Review

Reviewed Work(s): Feudal Society by Marc Bloch and L. A. Manyon

Review by: J. A. Raftis
Source: The Catholic Historical Review , Apr., 1962, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Apr., 1962), pp. 92-93
Published by: Catholic University of America Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25017015

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 92 BOOK REVIEWS

execution of this venture. For many teachers, the progress and completion
of it will be one of the great landmarks in Roman studies in our time.
Without undue defense of the decline of Latin study, it should be pointed
out that the language of jurisprudence is technical and, in many ways,
difficult. I would hazard a guess that no body of our material on Rome
has been so systematically neglected in our teaching of Roman history
as the legal materials. I believe this is due in part to the difficulty of pre?
senting it to students who are not proficient in the language. I do not
subscribe to the opinion that such inability should rightly condemn them
to an ignorance of a great civilization. This is a tremendous piece of work
and there is little that can be offered but praise. It was clearly hard
labor and has required much time and thought. The format and printing
are excellent and, although there may be some minor slips, I did not
find them. For class use, the book is invaluable. A student can learn
more about the tremendous and rapid development of Roman legal writing
by reading the Lex A cilia than he can from many descriptive pages in a
textbook. Let me add that few textbooks will have even a line or two,
much less several pages. Let us give our thanks to these valiant editors
and translators, to the university press that produced the book, and to
the classical seminary at Princeton.
Thomas A. Brady
University of Missouri

Feudal Society. By Marc Bloch. (Translated from the French by L. A.

Manyon.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1961. Pp. xxi,
498. $8.50.)
With the passage of time Marc Bloch emerges ever more clearly as one
of the most complete historians of the era between the two world wars.
Although he was to die a patriot, Bloch attacked the use of history as
a vehicle for nationalism; although a dedicated medievalist, he opposed
divisions of history as products of modern theories of progress; and al?
though a humanist and literary critic in the best tradition of the ?cole
des Chartes, he sought a broader cultural approach to history through the
use of the social sciences and, indeed, of all new auxiliary tools. This
first English translation of his last and most comprehensive scholarly
treatise, "now the most standard international treatise on feudalism" in
the words of Professor Postan in the foreword is, therefore, to be warmly
welcomed. Since scholars will be familiar with the French edition, and
in any case this study defies a simple review of contents, the following
remarks will be confined to Bloch's methodology.
It is a tribute to the precocious historical method of Marc Bloch that
this study should be as vitally important today as at the time of its first

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 BOOK REVIEWS 93

publication twenty years ago. In opposition to a definitive feudalism'

that would force medieval life through the narrow notion of the fief,
or to a class analysis of a serfdom and freedom that had a dozen different
degrees, Bloch demanded an open-ended approach to medieval society.
By emphasizing the variety of information available from different his?
torical tools, and the fresh questions arising from the comparative method,
the study of feudal society became for Bloch a vital, exciting, unfinished
business, e.g., familial lines were replaced by a more articulate division
of labor in the movement from tribe to settlement; but Bloch went on
to inquire how much we really know about family life after the settle?
ment. Or formal lines of dependence, a tendency to class structure, and
an incipient national state became common features of feudal society.
But the rate and ratio of these developments varied from one country to
another and, Bloch asked, could we really suggest one was 'better' than
another ? If not, what was truly 'progress' in feudal society ? What further
comparisons can be drawn from outside Europe to question or confirm
our knowledge of feudal society ?
Marc Bloch has, indeed, opened feudal society to the techniques of the
modern social historian. It will be enough to mention here such chapter
headings as "The Folk Memory" or "The Solidarity of the Kindred Group"
in illustration. At the same time this method provides a meeting place for
the traditional specialist and the social historian. The student of ideas
finds a fresh framework of reference in the chapter, "The Intellectual
Renaissance in the Second Feudal Age," and for the legal historian there
is a chapter on "The Foundations of Law," to mention only more obvious
examples. In the development of his technique Bloch was, of course,
dependent upon the over-all maturity of historical knowledge. And in this
respect this volume underlines strongly by its very structure the degree
to which ecclesiastical and commercial life are still studied as peripheral
to feudal society. Finally, the translator must be commended for an
excellent job of preserving Bloch's subtle style, perhaps as well as
possible in the English language. j A Raftis
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
Toronto

Henry VII in Italy. The Conflict of Empire and City-State, 1310-1313.

By William M. Bowsky. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
1960. Pp. xii, 301. $5.25.)
The work on the last three years of the life of King Henry of Luxem?
burg could be a Grecian tragedy. It tells how the personable prince of the
North, inspired by the medieval imperial tradition, sought to get himself
crowned in St. Peter's in Rome, but because of his ignorance of the

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