Our Medieval Heritage: Essays in Honour of John Tillotson for his 60 th Birthday (review)

Abstract

Short Notices 243 Parergon 21.1 (2004) Rasmussen, Linda, Valerie Spear and Dianne Tillotson, eds, Our Medieval Heritage: Essays in Honour of John Tillotson for his 60th Birthday, Cardiff, Merton Priory Press, 2002; pp. 235; cloth; RRP £25.00; ISBN 189837559. At a time when medieval and early modern studies are the subject of a major Research Networks survey and funding application to the Australian Research Council, it is very instructive to have this collection of papers from colleagues and students – past and present – of John Tillotson’s at the Australian National University. Tillotson has been at ANU since the mid-1960s, beginning as a PhD student of Eleanor Searle’s and later as a teacher and researcher. The contributors reflect something of the state of medieval studies in Australia, with only a minority holding full-time academic positions and the rest either employed outside academia, working in an honorary capacity, or working on doctoral or postdoctoral projects. The papers are given a reasonable degree of coherence by the way they reflect Tillotson’s own research interests. Three papers relate to the place of women in medieval European monasticism: Valerie Spear examines why there was little overt resistance to the dissolution of the English nunneries in the 1530s, Linda Rasmussen looks at how some groups of English nuns negotiated the place of their houses in the complicated patchwork of legal and financial privileges, and Julie Hotchin considers the nature of the obligation of male monks to provide pastoral care to women. Civic identity and moral regulation is another area of interest: Bill Craven discusses the relationship between sumptuary laws and the ‘bonfire of the vanities’ in Savonarola’s Florence, while Stephanie Tarbin investigates the regulation of sexual misconduct in 15th -century London. The other contributions are more miscellaneous, ranging from notions of masculinity in chivalric romance (Tania Colwell) to military campaigns in medieval Cappadocia (Alexander Grishin) – to mention just two. While there is some variation in quality and substance across the different papers, on the whole they are substantial and valuable additions to research in their specific areas. A final section which deserves particular notice is a group of three useful papers on digital applications in the field of medieval studies. Judith Pearce provides a succinct and thought-provoking survey of the possibilities for digital catalogues and image databases of medieval manuscripts. Dianne Tillotson gives a brief historical account of developments in the use of multimedia and the Web for teaching medieval studies, and Greta-Mary Hair reports on a specific, highly innovative computer package for teaching 11th century chant notation. Like the 244 Short Notices Parergon 21.1 (2004) other, research-oriented contributions, they reflect very well the variety and vitality of medieval studies in just one institution in the Australian higher education sector. Toby Burrows Scholars’ Centre The University of Western Australia Toch, Michael, Peasants and Jews in Medieval Germany: Studies in Cultural, Social and Economic History (Variorum Collected Studies), Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003; pp.xiv, 328; RRP £57.50; ISBN 0860788962. Michael Toch has devoted much of his scholarly life to teasing out some of the more obscure aspects of peasant history in Germany and Eastern Europe. For instance, while we know little of the language of German peasants, particularly when they are speaking to one another, he has used small but significant scenes in medieval German literature to consider what aspects of communication between lords and peasants can tell us about their social attitudes and the strategies they used at different times and in different places to maintain their particular interests. He develops some interesting ideas about the economic relationships involved that run counter to the received wisdom about the transition from direct cultivation to peasant tenure in agriculture that developed about the time of the Plague. This relates especially to the lord’s provision of the working capital for his tenants, an aspect of continental farming which did not cross the Channel and so is unfamiliar to historians of England. Agrarian credit of this and other varieties, and its organisation and importance, have been neglected. Much of his work is in such gaps, areas that have received little attention from other historians because of the difficulty...