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Medieval Christendom: Two Presentations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

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Scholarship and reflection go together all too seldom. Two new books about the Middle Ages combine them in a quite exceptional way. It is no accident, but a sad commentary on present historical teaching, that one book was written by a professor in retirement, the other by a college tutor in a period of enforced rest. Both convey the rare and delightful impression of learning recollected in tranquillity. One remembers that the great Belgian medievalist, Henri Pirenne, wrote his Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe far away from his books and his students in a German prison camp in the First World War.

The Thirteenth Century (1216-1307) by Sir Maurice Powicke falls into two parts; the change in method and treatment is easily discernible. The first part covering the reign of Henry III draws on the author’s earlier book, Henry III and the Lord Edward, published in 1947. This large-scale work in two volumes summarized the findings of recent studies including the author’s minute researches into the reign of Henry III. Here he condenses it into a crisp and exciting narrative. A few details are new, since the first book provoked discussion, and some fresh studies have appeared. But the main difference is that judgments stand out more sharply and the characters have clearer outlines. If Henry remains very much the same, a naive, changeable, but ‘fundamentally decent’ person, his great friend and antagonist, Simon de Montfort, has become more sympathetic and intelligible. The incalculable trouble-maker, while still ambitious and erratic, now stands in closer relations with the knights and freeholders of the shires who supported his cause through their mistrust of royal promises.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1954 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1953. (30s.) Volume IV of the Oxford History of England, edited by G. N. Clark.

2 ‘Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln.’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library xxxv (1953), 506.

3 Reprinted from The Legacy of the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1926) in F. M. Powicke, The Christian Life in the Middle Ages and Other Essays (Oxford, 1935), 1–30.

4 ‘The Political Importance of the English Bishops during the Reign of Edward II’, English Historical Review, lix (1944), 311–347.

5 A. L. Poole, The Obligations of Society in the XII and XIII Centuries (Oxford, 1946), 13.

6 R. H. Hilton, ‘Peasant Movements in England before 1381’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, ii (1949), 117–136.

7 R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (Hutchinson's University Library; 25s.).