European archives house an impressive volume of court proceedings from the thirteenth century onward, a phenomenon generated by the growing administrative apparatus associated with law and justice. Thanks to the importance of witness testimony in Roman canon law, proceedings of all kinds often include witness depositions. As Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie famously demonstrated in his 1975 book, Montaillou: village occitan, de 1294 à 1324 (Gallimard), such testimony provides startling insights into the lives and thoughts of ordinary people. Depositions are found in numerous contexts, ranging from civil lawsuits and criminal inquests to heresy trials and administrative inquests of different types. Especially interesting for their length and content are the depositions generated by canonization proceedings.
Souls under Siege features fascinating testimony provided by sixty-eight individuals during the canonization inquest for Countess Delphine of Puimichel, which took place in the town of Apt and elsewhere in Provence during the summer and fall of 1363. All walks of life and equal proportions of men and women were represented among the voices. Although Delphine (d. 1360) never quite made it into the ranks of the saints, she inspired the awe and affection of many Provençal people who knew and loved her. She had lived an interesting life; born in the upper valley of the Durance, she left Provence to reside in Naples for some years as a companion to Queen Sanxia, wife of King Robert (r. 1309–1343), and participated in a chaste marriage with another would-be saint, Elzéar de Sabran (d. 1323). Delphine lived out her final years in a convent in Apt, dying around the age of seventy-five.
The book is not a biography of Delphine, a fascinating subject in its own right. Nor does Archambeau seek to contribute to the established body of scholarship on canonization proceedings. Instead, the book's premise is that witness testimony provides sharp insights into how ordinary people felt about and responded to the dramatic dangers of the day, not unlike the manner in which sociologists analyze Twitter posts to grasp what the pandemic of 2020 has meant to people. And events during the years 1343–1363 were dramatic indeed, given the ceaseless political turmoil throughout the Kingdom of Naples, the outbreaks of plague that devastated Europe in 1347 and 1361, and the equally devastating outbreaks of peace during the Hundred Years War, which had the perverse consequence of flooding Provence with thousands of mercenary soldiers eager for plunder.
To give her study a focus, Archambeau selected episodes between 1343 and 1363 in which ideas of danger figured prominently in the testimony of at least five witnesses. The first chapter focuses on the dynastic conflict occasioned by the death of King Robert in 1343, a theme that continues into the second chapter, where she explores tensions that roiled Provence between 1347 and 1349. The third and fourth chapters address the mercenary invasions that began in 1357. These events took place against the backdrop of the devastation caused by the plague. Rather than treating plague as one sort of disaster and war as a distinctly different one, however, contemporaries talked and thought about both kinds of disasters in the same way, lumping physical and spiritual illness together in a single conceptual basket.
Where chapters 1–4 feature war, plague, and plundering, chapters 5–6 broach a new kind of danger, namely, the danger that could afflict one's soul if one failed to do penance correctly. Archambeau's point is that here, too, contemporaries did not bracket the dangers that could afflict the soul as ontologically distinct from other dangers. From this, her major conclusion is that perceptions of all types of danger were filtered through a sacral lens and seen as equally troubling for body and soul alike. In this, Archambeau participates in a long tradition that seeks to excavate the broad contours of European sacral cosmology before the (supposed) great disenchantment of the eighteenth century.
Not all of the articles of interrogation are equally relevant to the book's goals. Of the ninety-eight in the inquest, nine feature prominently in the book and another eleven receive some attention. There is good reason for this selective focus, since the most valuable articles, notably articles 1 and 35, were open-ended, allowing witnesses freedom to wander where they would. The testimony itself is less prominent than one might imagine, since long stretches of the chapters zoom out to provide historical context. Since events and themes overlap to some degree from one chapter to the next, there is a certain amount of repetition in the exposition. One of the consequences of an event-based organization, moreover, is that witnesses and their stories recede a little into the background, although Archambeau compensates for this by featuring one witness in each of the book's chapters. The chosen organization does allow Archambeau to link the testimony to vital themes in the history of Provence in an exceptionally vivid way. To do this, she has worked carefully through a considerable volume of studies carried out in recent years by historians of the region. One of the most important findings to emerge from this aspect of her study can be found in the depth of the tacit critique directed toward Queen Johanna of Naples (r. 1343–1382; readers may wish to read this book alongside Elizabeth Casteen's excellent 2015 study of Queen Johanna, From She-Wolf to Martyr [Cornell University Press, 2015]).
Archambeau belongs to a small but vibrant generation of U.S.-based historians who are making important contributions to the study of medieval Provence, a region whose fascinating history is surprisingly little known outside the community of specialists in France and Canada. Souls under Siege is a very welcome addition to the growing bibliography and illuminates Provençal history in an unusual and fascinating way.
