Slovenia, Bosnia-Hercegovina or Macedonia. Yet these are minor gripes. Shepherd’s book is recom-mended to all who wish better to understand Hitler’s Wehrmacht and the outcomeof World War II in Yugoslavia.

Scott B Smith, Captives of Revolution: The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik Dictatorship,

1918–1923, University of Pittsburgh Press: Pittsburgh, PA, 2011; xix + 380 pp., 12 illus.;

9780822944034, $45.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: James D White, University of Glasgow, UK

Ostensibly this book is about the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), but, as the authorexplains, rather than to simply restore a neglected party to scholarly attention, hisaim is to explicate the politics of the Russian civil war. As Smith shows, the twoaspects are connected: the history of the SR party provides an insight into thedynamics of the civil war and its outcome in favour of the Bolsheviks. Followingthe French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, Smith sees politics as a struggle toimpose an authoritative version of the social world. He believes that the versionof the civil war that the Bolsheviks sought to promulgate was that it was a contestbetween Red and White, between the forces of the proletariat and those of thebourgeoisie, and that there was no third way. This despite the fact that the civil warwas a very complex phenomenon, so that it would be more accurate to say thatthere was not one, but several simultaneous civil wars. The success of theBolsheviks was their ability to defeat the democratic opposition to their dictator-ship posed by the SRs and the Mensheviks and to secure for themselves a monop-oly of revolutionary discourse.

What gives shape to Smith’s book is not so much the sociological theory that itadopts, but the fact that it assigns such a pivotal role to the Constituent Assemblyand its dissolution in January 1918. This serves to emphasize the democratic cre-dentials of the SRs in contrast to the authoritarian tendencies of their adversaries.Less attention is paid to the SRs’ opposition to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and thesequence of events flowing from this, which is a narrative that previous historiansof the SR party have tended to follow.

Much of Smith’s book is devoted to the activities of the SRs in Siberia, as thearea in which the anti-Bolshevik movement was able to take root. Unlike in Russiaproper, the Siberian peasants enjoyed a greater prosperity, and there were fewerindustrial workers, a group more likely to support the Bolsheviks. In Siberia toothe SRs had the support of the Czechoslovak Legion, and with the Legion’s pro-tection they were able to establish a government bearing the title ‘Committee ofMembers of the Constituent Assembly’ or ‘Komuch’. Komuch was intended toestablish continuity with the Constituent Assembly that the Bolsheviks had dis-solved. Considering itself to be part of ‘revolutionary democracy’ Komuch tried to

Book Reviews 585

implement a moderate socialist programme. It promulgated the land reform thathad been adopted by the Constituent Assembly at its one and only session. But,because it considered the nationalization of industry premature, it denationalizedthose industries under its jurisdiction which had been nationalized by theBolsheviks.

Smith follows step by step the processes by which Komuch was undermined bycompetition from the more right-wing Siberian government, and latterly by thecoup d’etat carried out by Admiral Kolchak. He shows too how even relativelyliberal organizations, such as the cooperatives in Siberia, came to support Kolchak.Smith notes that support for Kolchak was also more likely to come from theBuriats and other ethnic minorities than the Russian peasants in Siberia.

The outbreak of the German revolution in November 1918 and the subsequentannulment of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk created a new situation for the SRs. Theycould no longer interpret their military campaign against the Bolsheviks as part ofthe wider war; now it had become part of a ‘normal civil war’, and they foundthemselves allied with the forces of reaction. Negotiations were opened with theBolsheviks to form an alliance in fighting against the Kolchak regime. However,the SRs had missed their moment; they had wanted to negotiate from strength, as avaluable ally against Kolchak, but by the time they came to bargain with theBolsheviks Kolchak’s forces had already disintegrated. The opportunity tobecome a moderating force on the Bolshevik dictatorship had passed.

For their part, the Bolsheviks were eager to demonstrate that the SRs were notpart of the revolutionary democracy that they claimed to be, but were in factrenegades from socialism and properly belonged to the anti-socialist camp. Thetrial of the SRs in 1922 was the opportunity for the Bolshevik regime to drive thisview home. Smith concludes his study by showing that the narrative of theBolsheviks’ being the only possible socialist party lay behind the show trials ofthe 1930s and Soviet political culture in general.

Smith has written an extremely valuable and dispassionate analysis of the pol-itics of the Russian Civil War centred on the dilemmas confronting the SR party.The limitation of the work is that it achieves its high degree of coherence by itsselectivity, selectivity in terms of following the continuity from the ConstituentAssembly rather than Brest-Litovsk, and selectivity in terms of geographicalarea: Siberia and the east rather than the western borderlands. It is essential read-ing for historians of the civil war period nevertheless.

David Stahel, Kiev 1941: Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East, Cambridge University Press:

Cambridge, 2012; xvi + 468 pp., 21 illus., 2 tables, 13 maps; 9781107014596, £25.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Stephen G Fritz, East Tennessee State University, USA

The German assault on the Soviet Union in June 1941 was a colossal endeavour, somuch so that any historian attempting to chronicle it of necessity has to pick amain point of emphasis. In his earlier work on Operation Barbarossa, to which


Kiev 1941 is a follow-up, David Stahel detailed the activities of Army Group Centrein its drive toward Moscow. His conclusion (rather revisionist to Anglo-Americanreaders, but one that mirrored the assessment of German historians) was that theWehrmacht’s triumph at Smolensk in late July was more apparent than real.Savage Soviet resistance combined with the limits of the German logistics systemmeant that Blitzkrieg had been replaced by positional warfare, which put Germanyat a grave disadvantage. The late autumn drive on Moscow thus not only had littlechance of success, but the turning point of the war had already come and gone atSmolensk. In addition to leaving himself open to charges of materialist determin-ism (the Germans lost simply because they had insufficient resources), Stahelseemed to also ignore in his earlier work the gigantic encirclement battle at Kievthat evidently jump-started the stalled Blitzkrieg campaign and gave the attack onMoscow a chance at success.

In some respects, Kiev 1941 is thus a response to his critics, with a furthermarshalling of his original arguments designed to show that the Ukrainian oper-ation, although spectacular, altered nothing. His evidence is persuasive and hisconclusions sound. The battle of Kiev has, indeed, been neglected, but in devotingonly two of his 10 chapters to the actual fighting, Stahel has not entirely rectifiedthis omission. The key to his argument, though, lies precisely in the importance ofthe larger context. Here, Stahel is on solid ground when he argues that the fierceSoviet resistance in July and August, which resulted in heavy German losses, pre-sented German leaders with a dilemma, especially when combined with the lack ofreplacements, the logistical shortcomings of the Wehrmacht and the poor roadsand unpredictable weather of Russia. Having failed to achieve the quick knockoutblow upon which their success was predicated, neither Hitler nor the Army HighCommand had a clear idea on how to proceed.

This led to the paralysing command disagreements of August which, far frombeing an example of Hitler’s petty interference, laid bare fundamental disagree-ments. While Halder at the OKH favoured a thrust on Moscow, Hitler had his eyesset on the economic resources of the Ukraine. Who was right? As Stahel notes, it isnot self-evident that Hitler possessed the weaker arguments: the failure ofBlitzkrieg meant the likelihood of the eastern war continuing into 1942, whichincreased the importance of the Ukraine for the German war economy, whileeven OKH planners conceded the dangers posed to Army Group Centre from itsoverextended southern flank. Finally, Stahel rightly emphasizes what should havebeen obvious at the time: the German supply and transportation systems were sooverburdened that, even had Hitler given the green light for an advance onMoscow, the necessary materiel to support such an advance could not have beenguaranteed.

As for the actual fighting at Kiev, Stahel corrects a number of popular misap-prehensions, most significantly in noting the hard fighting that slowed Germanoperations to a crawl, as well as the fact that the encirclement was enabled asmuch by Stalin’s ineptitude as German skill. The Wehrmacht certainly enjoyedsuperiority in operational technique, training and leadership, but in neither quality

Book Reviews 587

of equipment nor fighting ability did they outshine the Soviets. Despite the eventualscale of the victory, most Germans who experienced the savage combat in the Kievpocket were left more with a sense of foreboding than triumph. In the summer andautumn of 1941 the Germans were winning themselves to death, unable to convertoperational triumphs, won at an appalling cost they could not sustain, into astrategic victory. Still, success at Kiev produced jubilation at FuhrerHeadquarters and in Germany, as ultimate victory seemed possible.

The triumph at Kiev, however, could not alter the stark material equation facingthe Germans: while their strength ebbed even more, the Soviets showed yet againtheir powers of rejuvenation, while now also receiving the first shipments of whatwould be vital Anglo-American Lend-Lease aid. While Stahel perhaps too readilydismisses German prospects in the battle for Moscow (after all, the mid-Octoberpanic in the Soviet capital was quite real), his basic point is valid. In the absence ofanother monumental blunder on the part of Stalin the Wehrmacht lacked thestrength and resources to seize Moscow. Despite German illusions, at the timeand after the war, that superior will could simply overcome all obstacles, the realitywas that German power was insufficient to accomplish the goals set for theWehrmacht by Hitler. In bluntly reminding us of that reality, David Stahel hasperformed an important task.

Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011; viii + 577 pp.;

9780199599011, £25.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Abigail Green, Brasenose College, University of Oxford, UK

Jonathan Steinberg’s new biography of Bismarck has been widely acclaimed, andrightly so. I read a lot of German history, and this is the most enjoyable Germanhistory book I have read in years. As a deeply researched but accessible guide to thelife of one of nineteenth-century Europe’s most compelling and significant politicalfigures, it stands head and shoulders above other Bismarck biographies. The com-bination of Steinberg’s witty and engaging style with the profound insights intoGerman society and politics generated by a lifetime of scholarship provides thegeneral reader with much food for thought. This, however, is an academic journal,so it may be worth asking what Steinberg’s life of Bismarck has to offer to a morescholarly and rather better informed audience.

For me, the lasting benefit of this book has been the way in which it bringsBismarck the man to life. There are two distinct aspects to Steinberg’s achievement.On the one hand, Steinberg succeeds brilliantly in situating Bismarck in the socialworld of the nineteenth- century Prussian aristocrat. Thus we see the interconnect-edness of this world and the importance of family relationships, the tradition ofstate service, the provincial backwardness and relative isolation of the EastPrussian countryside, the strong current of devout Pietism, and the ingrainedsocial and political conservatism of the Junker class. We learn how this classshaped Bismarck, and the ways in which his personality set him at odds with it.


On the other hand, Steinberg is clearly fascinated by Bismarck’s complex psych-ology, and the ways in which it had an impact on his exercise of power and on hisrelationship with key figures such as Kaiser Wilhelm I and his wife Augusta. ForSteinberg recognizes that Bismarck’s power was, in the last analysis, psychological.This was, he argues, a man who changed the course of European history notthrough battle, because he commanded no armies, and not through the ballotbox, because despite his cult status in later years he never commanded a parlia-mentary party or mobilized mass support, but rather through the sheer force of hiswill as exerted over Kaiser Wilhelm and others in his immediate orbit. And thepeculiarity of this situation determined not merely his own career but the politicalstructure that he bequeathed to the Kaiserreich, in which the modern democraticfacade of the Reichstag overlay the absolutism of the old Prussian state, and theKaiser himself retained direct control of the army and the power to appoint ordismiss ministers.

Such a profoundly personal approach will, inevitably, have its detractors.Certainly, it works better when analysing Bismarck’s rise to power and the stun-ning diplomatic achievement of German unification than it does when analysingBismarck’s 20 years as Reichskanzler. Steinberg’s account of Bismarck’s life beforehe became Minister President provides illuminating insights into the evolution ofhis approach to the German question and his profound lack of principle in matterspolitical. His account of the politics of the 1860s is one of the best I have read, andwill be a great help to students seeking to understand what really mattered at thiscritical time.

By contrast, Steinberg’s analysis of Bismarck’s later years in power is ratherpatchy. Here, Steinberg focuses on Bismarck’s relationship with key politicaloperators like Windthorst, and on three key narrative strands: diplomatic rela-tions, the Catholic question and, to a lesser degree, the problem of theSocialists. This enables him to make sense of a vast amount of material,but it is by no means a comprehensive analysis. Scholars looking forinsight into even such major historical controversies as Bismarck’s socialimperialism will look in vain. Not that this really matters, since Steinberg isclearly seeking to write something more interpretative and insightful than atextbook.

More generally, those familiar with the history of the Kaiserreich may find thatthis biography presents a somewhat old-fashioned picture. With its focus relent-lessly on Berlin, the world of international diplomacy and, occasionally, the back-woods of Varzin, Steinberg’s book ignores the more complicated and variegatedsociety revealed by the current generation of German historians, who emphasizethe multiple modernities of late nineteenth-century Germany, and the continuedinfluence of liberalism on German politics and society. But the failure to takeaccount of these recent developments does not render Steinberg’s book less validor less insightful. Rather it serves to underscore the extent to which the archaic andthe modern coexisted side by side – both in Bismarck himself, and in the state andsociety he helped to create.

Book Reviews 589

Piotr Stolarski, Friars on the Frontier: Catholic Renewal and the Dominican Order in Southeastern

Poland, 1594–1648, Ashgate: Farnham, 2010; xvi + 265 pp.; 9781409405955, £65.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Howard Louthan, University of Florida, USA

Friars on the Frontier deserves a far broader readership than it is likely to receive.More often than not, Poland is only a small blip on the radar screen of earlymodern specialists. Its south-eastern frontier on the edge of Cossack countryseems remote. Then, there is the matter of the Dominicans. While the order maybe of great interest to medievalists, their place in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe is marginal at best – the great stars of the Catholic Reformationare the Jesuits. While other orders such as the Franciscans may receive some noticefor their supporting role, the Society of Jesus consistently gets top billing in thisperiod. Piotr Stolarski challenges these notions in this fine monograph. In so doing,he makes an important contribution to the burgeoning body of scholarship onCatholic Reform in Renaissance and early modern Europe.

Stolarski begins his book with an extended historiographical discussion.Recapitulating the weaknesses of the confessionalization thesis, he segues into amore specific analysis of Polish religious history. He is critical of a model that hastended to instrumentalize religion and view it primarily as an adjunct of stateformation. At the same time, he rightly challenges those who when consideringthe contributions of religious orders in the Catholic Reformation focus almostexclusively on the Jesuits. Without denying the importance of the Society,Stolarski contends that Catholic renewal in Poland was in no sense monolithic.The contributions of older orders such as the Dominicans must also be examined.In this basic sense the book succeeds. Indeed, Stolarski quickly highlights theresistance Jesuits faced in Poland from fellow Catholics. In the wake of an earlyseventeenth-century noble rebellion (the Sandomierz rokosz), the Jesuits encoun-tered significant hostility from both Protestants and Catholics. A few years later,they provoked an anti-Jesuit reaction at the university in Cracow in response totheir aggressive attempts to gain control of the institution.

Against this backdrop Stolarski traces the fortunes of Polish Dominicans, with aspecial emphasis on their work on the south-eastern frontier. Without glossing overthe order’s weaknesses during this period, he does highlight a number of criticalcontributions they made to the broader cause of Catholic Reform. The Dominicansspearheaded a successful campaign that resulted in the canonization of one of theirthirteenth-century members (Jacek Odrowaz_, canonized as St Hyacinth in 1594).Future king Wladyslaw IV (1632–48) appointed a Dominican as his court preacher,and the order continued to expand, especially in the east. Approximately fourhundred new convents were established in Poland-Lithuania during the seventeenthcentury – over a quarter of them were Dominican.

In the book’s final chapters Stolarski more closely investigates specific contri-butions of Dominican reformers. One of the monograph’s most compelling chap-ters is a study of Prince Wladyslaw’s court preacher, Fabian Birkowski. Wadingthrough a significant body of primary sources, Stolarski offers a concise overview


of his preaching and illustrates in particular how Birkowski appealed to traditionalvalues of the nobility through his sermons. Stolarski argues more broadly that theDominicans with their long history and experience in the Polish lands in manyways better understood and adapted to the local culture of the nobility than thebrasher and more aggressive Jesuits.

The book’s greatest strength is arguably its use of sources. From sermons tovisitation records, Stolarski has effectively mined a rich trove of primary sourcesand presents fascinating material on a variety of aspects of early modernCatholicism. More than simply an analysis of Polish Dominicans, Friars on theFrontier is the best available study in English on Catholic Reform in theCommonwealth. At times, though, the book’s apologetic tone can be heavy-handed. The Jesuits wear the black hats in Stolarski’s account, and though manyof his observations are on target, he would have benefited from a more explicitengagement with John O’Malley’s work on the Society.

Stolarski could also have strengthened his analysis by situating his material in awider central European context. The attempts of the Jesuits to expand their influ-ence at the university in Cracow, for example, were part of a broader pattern playingout across the Catholic world. At universities in Prague and Vienna, in Mainz andCologne, Jesuits vied with non-Jesuits for dominance and control of these institu-tions. In like fashion, he could have anchored his discussion of topics such as homi-letics, pilgrimage and confraternities in the larger body of literature on early modernCatholicism. These are, however, minor criticisms of a carefully researched studythat sheds such an important light on Catholic Reform in eastern Europe.

Gregor Thum, Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocl=aw During the Century of Expulsions, trans. Tom

Lampert and Allison Brown, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2011; xl + 508 pp., 90 b/w

illus., 2 maps; 9780691140247, £52.00 (hbk); 9780691152912, £24.95 (pbk)

Reviewed by: James Bjork, King’s College London, UK

The post-1945 transformation of Breslau into Wroclaw was one of the more dra-matic developments of twentieth-century European history. In the space of a fewyears, a city of more than 600,000 residents was largely emptied of its existingpopulation and repopulated by hundreds of thousands of immigrants fromPoland’s central regions and its former eastern territories. While this can hardlybe described as an ‘untold’ story, it has perhaps never been told as engagingly, andalmost certainly never analysed from so many provocative angles, as in GregorThum’s Uprooted, an English translation – with some additional introductory text– of his Fremde Stadt, originally published in 2003. Drawing on a rich and diversecollection of sources, from archival material to diaries and memoirs to guidebooksand local history periodicals, Thum’s book brings to life not only the profound,traumatic rupture that the city experienced after 1945, but also the subtle andcomplicated ways in which urban life was re-established and a sense of historicalcontinuity re-imagined.

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The literature on the transfer of the Oder-Neisse territories from Germany toPoland and the forced emigration of Germans from these territories has, not sur-prisingly, been subject to sharp national polarization. Transcending this polariza-tion is no easy task, and Thum resists the temptation to do so by avoiding difficultissues and reverting to a blandly ‘conciliationist’ account. He insists on framing thetransition to Polish rule in 1945 as a ‘tragedy’, premised as it was on the radicaldisruption of the lives of not only hundreds of thousands of emigrating Germansbut also hundreds of thousands of immigrating Poles. Chapters on ‘MythicizingHistory’ and ‘Cleansing Memory’ offer an uncompromising scholarly critique ofthe distortions generated by the creation of a neatly Polish-national thousand-yearhistory of the city. Thum argues forcefully that the new inhabitants of the citycontinued to be haunted by the total rupture of 1945 and the resulting absence ofany embodied municipal memory: ‘No stable local identity could emerge on thisbasis’ (385). These themes make the book a useful counterpoint to the rather sunnymulticultural optimism of Norman Davies’s Microcosm: A Portrait of a CentralEuropean City, in which the city’s traumatic mid-twentieth-century transformationis subsumed into a longue duree of German–Polish coexistence.

But if Uprooted continues some recognizably ‘German’ strands of argument, italso moves decisively beyond the stale national polemics of the past. First, Thumopens the book with a concise but highly effective account of how Breslau’s road tocatastrophe was paved by the self-immolating madness of the National Socialistregime long before Soviet and Polish forces entered. Second, in his extendedaccount of the establishment of Polish rule and Polish settlement, a critical toneis balanced by a commendable degree of empathy, especially for ‘ordinary’migrants, but also, to some extent, for national and Communist-party elites. Assuggested by a chapter titled ‘Propaganda as Necessity’, Thum recognizes thatattempts to ‘Polonize’ local history and make local landscapes meaningful fornew inhabitants were not just lamentable acts of ‘falsification’ but vital copingstrategies for overcoming the recent past and re-establishing urban life.

Finally, and most importantly, the book asks provocative questions and providessome surprising answers about what, exactly, the ‘Polonization’ and ‘de-Germanization’ of the city actually meant in practice. In certain ways, to be sure,nationalization was a straightforward process, hinging on the promotion of onenational language and the erasure of another. And the book gives due space torecounting how German signs and inscription were gradually removed from build-ings and German streets and other place names replaced with Polish ones. Butadding or subtracting text forms a relatively minor part of rebuilding a devastatedcity. Government officials, urban planners and architects had to figure out how‘Polishness’ could be visibly inscribed into Wroclaw’s new built environment.Which architectural styles ‘looked German’ or ‘looked Polish’ was an open anddebatable question, and in one of the most interesting sections of the book,Thum recounts some of the counter-intuitive rules of thumb that emerged.Gothic architecture, which one might think of as having broadly ‘Germanic’ con-notations, was read in a local context as impeccably ‘Polish’ since it evoked a period


(the Middle Ages) when Silesia was governed by princes of the Polish-speaking Piastdynasty. The Baroque style, by contrast, despite its affinities with RomanCatholicism, was associated with a period of increasing Germanization in Silesiaand was thus viewed somewhat suspiciously. Nazi-era buildings, resembling inmany ways the socialist realist monumentalism favoured by the post-warCommunist regime, were often preserved, while buildings from the nineteenthand early twentieth centuries, seen as more irredeemably ‘Prussian’, were morelikely to fall into disrepair or even face demolition.

In these sections describing debates about historic preservation and urban plan-ning, as well in early treatments of the challenges of integrating immigrants fromdiverse parts of Poland, Uprooted provides useful reminders of the ways in post-war Wroclaw was a ‘normal’ as well as an exceptional city. For while the demo-graphic discontinuities that new residents experienced were unprecedented for acity of this size, the subsequent processes of re-rooting, of making an urban spaceinto a landscape of legible places, followed a quotidian logic that will be recogniz-able to any student of urban history and amenable to comparative study. Thum’sbook is thus a highly stimulating contribution to a range of discussions in historyand the social sciences, as well as essential reading for those interested in the epicpopulation transfers of mid-twentieth-century Central Europe.

Balazs Trencsenyi and Marton Zaszkaliczky, eds, Whose Love of Which Country? Composite States,

National Histories and Patriotic Discourses in Early Modern East Central Europe, Brill: Leiden, 2010; viii

+ 784 pp.; 9789004182622, E136.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Thomas Lau, University of Fribourg, Switzerland

Despite the flurry of works over the past three decades which have explored thecomplicated internal structure of nationalism, we still know surprisingly little aboutits roots in pre- and early modern times: historians have largely focused on theobvious manifestations of national movements in the nineteenth century. This isnot to say that the previous centuries are terra incognita: scholars such as LindaColley, David Bell and Caspar Hirschi have produced influential studies on theconstruction of national myths in early modern England, France and Germany.Yet while their fine studies emphasized the impact early modern narratives had onthe construction of modern nationalism, they also called into question the distinc-tion between modern nationalism and early modern patriotism. There is therefore aneed for further research, especially on those periods (above all the seventeenthcentury) and those European regions that have been ignored so far.

To close this gap was the aim of the coordinators of the project ‘The IntellectualHistory of Patriotism and the Legacy of Composite States in East Central Europe’.The fascinating volume under discussion is the fruit of their efforts. In the intro-duction the editors outline their objectives, which are to examine the temporaltransformations of patriotic discourses in east central Europe, to explore regionalvariations, and to discuss the impact of decentralized political structures

Book Reviews 593

(composite monarchies) on the construction of national identities. The volume isdivided into four parts that combine a chronological and thematic approach. Eachof them stands, from the editors’ point of view, for a specific step in the develop-ment of early modern patriotism.

The first part focuses on ‘Humanist Visions of the Patria’. It comprises eightchapters written by well-established experts. Gabor Almasi explores the construc-tion of sixteenth-century Wallach identity. Most of the authors who were engagedin this process, Almasi emphazises, could hardly be called humanist. They lackedthe education and the typical social network defining this specific group of scholars.Nevertheless, the humanist idea became important to them. Challenged by theSaxon claim of superiority, Wallachian authors had to construct their own anti-quity. The Wallachians, they argued, were anything but Barbarian – they were anold Roman offspring who never lost the noble character of their ancestors.

This styling of the past was motivated by the desire to make one’s own nationappear respectable or even superior, but it could serve other purposes as well.Zrinka Blazevic shows in her chapter how rival religious and political factionsused the construction of a distinctive Illyrian identity in order to promote theirown interests or to bridge conflicting positions. Anna Grzeskowiak-Krwawicz ana-lyses the same mechanism in her chapter on the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.It was the idea of the Polish patria as the home of liberty, she argues, thatsmoothed the rivalries inside the multicultural noble society of the ‘Republic ofthe two nations’.

No doubt, the rhetoric and ideology of the humanist scholars was tremendouslyinfluential. They are however not to be confused with modern nationalism. Thenations they constructed had, as Lucie Storchova emphasizes in her brilliantessay, little to do with modern entities. As a relatively small and exclusive group,humanists were neither primarily concerned with political matters, nor with theconstruction of imagined communities, but with the individual’s capacity to governitself.

Is nationalism a new ideology that simply uses old elements to construct a newsense of community? Most of the seven authors contributing to the second part ofthe volume (‘The Politics of the Estates and the Love of Fatherland’) would dis-agree. Sandor Benes describes in his chapter how a princely servant and a scholarcooperated in redefining Croatia. They did so by pursuing very different interests.Nevertheless, the fatherland they reconstructed was more to them than simply auseful instrument: the love they felt for their patria was real. The question whetherearly modern nationalism leads directly to modern nationalism is difficult toanswer, because the phenomenon is a multifaceted one, as Petr Mat’a explains inhis chapter on the ‘Patres Patriae’. In seventeenth-century Bohemia the term patriacould mean virtually everything to everyone.

This was true also in respect of the religious dimension of the patria discourse,discussed in the third part of the volume. The master narrative of the elect people,Balazs Trencsenyi explains, gave meaning to otherwise meaningless events.Moreover it provided divers religious groups with the opportunity to identify


themselves as the embodiment of the true nation. The almost Babylonian confusionaround the meaning and the usages of the term patria was still to be observed in thelate eighteenth century. In the fourth and last section of the book dealing with‘Enlightenment Modalities of Patriotism’, Zsuzsanna Torok demonstrates that it isimpossible to distinguish between a feudal Landespatriotismus and a modernreform patriotism in eighteenth-century Transylvania. In line with other contribu-tors she resists the temptation to give simple answers to difficult questions.

Like most edited collections this volume has a number of weaknesses. The mainone is that the editors do not succeed in explaining why Poland should be placedinto the same historical area as Croatia or Transylvania. Is eastern central Europein the early modern period to be seen as a distinctive geographical, political andcultural entity? Arguably, eastern central Europe was not formed by the commonexperience of decentralized power in the early modern period, but rather by theexperience of communism, democratic revolution and new nationalisms in the latetwentieth century.

This insight, however, has prompted historians to look at the early modernperiod in new ways. The weakness of the volume is thus also its strength: its con-tributors do not interpret early modern patriotism as a nationalist ideology in themaking. Instead, they analyse the formation of a framework that could be used fordifferent purposes; and they show the impact of this framework on modern nation-alism without neglecting the differences between the two.

Solomon Wank, In the Twilight of Empire: Count Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal (1854–1912), Imperial

Habsburg Patriot and Statesman. Volume 1: The Making of an Imperial Habsburg Statesman, Bohlau:

Vienna, 2009; 292 pp., 4 illus.; 9783205783527, E39.00 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Laurence Cole, University of Salzburg, Austria

As one of the key players among the Austro-Hungarian policy-making elite in thedecade prior to 1914, Count Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal is long overdue a bio-graphical treatment. Solomon Wank, who has already co-edited an extensivevolume of Aehrenthal’s correspondence, offers here the first volume of a biograph-ical study, which is nothing if not a tribute to scholarly endurance. The authordetails in the preface how research for the project began in 1958, and part of theground covered here formed the basis for his PhD of 1961. Over the years, Wankhas continually returned to Aehrenthal’s life and times, and this impressive, schol-arly work is testimony to the careful perusal of much archival material and sec-ondary literature. Pending Volume 2, it starts to fill an important gap in theliterature and provides fascinating insights into the mindset of someone at theapex of the Habsburg state, even if perhaps not entirely at ease there.

In line with the book’s subtitle, Wank’s emphasis is on Aehernthal’s develop-ment as a career diplomat and his early experiences in imperial service. Like themajority of his fellow diplomats, Aehrenthal came from a noble background, yetone of recent vintage. A successful entrepreneur, his great-grandfather had been

Book Reviews 595

raised to the nobility in 1790, before being knighted in 1805 for his contribution tothe fight against Napoleon; with the family estate expanding in subsequent years,Aehrenthal’s grandfather was raised to the baronetcy in 1828. When, therefore,Alois was born in the family castle of Gross-Skal/Hruba Skala in Bohemia in 1854,he became part of a family very much on the rise; two sisters would marry into theprominent aristocratic Colloredo-Mannsfeld family; Aehrenthal himself wouldmarry late, only in 1902, but confirmed the family’s new status by taking as hiswife Countess Paula Szechenyi, from the illustrious Hungarian magnate family.Aehrenthal was subsequently raised to the title of Count in 1909.

After tuition at home, the young Aehrenthal attended grammar school inPrague, where he mixed with the scions of leading Bohemian families. Fundedfrom his parents’ considerable patrimony, there followed periods of legal studyat the universities in Prague and Bonn, before he took his diplomatic exams inVienna during the winter and spring of 1877–78. However, as Wank emphasizes,Aehrenthal ‘became a consummate diplomat without inwardly desiring that career’(123). From his family correspondence, it seems clear that he would have muchpreferred the life of a country gentleman, cultivating his estates. With the family nolonger dividing the inheritance as it had once done, Aehrenthal – the second son,and third of six children – was denied this opportunity, and felt obliged to follow apublic career.

In an intriguing second chapter, full of psychological observations, Wank showshow Aehrenthal came to view it as his ‘holy mission’ to preserve the HabsburgMonarchy and, if possible, to strengthen it too (67). His views on how this might bedone were formed across the various stations of his burgeoning career. Above all,Wank pinpoints as decisive for Aehrenthal’s political formation his experience inRussia under Count Gustav Kalnoky, who arrived as ambassador to St Petersburgin July 1879. As the latter’s pupil, Aehrenthal ‘learned what became for him thetwo basic facts of Austro-Hungarian foreign policy. The first was the inescapablenecessity of establishing a basis for coexistence with Russia. The second. . . was thenecessity of carving out a clear-cut Austro-Hungarian sphere of influence inthe Balkan peninsula, with Serbia becoming an Austro-Hungarian protectorate’(128–9). For Aehrenthal, reconciling these two aims could be achieved by an agree-ment between the two powers, ‘partitioning the Balkans into respective western andeastern spheres of influence’ (131).

If these formed the guiding foreign political principles for his career, the purposeand manner of pursuing them were reinforced by Aehrenthal’s conception of theplace of foreign policy within the overall mission of the Habsburg state. Aehrenthalshared Kalnoky’s view that the Habsburg Monarchy was an inorganic politicalentity, which needed a strong political concept in order to survive. It was in the fieldof foreign policy that Aehrenthal believed such a concept could be found.Moreover, lacking a unified governmental structure after the establishment ofDualism in 1867, it fell upon the Foreign Minister (who also acted as Ministerof the Royal and Imperial House) to provide a cohesive vision for Austria-Hungary. In other words, Aehrenthal saw the role of the Foreign Minister as


being that of a de facto ‘Imperial Chancellor’. This in turn implied an ‘active policyas a means to restore the prestige of the monarchy and to acquire power for it’ (72).

Aehrenthal expounded on these ideas in a lengthy memorandum of December1898 to Goluchowski, Aehrenthal’s predecessor as Foreign Minister. Here, headvocated a forward policy in the Balkans, including the possible annexation ofSerbia. This proved to be not the only area of policy difference betweenGoluchowski and Aehrenthal. As well as criticizing the former’s overly ‘quietist’foreign policy, the two clashed over priorities and the links between foreign anddomestic affairs. Aehrenthal believed that foreign policy could help provide inter-nal consolidation, which could be achieved by appropriate concessions to theCzechs and other Slavic populations, while not jeopardizing the position of theAustrian Germans as the main supporters of the state. Goluchowski, believing thatan active foreign policy required the possession of power, which a state either hador did not have (rather than being able to acquire it), took a more cautiousapproach with regard to internal policy too. He supported a more generouspolicy towards the Slavic non-dominant ethnic groups and was more scepticaltowards the ideas of ‘modernized absolutism’ gaining favour in the circlesaround Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and to which Aehrenthal was becomingincreasingly sympathetic.

While aspects of this story are familiar in outline, or from vignettes alreadypublished by Wank, it is all woven together here into a very effective and con-sidered narrative. In particular, the author carefully brings out the clear contra-dictions in Aehrenthal’s aims: seeking to keep Russia on side, but pursuing a moreactive Balkan policy, and believing that conciliation of the Slavic populations wasnecessary, while advocating the interests of the Germans and central governmentwithin Austria as the foundation of the state. Trying to square these circles asForeign Minister would prove an even greater challenge. One eagerly awaits thepublication of Volume 2.

Book Reviews 597

Documents

ReviewManuel Álvarez Tardio and Fernando del Rey Reguillo (eds.), The Spanish Second Republic Revisited. From Democratic Dreams to Civil War (1931-1936), in European History Quarterly,