In The Crisis of the Twelfth Century, an impressive work that is the culmination of an equally impressive body of work on political history, Bisson asks a seemingly simple question: How and why did the experience of power become that of government in medieval Europe? In what he terms the “landslide towards lordship” (47) in the twelfth century, Europe experienced the stress associated with growing pains, or in his particularly apt metaphor, “a confused old head on this young body” ( 9). This stress was the result of three intersecting trends: first, the new money bred nontitled urban elites; second, these new ranks valued merit over birth; and third, an old church was in need of reform. As government in the shape of monarchy arose or revived within patrimonial (“feudal”) lordship, the nascent realms of Europe experienced a crisis Bisson describes as a conflict between “unlike mentalities” and “moralities of power” (17–18). This “millennial crisis in west Frankland” (53) led to a set of conditions familiar to all medieval historians—predatory lordship and the attendant violence so vividly described by chroniclers. This violence eventually bred enduring, even if flawed, bureaucratic institutions of government and law to administer justice, to ensure the accountability of officials who come to power through election not lordship, and to share power with parliamentary assemblies. Bisson carefully analyzes an impressive array of sources to describe the redefinition of fidelity that lords impersonally implemented to serve public ends. This redefining reverses the formulation of patrimonial lordship as public power in private hands and reveals a grudging recognition of collective interest (res publica) on the part of those entrusted with governance. Because service was closely entwined with lordship, it pitted serving (governance) against dominating (tyranny). Vicars in Italy could abuse townspeople because vicars were corrupt, but also because the linkage of service and office made corruption possible and nearly impossible to stop.
Bisson has already, and eloquently, described the experience of this raw, brutish power in his monograph, Tormented Voices (1998), and his edited collection, Cultures of Power (1995). Here he draws on the sociological and anthropological theories that infuse political theory (notably Philippe Buc, C. Stephen Jaeger, Geoffrey Koziol, Jean-Claude Schmitt). He engages in old debates like the question of “feudal” (Dominique Barthélemy, Pierre Bonnassie, Susan Reynolds, Elizabeth A. R. Brown). In both instances he expands significantly the geographical range of the analysis. His aim is to provide an empathic study of power observed from the privileged vantage point of those in power but felt from a disadvantaged perspective. He describes the impact of unattenuated brute force because, he argues, the study of power is not simply that of the powerful, it is also a study of the powerless.
His twelfth century is a long one, from around 1050 to 1215. It is punctuated by a series of events well known to medieval scholars: the Norman conquest (1066), the Investiture Conflict (1075–1085), the First Crusade (1095–1099), the Christian capture of Toledo (1085), the killing of King William Rufus (1100), and the murder of Count Charles the Good of Flanders (1127). During this period, power was imagined as government. It was expressed as submission and alliance, ceremony in the lord's presence, sacralized rituals of oath and consecration, and violence—seizure, rape, intimidation, extortion, arson, and murder—all with castle building as the symbol of unbridled power. He expertly distinguishes power from authority, patrimonial from official, status and order, tyranny and good government.
The book is an important and very much needed comparative study of a single-focused period. This century, no matter how its chronology is delimited, has been studied in bits and pieces, mostly focusing on individual realms, rulers, or problems. This atomization of the century made it difficult to comprehend generalizable problems of governance and violence, but comparative history demands a scope and distance that few scholars can muster.
Despite its innovation and theoretical framework, there is a substantial and regrettable omission. Women are rarely seen or heard. Lordship was not just kingship. Women who exercised lordship—empresses, queens, countesses, duchesses, abbesses—go into parentheses all too often. Women appear when there is a “dynastic crisis,” which is a euphemism for men unwilling to let women govern. Bisson describes lordship in the twelfth century as if it were the domain of men and affected only them. However, this is an age when men enacted laws that affected women in power. In the shift Bisson describes, women were shoved aside, and men justified the act by associating lords and kings with Christ-like traits and military necessity. Over time, the power and authority many women once exercised were seized. Furthermore, the shift affected not only elite women. Women of all ranks were victims of predatory lordship. They were raped, killed, robbed, and intimidated, as were men, but in profoundly different ways that Bisson discusses only in passing but which merit inclusion in a study that aims to describe the experience of power by the governed. Given its attention to sociological and theoretical work, this book would have been far better, more useful to a wider audience, had the author been equally attentive to new works in feminist and gender theory and masculinity studies and case studies of women in warfare.
This is a deeply learned book, not for the faint of heart or the unsophisticated reader. Bisson presumes a thorough and comprehensive knowledge of the events and close readings of a wide range of texts. However, the astute reader will be rewarded with an illuminating comparative study of a pivotal point in the history of the European Middle Ages.
