Die Lehre vom Ritterstand: Zum Ritterbegriff in Historiographie und Dichtung vom 11. biszum 13. Jahrhundert by Hans Georg ReuterReview by: Bernard S. SmithThe American Historical Review, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Jun., 1975), p. 628Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1854280 .

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628 Reviews of Books

tions and is often repetitious in stating facts or ideas. His book is well documented and is supplied with an ample bibliography, especially valuable for its listing of Arabic manuscripts and printed sources. There are several maps, though the island of Minorca is missing on them. Several of the dates assigned to Christian rulers are incorrect. For all its deficiencies, this book is helpful and will no doubt achieve one of the author's principal aims, to encourage further study of Muslim Spain.

JOSEPH F. O'CALLAGHAN

Fordham University

HANS GEORG REUTER. Die Lehre vom Ritterstand: Zum Ritterbegriff in Historiographie und Dich- tung vom II. bis zurn 13. Jahrhundert. (Neue Wirtschaftsgeschichte, number 4.) Cologne: Bohlau Verlag. 1971. Pp. ii, 207. DM 24.

This essay undertakes a very necessary work of demolition, and its success reminds us of the truth that for a better understanding of the past we do not so much need new evidence as a more rigorous examination of what ev- idence we already have. The author asks whether the literary historians' belief in the existence of a knightly class, which was re- sponsible for the lay culture of the German High Middle Ages, can be sustained by con- temporary literary and historiographical ev- idence and concludes that it cannot. His method is to interpret the key words "Ritter" and "miles" in all kinds of context and to demonstrate thereby that the variety and fluidity of their meanings make it impossible to apply them as fixed class or functional labels. Even the often cited tripartite division of medieval society-clergy, warriors, and farmers-is shown to be less contemporary sociology than hortatory exegesis. If there was an ordering principle, and it is not certain anyone felt a need for one, it classified people according to the powers they exercised over land and other men. Mod- ern attempts to accommodate the tangle of re- ciprocal rights and duties these powers entailed to the tidy nineteenth-century concepts of "class" and "profession" have compounded the errors made first by eighteenth-century legal historians and then by Romantic literary critics, who saw courtly literature as a true reflection of medieval life and its knights as a unified class self-consciously expressing the spirit of their times. With the poetry thus misunder- stood by its most authoritative interpreters and thereafter appealed to as historical evidence, fiction has been piled on fiction. The author's

scrutiny of the literature produced in Germany between io6o and 1250 provides such clear evidence of the falsity of the received view that one can only wonder why it has been clung to for so long.

BERNARD S. SMITH

Swarthmore College

REINHOLD SCHUMANN. Authority and the Com- mune: Parma 833-II33. (Fonti e studi, Second Series, 8.) [Parma:] Presso della Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Province Parmensi. 1973. Pp. xxi, 397, 12 maps. $19.00.

How, in Parma and similarly in other towns, did the civic assembly, around the turn of the eleventh century, acquire authority that had at one time been exercised from above, when the assembly itself had been formed from be- low? A good discussion of a question like this one has bearing on every study of government in the Middle Ages and later, and a good dis- cussion means a full discussion, which is what Schumann has given us.

The scope of the book, as its title indicates, extends far beyond the moment a broad seg- ment of the population takes on a significant part in legitimate government. There is, first, a close examination of comital authority under the later Carolingians, not as simple a matter as used to be imagined, and one Schumann can illuminate with material from the Lombard and late Roman periods. The greater part of the study, and the most complex, takes up what happened to this comital jurisdiction, its distribution among families of various kinds and, largely, to the church of Parma in its various manifestations. The account goes be- yond the acquisition of authority by the civic assembly and others to conclude with the establishment of the commune in 1133, all in a well-developed context of reform and papal- imperial rivalry.

The central virtue of the study is the care its author has taken to work up each point in his argument with necessary material. He mines his documents for indications of the interests represented in them and the norms and expectations that, if understood, constitute their meaning. Its central vice is, naturally, the monographic style, but it is not unreadable, often insightful, and always clear when read with care. In his analyses Schumann considers evidence from topography, iconography, gene- alogy, political circumstance, and just about everything else available to supplement his own command oif the diplomatic. Most valuable, I

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