Little does it quake as it lies on the plate

Tom Shippey

• The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe edited by George Holmes
  Oxford, 398 pp, £17.50, March 1988, ISBN 0 19 820073 0
• A History of 12th-century Western Philosophy edited by Peter Dronke
  Cambridge, 495 pp, £37.50, April 1988, ISBN 0 521 25896 0
• The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c.350-c.1450 edited by J.H. Burns
  Cambridge, 808 pp, £60.00, May 1988, ISBN 0 521 24324 6
• Medieval Popular Culture: Problem of Belief and Perception by Aron Gurevich, translated by Janos Bak and Paul Hollingsworth
  Cambridge, 275 pp, £27.50, May 1988, ISBN 0 521 30369 9
• A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World edited by George Duby, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
  Harvard, 650 pp, £24.95, April 1988, ISBN 0 674 39976 5

A captious person might mutter that The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe is a little ‘hobbitical’: it reminds one of Professor Tolkien’s hobbits, who ‘liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions’. This would be unfair, in that it is a splendid volume, presenting contemporary scholarship to the general reader with care, grace, much thought and many illustrations; filled with things that most general readers won’t know at all, and that many specialist readers won’t have thought of. Still, it is sometimes possible to imagine the contributors putting down their pens, staring at their charts of ‘The Capetian Kings’ or ‘The Royal House of Jerusalem to 1187’ – ‘BALDWIN I (1100 – 1181) m. (1) Godvere of Tosni (2) daughter of T’oros (3) Adelaide, countess of Sicily’ – and getting up from their desks with a feeling of justified completion and a mutter of ‘well, that’s that!’ Here are the pedigrees; here the accounts of political pressures; here are the maps – possessions of the kings of France, trade routes to Islam, routes of Viking invasions – thus, so, black and white, and not otherwise.