Review

Author(s): Mark C. Bartusis

Review by: Mark C. Bartusis
Source: The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Jan., 1998), pp. 89-90
Published by: Catholic University of America Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25025154
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 BOOK REVIEWS 89

My reservations are niggling. Pobst generally specifies the nature of the en

tries in the register, noting which are "letters patent" (e.g., no. 8), which are sim
ply "letters" (e.g., no. 11), and which are memoranda (e.g., no. 39)The nature of
a few entries is, however, less clear. No. 98, for example, is described as a "letter
of commission." Does that mean that no. 97, described simply as a "commission,"
is to be understood as a memorandum and not a letter? If a memorandum, why
not an explicit notice as in no. 39? Consistency in such matters is helpful in a
calendar. A note for no. 816 explaining why Pobst concludes the letter of in
duction was sent to the archdeacon of Sudbury rather than to the archdeacon's
official would also be useful. But these are small desiderata for an excellent edi
tion.
Michael Burger
Mississippi University for Women

The Reluctant Emperor: A Biography of fohn Cantacuzene, Byzantine Em

peror and Monk, c. 1295-1383. By Donald M. Nicol. (New York: Cam
bridge University Press. 1996. Pp. xiv. 203. $3995.)

Some dozen years ago I met Donald M. Nicol at a conference. Reflecting on

our mutual interest in the late Byzantine period, we discussed the perennial
trend toward overspecialization at the expense of works with broader perspec
tives and grander themes. He summarized this point of view by advising me,
then a graduate student, to write "big books." Throughout a distinguished schol
arly career Nicol has been true to this counsel, and for the benefit of a genera
tion of Byzantine historians, and others to come, he has written quite a few "big
books." Known to all Byzantine historians are The Despotate ofEpiros (Oxford,
1957), The Byzantine Family of Kantakouzenos (Cantacuzenus) ca.
1100-1460: A Genealogical and Prosopographical Study (Washington, D.C,
1968), The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 1261-1453 (London, 1972; 2nd ed.,
Cambridge, 1993), and The Despotate of Epiros, 1267-1479 (Cambridge,
1984), as well as other books and many articles which have established Nicol as
the pre-eminent authority on late Byzantine political history. Thus, the life and
age of John VI Kantakouzenos are familiar territory. But as he explains, his pur
pose here was to write not a social and political history of the Byzantine Empire
in the fourteenth century, but "a biography of a great and much-maligned and
misunderstood man" (p. 2).

John Kantakouzenos, emperor from 1347 to 1354, lived and led through civil
wars, dynastic squabbling, rebellions, religious controversies, invasions by Serbs
and Turks, and wars with Albanians and Latins. His thousand-page memoirs
which cover the period from 1320 to 1356 are an exemplary contribution to
medieval historiography and the most important source for the history of
fourteenth-century Byzantium. Nevertheless, they tell us very little about the

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90 BOOK REVIEWS

man himself. He wrote about himself in the third person, depicting himself, on
the whole, as a well-meaning, high-minded participant in much tragic business.

Nicol scours the sources to provide whatever can be said about the person
ality of John VI Kantakouzenos in order to round out his presentation of the his
tory of the period. He offers a sympathetic view of his subject, and this has
formed the basis of nearly every modern Byzantinist's opinion of the man. And
therein lies the problem. There are only so many ways to tell the same story.
About a third of The Byzantine Family of Kantakouzenos (pp. 35-103) deals
with Kantakouzenos and a quarter of The Last Centuries of Byzantium (pp.
157-261) deals with the period covered by his memoirs. Perhaps three-quarters
of the present book consist of paraphrases of sections from these two works.
Nicol tells the story well, and it is a story worth telling, but there is little here
that he has not already said before. Scholars and students would do better to
read his Last Centuries of Byzantium, a superb treatment of the turbulent late
Byzantine age.
Mark C. Bartusis
Northern State University
Aberdeen, South Dakota

Liberty, Right, and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought. By

Annabel S. Brett. (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 254.)

The word ius, as anyone acquainted with medieval juristic or scholastic texts
recognizes immediately, poses a baffling array of problems for those who wish
to explicate its range of meanings. Annabel Brett has written an important and
stimulating book that provides such an explication with respect to the scholas
tic discourse of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as well as the writings of
the Spanish Neo-Scholastics of the sixteenth century and Thomas Hobbes in the
seventeenth. In asuming this challenging undertaking, Brett has performed a
signal service for scholars. Our knowledge of the uses to which this term was
put has been enriched substantially by her work.

Brett's work is divisible into two large sections, each consisting of three chap
ters. In the first half of her book, she addresses the formation of the scholastic
discourse of individual rights. She begins by rebutting the notion, advanced by
historians like Richard Tuck, that the equivalence between ius and dominium
made by some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century writers amounts to "the ori
gin' of the modern subjective right in its most radical form ... in which it is pre
eminently associated with liberty, with property, and with a certain idea of
sovereignty" (p. 10).To be sure, some thirteenth-century writers, especially the
ologians associated with the Franciscan Order, did make such an equation. St.
Bonaventure and John Pecham, for instance, equated ius and dominium as part
of a larger effort to understand the freedom of the will necessary to renounce
the goods of this world: uIus as much as dominium involved the ability to claim

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