Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World (review) Gregory Hanlon Journal of World History, Volume 21, Number 1, March 2010, pp. 140-145 (Review) Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.0.0102 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/376799 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] 140 journal of world history, march 2010 In many ways these essays work well together and demonstrate some of the new understandings of premodern use and reception of ceremony and ritual. For example, Muir’s inclusion of Renaissance optical theory to try to explain how people saw the procession was both interesting and innovative. However, his claim that ceremony could never impose a single message or produce a single interpretation was not as original. There were no references to scholarship that had already demonstrated the ambiguity of early modern symbolism or that most of the common people did not comprehend the elaborate allegories staged by the civic elites and often only caught glimpses or heard snatches of the entire event.1 Although all four essays tried to explicitly evaluate the participation of the audience, they did not really take into account that the ceremony/ritual itself was not experienced in its totality. Whereas Muir’s bibliography may not have been as inclusive as I would have liked, he did include gender in his analysis, something that the other authors did not do, which does seem a striking omission, especially if one is trying to discern the possible messages received by the audience. In spite of each essay’s shortcomings, this erudite and comparative collection of scholarship on ritual and ceremony in premodern Europe, although probably too advanced for undergraduate students, does offer interesting insights to scholars who work on this subject. catherine l. howey Eastern Kentucky University Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World. Edited by charles h. parker and jerry h. bentley (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. 332 pp. $75.00 (cloth); $34.95 (paper). Individual and Community is a loose-fitting title for studies combined under the guise of tribute to the eminent scholar James Tracy. Like a conference panel with too many participants, the three thematic 1 For example, see Stephen Orgel, “Gendering the Crown,” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 133–165; and R. Malcolm Smuts, “Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma: The English Royal Entry in London, 1485–1642,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 65–93. Book Reviews 141 groupings look a bit contrived. Charles H. Parker’s introductory essay seeks to justify the superiority of the term “early modern” with respect to the traditional “Renaissance-Reformation” tradition of the American academy. Jerry Bentley notes that the term “early modern” has only been in use since the 1960s. After evoking some of these debates over periodization, he concludes that three fundamental processes drove the development of the early modern world: the creation of a global network of sea lanes, an early capitalist global economy, and the global exchange of biological species. These processes gave Western Europe a modest advantage in its interaction with the different peoples of the planet. Bentley is apparently unaware that continental European scholars have been referring to the period between 1500 and 1800 as the “modern era” for at least a century. His notes reveal that he reads only English, which is a rather dire shortcoming for any historian of any period. The book’s first section purports to stress the importance of corporate structures in everyday life. Thomas Brady reviews the historiography of German late medieval and early modern communal life and how it would help us understand the Peasants’ War and the Reformation. Peter Blickle emphasized the unity of burghers, peasants, and miners in their local assemblies, which helped foster a notion of a religious community. Tom Scott, in contrast, stressed the growing commercialization and specialization of labor that undercut the very unity that Blickle extols. Brady characterizes these contrasting views as one promoting a moral agenda aiming to improve public life (Blickle) and the other stressing utilitarian rationality (Scott), before concluding that neither approach can adequately treat the messiness of the Peasants’ War. Henk van Nierop also examines the weight of communal solidarities in the Netherlands when political elites were forced to choose between rebellion and loyalty. Even when they were unambiguously Catholic, urban leaders were notoriously reluctant to prosecute heretics in their midst, and the militias were unwilling to use force against their fellow citizens. The militias stepped into the political void on one side or the other, and the arrival of refugees tipped the local balance decisively. In the aftermath of the Pacification of Ghent in 1579, reconciliation followed the road of respect for local autonomy, helped along by an economic revival after 1590. Carla Rahn Phillips seeks the glue holding the Spanish empire together in the enduring strength of family and local allegiance that spanned the Atlantic. Kinship was a reciprocal bond that lasted the entire lifetime of related individuals. Spanish migrants to the Americas married indigenous women or took up liaisons with them, and their mestizo offspring became vectors of Hispanization. Tes- 142 journal of world history, march 2010 taments reveal how kinship ties on each side of the Atlantic proved very resilient. The application of Spanish municipal organization to the Americas also served to give rootless people an address and a public life as citizens endowed with local responsibilities and recognition by royal authorities. Finally, Spanish Catholic confraternities spanned the oceans too, in which people of diverse status could enter into groups of symbolic kinship. All these affinity groups enabled people to rise on the social ladder, under the benign approval of the monarch. The second section explores the effects of migration and the contact between diverse cultural worlds. William D. Phillips Jr. teaches us that Europeans traveled to Asia in some numbers during the Pax Mongolica of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Missionaries and merchants spread across the trade routes of Central Asia. Latin Christians formed sizeable groups in India and China, where they were useful intermediaries between the Mongol rulers and their distrusted Chinese subjects. The identification of the Christian merchants and missionaries with the Mongols led to the collapse of these networks with the advent of a native Chinese dynasty, and Western migrants would have to begin afresh in the early sixteenth century. Douglas Catterall studies the migration patterns in the North Sea zone, first with the Scots merchant and maritime communities in Rotterdam. The Scots had the easiest transition to their adopted country by virtue of their Calvinism. Dutch and Flemish craftsmen established themselves on the periphery of London, where they could escape guild regulations. Their various creeds and confessions just added to the religious diversity of the capital city. Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam arrived under the guise of being “converse” Christians and did not drop the mask until 1603; they emerged as a “public” presence after 1620. These groups all secreted their own leaders, who concentrated some power of arbitration and discipline. Migrants who were unhappy with their local leaders could either join the host community or move on. Sanjay Subrahmanyam seeks the roots of ethnography in the Eurasian world, but the Dutch tendency to violence got in the way of a proper ethnological project. Dutch writings usually had close links to the special outlook of the East India Company, portraying Moghul or Iranian polity as corrupt and cruel. They treated Hindus with the same opprobrium. Company observers, writers, and image makers were keen to collect information they found useful, like plants and their uses, but they adopted a more negative tone when portraying the behaviors and beliefs of the social groups they encountered. Finally, Michael N. Pearson studies the consolidation of Islamic communities around the Indian Ocean littoral from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The emphasis to make nominal Book Reviews 143 Muslims adhere to a more “pure” observance is a process that continues to this day. Muslim traders brought their own preachers with them on their travels, who were instrumental in spreading the faith by making high-ranking converts in the ports where they traded. Consolidation of conversion might be achieved in the hajj to Mecca, the greatest routine movement of people anywhere in the early modern world. The spread of Arabic similarly supplanted native terms and concepts with those of the Arabian heartland. The coastal peoples gradually became distinct from their hinterlands by their religion. The book’s final section addresses the changing relationships between the individual and their community through multiple forms of association. Marie Seong-Hak Kim studies the deliberate reworking of French local customs by professional jurists who wished to devise a unified system of legislation during the sixteenth century. The king could not decree these changes on his own, so he relied on local elites to reexamine the corpus of custom in the light of the common good. Local lawyers, guided by a royal commissioner overseeing their activity, easily convinced the district estates to change inequitable and unreasonable rules. The campaign to reform and codify custom transformed it from a popular, empirical, and collective practice observed in the living community to a body of learned, reasonable, and equitable judicial rules sanctioned by the crown. Hugo de Schepper also examines the spread of royal power via the judicial system in the nearby Low Countries. Rural and regional tribunals functioned alongside feudal and country courts, all using customary local law not derived from written traditions. Judges in both city and country courts passed sentences in a discretionary manner without much possibility of appeal. Under the Burgundian and Habsburg princes, however, supraterritorial institutions emerged and by 1530 professional jurists operated everywhere. Private individuals now had the right to petition justice from the royal authorities, thereby demonstrating their confidence in royal justice over that of local or regional instances. The prince acquired by the same occasion the right to grant pardons in criminal offences and clemency for almost everything in the civil realm. These letters continually reinforced a feeling of warmth around the sovereign, with the result that individuals in urbanized regions greatly abetted the authority of the monarch. Susan Karant-Nunn returns to the religious realm to explore why the communal cohesion that produced the Reformation was so shortlived. Lutheran pastors were placed in a difficult position in the communities in which they officiated. They were held to rebuke and discipline people for sin, with the prince’s active support. Unrepentant sinners 144 journal of world history, march 2010 would be subjected to ostracism or multiple shaming rituals, and even sterner discipline was meted out in Calvinist districts. Protestant clergy everywhere were assisted by a lay board whose elders scrutinized everyone’s morality. In order to enhance the prestige of this clergy, rulers imposed the same rules that the Council of Trent adopted for priests, which socially separated the clergy from the laymen. In towns there was a narrow social elite with which the ministers could interact, but in villages the clerics could avoid complete isolation only by closing their eyes to peccadilloes. Ulrike Strasser laments that much of the literature on religious behavior rarely includes women, for modern definitions of religion affirm the primacy of belief over practice. German Protestants sometimes tolerated female convents, whose services teaching Christian virtues and domestic skills earned the approval of magistrates. In Catholic countries, the Council of Trent sought to diminish the hold of families over convents and erect ever-greater barriers to the outside world, but even there, she stresses that historians would exaggerate by portraying the nuns solely as victims. Convents could become influential places that dispensed charity, education, and hospital care. They appear particularly influential in acculturating mestizas in Spanish America. Convents in the Americas could offer spiritual perfection and moral influence to indigenous populations. The last contributions return to the economic domain. Kathryn Reyerson examines the transitional place of Jacques Coeur, financier and tax farmer to the king of France in the first half of the fifteenth century. He was the creator of the first French Mediterranean fleet, whose activities accelerated the emergence of the kingdom as a maritime power. Coeur’s multifaceted operations built around spices and precious metals relied on a network of compatriots from Berry, whose relations were more tightly controlled with respect to Italian firms. His ability to generate money was crucial to French success in the war against England, but his rising influence was still unsettling in a feudal society. As a forerunner to the Fuggers, he was too far ahead of his time. Donald J. Harreld examines the foreign merchants plying their trade in sixteenth-century Antwerp. Merchant guilds typically included only the large-scale, long-term foreign traders. Minor foreign merchants operated more as “free riders,” engaging in more traditional sectors, like the cheap textiles, foodstuff, and dyestuff of the southern Netherlands. These small-scale traders developed procedures of reciprocity with counterparts elsewhere that obviated the need for greater infrastructure. He sees a great deal of this mercantile individualism outside the merchant guilds of Antwerp. Markus Vink sees the East India Company as rather a typical early modern mercantilist institu- Book Reviews 145 tion straddling the collective and the individual. An ongoing historiographical tradition has emphasized how the East India Company could not free itself of high overhead costs and practices of representation that weighed heavily on its balance sheet. The company was a house of many rooms, however, and did more to bring the various parts of the Indian Ocean into contact with each other than any other agency, though routinely using force to achieve that aim. The system began to unravel after 1680, owing to increasing local restrictions in trade, combined with growing English competition. gregory hanlon Dalhousie University Witchcraft and the Papacy: An Account Drawing on the Formerly Secret Records of the Roman Inquisition. By rainer decker. Translated by H. C. Erik Midelfort. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. 262 pp. $45.00 (cloth). This engaging book will be of interest, for different reasons, to two different audiences. Decker has undertaken to write a brief, lucid account of the persecution of witchcraft in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to modern times, with particular respect to the role played by the Roman papacy and papally appointed inquisitorial authorities in that persecution. His goals are to counter the “black legend” of “the Inquisition” still prevalent in popular imagination, and more broadly to demonstrate that “the Church” was not the principal guiding force behind medieval and early modern witch trials. He writes in short, easily digestible chapters without excessive notation, clearly aiming at a general readership. At the core of this wide-ranging survey, however, is a more in-depth study of the handling of witch trials by the Roman Curia and above all by the central council of the Roman Inquisition. The weekly minutes of this body, preserved in the archive of the Holy Office in Rome and open to scholars only since 1998, form the source base for that study. Because the Roman Inquisition was established in 1542, Decker’s first several chapters, dealing with the medieval period, are almost exclusively a general overview of the role of the papacy and papal inquisitors in the slow emergence of the concept of diabolical witchcraft and the earliest European witch trials. He points out that for much of the Middle Ages, the papacy had little effective control over far-flung church institutions and that the persecution of magicians and witches, such as