The papers in this collection derive from the 2009 meeting of the Konstanzer Arbeitskreises für Mittelalterliche Geschichte, its publication delayed by the necessity of translating several of the papers given in languages other than German. The result is a rich and wide-ranging series of studies that explore political Gewalt in multiple forms (potestas, vis, violentia, crudelitas) as well as manifestations of resistance to the same.

Jean-Marie Moeglin’s study of the rex crudelis offers a sweeping comparative survey of kingship from the eleventh through fourteenth centuries in France, the empire, and England to determine the standards by which contemporaries judged the application of Gewalt as legitimate or illegitimate. Torsten Hiltmann analyzes the French Amtskönige—so-called kings who exercised oversight of such endeavors as gambling and prostitution, minstrelsy, and commercial peddling; he concludes that in these realms as in the monarchy itself, potestas and violentia went hand in hand. Stefan Leder’s article on the middle Islamic period explores the relationship between the overlapping sources of authority—religious, political, and tribal—that authorized and delimited royal power. Nicolas Offenstadt examines royal proclamations and those who delivered them, highlighting the extent to which violence and resistance could be directed against heralds as proxies of the king or lord. Uwe Tresp studies the election of kings in Bohemia, where the Hussite revolution threw royal succession into confusion and created ample opportunity for challenging royal legitimacy. Jörg Rogge examines the form and function of violence against the kings of England and Scotland, and their advisors and favorites, which regularly found justification in the alleged breach of coronation oaths. The aim of such action, he asserts, was to offer corrections to perceived tyranny and to tie the king closer to the higher nobility.

Jenny Rahel Oesterle compares the Christian and Muslim traditions on legitimate armed resistance to tyranny. Although the legal traditions in Islam made no such provision, she notes, in practice a distinction emerged between criminals and rebels, which permitted the sovereign to respond to and work for the reintegration of the latter. Karl Ubl focuses on the reign of Philip the Fair (1285–1314), whose aggressive policies provoked the charge of tyranny. Contemporary political theory held that tyranny was remediable if a king could be brought to listen to criticism and amend his rule; Philip was judged to have done so and thus to have become a worthy king. David Nirenberg’s article on the 1391 pogrom against the Jews of Valencia offers a sophisticated reading of the tragedy and its aftermath. Joan I, under whose protection the Jews lived, raged against the challenge to his authority and demanded the immediate execution of 300–400 people. What followed was a constitutional crisis in which civic leaders averted royal wrath by successfully negotiating the very meaning of the collective violence against the Jews: it was not a massacre but a miracle, by which God manifested his will. William Caferro’s analysis of rituals of honor and dishonor in late medieval Italy demonstrates their close association with war and politics in an age in which armed conflict was both endemic and inconclusive. Andreas Bihrer explores the uses of memory in his analysis of the contemporary chroniclers’ treatment of the murder of King Albrecht I. Franck Collard employs literary and legal sources to uncover contemporary attitudes toward poison as an agent of political violence.

In a useful and elegant concluding synthesis, Hermann Kamp attempts to draw together these disparate papers by grouping them into related themes: the foundation and delimitation of royal authority, challenges to royal authority, attacks on the ruler, violence against royal proxies, the power of discourse, the meaning and purpose of ostentatious violence, and, finally, whether the many facets of Gewalt evident in late medieval political life distinguish it from other eras. The reader might be well served by beginning here before proceeding to the individual papers; one wonders why the editors themselves did not group these papers thematically. In any case, the final product is a stimulating collection that will likely engage scholars of the later Middle Ages for some time to come.