408 BOOK REVIEWS

examining archival materials we can also acquire more knowledge about

such important matters as the relations between those at Milan who either
supported or were hostile to the work of renewal, the antagonisms that
sprang up between various cities as they defended their own interests, the
feeling of solidarity that developed or the clashes that arose between the
cities and the country, and, finally, the attitude assumed by the court in
Vienna.
Klang's study exposes these problems with considerable understanding,
but the author has written only a general overview. His survey, nonetheless,
is highly significant and has been clearly written. It can most assuredly be
regarded as a book that can be read with profit by persons who have no
specific interest in this particular field but who wish to acquire an under-
standing of those aspects of Lombard history which he covers here.
University of Milan VANNA MAZZUCCHELLI

Faccini, Luigi, L'economia risicola lombarda dagli inizidelXVIIlsecolo

all'Unitd. In Regione Lombardia, Studi e Ricerche, No. 6. Milan: SugarCo
Edizioni, [1977]. Pp. 203.

This is a concise, lucid account of rice cultivation in Lombardy from

about 1730 to the 1860's. Scholars with a direct interest in the subject will
read the entire book with profit, but there are also conclusions and sug-
gestions of general import which, intriguing as they stand, should be
amplified and presented to a larger audience.
Mainly drawing on contemporary commentary, often polemical, and on
government records, above all the Lombard cadaster (censimento) of 1719-
1760, clearly a marvelous source for studying the old regime, Faccini
shows how the growing of rice in the plain bordered by the Po, Adda, and
Ticino rivers spread and intensified between 1730 and 1815, and then for
the next half century became still more productive while keeping to the
same area. Methods of cultivation, rotation, and employment are described,
analyzed, and documented. The development of intensive rice cultivation
was important and illuminating because it required much capital, was
innovative in the use of labor, and imposed a high degree of planning and
calculation on owners and leaseholders, more on the latter than on the
former. Indeed, for the author and other historians whom he cites, the best
farms resembled factories of the early industrial revolution. "Coming to
associate itself more closely with the market, and inviting the investment
of capital and the separation of workers from the means of production"
(p. 49), rice cultivation was a precocious rural route to the modernization
of the European society and economy. On the other hand, the fact that
proprietors and growers found the way relatively easy in Lombardy indi-
cates how advanced the province already was in the mid-eighteenth century.
 BOOK REVIEWS 409

Not wishing to go beyond his evidence, Faccini could not deal with the
reaction of the peasants, especially migrant and seasonal laborers, to new
hardships and uncertainties. Nor could he clarify the relationship between
landlords and the peculiarly energetic and able Lombard lease farmers,
whose overall role in society one may speculate about but not grasp. The
chapter that fixes on the politics of agriculture, on the half-hearted or
inconclusive attempts by various governments to regulate rice cultivation
as a possible cause of sickness, establishes a basic narrative without pen-
etrating deeply below the surface of events. Hence the author's persistent
linking of change with a "new agrarian bourgeoisie" is an assertion rather
than a demonstrated or even argued thesis. It is very much a question
whether this idea best explains the dynamic qualities of the Age of En-
lightenment or the way in which the eighteenth century flowed into the
nineteenth.
University of British Columbia DANIEL M. KLANG

Hershe, Peter, Der Spdtjansenismus in Osterreich. In Veroffentlichungen

der Kommission fiir Geschichte Osterreichs, Vol. VII. Vienna: Verlag
der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1977. Pp. x, 451.
DM 80.

Hersche, whose work on reform Catholicism in eighteenth-century Aus-

tria was very well received, now gives us an encyclopedic study of Austrian
Jansenism. The book delivers far more than the title promises. It begins
with a general section on what Jansenism actually was, defining that move-
ment with more accuracy than one will find anywhere else in the literature.
This section is a model of compression that can only be admired. The
author goes on to describe the French, Dutch, and Italian strains of Jan-
senism and their influences on the Austrian Church. This section also cannot
be faulted. Hersche is undoubtedly right in insisting that rigorism and
generalized opposition to the Jesuits, not only to their probabilism, formed
the core of Jansenist theology.
Hersche once and for all does away with a number of myths and mis-
understandings about the Austrian Jansenist movement: (1) Gerald van
Swieten, as he establishes, was never a Jansenist; he only disliked the
Jesuits. (2) Neither Joseph II nor Count Wenzel von Kaunitz had much
sympathy for the Jansenists, but they were willing to make use of them
so long as Maria Theresa bestowed her favor upon them. (3) There was
never more than a tactical alliance between the Jansenists and the advocates
of secular enlightenment, who, in the main, distrusted one another. (An
exception, however, must be made for the Dutch physician Anton de Haen,