Nobility, Land, and Service in Medieval Hungary by Martyn s> Rady (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 743 as a bufferbetween the ideological poles of capitalism and communism. She travelled extensively, from her birthplace in Constantinople via a novitiate in Franceand Italy, to Menshevik Georgia, the Soviet Union, North Africa and America, and thence to her final restingplace in Worthing, Sussex. Monique Reintjes has tracked Keun's career, almost literally, across Europe and beyond, and searched out all that survives of the written and oral evidence relatingto her biography, amoursand literaryactivity. Keun was a socialist and, after the title of one of her earliest novels, une femme moderne. She considered the hymen 'a nonsense', and made the heroines of her novels pay for their own meals (p. 22). She also had very little time for the Bolsheviks and was emphatically not a fellow traveller. As she herself wrote, the true condition of Soviet Russia, which she discovered in I921, 'brokeherheart'(p. 33).The presentworkdiscussesextensivelyKeun's travels in Georgia, both before and after the Red Army invasion, and, rathermore briefly,her forced sojournsin Sevastopol, Kharkov and Moscow in the early 1920s. It additionally recalls to scholarly attention the many vignettes, anecdotes and observations contained in Keun's several and now largely forgotten works on contemporary East European politics and society: most notably, MyAdventures inBolshevik Russia(I 923) andIntheLandoftheGolden Fleece (1924). School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies MARTYNRADY University College London Rady, Martyn.Nobility,Land,andService inMedieval Hungary. Studies in Russia and East Europe. Palgrave, Basingstoke and New York, 2000. XV+ 23 I pp. Maps. Notes. Bibliography.Index. /45.??. IN this volume, Martyn Rady offers an account of land-holding and noble society in Hungary (extending to Slavonia, the Slovak Highlands, and Transylvania) from the tenth to the sixteenth century. Beginning with an account of the dynastic strugglesin Hungary which led to the house of Arpad coming to unquestioneddominance, Rady exploresand laysbare the intricate cat's-cradleof relationshipswhich knit the nobility together. His model is the structure of the royal household, and the officials udvarnik, ispan,and iobagiones castri-around whose activities the book revolves. The core of the study is on land-holding, and Rady's account of this is comprehensive and readable; he spends much time examining communal land-holding, and, in particular, the tension generated by complicated legislation affecting the devolution of estates on death, between escheat to the Crown, and the inheritance claims of direct male descendants, and collaterals. He also examines the institutionknown as 'the daughters'quarter' (pp. I03-07) and the subterfuges developed throughout the fourteenth century by which the practice evolved (as such are wont to do) despite the provision that the quarter was supposed to be paid in cash or kind into a means of permanently conveying estates, immunized from inheritance claims, to claughters. 744 SEER, 79, 4, 2001 Much more than the socio-legal dealings of the nobility fallswithin Rady's purview. This reviewerwas particularlyinterestedin his account of the role of the pristaldus,a sort of twelfth-century ad hocsheriff (p. 65), who was also expected, in remembering them, to function as 'a physical record of the proceedings', and the description(pp. 71-74) of the course of litigation viathe varioustypes of quasi-judicialinquisition. The scholarshipin this book is palpable and it is often put to excellent use. For instance, there are lucid and economic descriptions of the labyrinthine machinations underpinning the creation of land-power bases by particular individuals (e.g. p. 34), as well as the disastrouseffect of partible inheritance (e.g. p. 46). Perhaps,however, it shouldnot passwithoutnotice thattheweight of scholarship does occasionally impede the fluency of the argument: this reviewer could not but admire 'Pozsega, the name of which recalls the Slavonicword foran assart'(p. 8i), but thought itjust too good a line to throw away almost as an aside. The reader seeking the amplest exploitation of this interestingstudywould have been assistedby some easily-providedmodifications.It is a nuisance that the first-rate footnotes (sic) appear at the end. A glossary of technical expressionswould have closed some loopholes (e.g. zupan(p. 24) seems to go unexplained), and would have enabled the authoritativeform of some slightly unstable technical expressions, for instance, udvarnik/udvornik ('provider')to have been settled. The absence of a list of monarchs' dates is...