Book Reviews 603

professional expertise in the field of Roman law and contributed to the romanisation of German civil law.

When law on the continent was codified, the role played by learned law was reduced to commentary and exegesis of the formal law, modern legalpositivism. Also the natural law movement-more correctly Vernunftsrecht according to the author-that followed in the wake of the elegant jurisprudence- was effectively curbed when codifications came about ‘For an advocate to resort to natural law, his case must already be desperate’ (p. 141). Modern law became positive law enacted by the political legislator.

This general historical scheme is the structure of the book. It starts with the Code Civil, and then follows the chronological exposition. In the end we find chapters with discussions of the contributions of statute, case law, and scholarship, and the factors of the history of law.

I think, however, that a continental European legal perspective makes it difftcult to see the lasting imprint on modern law by the Germanic-feudal tradition on English law.

This may be sought in the field of the Rights of Man. The first North American declaration was attached as an amendment to the constitutional project in the manner of the numerous bargains between rulers and subjects of the Germanic feudal order in which the rights and privileges of the latter were guaranteed to obtain their support. In North America the tradition of the Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights was pronounced, but examples from other European countries of feudal charters guaranteeing the rights and privileges of various classes of subjects are numerous. Once cast in the abstract universalist form of the American Rights of Man it was immediately re-imported to Europe to bear its impact upon the French Revolution. The influence on contemporary European law is perhaps even greater. This then might be the lasting contribution by the dark age of Germanic feudal law. But it is not easily seen in the Continental tradition of learned law. The imperial structure of Roman law has no place for it. Bentham, the English exponent of codification, criticised it as a ‘feudal hangover’. Most will see it as an expression of natural law thinking, but the historical origins are, I think, in the Germanic- feudal tradition in its English continuity.

Van Caenenem’s book springs from his long confrontation with English law. Also when it provokes objections it is a valuable and indeed a learned contribution.

Roskilde University Ib Martin Jarvad

Distinguo: Reading Montaigne Differently, Steven Rendall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), viii + 136 pp., E22.50 P.B.

Montaigne’s Essays are notorious for their self-contradiction, for what Steven Rendall calls their ‘incompatible but inseperable’ (p. 72) ‘differences’ (p. vii). In an invigorating overview of the history of Montaigne criticism, he argues that we have not yet come to terms with the Essays’ textual difference. Villey and Strowski, he maintains, got around the contradictions by saying that Montaigne changed his mind, evolving from Stoicism to Scepticism to Epicureanism. Armaingaud’s approach was to claim that Montaigne never wavered on important points, and was inconsistent on secondary ones for merely tactical reasons. Jules Brody’s more recent ‘philological’ method, while invaluable for its revelations of textual resonance, willingly pays attention only to the words themselves, but at the expense of ignoring the logical contradictions; such a reading, like Armaingaud’s, takes it upon itself to decide what is central (the words) and what is peripheral (the ideals), and thereby ‘precludes reading the text’s difference’ (p. 10). Jean- Yves Pouilloux confronts the issue head-on, arguing for three levels of discourse in the

604 Book Reviews

Essays: opinions, their contradiction, and then the undermining analysis of that contradiction. That’s fine as far as it goes, Rendall maintains, but Montaigne is more complex than that, and besides Pouilloux’s reading doesn’t account for the essayist’s claim that his book is his self-portrait.

The ground thus cleared, Rendall then begins with Montaigne’s first chapter, ‘Par divers moyens on arrive h pareille fin’ (I, 1) showing that one enters the Essays through an unsolvable puzzle (should the hopelessly beseiged beg for mercy or seek to gain the admiration of the enemy by brave defiance?) whose ‘logic is not reducible to syllogistic deduction’ but which is ‘organised by a complex grid operating on several levels and . . . axes that intersect but remain distinct and even incompatible’ (p. 21). ‘De Z’inconstance de nos actions’ (II, l), gives Rendall his title: ‘Distingo’, Montaigne there writes, ‘est Ieplusuniverselmembre dema Logique’. Rendall argues that such a statement is a contradiction, Distingo being at odds with universel. He detects the same contradiction in the last chapter of the Essays, ‘DeZ’experience’ (III, l), where Montaigne declares that ‘il n’est aucune qualitk si universelle. . . que la diversite’. ‘Universal diversity’, comments Rendall, ‘is an oxymoron; by a strange paradox, diversity could be universal only by not being universal’ (p, 29). There are, of course, many more paradoxes in the Essays than Rendall discusses; it was not his intention to catalogue them all.

Rather, he addresses what is the central ‘difference’ around which his commentary is constructed, the one between these irreconcilable ‘differences’ (the paradoxes and self- contradictions) and what he calls Montaigne’s effort ‘to reduce the difference within his text’, an attempt that only ‘complicates and confirms it’ (p. 53). The difference I have with Rendall’s reading, however, is that I am not persuaded by his argument that Montaigne was trying ‘to assert his mastery over the different components of his text and to limit and control the diversity of interpretations given it by readers’ (p. vii). It may just be that I have difficulty imagining Montaigne being in any kind of difficulty, in which case it’s my problem and not Rendall’s. Part of his argument is based on what he terms the Renaissance phenomenon of ‘the emergence of the Author’ (p. 70), ‘a new conception of literary production and property grounded in the individual subject’ (p. 63). Such a subject would want to be in control of his own text, but did Montaigne? Or, if he did, did he necessarily fail in the attempt?

The reader will want to see for himself/herself; it could be that Rendall is right. In any event, his reading of the Essays is provocative, learned, and likely to remain a landmark in Montaigne studies.

Miami University Randolph Runyon

William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, Ian Dyck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 330 pp., g35.00 H.B.

In this new book on the English radical William Cobbett (1763-l 835) Ian Dyck aims to situate Cobbett’s social and political ideas in the context of popular rural culture during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Dyck makes a strong case for his approach as the way to a fuller understanding of Cobbett’s ideas than that provided by previous historians. Cobbett emerges as primarily the spokesman for the interests of rural labourers and small farmers, among whom he spent a great deal of his life as a practising farmer. There is much to admire here in Dyck’s discussion of rural popular culture and Cobbett’s participation in it. At the same time, Dyck’s study has limitations, much like those he criticises in the work of other historians, which means that he is only partially successful in his intended aim.

William Cobbett is a fascinating historical figure, whose life and opinions were full of