Review Sobre El Libro de Nederman Heresy in Transition
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BOOK REVI EWS AND NOTES 899 Adam J. Kosto considers the use of hostages in late-thirteenth-century Occitania as an early expression of representation, based on geography as well as estate. Alfonso III of Aragon demanded that hostages for Charles of Salerno include not only princes, nobles, and burghers, but also English (Gascon), French, and Provencal nobles and burghers. Two essays discuss the issue of growing consolidation of political power. Nathaniel L. Taylor charts the history of the house of Guifred the Hairy fr om the tenth to the twelfth century. The family, who became the Counts of Barcelona, moved from a comital power that was considered private, heri- table, and divisible property (138) to primogeniture and consolidation. Elizabeth Haluska-Rausch documents a similar process affecting widows near Montpellier. From the late tenth to the early thirteenth century these women lost first the ability to succeed to independent political power and eventually guardianship of their children in all but the domestic sphere. Simon R. Doubleday laments the loss of the historical voice of the power- less, and yet Alan Cooper records a few protests of ordinary jurors in Domesday Book; Carol Symes records activities of thirteenth-century Arras jongleurs, and Alan Friedlander describes individual signs o f thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century Languedoc notaries. Many of these authors have heeded Professor Bisson's counsel to analyze the exercise of power in m edieval localities. The collection, fo r example, also contains Stephen P. Bensch's essay on the efforts of the Counts (ca. 1080- 1140) to control minting in Em puries; Paul Freedm an's account of a charter o Count Oliba, who developed the Truce of God; and Bruce L. Venarde's contribution that Robert of Arbrissel , d. 1116, demonstrated eccentric behav- ior but was not an early feminist. The theme of the book provides a provocative means to consider niedieval topics with fresh techniques and insights. This reviewer's fear, however, is that some of this valuable knowledge will languish unread because the appropriate students will lack access to detailed databases. John W. Dahmus Stephen F. Austin State University Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of eresy in Medieval and Early Modem Europe. Edited by Ian Hunter John Christian Laursen an d Cary J . N ederman. Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700. Alders hot, U.K. : Ash gate, 2005. xii + 210 pp. $ 99.95 cloth. In their introduction to this collection of articles, the editors express their intention to chart transformations in the social construction of heresy from the Middle Ages to the early modem period. This is a timely goal insofar as there has been a recrudescence of heresy research in the past few decades. The majority of this recent research has been of the synchronic variety. It is thus mostly concentrated on specific moments in the long—and lugubrious— history of heresy within Christendom. Accordingly, transhistorical and/or theoretical assessments of this subject have been few and far between. Any endeavor to study heresy in diachronic and nomothetic perspective would be a welcome addition to the scholarly literature (for a review of this literature, see Jacques Berlinerblau, Toward a Sociology of Heresy, Orthodoxy, and Doxa, History of Religions 40 [2001]: 327-51).
Review Sobre El Libro de Nederman Heresy in Transition
