New Cambridge Medieval History.

WATTS, JOHN

New Cambridge Medieval History, VII: c.1415 - c.1500, ed. Christopher Allmand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). xxii + 1,048 pp.; 24 plates, 21 maps. ISBN 0-521-38296-3. 65.00 [pounds sterling].

Fifteenth-century Europe may not seem propitious territory for a multiauthored, monumental work like the New CMH. Caught, even now, between discourses of `waning' and `renaissance', this period is ia difficult one to characterize; its sources are extensive, its politics are intricate, its major cultural, social, and economic dynamics obscure or debated. The achievement of Christopher Allmand and his contributors is thus particularly striking. This is a book which not only succeeds in its series's traditional task of presenting canonical information on a suitably lavish scale, but also rises to the more novel and difficult challenge of making sense of the fifteenth century, both as a whole, and in most of its constituent spheres. The country-by-country surveys which dominated the old CMH still account for more than half the book, but here they are preceded by three sections covering, respectively, conceptual and constitutional frameworks, society and the economy, and culture. Structure thus receives as much prominence as action, and most of the contributors succeed brilliantly in presenting and explaining their interplay: the thematic chapters typically have a dynamic element; the narrative chapters, which often cover more than politics alone, typically discuss structural conditions. Some of the structural chapters get bogged down in problems of definition or categorization; occasionally, they rely on dated generalizations (was fifteenth-century Europe really beset by problems of authority unleashed by the Great Schism, for example?). But a much more striking feature of them is the development of new interpretative keys: the spreading impact of education and the wider circulation of artworks; the disjuncture between constitutional realities and the vocabularies of political understanding. The narrative chapters sometimes fail to introduce the polities under discussion (the English chapters, though not the British ones, are predictable offenders here; the Scandinavian chapter a more surprising one); but most provide skilful and meaningful accounts of politics, eminently suitable for undergraduates, but also interesting and informative for their tutors (and equipped with valuable bibliographies). One could have wished for slightly more editorial control at times: a little more uniformity of structure and scope of coverage might have improved some articles without damaging others; a historiographical introduction, and a slightly more searching conclusion, would have been nice. But this is perhaps to expect too much. Complexity is, after all, the keynote of fifteenth-century Europe as it is presented here -- a time of economic challenges and opportunities, of political development and diversification, of rapid educational advance and widespread curiosity about both world and faith, of traditional heuristics and established social structures struggling with new ones; such a time cannot be summed up simply.

JOHN WATTS Oxford