Annexer? Les Déplacements de frontières à la fin du Moyen Âge, ed. Stéphane Péquignot and Pierre Savy

Abstract

This volume is the published outcome of two workshops held in 2012–13 on the topic of later medieval annexations and movements of borders. The contributors offer an admirably coherent set of chapters, which relate to one another both thematically and geographically: all of the contributions cover regions on, or just beyond, the shifting and contested frontiers of the kingdom of France in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. This coherence is aided by the tight definitional scope established by the editors, Stéphane Péquignot and Pierre Savy, in their introduction. Against the backdrop of a crowded historiographical field concerning the medieval frontier, they seek to pin down the modalities by which lands, jurisdictions and peoples moved from the control of one lord to another, and the conceptions of borders and sovereignty which such processes revealed or transgressed. They acknowledge that to speak of ‘annexation’ (a nineteenth-century word in its modern sense) raises problems of teleology and anachronism, which have been especially prevalent in narratives of French history. Yet contemporary concepts of annexatio or transportus and their vernacular equivalents did exist, and sometimes connoted the joining or attaching of a possession to a patrimony. The editors contend that studying processes of changes in boundaries and spheres of control reveals late medieval ideas of ‘the constitution of territory, that which makes and underpins the spatial demarcation of power’, and the extent to which contemporary authorities pursued deliberate ‘projects of annexation’ (pp. 17–19).