Mediwval France in Danger
Life in Mediseval France. By Joan Evans. (Phaidon Press, 32s. 6d.) '0 HOLY God of Gods in Sion,' a fourteenth- century Englishman wrote, 'what a mighty stream of pleasure made glad our hearts whenever we had leisure to visit Paris, the paradise of the World!' And a contemporary explained (in the true parlance of medimval scholasticism) that to be in Paris was to exist in the absolute sense, but to be anywhere else was to exist relatively. There is an element of hyperbole in all this praise; but it has echoed down the ages and it is important to see on what foundations it rests.
There is no doubt that between the First Crusade and the Hundred Years' War French civilisation assumed a pre-eminence which it has never subsequently entirely surrendered, and this sumptuous edition of Dr.Evans's well-known book indicates some of the reasons why and how.
Nevertheless the gratitude which we feel to- wards the Phaidon Press is subject to certain qualifications. The plates are a joy; but what is their relation to the text, and on what principle have they been selected? Three-quarters of them date from the last century of the Middle Ages, which Miss Evans dismisses in an epilogue of a dozen pages; but only two refer to the period be- fore 1200, with which she deals at length. The resulting hiatus is disconcerting, and an unwary reader might conclude that the art and life of fifteenth-century France were typically medieval, which was certainly not the case. In the second place, Miss Evans's own work, for all its qualities, is now more than a quarter of a century old; and it is strange today to find the twelfth century described as an age of 'brotherhood and equality,' or even as an 'age of democracy.' It is not only that a great deal of new work has appeared on all
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aspects of medineval France in the interval, but that our lines of approach have changed. Precisely because Miss Evans relies for illustration so• largely upon contemporary literature, she is apt to take the Middle Ages at their own valuation. The modern historian, endeavouring to balance fact and theory, ideal and reality, is more critical. Life in medieval France was coarser, harsher, more brutish, than either the text or the illustra. tions of this book suggest; ahd there is a real danger that it may foster a false romantic medievalism. GEOFFREY BARRACLOUGH
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