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T H E L I F E OF E D W A R D T H E CONFESSOR’

THIS IS AN EXCELLENT addition to Nelson’s Medieval Texts. The text has all the qualities which recommend it for the close study which this series exists to promote, and Professor Barlow, with loving care and lavish expenditure of effort, has provided all the aids that could be desired. He is often able to improve a text which is unusually, and still sometimes impenetrably, corrupt. His translation is vigorous and often beautifidly apt, and there will be few who do not sometimes need its assistance. He is alert to the literary resonances of this sophisticated work, and to the conventions in which it was written; yet he never allows its literary interest to overshadow the primary task of interpreting the work as a piece of history. His editorial care makes the volume a pleasure to use, and it is care well spent. For the Vita Edwardi is a most puzzling and difficult work-difficult to understand, difficult to interpret and most difficult to fit into its historical setting. The difficulties, how- ever, are not greater than the interest of the text, and in easing the reader’s path towards a solution of the difficulties, Professor Barlow is meeting the needs of a wider circle than a few professional scholars. This work deserves to be widely studied for many reasons. I t is the first literary work produced in post-Conquest England. If it is not the first life of an English king written by a contemporary, it is the first of which the contemporaneity is now beyond dispute. It stands at the head of an important line in hagiography: the author’s boast-quisque post tmptet, sane secundus em’t-is justified in more senses than he can have realized. In addition, this is a sepulchral monument to the greatest family in King Edward’s England-the family of Godwin. To come within measurable distance of satisfying so many discordant claims argues a high degree of mental agility and literary skill on the part of the author.

Above all this is a work which still has power to stir the imagination. I can testifjr to th is , because when I last wrote about it, it was to solace a month of waiting for another invasion, and perhaps Conquest, in the summer of 194.0. The occasion and the work, which so curiously matched it, are for me inseparable. I t is, after all, a great tribute to an eleventh-century author to be able to say that, read in the darkest days of the twentieth century, he wrote like a man who had been through it all before, and that he could fortify the mind and imagination for the days which seemed imminent when, in his words, ‘pervaga- buntur diaboli totam hanc terram igne, ferro, et depredatione hostili’.

Notes by F. Barlow (Nelson’s Medieval Texts, 50s.). THE LIFE OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR, edited and tK3n!dated with Introduction and

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If I may be allowed to pursue this autobiographical diversion a little further, it opens the way to two problems which the reader must face at the threshold of this work. These are the problems of date and of authorship. In 1940 I wished to defend the traditional view, that the author was writing in the immediate aftermath of the Conquest, against the arguments of Marc Bloch in favour of a date in the early twelfth century, which then held the field. I also put forward the name of Goscelin of St. Bertin as a possible, and even probable, author. In a very careful review of the evidence published in 1946,~ Miss E. K. Henningham came out strongly in favour of the early date, and Professor Barlow is decisively on the same side. We shall hear no more of Bloch‘s unlucky hypothesis; but Professor Barlow has a new one. He goes further than any previous writer in pushing the date back. He believes that the work can be divided into two Books, written at different times, the first shortly before, and the second immediately after, the Conquest. His suggestion is that the work was started in King Edward’s lifetime in the full-tide of prosperity of the Godwin family, ‘abandoned in 1066 when things began to go wrong’, and con- tinued on a new plan as a piece of hagiography in 1067.

Professor Barlow thinks that there must have been a gap between the composition of the two Books because of a change of tone and attitude to the king, because of a change in structure and form, and because the author (in a dialogue with his Muse) ‘tells us explicitly that he was forced to change his plan’. These are interesting points, but they seem to me to be made mare emphatically than the evidence warrants. I think that Professor Barlow has been somewhat mesmerized by his own division of the text into two distinct Books. I t is worth emphasizing that they are not so divided in the manuscript. This would not matter if the internal evidence were entirely clear. But it is not. I t depends on a number of finely drawn distinctions, all open to more than one inter- pretation. The evidence that King Edward was alive while Book I was written is very fragile (p. xxvii); and that for the unexpected change of plan is even more so. The author certainly accuses his Muse of landing him in a hole, and the Muse promises to show him a way out; but a man who has adopted one literary fiction in addressing his Muse at all, is certainly capable of another in pretending that he does not know where to turn next, and appealing to his Muse for help. This is a fiction within a fiction. At least so it seems to me. Again, any literary work-and especially one that had to satisfy so many virtually incom- patible requirements as this one did-displays a number of different moods and different facets of the subject; and of course it may not all have been written at one time, or in the order in which it now appears. But unless the author himself tells us the answers, the minutiae of these questions are generally beyond our reach. Who could know that what I published in 1943 was written in 1940, unless I said so? Here we have

Speculum, xxi, 419-56; cf. E.H.R. lviii, 1943,385-400, for my note.

REVIEW ARTICLES ‘99 only the end-product, which existed certainly by 1070, and possibly within a year of the Conquest. But whether any of it was written before King Edward’s death, and whether the plan was changed in mid- career, are points to me extremely dubious.

On the question of authorship, Professor Barlow gives an admirably clear and balanced account of the claims of Goscelin of St. Bertin. In addition, he considers the claims of Folcard, another monk from the same house, who wrote some lives of English saints. Folcard is a much more shadowy and elusive figure even than Goscelin, and on his present form he does not appear a strong runner. But the time for decision has not yet arrived. Perhaps the full study and edition of Goscelin’s works projected by Professor B. W. Scholz will bring that time nearer.

I t would be possible to pick out many other points for discussion, but enough has been said to indicate the range of problems which this text raises. The Introduction and notes provide an excellent starting point for what is after all the chief purpose of the book-to assist the study of the text itself. Naturally in so difficult a work, there are details in Professor Barlow’s interpretation which are open to question. The study of this text emphasizes very forcibly the need for new aids to the study of medieval Latin, like the dictionaries now in preparation. I t is humbling to realize how little one knows, and how much is still dark that is surely knowable. All Souls College, Oxford R. W. SOUTHERN

T H E T H O U G H T OF D E T O C Q U E V I L L E

THE TITLE of this book1 is a just description of its contents. Mr. Lively’s exposition of Tocqueville’s ideas about society may claim to be fuller, clearer and more detailed than any that exists in the English language today. Historians and sociologists may complain that too little attempt has been made to relate Tocqueville’s ideas to the social and political circumstances and discontents in which they were conceived; historians of ideas may wonder whether the paternity and milieu of his ideas have been sufficiently investigated; philosophers may be tantalized by ex- cessively brief and tentative analyses of central social and political concepts and by excessive caution in the author’s comments on the value or, more particularly, the internal coherence of Tocqueville’s views. But these are tasks which Mr. Lively has not set himself: these omissions do not detract from his success in doing what he aimed to do: to expound and examine what Tocqueville thought and said. I can render the reader no better service than by attempting to indicate the topics with which he deals and his treatment of them.

Mr. Lively begins by a short vignette of Tocqueville’s personality. He 1 THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL Tn0uOn-r OF ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE. By Jack LiveIy.

Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1962. 263 pp. 25s.