1

General Editor:		

Christina von Hodenberg

Managing Editors:

Marcus Meer and Pascale Siegrist

Review Editor: 		

Pascale Siegrist

Editors:			Mirjam Hähnle
			Marcus Meer
			Markus Mößlang			Michael Schaich
Assistant Editors:			Marielle Sutherland
Jozef van der Voort

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ISSN 0269-8552
Cover design: Lucy Schönberger
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German Historical Institute London
Bulletin
Volume XLV, No. 2

November 2023
CONTENTS

Pride and Prejudice in Stories of Medieval Travel and
Migration
Special issue edited by Marcus Meer

Introduction
by Marcus MeerGo the Distance: Concepts of Migration and Origin in the
Gesta Hungarorum of the Anonymous Hungarian Notary
by Kiri Kolt
Marginal People, Marginal History: A Historiography ofMedieval Romani Immigration
by Lane B. Baker

3

27

44

Classics Reread
Bringing the Middle Ages to Life:
Arno Borst, Lebensformen im Mittelalterby Levi Roach

76Book Reviews
Sarah Greer, Commemorating Power in Early Medieval Saxony:
Writing and Rewriting the Past at Gandersheim and Quedlinburg(Hedwig Röckelein)
Jason T. Roche, The Crusade of King Conrad III of Germany:
Warfare and Diplomacy in Byzantium, Anatolia and Outremer,
1146–1148 (Knut Görich)
William D. Godsey and Petr Maťa (eds.), The Habsburg Monarchy
as a Fiscal–Military State: Contours and Perspectives 1648–1815(Anke Fischer-Kattner)

81

87

95

Contents
Simon Huemer, Die europäische Wahrnehmung des Königreichs
Dänemark nach der Einführung der Lex Regia: Die Rezeption vonund Debatte über Robert Molesworths Account of Denmark als
Diskurs über die absolute Monarchie anhand seiner Deutung derdanske Enevælde von 1694 bis ca. 1770 (Andreas Pečar)
Tom Tölle, Heirs of Flesh and Paper: A European History of
Dynastic Knowledge around 1700 (Michael Rohrschneider)
Michael Kläger, Zivilisieren durch Strafen: Britisch-Indiens
Gefängnisse in der globalen Wissenszirkulation über die
strafende Haft, 1820–1889 (Joanna Simonow)
Isabella Löhr, Globale Bildungsmobilität 1850–1930: Von der
Bekehrung der Welt zur globalen studentischen Gemeinschaft(Daniel Laqua)
Sven Fritz, Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Rassenwahn und
Welterlösung. Biographie (Daniel Siemens)
Itay Lotem, The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France:
The Sins of Silence (Jan C. Jansen)

102
106

110

115
122
128

Conference Reports
Things on the Move: Materiality of Objects
in Global and Imperial Trajectories, 1700–1900
by Lena Potschka
135
Infrastructures for Social Data in Contemporary History:Pro­posals for a Better Future
by Kerstin Brückweh and Pascal Siegers142
Trans-Regnal Kingship in the Thirteenth Century
by Jörg Peltzer148
Beyond the Progressive Story:
Reframing Resistance to European Integration
by Katharina Troll, Alexander Hobe, and William King152
Behind the Wire: Internment during the First World War.
The Global German Experience
by Dina Gusejnova158

Noticeboard

161

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE IN STORIES OF
MEDIEVAL TRAVEL AND MIGRATIONINTRODUCTION
Marcus Meer
The idea that the Middle Ages were inaugurated by ‘barbarian invasions’ (Völkerwanderungen)—large-scale migrations of people that in
one fell swoop swept away the well-ordered world of Roman an­­tiquity for a landscape of unorganized, Dark-Age tribalism—has lost
ground in scholarship.1 So has the idea that—after this era of explosive movement—medieval Europe was paralysed by lack of mobility,2with people confined to their local community and anyone who daredto travel beyond its boundaries regarded as deeply suspicious. Yet
medieval society was more complex than that, as shown not least
Peter J. Heather, Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth ofEurope (Oxford, 2010); Guy Halsall, ‘The Barbarian Invasions’, in Paul Four­acre (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. i: c.500–c.700 (Cambridge,2005), 35–55; Peter Geiss and Konrad Vössing (eds.), Die Völkerwanderung:
Mythos—Forschung—Vermittlung (Göttingen, 2021); Mischa Meier, Geschichte
der Völkerwanderung: Europa, Asien und Afrika vom 3. bis zum 8. Jahrhundert n.
Chr. (Munich, 2021). See also the contributions to Brill’s series ‘Transform­ationof the Roman World’.
2
John F. Romano (ed.), Medieval Travel and Travelers: A Reader (Toronto,2020), p. xi: ‘The popular conception is that medieval people traveled little’.
For historiographical overviews, see also Romedio Schmitz-Esser, ‘Traveland Exploration in the Middle Ages’, in Albrecht Classen (ed.), Handbook ofMedieval Culture: Fundamental Aspects and Conditions of the European Middle
Ages, 3 vols. (Berlin, 2015), iii. 1680–704; Albrecht Classen, ‘Time, Space, andTravel in the Pre-Modern World: Theoretical and Historical Reflections. An
Introduction’, in id. (ed.), Travel, Time, and Space in the Middle Ages and Early
Modern Time: Explorations of World Perceptions and Processes of Identity Formation (Boston, 2018), 1–75; Michael Borgolte, ‘Medieval Era Migration: An
Overview’, in The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (Chichester, 2013), at[https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm355].
1

3

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration(and with remarkable ease) by Arno Borst’s seminal book on ‘Formsof Life in the Middle Ages’ (Lebensformen im Mittelalter), whose fiftieth publication anniversary is commemorated in this issue by Levi
Roach’s review in our ‘Classics Reread’ series.3 The contributors to thisissue, too, underline that although any movement away from home
was arduous and often even dangerous, people in the Middle Ages
exercised a degree of mobility that may still be surprising to somemodern onlookers. The contributions to this volume also highlight,
however, the ambiguity with which travellers and migrants of themedieval period were viewed by their contemporaries. Some of thesurviving sources condemned people on the move, especially when
they were perceived to be travelling without purpose or when their
movements were suspected of posing a danger or inflicting harm.
Other authors, by contrast, celebrated their accomplishments on theroad or indeed im­­agined their historical roots in adventurous movements of migration.

Prejudice against Travellers and Migrants
To be sure, prejudice against and hostility towards people on themove was far from exceptional, especially when these people did not
fall under the umbrella of (Catholic) Christianity, and even more sowhen their movement came with the spectre of violence. The campaigns of the Vikings from the eighth to the eleventh centuries andof the Mongols in the thirteenth, just like those of the Huns and theAvars in the fourth and fifth centuries, were depicted with extreme
hostility in medieval literature.4 Here, the predatory raids and military clashes that did occur and caused understandable concern were
Arno Borst, Lebensformen im Mittelalter (Frankfurt am Main, 1987), esp.
219–37.
4
Caitlin Ellis, ‘Remembering the Vikings: Violence, Institutional Memory
and the Instruments of History’, History Compass, 19/1 (2021), at [https://doi.
org/10.1111/hic3.12644]; Ann Trudy Fielding, ‘The Image of the Mongols
in Western European Imagination (1220–1500)’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
University of Cambridge, 2005); Diederik Burgersdijk, ‘Creating the Enemy:
Ammianus Marcellinus’ Double Digression on Huns and Alans (Res Gestae
31.2)’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 59/1 (2016), 111–32.
34

Introduction
turned into apocalyptic scenes, and their initiators into bloodthirsty
monsters devoid of humanity. Such themes are found, for instance, inthe historiographical accounts of the Magyars’ activities before forces
led by Emperor Otto I put an end to their raids in the Battle of Lechfeld, near Augsburg, in 955. Not only did the Magyars invade, loot,and torch entire cities, so that ‘smoke and skies red with fire revealed
where each band was’, as the monk Ekkehard (b. c.980) claimed in
his history of the monastery of St Gall,5 but the abbot and chronicler
Regino of Prüm (d. 915) branded them ‘a people fiercer and more cruelthan any beast’:6
Moreover, rumour has it, they eat meat only raw, they drink
blood, and they carve up the hearts of people they take captive to devour as a remedy, unaffected by compassion andunmoved by any sentiments of piety.7

Worse yet, as non-Christians, they lacked the right faith—a flaw
that rendered people on the move suspicious even when they were perfectly peaceful and, in fact, often already settled. This flaw was thus
imputed to Jewish people, whom medieval Christians im­­agined as
eternal migrants despite their often long-standing presence in Europe.
In later medieval chronicles, such as those written in St Albans, suchinterpretations of the relationship between Christianity and the Jewish
diaspora became personified. The figure of the ‘Wandering Jew’, inAnn Matter’s words, ‘takes on all of the characteristics of the whole
Jewish community in Christian culture’, in which Jews were believed
to be punished for their alleged role in the death of Jesus of Naz­ar­eth.
The ‘Wandering Jew’ is thus cursed with ‘a fugitive presence’ and has‘no home until the end of the world.’8 Of course, medieval Christians
Georg Heinrich Pertz (ed.), Scriptores rerum Sangallensium: Annales, chronica ethistoriae aevi Carolini, MGH SS 2 (Hanover, 1829), 105. All translations are myown, unless otherwise indicated.
6
Friedrich Kurze, (ed.), Reginonis abbatis Prumiensis Chronicon cum continuatione
7
Treverensi, MGH SS rer. Germ. 50 (Hanover, 1890), 131.
Ibid. 133.
8
E. Ann Matter, ‘Wandering to the End: The Medieval Christian Context ofthe Wandering Jew’, in Franklin T. Harkins (ed.), Transforming Relations: Essays
on Jews and Christians throughout History in Honour of Michael A. Signer (Notre
Dame, 2010), 224–40, at 232; Jean-Claude Schmitt, ‘La genèse médiévale de la55Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
themselves contributed much to this perception, repeatedly robbing
Jewish people of their homes and forcing them into exile, as after the
expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 or from the Palatinate of theHoly Roman Empire in 1390, among numerous other instances.9
Yet even Christians were not safe from prejudice if their movement was perceived to pose a risk to local communities. Mercenaries
who roamed the land in pursuit of employment were seen as a threat
not only due to their martial profession but also because of a supposed lack of loyalty, even if their arrival did not herald war to begin
with.10 The Third Lateran Council in 1179 held that the destructiveness of their activities was, in fact, equal to ‘the ways of pagans’.11
Indeed, ‘when no respectable tie bound a warrior to a cause or group’,
then that warrior, as Steven Isaac concludes, risked being seen as ‘alégende et de l’iconographie du Juif errant’, in Juliette Braillon-Philippe andPierre Birnbaum (eds.), Le juif errant: Un témoin du temps (Paris, 2001), 55–76;
George K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Providence, 1965), 16–37.
Robin Mundill, ‘Banishment from the Edge of the World: The Jewish Ex­peri­ence of Expulsion from England in 1290’, in John Tolan (ed.), Expulsion andDiaspora Formation: Religious and Ethnic Identities in Flux from Antiquity to theSeventeenth Century (Turnhout, 2015), 85–101; Nureet Dermer, ‘Between Foreigners, Strangers and Jews: The Changing Perception of Parisian Jews on the
Eve of the 1306 Expulsion’, Medieval Encounters, 27/4–5 (2021), 308–34; Jona­than Ray, After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry (New York,
2013), chs. 1–2; Gerd Mentgen, ‘Die Judenvertreibungen im mittelalterlichen
Reich: Ein Forschungsbericht’, Aschkenas, 16/2 (2008), 367–403. See also Benjamin Scheller, ‘Vertreibung als Disambiguierung: Die Ausweisung der Juden
aus England (1290), Frankreich (1394), Spanien (1492) und dem Königreich
Neapel (1510) im Vergleich’, in Markus Bernhardt (ed.), Inklusive Geschichte?
Kulturelle Begegnung—Soziale Ungleichheit—Inklusion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main, 2021), 120–48.
10
Nikolas Jaspert, ‘Mobility, Mediation and Transculturation in the Medi­eval Mediterranean: Migrating Mercenaries and the Challenges of Mixing’,
in Laila Abu-Er-Rub et al. (eds.), Engaging with Transculturality: Concepts, Key
Terms, Case Studies (Abingdon, 2019), 136–52; Hunt Janin and Ursula Carlson, Mercenaries in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Jefferson, NC, 2013); John
France (ed.), Mercenaries and Paid Men: The Mercenary Identity in the Middle
Ages (Leiden, 2008).
11
Giuseppe Alberigo et al. (eds.), The General Councils of Latin Christendom
from Constantinople IV (869/870) to Lateran V (1512–1517), 2 vols. (Turnhout,2013), i. 146.
96

Introduction
stranger not only to the land he plundered, but also to God’s mandated order.’12
In other instances, it was fears of economic competition that created‘fierce anti-alien feeling’, as migrants in London, frequently with Italian, French, Dutch, or German backgrounds, experienced throughout
the later Middle Ages and well into the early modern period.13 Whether
simple weavers or skilled goldsmiths, their impact on the labour
market and their cultural otherness led to abuse and violence: everyday insults that denounced migrants as ‘erraunt theves and their wifes
strong erraunt hores’ might be a matter for the courts,14 but charges of
economic harm done to the livelihoods of London citizens sometimes
had even graver consequences. A sermon that proclaimed ‘alyens andstrau[n]giers eate the bread from the poore fatherles chyldren, andtake the liuynge from all the artificers, and . . . from all merchauntes’
was the prelude to the Evil May Day of 1517, when the homes andshops of foreigners were ransacked—a comparatively mild outcomein this case, as xenophobia had also led to lethal attacks on London’s
immigrants in the Middle Ages.15
12
Steven Wayne Isaac, ‘Down upon the Fold: Mercenaries in the Twelfth Century’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Louisiana State University, 1998), 328–9.
13James L. Bolton, The Alien Communities of London in the Fifteenth Century:
The Subsidy Rolls of 1440 and 1483–4 (Stamford, 1998), 39–40. See also William Mark Ormrod, ‘Enmity or Amity? The Status of French Immigrants
to England during an Age of War, c.1290–c.1540’, History: The Journal of theHistorical Association, 105/364 (2020), 28–59; Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli andJessica Lutkin, ‘Perception, Identity, and Culture: The Italian Communities in Fifteenth-Century London and Southampton Revisited’, in WilliamMark Ormrod, Nicola F. MacDonald, and Craig D. Taylor (eds.), Resident
Aliens in Later Medieval England (Turnhout, 2017) 89–104; Bart Lambert and
Milan Pajic, ‘Immigration and the Common Profit: Native Cloth Workers,
Flemish Exiles, and Royal Policy in Fourteenth-Century London’, Journal of
British Studies, 55/4 (2016), 633–57; Joseph P. Huffman, Family, Commerce, andReligion in London and Cologne: Anglo-German Emigrants, c.1000–c.1300 (Cambridge, 2002), esp. ch. 7.
14
The National Archives, Kew, STAC 2/21/121, cited in Joshua Thomas
Ravenhill, ‘The Experiences of Aliens in Later Medieval London and the
Negotiation of Belonging, 1400–1540’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University
of York, 2019), 154.
15
Edward Hall, Hall’s Chronicle: Containing the History of England, during theReign of Henry the Fourth, and the Succeeding Monarchs, to the End of the Reign

7

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
Economic concerns also applied to individuals who merely passed
through towns and villages in search of a living, be they itinerant
merchants or vagrant labourers. But these groups had another problem: ‘because they were perceived to be mobile, their good character
could not be pledged by a neighbour, nor could they be relied upon
to take up arms when needed—just as other visitors to the city (evenquite wealthy foreign merchants) were equally strange and untrustworthy’.16 In a face-to-face society, transitory presence was a potential
problem. This suspicion of travellers and migrants whose place ofresidence—or at least place of origin—was uncertain or non-existentfeatures in Lane Baker’s contribution to this special issue, which discusses the first accounts of the Romani’s arrival in Central and Western
Europe. The German-speaking chroniclers of the Middle Ages, Baker
stresses, painted a picture that was not yet as consistently negative as
the condemnations of Romani by later, early modern commentators,
who have unjustly dominated the historical perception of Romani
migration in medieval Europe for too long.
Vagrants, however, were quickly suspected of evil intent. In the Icelandic sagas, ‘[t]hey are depicted as scurrilous, mercenary, treacherous
and manipulative, and rarely have social or kinship links of significance.’17 Vagrant beggars were in a category of their own, in medieval
Iceland and elsewhere, because medieval charity was focused on
of Henry the Eighth (London, 1809), 587. See also Brodie Waddell, ‘The Evil
May Day Riot of 1517 and the Popular Politics of Anti-Immigrant Hostility in
Early Modern London’, Historical Research, 94/266 (2021), 716–35; Len Scales,‘Bread, Cheese and Genocide: Imagining the Destruction of Peoples in Medieval Western Europe’, History: The Journal of the Historical Association, 92/3
(2007), 284–300.
Sarah Rees Jones, ‘Household, Work and the Problem of Mobile Labour: The
Regulation of Labour in Medieval English Towns’, in James Bothwell, Peter
Jeremy Piers Goldberg, and William Mark Ormrod (eds.), The Problem of Labour
in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2000), 133–53, at 142. See also Vito
Piergiovanni, ‘The Itinerant Merchant and the Fugitive Merchant in the Middle
Ages’, in Laurent Mayali and Maria M. Mart (eds.), Of Strangers and Foreigners(Late Antiquity–Middle Ages) (Berkeley, 1993), 81–96; Stephen Moore, ‘Perceptions of Vagrancy in Extant Legal Records throughout the Later Middle Ages,
1100–1400’ (unpublished MA dissertation, Carleton University, 1993).
17
Jamie Cochrane, ‘Gossips, Beggars, Assassins and Tramps: Vagrants andOther Itinerants in the Sagas of Icelanders’, Saga-Book, 36 (2012), 43–78, at 44.
16

8

Introduction
helping members of the community who, often through bodily injury
or deficiency, were unable to support themselves. By contrast, peoplesuspected of being merely unwilling to work, especially outsiders,evidenced by their ability to travel from place to place, were seen as aburden on a locality’s welfare resources and the so-called bonum commune, that is, the common good.18 In fact, vagrancy, where interpreted
as a choice of lifestyle, was so contemptible to some medieval obser­vers that it rendered even religious men suspicious. In 1319, when thearchbishop of Dublin, Alexander Bicknor, ‘bitterly complained of the
Mischiefs arising from the Straglers and Beggars that infested the Cityand Suburbs’, he convinced the city’s mayor to remove ‘idle Person[s]within his Liberties’, and importantly, ‘even the begging Friers were
not excused.’19
In their choice of poverty and reliance on alms, the mendicant
orders, such as Dominicans and Franciscans, traversed Europe rather
than confining themselves to solitude as hermits or enclosure inmonasteries. This rejection of ‘fixedness of place’ (stabilitas loci)—a
popular idea in Christian monasticism—met with criticism as early as
the sixth century, when the Rules of the Master and of Saint Benedict
denounced gyrovagi—‘those who wander’:they ask to rest their restless feet after journeying; using travel
as a pretense, what they really desire is to relieve not their feetbut their bellies . . . Never staying put, they are forced by traveling every day to beg, sweat and groan, instead of living andworking in one place . . . they prefer to travel than stay still.
Ever wandering through different lands, they have no idea
where they might support their weariness, or even where theymight find their burial.20
18
Kellie Robertson, The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Literary and Legal Productions in
Britain, 1350–1500 (New York, 2016), 184–90; Esther Cohen, ‘Vagrancy’, in John
Block Friedman and Kristen Mossler Figg (eds.), Trade, Travel, and Ex­plor­ationin the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia (New York, 2000), 623–4; Miri Rubin, ‘The
Poor’, in Rosemary Horrox (ed.), Fifteenth-Century Attitudes: Perceptions of Society in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 1994), 169–82.
19James Ware, The Whole Works of Sir James Ware Concerning Ireland, ed. Walter
Harris, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1764), i. 331–2.
20
Translated in Daniel Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority
and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 2002), 10.

9

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
To be sure, the mendicants would have maintained that not all those
who wander are lost. And they had a convincing argument on theirside:21 after all, Jesus of Nazareth had not only been poor, but alsoborn on a journey, and had spent his life wandering before commanding his disciples to ‘go into all the world and preach the gospel to all
creation’ (Mark 16:15).

Travellers and Travel Accounts
The ideal of stabilitas loci notwithstanding, evangelization was one
justification for religious men to travel even before the mendicantselevated religious vagrancy to an ideal (although many of them settled eventually). The famous early medieval chronicler Bede (d. 735)
described in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum how it was ‘mostly
monks’ who had risked the crossing from Ireland and the Continentthat preached to the peoples of Britain and eventually converted themto Christianity.22 Much more mundane reasons to be on the roadsprang from the administrative needs of monasteries, chapters, andchurches, which required monks, canons, and priests to travel regularly to see each other, their bishops (perhaps even the pope in Rome),
and other magnates.23
Benedikt Mertens, ‘ “Vidi quasi vias ipsorum multitudine plenas” (1 Cel27): Die evangelische Wanderschaft in der Praxis und Debatte der Minderbrüder im 13. Jahrhundert’, Wissenschaft und Weisheit, 63/1 (2000), 9–60.
22
Janneke E. Raaijmakers, ‘Missions on the Northern and Eastern Frontiers,c.700–1100’, in Alison Isdale Beach and Isabelle Cochelin (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West (Cambridge, 2020), 485–501, at
485. See also Conrad Leyser and Hannah Williams (eds.), Mission and Monasticism (Rome, 2013); Joachim Bohlem (ed.), Der missionarische Charakter desabendländischen Mönchtums (Grevenbroich, 2001), p. iii.
23
Olivier Delouis, Maria Mossakowska-Gaubert, and Annick Peters-Custot(eds.), Les mobilités monastiques en Orient et en Occident de l’Antiquité tardive au
Moyen Âge (IVe-XVe siècle) (Rome, 2019); Peter Erhart and Jakob Kuratli Hüeb­lin (eds.), Nach Rom gehen: Monastische Reisekultur von der Spätantike bis in die
Neuzeit (Vienna, 2021); Helena Vanommeslaeghe, ‘Wandering Abbots: Abbatial Mobility and stabilitas loci in Eleventh-Century Lotharingia and Flanders’,in Steven Vanderputten, Tjamke Snijders, and Jay Diehl (eds.), Medieval Liègeat the Crossroads of Europe: Monastic Society and Culture, 1000–1300 (Turnhout,
21

10Introduction
Certainly, travel was a necessity for many medieval people as amatter of occupation.24 The administration of entire realms required
even kings to remain on the move, although the notion of itinerantkingship (Reisekönigtum) is most famously associated with the German
kings and emperors, whose permanent movement through theirlands, without centralized courts or official capitals, remained thenorm throughout the Middle Ages.25 Mobility was even more essential to the duties of government agents—such as messengers, envoys,
sheriffs, justices, and heralds—who ensured that rulers remained
in touch with their subjects, dispersed possessions, and foreign
powers.26 From the twelfth century onwards, knights would follow
the king into war or, when there was no war, join the tournament
2017), 1–28; Notker Wolf, ‘Mönche auf Reisen: Ein Kontrapunkt zur “stabilitas loci”?’, in Jakob Kuratli Hüeblin and Peter Erhart (eds.), Vedi Napoli e poi
muori: Grand Tour der Mönche (St Gallen, 2014), 11–16; David Lepine, ‘ “Loose
Canons”: The Mobility of the Higher Clergy in the Later Middle Ages’, in Pere­grine Horden (ed.), Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the2003 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington, 2007), 104–22.
24
Marianne O’Doherty and Felicitas Schmieder (eds.), Travels and Mobilities
in the Middle Ages: From the Atlantic to the Black Sea (Turnhout, 2015); Horden(ed.), Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages; Paul B. Newman, Travel andTrade in the Middle Ages (Jefferson, NC, 2011); Norbert Ohler, The Medieval
Traveller, trans. Caroline Hillier (Woodbridge, 2010); Margaret Wade Labarge,
Medieval Travellers: The Rich and the Restless (London, 1982). See also n. 1.
25
Boris Bove, Alain Salamagne, and Caroline zum Kolk (eds.), L’itinérance
de la cour en France et en Europe: Moyen Âge–XIXe siècle (Villeneuve-d’Ascq,2021); Julie Elizabeth Kanter, ‘Peripatetic and Sedentary Kingship: The Itineraries of the Thirteenth-Century English Kings’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
King’s College London, 2011); John William Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship andRoyal Monasteries in Early Medieval Germany, c.936–1075 (Cambridge, 1993);
Hans Conrad Peyer, ‘Das Reisekönigtum des Mittelalters’, Vierteljahrschrift für
Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 51/1 (1964), 1–21.
26
Michael Borgolte, ‘Experten der Fremde: Gesandte in interkulturellen
Beziehungen des frühen und hohen Mittelalters’, in Centro italiano di studi
sull’alto medioevo (ed.), Le relazioni internazionali nell’alto medioevo (Spoleto,2011), 945–92; Richard Gorski, ‘Justices and Injustice? England’s Local Officials in the Later Middle Ages’, in John C. Appleby and Paul Dalton (eds.),
Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England: Crime, Government and Society,c.1066–c.1600 (Abingdon, 2016), 55–74; Wim van Anrooij, ‘Heralds, Knights
and Travelling’, in Erik S. Kooper (ed.), Medieval Dutch Literature in its European Context (Cambridge, 1994), 46–61.

11

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
circuit to hone their skills and pursue fame.27 Some well-to-do offspring were sent to be educated at Europe’s multiplying universities,
often far away from their homes.28 Sons of townspeople joined thestudent population in order to acquire the educational foundation to
run their family business, while others took apprenticeships in otherbranches of the enterprise that often led them away from their home
towns.29 Frequently, their commercial occupations required them totravel between centres of trade, like the merchants of the Hansa, who
dispatched a constant stream of goods—and countless people to transport them—all over Europe on roads, rivers, and seas.30 Even serfs,
who were otherwise ‘bound to the soil’ and thus had any voluntary
27
David Crouch, Tournament: A Chivalric Way of Life (London, 2006); Richard W. Barber, ‘Chivalry in the Tournament and Pas d’armes’, in Robert W.
Jones and Peter Coss (eds.), A Companion to Chivalry (Woodbridge, 2019),
119–38; Karen Watts and Alan V. Murray (eds.), The Medieval Tournamentas Spec­tacle: Tourneys, Jousts and Pas d’armes, 1100–1600 (Woodbridge, 2020);
Stefan Krause and Matthias Pfaffenbichler (eds.), Turnier: 1000 Jahre Ritterspiele (Munich, 2017).
28
Pauline Spychala, ‘Omnibus qui causa studiorum peregrinantur: Mobilitéssociales et géographiques des universitaires allemands, hongrois et slaves desuniversités françaises (1330–1500)’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Université deParis-Est Sup, 2021); William James Courtenay, Jürgen Miethke, and David B.
Priest (eds.), Universities and Schooling in Medieval Society (Leiden, 2000); AlanB. Cobban, The Medieval English Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to c.1500(London, 1988), 300–11.
29
Beata Możejko, ‘Young Burghers from Gdańsk at European Universities
in the Late Middle Ages’, in Martin Nodl (ed.), Středověká univerzitní vzdělanost (Prague, 2017), 135–68; Edelgard E. DuBruck, ‘Late-Medieval Merchants:
History, Education, Mentality, and Cultural Significance’, Fifteenth-Century
Studies, 28 (2003), 97–110; Klaus Wriedt, ‘Schule und Universitätsbesuch in
norddeutschen Städten des Spätmittelalters’, in id., Schule und Universität:
Bildungsverhältnisse in norddeutschen Städten des Spätmittelalters. Gesammelte
Aufsätze (Leiden, 2005), 27–44.
30
Chris Wickham, The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean
Economy, 950–1180 (Oxford, 2023); David Jacoby, ‘The Migration of Merchants and Craftsmen: A Mediterranean Perspective (12th–15th Century)’, inid. (ed.), Trade, Commodities and Shipping in the Medieval Mediterranean (Aldershot, 1997), 533–60; David W. Griffiths, ‘Exchange, Trade, and Urbanization’,in Wendy Davies (ed.), From the Vikings to the Normans (Oxford, 2003), 73–106;
Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz and Stuart Jenks (eds.), The Hanse in Medieval and
Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2012).

12

Introduction
mobility curtailed, occasionally had to travel to fulfil their obligations
to their lords.31
While travel was thus indispensable to turning the wheels of thisworld, ideas around pilgrimage suggested that travel to the holysites of Christendom might even ease access to the promises of thenext.32 People from all stations of life took up the pilgrim’s staff, fromfarmers and workers of modest means who visited nearby relics toburgesses, nobles, princes, and kings, who could afford to undertake even the costly journey to the Holy Land. Among the selectionof stereotypical pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century
Canterbury Tales is the fictional character of Alison, better known as
the Wife of Bath. Her presence reminds us that medieval women—
whether as pilgrims, as nuns taking care of their convents’ affairs,
as princesses sent to wed princes abroad, or as wives and maids
who followed their husbands and masters on campaigns—were no
strangers to travel either.33 Perhaps the most famous example of a
Paolo Tedesco and Steffen Patzold (eds.), Beyond the Manorial Economy:
Peasant Labour and Mobility in Carolingian and Post-Carolingian Europe, special issue of Journal of European Economic History, 48/3 (2019); Paul Freedman
and Monique Bourin (eds.), Forms of Servitude in Northern and Central Europe:
Decline, Resistance, and Expansion (Turnhout, 2005). See also Tom Scott, ‘The
Survival of Serfdom in Western Europe’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für
Rechtsgeschichte: Germanistische Abteilung, 136/1 (2019), 51–75.
32
Diana Webb, Medieval European Pilgrimage, c.700–c.1500 (Basingstoke, 2002);
Jenni Kuuliala and Jussi Rantala (eds.), Travel, Pilgrimage and Social Interaction
from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (Abingdon, 2021); Klaus Herbers and Hans
Christian Lehner (eds.), Unterwegs im Namen der Religion: Pilgern als Form vonKontingenzbewältigung und Zukunftssicherung in den Weltreligionen / On the
Road in the Name of Religion: Pilgrimage as a Means of Coping with Contingency
and Fixing the Future in the World’s Major Religions (Stuttgart, 2014).
33
Leigh Ann Craig, Wandering Women and Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims
in the Later Middle Ages (Leiden, 2009), esp. 39–49. See also Diana M. Webb,‘Freedom of Movement? Women Travellers in the Middle Ages’, in Christine
Meek and Catherine Lawless (eds.), Pawns or Players? Studies on Medieval
and Early Modern Women (Dublin, 2004), 75–89; Bart Lambert and Joshua
Ravenhill, ‘Travelled Women: Female Alien Immigrants in Fifteenth- andEarly-Sixteenth-Century London’, in Caroline M. Barron and Martha Carlin(eds.), Medieval Travel: Essays from the 2021 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington,2023), 155–73; Carole Anne Maddern, ‘Female Mobility in Medieval English
Romance: A Study of Travel and Transgression’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
31

13

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
well-travelled woman in the later Middle Ages is Margery Kempe(c.1373–1438), who is known not only to have journeyed from her
English home to Gdańsk to visit her daughter-in-law, but also to haveundertaken multiple pilgrimages.34 Margery covered a vast distance
between different sacred sites, from Wilsnack in Brandenburg all
the way to Santiago de Compostela, Rome, and even Jerusalem, as
her Book, hailed as the first auto­biog­raphy in the English language,
relates in fascinating detail.35
Indeed, the Middle Ages were a mobile period in which people
found purposeful travel—as opposed to the aimless wandering of avagrant, it would seem—perfectly justifiable and even respectable:‘to be widely travelled was, in the Middle Ages’—in anticipation of
the early modern Grand Tour as a feature of elite habitus—‘generally
considered a mark of distinction’.36 As early as the twelfth century,
the theologian Honorius of Autun (d. c.1140) admitted that rather
than seeking the forgiveness of sins, some pilgrims saw the rewardof their travels not only ‘in having seen pleasant places and beautiful
buildings’ but also ‘in the praise they love’.37 To claim the symbolic
capital promised by travel, travellers brought back souvenirs associated with remote places, such as pilgrim’s badges.38 To write about
King’s College London, 2001); Patrik Pastrnak, Dynasty in Motion: Wedding
Journeys in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York, 2023).
Iulia-Andreea Milică, ‘Women and Medieval Travels: The Book of Margery
Kempe’, Acta Iassyensia Comparationis, 2/18 (2016), 17–25; Albrecht Classen,‘Reisende Frauen im Mittelalter: Literarische Reflexionen europaweit, historisch belegte Reisende (Margery Kempe) und Reiseberichte für Frauen (Felix
Fabri)’, Mediaevistik, 34/1 (2021), 213–36.
35
Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. Anthony Bale (Oxford,2015).
36
Labarge, Medieval Travellers, 251. See also Jan van Herwaarden, ‘Pilgrimages and Social Prestige: Some Reflections on a Theme’, in Herwig Wolfram(ed.), Wallfahrt und Alltag in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Vienna, 1992),
27–79; Rainer Babel and Werner Paravicini (eds.), Grand Tour: Adeliges Reisen
und europäische Kultur vom 14. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Ostfildern, 2005).
37
Yves Lefèvre, L’Elucidarium et les Lucidaires: Contribution, par l’histoire d’untexte, à l’histoire des croyances religieuses en France au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1954), 435.
38
Rachel Facius, ‘Pilgrim Badges and the Magical Middle Ages: Aspectsof the Cult of Saints, Magical Thinking, and Religious Identity’, in Sergio
Escribano-Ruiz, Magdalena Ewa Naum, and Jette Linaa (eds.), Material
34

14

Introduction
one’s journeys, as Margery Kempe had done, was another means tothe same end, as a host of research on the literary works of medi­
eval travellers demonstrates. Over the course of the Middle Ages, as
Shayne Aaron Legassie has convincingly argued, ‘travel was increasingly understood as an ennobling, taxing form of work, at once
physical and intellectual’.39
Perhaps the most famous travel account of the Middle Ages is
associated with Marco Polo (d. 1324). It heaps praise on the Venetianmerchant’s accomplishments on his journey beyond the borders of thefamiliar European landscape all the way to the capital of the Mongol
Khan Kublai, which lasted from 1271 to 1295:
from the day the Lord our God moulded our first father Adamwith His hands until this very hour, there has never been aman, neither Christian nor pagan, Tartar nor Indian, nor of any
other race, who has explored and discovered the truth about somany disparate parts of the world and its great wonders as has
this Messer Marco Polo.40
Exchanges in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Archaeological Perspectives(Turnhout, 2021), 143–72; Detlev Kraack, ‘Chivalrous Adventures, Religious
Ardour and Curiosity at the Outer Periphery of the Medieval World: Inscriptions and Graffiti of Later Medieval Travellers’, in Jean-Michel Mouton (ed.),Le Sinaï de la conquête arabe à nos jours (Cairo, 2001); Marcus Meer, ‘Seeing Proofof Townsmen on the Move: Coats of Arms, Chivalric Badges, and Travel inthe Later Middle Ages’, Journal of Early Modern History, 25/1–2 (2021), 11–38.
39
Shayne Aaron Legassie, The Medieval Invention of Travel (Chicago, 2017),
p. viii (emphasis original). For historiographical overviews, see Mary Baine
Campbell, ‘Medieval Travel Writing (1): Peregrinatio and Religious Travel
Writing’ and Sharon Kinoshita, ‘Medieval Travel Writing (2): Beyond the
Pilgrimage’, both in Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (Cambridge, 2019), 33–47 and 48–61. See also Kim M.
Phillips, ‘Travel, Writing, and the Global Middle Ages’, History Compass, 14/3
(2016), 81–92. For a bibliography of source texts and secondary literature, seealso the database European Travel Accounts of the Late Middle Ages, at [https://digiberichte.de/], accessed 25 May 2023.
40
Marco Polo, The Travels, trans. Nigel Cliff (London, 2015), prologue. See also
Teresa Shawcross, ‘The World View of Marco Polo’s Devisament dou monde:
Commercial Marvels, Silk Route Nostalgia, and Global Empire in the Late
Middle Ages’, in Christian Raffensperger (ed.), Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe (Abingdon, 2022), 142–70.

15

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
Even earlier, between 1253 and 1255, the Franciscan monk William of
Rubruck had embarked on a similar journey to evangelize the heartlands of the Mongol Empire.41 His letter to Louis IX of France informed
the king of the customs of the Mongols and other peoples of Eastern
Europe and Northern Asia, which gave William the impression that
he was ‘entering another world’.42 Informative as the Itinerarium is,
William could not help but hint at his own courage, as in the caseof one encounter which left him feeling ‘as if I had escaped from theclutches of demons’.43 Despite his suspicion, he acknow­ledged that
the Mongols, whom he calls ‘Tartars’, were formidable adversaries,
not least borne out by their—and perhaps also his own—toughness
in terms of travel:
I tell you with confidence that if our peasants—to say nothingof kings and knights—were willing to travel in the way the
Tartar princes move and to be content with a similar diet, they
could conquer the whole world.44

William of Rubruck’s journey ended in the Holy Land, where a
Dominican monk by the name of Felix Fabri (d. 1502) also journeyedover two hundred years later, in 1483–4, and penned an extensive
travel account, his Evagatorium in Terræ Sanctæ.45 Fabri stressed that
his interest in the Holy Land was sincere and far removed from thatof other visitors. He derided ‘noblemen motivated by vanity’, whowere more concerned with scratching their names and coats of arms
into various places; even the walls of the Holy Sepulchre were notsafe, to the dismay not only of the local Muslim population but also
41
Shirin Khanmohamadi, ‘The Look of Medieval Ethnography: William of
Rubruck’s Mission to Mongolia’, New Medieval Literatures, 10 (2008), 87–114;
Peter Jackson, ‘William of Rubruck in the Mongol Empire: Perception andPrejudices’, in Joan-Pau Rubiés (ed.), Medieval Ethnographies: European Perceptions of the World Beyond (Abingdon, 2009), 273–90.
42
William of Rubruck, The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to
the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253–1255, trans. Peter Jackson (London,
43441990), 97.
Ibid. 98.
Ibid. 278.
45
Kathryne Beebe, Pilgrim and Preacher: The Audiences and Observant Spir­itu­ality
of Friar Felix Fabri (1437/8–1502) (Oxford, 2014); Hilda F. M. Prescott, Friar Felix
at Large: A Fifteenth-Century Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (New Haven, 1950).

16

Introduction

Fig. 1: Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, dressed as a pilgrim boundfor the Holy Land, depicted in a manuscript from the last quarter of the
fifteenth century. British Library, London, Cotton MS Julius E IV/3, fo. 5r.
Photoengraving printed in William St John Hope and Viscount Dillon (eds.),
Pageant of the Birth Life and Death of Richard Beauchamp Earl of Warwick K.G.
1389–1439 (London, 1914), 18.

17

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration

Fig. 2: Richard of Warwick kneels before the tomb in the Chapel of the Holy
Sepulchre in Jerusalem. British Library, London, Cotton MS Julius E IV/3, fo. 9r.
Photoengraving printed in Hope and Dillon (eds.), Pageant, 34.

the ‘devoted and sincere pilgrim’—presumably someone like himself—‘who had come to this sacred place at great cost and effort andthrough a thousand dangers’.46
Felix Fabri, Evagatorium in Terræ Sanctæ, Arabiæ et Egypti peregrinationem, ed. Konrad Dieterich Hassler, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1843), iii. 94–5. For
the wider phenomenon of travellers’ graffiti, see also Kraack, ‘Chivalrous
Adventures’.
46

18

Introduction

Fig. 3: Coat of arms and badges of pilgrimage sites and chivalric orders collectedby Konstanz patrician Conrad Grünenberg in a copy of his travel account(c.1487). Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe, St. Peter pap. 32, fo. 50v.

Among these perhaps more vain than pious pilgrims was the earlof Warwick, Richard Beauchamp (1382–1439), whose pilgrimage toJerusalem in 1408 was immortalized (alongside his accomplishmentson the battlefield) in the Beauchamp Pageants (Figs. 1–2). Similarly, theKonstanz burgess Conrad Grünenberg travelled to the Holy Land in
1486 and documented his experience—in both text and image (Fig. 3)—
not just for himself but also for ‘his supporters and friends’.47 While
the pilgrimage offered ‘full absolution from sins and punishment’, it
worked wonders for Grünenberg’s social status as well: in Jerusalem,
he was admitted to the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, whose badge he
Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe, Cod. St. Peter pap. 32, fo. 1r, at [https://digital.blb-karlsruhe.de/urn/urn:nbn:de:bsz:31-1272], accessed 25 May 2023.
See also Konrad Grünemberg, The Story of Sir Konrad Grünemberg’s Pilgrimage
to the Holy Land in 1486, trans. and ed. Kristiaan Aercke, A. C. J. de Vrank­rijker,
and Walther Fränzel (Moncalieri, 2005).
47

19

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
displayed in his travel account as proudly as he subsequently claimed
the title of ‘knight’ (Ritter) for himself.48
The souvenirs sought by medieval travellers and mentioned intheir accounts were not always so benign. When Leo of Rozmital,a Bohemian knight, embarked on his perambulation of Europe andreached the Iberian peninsula, he and his retinue visited not just Santiago de Compostela, but also the courts of the region’s magnates.49
After the king of Portugal invited him to choose a gift, the accountby Rozmital’s companion Gabriel Tetzel, from Nuremberg, states thatthe knight initially requested ‘two Moors’.50 A parallel report by Roz­mital’s squire claimed, in a more detailed reference to the cruel realityof medieval slavery and premodern forced migration,51 that the kinginsisted on awarding the delegation two horses and two apes as well,since ‘that which you ask [i.e. the slaves] is of no value’, as ‘no less than
100,000 or more Ethiopians . . . sold like cattle’ were brought from his
African possessions every year.52
Folker Reichert, ‘Zu Ehren Christi, zum Nutzen der Familie: Die Pilgerreise des Konrad Grünemberg’, Damals, 48/3 (2016), 58–63; Klaus Graf, ‘Adel
als Leitbild: Zur Geschichte eines Grundwerts in Spätmittelalter und früher
Neuzeit’, in Horst Carl and Sönke Lorenz (eds.), Gelungene Anpassung? Adelige
Antworten auf gesellschaftliche Wandlungsvorgänge vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert (Ostfildern, 2005), 67–81, at 67.
49
Françoise Michaud-Fréjaville, ‘Le voyage du seigneur Léon de Rozmitalen Occident, un apprentissage?’, in Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public (ed.), Voyages et voyageurs au Moyen Âge: XXVIe
Congrès de la SHMES, Limoges-Aubazine, mai 1995 (Paris, 1996), 31–52; Denise
Péricard-Méa, ‘Leo von Rozmital, böhmischer Pilger und Botschafter (1465–
1467) im werdenden Europa’, in Daniel Doležal and Hartmut Kühne (eds.),
Wallfahrten in der europäischen Kultur / Pilgrimage in European Culture (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), 109–20.
50
Malcolm Letts (ed. and trans.), The Travels of Leo of Rozmital through Germany,
Flanders, England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, 1465–1467 (Cambridge,1957), 120.
51
David Eltis et al. (eds.), The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. ii: AD
500–AD 1420 (Cambridge, 2021); Youval Rotman, ‘Migration and Enslavement: A Medieval Model’, in Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Lucian Reinfandt,
and Yannis Stouraitis (eds.), Migration Histories of the Medieval AfroeurasianTransition Zone: Aspects of Mobility between Africa, Asia and Europe, 300–1500 CE(Leiden, 2020), 387–412. See also below, n. 67.
52
Letts, The Travels of Leo of Rozmital, 106–7.
48

20

Introduction
Stories and Realities of Migration
The promise of arduous journeys and faraway places as a sourceof pride proved even more attractive when combined with anothersource of honour in the Middle Ages—namely, descent. From late
antiquity all the way to the early modern period, medieval authors
were infatuated with the idea that certain peoples—usually theirown—found their origins not just in a distant past, preferably with afearsome forefather, but also in a remote place.53 As the late Alheydis
Plassmann, the most eminent scholar of these legends, observed,
these so-called origines gentium ‘never contain the claim that the gensalways stayed in one place and that their origin is lost in the past’;on the contrary, ‘a story of migration is the usual variant of choice.’54
Inspired by Plassmann, Kiri Kolt, in her contribution to this special issue, identifies the same emphasis on movement in attempts
at identity construction found in Hungarian origines gentium. At theend of the twelfth century, members of previously disparate groups
were keen to embrace the idea of a larger Hungarian gens suggested
by writers on Hungarian history, which accorded them their pride ofplace among the other Christianized peoples of Europe who alreadypossessed remarkably similar origin stories. One popular theme ofmobile continuity in these stories which influenced the Hungariancase, as Kolt shows, had classical or indeed mythical Greco-Roman
53
Susan Reynolds, ‘Medieval origines gentium and the Community of theRealm’, History, 68/224 (1983); Walter Pohl, ‘Narratives of Origin and Migration in Early Medieval Europe: Problems of Interpretation’, Medieval History
Journal, 21/2 (2018), 192–221; Arnold Angenendt, ‘Der eine Adam und dievielen Stammväter: Idee und Wirklichkeit der Origo gentis im Mittelalter’, inPeter Wunderli (ed.), Herkunft und Ursprung: Historische und mythische Formen
der Legitimation (Sigmaringen, 1994), 27–52.
54
Alheydis Plassmann, ‘Origines gentium and the Long Shadow of Rome’, in
Linda Brady and Patrick Wadden (eds.), Origin Legends in Early Medieval Western Europe (Leiden, 2022), 405–23, at 417. See also Alheydis Plassmann, ‘Das
Wanderungsmotiv als Gründungsmythos in den frühmittelalterlichen Origines gentium’, in Michael Bernsen, Matthias Becher, and Elke Brüggen (eds.),
Gründungsmythen Europas im Mittelalter (Göttingen, 2013), 61–78; Al­­heydis
Plassmann, Origo gentis: Identitäts- und Legitimitätsstiftung in früh- und hochmittelalterlichen Herkunftserzählungen (Berlin, 2006).

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Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
ancestry—namely, the Roman appropriation of the Troy myth in the
figure of Aeneas and his escape, odyssey, and settlement in Italy.
In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie, another Trojan
warrior by the name of Brutus, ‘fourth in line from Aeneas’, fled Italy
after accidentally killing his father and experienced an odyssey of hisown, which eventually led him to a land formerly called ‘Albion’.55
Here, the new masters—having purged the land of the ‘giants’ whopreviously inhabited it—now called themselves ‘Britones or, by a corruption of the name, Britanni’ after Brutus, who ‘buil[t] himself a city,which he name[d] New Troy after the old; . . . today it is known by thedifferent name of London.’56 Just as Geoffrey of Monmouth casuallycreated a foundation story for London and its urban population, so
town clerk and chronicler Robert Ricart suggested that Bristol, likeother British cities, had a Trojan founder by the name of Brennius,
who ‘first founded and billed this worshipfull Towne of Bristut thatnowe is Bristowe’.57
Not all origines gentium were entirely based in fanciful fictions;some had a more or less loose connection to historical events. When
the Venerable Bede wrote his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, he
named Angles, Saxons, and Jutes as the peoples who subjugated theBritish population and established multiple early medieval English
kingdoms.58 As new research shows, their military and migratory
influx, however, might not have had as transformative an effect onearly British society as Bede—and nationalists of much later cen­tur­
ies—tended to think.59 Another origo gentis with a grain of truth at its
Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, vol. v: Gesta Regum Britannie, trans. Neil Wright (Cambridge, 1991), 27.
				5756
Robert Ricart, The Maire of Bristowe Is
Ibid. 28–33.
Kalendar, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith (London, 1872), 10. See also Peter Fleming(ed.), The Maire of Bristowe Is Kalendar (Bristol, 2015), 9–10.
58
Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum; Historia abbatum; et Epistolaad Ecgberctum; cum Epistola Bonifacii ad Cudberthum, ed. George H. Moberly(Oxford, 1881), 36.
59
Kazutomo Karasawa, ‘Historical Origins of a Mythical History: The Formation of the Myth Supporting Anglo-Saxonism Reconsidered’, in Karen Louise
Jolly and Britton Elliott Brooks (eds.), Global Perspectives on Early Medieval
England (Woodbridge, 2022), 171–89; Stephen J. Harris, ‘An Overview of Raceand Ethnicity in Pre-Norman England’, Literature Compass, 5/4 (2008), 740–54;
55

22

Introduction
centre is that narrated by the dean of St Quentin’s monastery in Aisne.
The chronicler of the Historia Normannorum (994–1015) presented thebackground of the dukes of Normandy as one of many adventurous
journeys,60 and of course the duchy’s Norman lords were descended
from seafaring Northmen who had settled (and raided) in France
before the Frankish King Charles the Simple invested the Viking
leader Rollo with the county of Rouen in 911.61
The Normans, like their Viking ancestors who settled in places
as far apart as Greenland and Russia, are an excellent example ofthe mobility that continued to shape Europe in the medieval period.
They probably had no more than a vague sense of ‘Normanness’,
however carefully curated in their own origines gentium and othermedia. Still, various bands of aristocrats and knights of Norman heritage not only famously conquered England in 1066, but throughout
the eleventh and twelfth centuries also founded kingdoms and principalities in the Mediterranean, including, among other places, Sicily
and the Levant.62
In the latter region, a band of Normans led by the infamous
Bohemond (c.1054–1111) from the Norman possession of Taranto insouthern Italy was part of the European expedition that established thePrincipality of Antioch, one of the so-called crusader states, in the wakeof the First Crusade (1096–9). Although Pope Urban II had suggested
Erik Wade and Mary Rambaran-Olm, ‘The Many Myths of the Term “AngloSaxon”’, Smithsonian Magazine (2021), at [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/
history/many-myths-term-anglo-saxon-180978169/], accessed 29 May 2023.
60
Alheydis Plassmann, ‘Shifting Identities: The Normans and the Perceptionof the Norman gens ’, in Viola Skiba, Nikolas Jaspert, and Bernd Schneidmüller
(eds.), Norman Connections: Normannische Verflechtungen zwischen Skandinavien und dem Mittelmeer (Regensburg, 2022), 248–61; Benjamin Pohl, Dudoof Saint-Quentin’s Historia Normannorum: Tradition, Innovation and Memory(Woodbridge, 2015), esp. 198–202.
61
Pierre Bouet, ‘Rollon et la fondation de la Normandie’, Études Normandes,
7/1 (2018), 52–9; Jean-Baptiste Auzel (ed.), La Normandie existe-t-elle? Être Normand au fil des siècles (Saint-Lô, 2019), 48–65.
62
Levi Roach, Empires of the Normans: Makers of Europe, Conquerors of Asia
(London, 2022); Emily Anne Winkler and Liam Fitzgerald (eds.), The Normans
in the Mediterranean (Turnhout, 2021); Keith J. Stringer and Andrew Jotischky(eds.), Norman Expansion: Connections, Continuities and Contrasts (Farnham,2013).

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Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
to the European nobility that ‘this land which you inhabit . . . is too
narrow for your large population’ when he called upon them to ‘[e]nter
upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre’,63 the political units in ‘Outremer’
that were created as a result of the crusade were settled by few Euro­peans permanently and ultimately remained short-lived.64
Things were very different when it came to the crusades against
Eastern Europe and its non-Christian populations. After the Wendish
Crusade of 1147, this area experienced a significant increase in the
migration of settlers from Western Europe into areas invaded andcontrolled by the Teutonic Order.65 Their efforts continued a trendof violent conquest, peasant migration, and town foundation—thecreation of a Germania Slavica66—that had begun under the Carolingians and Ottonians in the ninth and tenth centuries and had reached
its first crescendo in the twelfth century, when chronicler and priest
Helmold of Bosau (b. c.1120) marvelled at how ‘all the country of the
Edward Peters (ed.), The First Crusade: The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres andOther Source Materials, 2nd edn (Philadelphia, 2011), 28.
64
Jan Vandeburie, ‘ “Maugré li Polein”: European Migration to the Latin Eastand the Construction of an Oriental Identity in the Crusader States’, in Caro­line Barron, Justin Yoo, and Andrea Zerbini (eds.), Migration and Migrant
Identities in the Near East from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (London, 2019),
244–62; Piers D. Mitchell and Andrew R. Millard, ‘Approaches to the Studyof Migration during the Crusades’, Crusades, 12/1 (2013), 1–12; EdwardPeters, ‘There and Back Again: Crusaders in Motion, 1096–1291’, Crusades,
5/1 (2006), 157–71.
65
Gregory Leighton, ‘The Teutonic Order and the Origins of its State as an
Example of a Crusading Landscape in Fourteenth-Century Prussia’, in Torben
Kjersgaard Nielsen and Kurt Villads Jensen (eds.), Legacies of the Crusades: Proceedings of the Ninth Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades andthe Latin East, Odense, 27 June–1 July 2016 (Turnhout, 2021), 285–304; MariusŠčavinskas, ‘On the Crusades and Coercive Missions in the Baltic Region in
the Mid-12th Century and Early 13th Century: The Cases of the Wends andLivonians’, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, 63/4 (2014), 499–527. See
also Werner Paravicini, Die Preußenreisen des europäischen Adels, 3 vols. (Sigmaringen and Göttingen, 1989–2020).
66
Jan M. Piskorski, ‘Medieval Colonization in East Central Europe’, in Charles
W. Ingrao and Franz A. Szabo (eds.), The Germans and the East (West Lafayette,2008), 27–36. See also Christian Lübke, ‘Germany’s Growth to the East: From
the Polabian Marches to Germania Slavica’, in Graham A. Loud and Martial
Staub (eds.), The Making of Medieval History (Woodbridge, 2017), 167–84.
63

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Introduction
Slavs . . . was now, through the grace of God, made, as it were, one
colony of the Saxons’.67
Similarly to how these migrations into Eastern Europe displacedand enslaved Slavic pagan populations in ‘a cruel process of Christianization and Germanization, providing a religious gloss to ethnic
cleansing and territorial aggrandizement’,68 Muslim populations on
the Iberian peninsula suffered under the Reconquista. This development gradually brought to an end the convivencia that had allowed
for modes of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in
Al-Andalus.69 The sack of Granada in 1492 completed this almost eighthundred-year-long conflict between Christian rulers from Northern
Europe and Muslim rulers from North Africa, which had begun in 711
with the capture by Arab and Berber forces of the Visi­gothic Kingdom,
one of the realms that had sprung from the ‘barbarian invasions’.70***
As these latter examples also illustrate, the medieval period saw
migration for centuries beyond the ‘barbarian invasions’. Medievalists have shown that economic, social, and political contingencies
and opportunities motivated or even forced people to migrate to new
homes. Other travellers were on the move for a short time only inHelmold of Bosau, The Chronicle of the Slavs, trans. Francis Joseph Tschan(New York, 1966), 281.
68
Christopher Tyerman, The Crusades: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford,2005), 47. See also Anti Selart, ‘Slavery in the Eastern Baltic in the 12th–15th
Centuries’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), Schiavitù e servaggio nell’economia
europea: Secc. XI–XVIII / Serfdom and Slavery in the European Economy: 11th–18th
Centuries (Florence, 2014), 351–64.
69
Pamela A. Patton, ‘What Did Medieval Slavery Look like? Color, Race, andUnfreedom in Later Medieval Iberia’, Speculum, 97/3 (2022), 649–97; Pieter S.
van Koningsveld, ‘Muslim Slaves and Captives in Western Europe during
the Late Middle Ages’, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 6/1 (1995), 5–23.
70
Jonathan Jarrett, ‘Before the Reconquista: Frontier Relations in Medieval Iberia, 718 to 1031’, in Manuel Delgado, Laura Lonsdale, and Javier
Muñoz-Basols (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies (London,
2017), 27–40; Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain(Philadelphia, 2003).
67

25

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
search of power, profit, or salvation, or perhaps out of sheer curiosity,and were able and often keen to return to their established abodes.
Many were inspired to write about their experiences of travel or
migration, whether as victims of violent incursions, as observers of
strangers in their midst, or out of pride in their own or their ancestors’
achievements as travellers.
The contributions to this special issue add further breadth to thediverse scholarship on medieval migration and travel, whose surface
this introduction has only been able to scratch. In their focus on literary engagements with mobility and people on the move, the articles
presented here underline the ambiguity of perceptions of mobility inthe medieval period. Sometimes movement prompted derision andcondemnation, while in other instances it served as a source of honourand distinction. Crucially, it appears to have been the person of thetraveller or migrant that guided the judgement of their contemporaries. In this sense, the medieval experience of and engagement withmobility resembles the rather ambivalent views found in the present. Even now, attitudes which view movement—of refugees andmigrants, for example—with suspicion and disdain coexist and compete with celebrations of the global mobility exercised by self-declared‘digital nomads’ and cosmopolitans. The identity of the migrant or
traveller, in continued relation to traits like religion, ethnicity, and theperceived benefit to local communities, remains the decisive factor in
judging, permitting, and restricting human mobility, much as it wasin the Middle Ages.

MARCUS MEER has been a Research Fellow in Medieval History at
the German Historical Institute London since 2020, when he received
his Ph.D. from Durham University in a cotutelle arrangement with
the University of Münster. He is a historian of medieval culture
and communication with a comparative interest in England, theGerman-speaking lands, and more recently also the Low Countries in
the later Middle Ages.
26

GO THE DISTANCE:CONCEPTS OF MIGRATION AND ORIGIN IN THE
GESTA HUNGARORUM OF THE ANONYMOUSHUNGARIAN NOTARY
Kiri Kolt
At the end of the twelfth century, an anonymous writer sat down tofulfil a promise he had made to his friend, an individual addressed
only as ‘the venerable N’, to establish
the genealogy of the kings of Hungary and of their noblemen:
how the seven leading persons, who are called the Hetumoger,came down from the Scythian land . . . and why the people
coming forth from the Scythian land are called Hungarians inthe speech of foreigners but Magyars in their own.1

These Magyars, he furthermore claimed, had got their name from
Magog, son of Japheth, the first king of Scythia, from whose line thefamous King Attila was also descended.2 In a few sentences across thefirst couple of chapters of this text, the Gesta Hungarorum, the author
thus created an origin story for the Hungarians that invoked the biblical figures of Gog and Magog, classical texts by writers fascinatedwith the ‘other’ peoples of antiquity (such as the nomadic Scythians),and early medieval history, along with the first traces of Hungarian
ethnogenesis. What is more, all parts of this origin narrative prominently feature implicit and explicit references to the movement ofpeoples. Legends of migration played a key role in the developmentof the identity of the Hungarians in the Gesta and in the many texts
that followed it. So much so that the descent from Scythia remained
part of the Hungarian national consciousness until well into theAnonymous (Notary of King Béla), Gesta Hungarorum / The Deeds of the Hungarians, ed. and trans. Martyn Rady and László Veszprémy, & Master Roger,
Epistola in miserabile carmen super destructione Regni Hungarie per tartaros facta/ Epistle to the Sorrowful Lament upon the Destruction of the Kingdom of Hungary
by the Tatars, ed. and trans. János M. Bak and Martyn Rady (Budapest, 2010),
2–3, hereafter cited as GH.
2
GH, 6–7.
1

27

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
nineteenth century.3 How then did the concept of migration come tobe such an evocative part of this elaborate origin story? This article
seeks to answer this question by exploring the Hungarian origin story
presented in the Gesta in the light of Alheydis Plassmann’s model ofthe medieval migration motif.4 Applying this framework to the Gesta
Hungarorum enables a deeper understanding of the structure of the
Hungarian migration myth and reveals the careful and deliberatechoices the author made in order to create a story that has con­tinued
to fascinate audiences and scholars both in and outside Hungary fromthe medieval period through to the present day.

The Gesta Hungarorum and the Genre of Origo Gentis
The Gesta Hungarorum is a prime example of the centrality of movement in medieval origin stories because the whole narrative paints
the outline of a complex and complete journey, from the ancestors’
depart­ure from their homeland to their arrival at their new settlement.
Regrettably, this text has received less attention in English-language
scholarship than the later, longer thirteenth-century chronicle of thesame name by Simon of Kéza.5 The Gesta written by the Anonymous
Notary, however, is the oldest extant Hungarian origin narrative written in Latin, which was the most common language for these types ofAlexander John Sager, ‘Van Ôstrit Allenthalbin: Images of Eastern Europe inMedieval German and Hungarian Literary Culture, 1050–1300’ (unpublished
Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University, 2000).
4
Alheydis Plassmann, ‘Das Wanderungsmotiv als Gründungsmythos in den
frühmittelalterlichen Origines gentium’, in Michael Bernes, Matthias Becher,and Elke Brüggen (eds.), Gründungsmythen Europas im Mittelalter (Göttingen,2013), 61–77.
5
It is significant that Simon of Kéza’s text was the first to be published as a
critical edition with an English translation in the Central European Medi­eval
Texts series in 1999, whereas the CEMT edition of the Gesta Hungarorum only
came out in 2010. See Simon of Kéza, Gesta Hungarorum / The Deeds of the
Hungarians, ed. and trans. László Veszprémy and Frank Schaer (Budapest,
1999). For more information on Simon of Kéza and his influence on Hungarian national history writing, see Norbert Kersken, Geschichtsschreibung im
Europa der ‘nationes’: Nationalgeschichtliche Gesamtdarstellungen im Mittelalter(Cologne, 1995), 662–70.
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Migration and Origin in the Gesta Hungarorum
texts in the Middle Ages. Most scholars agree that the chronicle waswritten sometime after 1192, though it is difficult to be sure because
the author only identified himself with an initial, ‘P’, and by mentioning that he was a notary to a king by the name of Béla, of which there
were no fewer than four during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.6
The text belongs to the genre of the so-called origo gentis narratives written throughout the Middle Ages. These myths of origin
were, as Alexander John Sager has put it, ‘narratives of diaspora andmigration’, meant to create a sense of community for their audience
both as members of a distinct people and as part of the wider Christian world.7 This desire to place populations within the medieval
Christianitas is why origo gentis stories became particularly popularduring the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when newly Christianized peoples like the Hungarians started writing their own histories.8
The intended readers of these texts were often the ruling elite, both
ecclesiastical and secular, who found in the narratives validations of
their claims to lands and titles. The Hungarian Notary, for example,
often emphasized this by explaining that certain nobles had received
their possessions from the ninth-century leader Árpád and that ‘theirdescendants have . . . been worthy to keep these lands till now.’9
Although often presented as authentic reports of historical events by
their authors, the value of the origines gentium to the modern histor­
ian lies more in their imagined presentation of the past than in any
factual information.
Within the narratives of origines gentium, a migration story could
be a particularly useful topos with which to locate a gens in the universal historical landscape and link its history with events from biblicaland classical literature. Especially if a people had not been mentioned
7
GH, pp. xxi–xxii.
Sager, ‘Van Ôstrit Allenthalbin’, 8.
Alheydis Plassmann, Origo Gentis: Identitäts- und Legitimitätsstiftung in frühund hochmittelalterlichen Herkunftserzählungen (Berlin, 2006); Magali Coumert,
Origines des peuples: Les récits du Haut Moyen Âge occidental (550–850) (Turnhout, 2007); Susan Reynolds, ‘Medieval origines gentium and the Communityof the Realm’, History, 68/224 (1983), 375–90; R. W. Southern, ‘Presidential
Address: Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society: Fifth Series, 20–3 (1970–3).
9GH, 48. For more on the causa scribendi and the audience of the Gesta Hungarorum, see GH, p. xxv.
6
8

29

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migrationin the established historical tradition, an explanation had to be foundfor where they had come from and how they had ended up in theirpresent home. A migration motif, as Plassmann called it, can be foundin many origo gentis stories and can be broken down into three different elements: where the departure took place spatially, what thejourney looked like, and how the arrival was depicted.10

The Place of Origin
Taking each of these elements in turn, let us return now to the text of
the Gesta Hungarorum and its descriptions of the Scythian homelandof the Hungarians. Locations such as Scythia, Troy, and Scandinavia
were attractive places of origin to medieval people because, as Walter
Pohl has explained, they were located on the European periphery andwere ‘known above all from legends and long reputed as places of emigration.’11 In fact, many of the traditional choices of homeland dated
back to antiquity. Troy is perhaps the most famous example. The classical writer Vergil used it as the original home of the Romans, and thestory was so influential that in the seventh century Fred­egar, the writerof the first Frankish origin story, appropriated the city and made its
exiles into the ancestors of the Franks too.12 The Bible was also a reliable source for the origins of peoples. Claiming ancestry from Noahand his son Japheth proved especially popular in the Middle Ages,
as it indicated a genealogical relationship with the chosen people, as
well as a geographical descent from biblical lands in the distant past.
More often than not, however, writers combined biblical, classical, andearly medieval legends to create their own ancestry myths. The use of
Scythia, a classical concept, in the Gesta Hungarorum alongside a lineage traced back to the biblical Magog and Japheth is therefore notunusual. What is worth exploring, however, is the way Scythia wasdescribed by the Anonymous Notary and the reason why it was designated as the Hungarians’ homeland in the first place.
Plassmann, ‘Das Wanderungsmotiv’, 63.
Walter Pohl, ‘Narratives of Origin and Migration in Early Medieval Europe:
Problems of Interpretation’, Medieval History Journal, 21/2 (2018), 192–221, at
12
194.
Reynolds, ‘Medieval origines gentium’, 376.
10
11

30

Migration and Origin in the Gesta Hungarorum
It was the Anonymous Notary’s main source, the ninth-century
German abbot Regino of Prüm, who first described the Hungarians
as a people who, ‘unheard of in previous centuries, because they
were not named [in the sources], emerged from the Scythian kingdoms’ in 889.13 Regino gave the Hungarians a Scythian ancestry
seemingly because he could not find any information on their actual
origins. Scythia, therefore, was less an actual place and more a typeof literary topos—one that brought with it a variety of characteristics.
The An­onym­ous Hungarian Notary, for example, copied Regino’s
assertion that the people living in Scythia had never been ruled byan emperor.14 This independence was a crucial point in origo gentis
le­gends. The Normans claimed Scandinavia as their ancestral homeland precisely because it had never been part of the Roman Empire.
The Scandinavians could therefore be portrayed as a mighty people
who had been able to maintain their independence against the military power of the Romans.15
Scythia as a topos had a similar type of history. It was Herodotus,
the fifth-century BCE father of history, who first mentioned Scythia in
his Histories, where he presented its inhabitants as a model of other­ness to contrast with his main subject, the Greeks. The Scythians, who
lived on the Pontic Steppe between the seventh and third centuries
BCE, were a nomadic people, constantly moving from place to place.
The Greeks, on the other hand, took great pride in their cities andtheir life-long attachment to one area.16 In other words, the Scyth­ians
provided a counterpoint against which the Greeks could set their own
identity. This is why Scythia is described in classical literature as ‘adistant land . . . on the edges of the world.’17 Though Herod­otus was
not read by medieval writers, his description of Scythia set a precedent
13
Simon MacLean (trans.), History and Politics in Late Carolingian and Ottonian
Europe: The Chronicle of Regino of Prüm and Adalbert of Magdeburg (Manchester,
142009), 202.
GH, 6–7.
15
On the Scandinavian ancestry of the Normans and the significance of independence, see Robert W. Rix, The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination:
Ethnicity, Legend, and Literature (New York, 2015).
16
François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in
the Writing of History, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley, 1988), 11.
17
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. David Grene (Chicago, 1956), 416–17.
Cited in Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus, 13.

31

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
and was mediated through a variety of authors from an­­tiquity to theearly Middle Ages. Thus we see that the Gesta’s idea of the Scythians
as an independent people echoes Herodotus’ notion of nomads without a home or a ruler.
Next to political independence, antiquity was another particularly
sought-after characteristic in origines gentium, and this was provided
to the Scythians by Marcus Junianus Justinus Frontinus, commonly
known as Justin, a Roman historian from the second or third century
CE. He wrote extensively about Scythia in his Epitome, an abridgement of the earlier writer Pompeius Trogus’ Philippic Histories. In
Justin’s work, the Scythians were opposed to the Egyptians rather
than the Greeks, and through a complicated set of scenarios describing the inception of the world, he argued that Scythia was older thanEgypt.18 Justin’s direct influence, mediated through Regino of Prüm,
can be found in the Gesta Hungarorum’s first chapter, where the author
relates that ‘the Scythians are a more ancient people.’19 The word thatstands out here is ‘more’, which does not make sense in the context of
the Gesta, where there is no comparison with other peoples. It does
make sense, however, as an invocation of Justin, who made this claim
immediately after his discussion of the Egyptians.20
The classical writers had thus established the Scythians as highly
desirable ancestors by emphasizing their independence and an­­tiquity,and it was then up to medieval historians to claim them as their own.
Yet by late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the role of Scythia had
to be reframed in light of the rise of Christianity. Rather than appearing as uncivilized, in contrast to the intellectual soci­eties of antiquity,
the Scythians became exemplars of innocent pagans living in ignorance
until they discovered the true religion. For ex­­ample, the fifth-century
writer Orosius attributed Scythian origins to the Goths, thereby transferring the Christian-like characteristics of the former to the latter,
which gave the Goths a kind of innate Chris­tian­ity that helped themmake peace with the Romans. Drawing on Judaeo-Christian tradition,
he equated the Goths with the Getae—a people often seen as descend­ants of the biblical Gog and Magog, the sons of Japheth and grandsons
18
Marcus Junianus Justinus, Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus,
ed. and trans. John Selby Watson (London, 1853), 2.1.
19
20
GH, 6–7.
See Rady’s explanation in GH, 6, n. 4.

32

Migration and Origin in the Gesta Hungarorumof Noah, whose base was said to be in the lands of Scythia.21 Many subsequent medieval authors ascribed a Scythian heritage to previously
pagan peoples, and so the Hungarians came to claim this ancestry too.
The Anonymous Notary used this Gothic–Christian ancestry himself
when he noted that the Hungarians, who were called Magyars in theirown language, were named after Magog.22 This stands in line with awider medieval tradition in origines gentium of using etymology to linkpeople to a heroic ancestor, an event, or a place. Names had specificmeanings which could explain the characteristics of the gens or, as is
the case here, could be interpreted as harbouring some type of divine
purpose.23
Here it may be useful to pause for a moment and note that eventhough the Hungarian origin narrative was informed by many classical and religious works of literature, the influence of oral traditions
cannot be wholly disregarded. As Pohl has rightly pointed out, it
would be wrong to assume that pagan peoples like the Goths or the
Hungarians ‘completely forgot their indigenous traditions as soon as
they entered the Roman Empire’.24 Indeed, in the middle of the tenthcentury, as historians have found, the historical consciousness of the
Hungarians still relied very much on an oral tradition which celebrated the conquest of the country by the previous generation. Only
after their Christianization in the eleventh century did they feel theneed for a wider history, following a more general tendency among
recently converted peoples to create their own origines gentium.25 An
increased anxiety over using ‘authentic’ accounts of historical events
A. H. Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2005), 61.
According to Rady, Anonymous is the only Hungarian chronicler to havemade this connection. See GH, 7, n. 7.
23
Alheydis Plassmann, ‘Intentionale Deutungen von Gentes-Namen’, in Frank
Hentschel and Marie Winkelmüller (eds.), ‘Nationes’, ‘Gentes’ und die Musik
im Mittelalter (Berlin, 2014), 53–4. See also Plassmann, Origo gentis, 18–24 and
362–77. More broadly on the topic of etymology and peoples, see Arno Borst,
Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und Vielfalt derSprachen und Völker, 6 vols. (Stuttgart, 1957–63).
24
Pohl, ‘Narratives of Origin and Migration’, 200.
25
János Harmatta, ‘Érudition, tradition orale et réalité géographique: Le récit
sur l’Exode des Hongrois chez Anonyme’, Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum
Hungaricae, 27 (1979), 285–303, at 289.
21

22

33

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
made people like the Anonymous Notary determined to use scriptural and classical sources to inform their narratives instead of relying
on folk tales.26 To show his earnestness in this pursuit, Anonymous
asserted that he had written his text to make sure that anyone interested in learning about the Hungarian past would not need to turn to‘false stories of peasants and the gabbling song of minstrels.’27 Despite
this adamant statement, however, it is highly likely that some oral
origin stories circulating among the various leading families madetheir way into the Anonymous Notary’s narrative.28
What is clear is the number of cultural references he applied retro­
spectively to the early Hungarians. For example, he claimed that
the Scythians lived in felt tents and that, when they left their homeland, they crossed the river Etil (the modern-day Volga) ‘sitting onleather bags in the pagan manner.’29 As Martyn Rady mentions, these
may have been customs that Anonymous had witnessed among his
countrymen as late as the twelfth century.30 Attributing these pagan
habits to the Scythians perhaps made it easier for a contemporary
audience to identify themselves with these distant ancestors. The
fact that Anonymous describes many of the early Hungarians’ pagan
behaviours in a positive light is quite unusual, especially compared tocontemporaries such as Cosmas of Prague. Part of the reason might
be a lack of alternatives, because there was so little information on
Hungarian prehistory (that is, before the conversion) available to awriter of the twelfth century. Anonymous navigated this vacuum
by claiming that the Hungarians had been led by God and the Holy
Spirit from the beginning.31 What the writer tried to do was create acontinuity between the pagan past and the Christian present. Hence
26
For more on this general trend in Europe in the twelfth century, see Paul
Magdalino (ed.), The Perception of the Past in Twelfth-Century Europe (London,
271992).
GH, 4–5.
28
For a more detailed exploration of Anonymous’ possible local sources, seeGH, p. xxix.
29
30
GH, 8–9 and 20–1.
See Rady’s notes, GH, 9, n. 5 and 20, n. 3.
31
László Veszprémy, ‘More paganismo: Reflections on the Pagan and Christian
Past in the Gesta Hungarorum of the Hungarian Anonymous Notary’, in Ildar
H. Garipzanov (ed.), Historical Narratives and Christian Identity on a European
Periphery: Early History Writing in Northern, East-Central, and Eastern Europe(c.1070–1200) (Turnhout, 2011), 183–201, at 201.

34

Migration and Origin in the Gesta Hungarorum
every part of the Hungarian migration, from leaving Scythia to fighting with local lords and taking lands, was clothed in a veil of divine
providence. This not only showed that the Hungarians had God’s support in their quest for a new homeland, but also afforded them a kindof innate Christianity, making their later official conversion a logicalconsequence rather than a radical break with their past.32 This becamea particularly important theme when the Scythians set out on theirjourney for a new land.

Leaving the Homeland
Anonymous’ chapter on Scythia ends with the reason why the
Hungarians left this land: ‘although spacious enough, it was stillinsufficient to sustain or hold the host of peoples begotten there.’33
As Rady has mentioned, there are many medieval historical texts
that present the problem of overpopulation as an incentive to leave aplace of origin. The Gesta, via Regino, quotes from Paul the Deacon’s
Historia Langobardorum, which applies the same justification to the
movement of the Goths, amongst others.34 The Anonymous Notary
wrote that the leaders of the Hungarians, upon making the decision
to leave, agreed to ‘seek for themselves the land of Pannonia that they
had heard from rumor had been the land of King Attila, from whoseline Prince Álmos [the leader of the Hungarians] . . . descended.’35
Anonym­ous was peculiar in that, unlike other chroniclers, he did not
make any clear connections between the Huns and the Hungarians.
Any link between the Hun Attila and the Hungarian Álmos in the
Gesta came from the fact that they were both descendants of the firstking of the Scythians: Magog, son of Japheth, one of the three sons ofNoah. Throughout the text, however, this kinship relation remains alittle ambiguous and it seems, as László Veszprémy has suggested,that the author involved Attila only at certain stages of the journey
and within the pagan framework when he remembered that associations with the legendary king would make more sense, but not
32
34

Veszprémy, ‘More paganismo’, 185–9 and 200–1.
Cited in GH, 11, n. 2.

35

33
35

GH, 10–11.
GH, 16–7.

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
at others where divine support and Christian heritage were more
important.36
Certainly, the theme of a people inhabiting a land previously settled by its ancestors carried biblical connotations, as it was inspiredby the story of Moses and the Israelites wandering towards the land
promised to them by God. God told Moses that he should lead his
people out of Egypt to the land of the ‘Canaanite, and Hittite, andAmorite, and Perizzite, and Hivite, and Jebusite.’37 The Canaanites
were the tribe descended from Canaan, son of Ham, another son of
Noah. The land where this tribe lived had been promised to Abrahama few hundred years earlier, so there were a number of ge­nea­logic­allines that connected the Israelites to those who had settled the Promised Land previously.38 The Israelites thus travelled to a place where
one of their ancestors had lived before. In the Gesta, the Hungarians
followed this same pattern, as the author claimed that they migrated
to land that had previously been conquered by Attila, the Hungar­
ians’ distant Hunnish relative. In chapter twenty, Anonymous makes
the link even more explicit by casting the Hungarian Prince Álmos
and his son Árpád as the sons of Israel to whom Moses had promisedthat ‘[e]very place that your foot shall tread upon shall be yours.’39
According to the narrative, the Hungarian leaders and their companions fulfilled this prophecy because whatever territory they (and their
alleged Hunnish ancestors) had conquered, they and their descend­ants had held until the present day. This suggested continuity could
have also helped to legitimize claims to land that may have been disputed in Anonymous’ time, when references to legendary ancestors
became more widespread in other texts too. After 1200, for example,
genealogical claims became increasingly important in the documentsof many of the leading Hungarian families.40

Veszprémy, ‘More paganismo’, 194.
Exod. 3:17. Bible quotations are taken from Swift Edgar and Angela M.
Kinney (eds.), The Vulgate Bible: Douay–Rheims Translation, 6 vols. in 7 parts(Cambridge, MA, 2010).
38
39
40
Gen. 15.
GH, 54–5 and Deut. 11:24.
GH, p. xxv.
36
37

36

Migration and Origin in the Gesta Hungarorum
On the Move
When it came to the actual journey of the Hungarians, Moses andthe Israelites once again provided the inspiration. Like them, when
the Hungarians first started their travels, they wandered throughempty regions, never coming across ‘the way of a city for their habi­tation’.41 Here, the author invokes Psalm 106, which deals with thetheme of divine salvation and describes God guiding the Israelites
to the Promised Land despite their transgressions. This referenceemphasized that God was also leading the Hungarians on their journey from their homeland to a new, better place. In the same section,
Anonymous wrote that after wandering for many days the Hungarians swam across the river Etil in the same ‘pagan way’ as the
Scythians, as I have mentioned above. The river is thus not just aphysical feature of the landscape, but also marks the departure fromthe Scythian lands and cultural heritage. It was a threshold not justbetween land and water, but between civilized and uncivilized—
Christian and non-Christian.42 It was this transition that physically
put the Hungarians on the path of Christianity, a notion which is
amplified by the Anonymous Notary’s efforts to cast the Hungarians
as the Israelites reincarnate.
After crossing the Etil, the Hungarians came into the land of theRus’, which they decided to conquer. The princes of the Rus’ were initially afraid of them, the Gesta insisted, because ‘they had heard that
Prince Álmos . . . was of the line of King Attila, to whom their forefathers had annually paid tribute.’43 Here we can see in action what I
have mentioned above, namely that Anonymous had to emphasize
the Hungarians’ kinship with Attila because he was aware that thiswas the more authentic and more impressive choice. The memory of
GH, 20–1. Cf. Ps. 106:4.
The notion of rivers as dividing lines can be traced back to classical literature. Vergil’s Aeneid, for example, describes the Styx, a river in the Underworld
which divided the world of the living from the world of the dead; Vergil,
Aeneid, vi. 439. Anonymous would have taken these models not directly from
Vergil or other classical sources, but rather from ‘popular readings’ and possibly from Dares’ Excidium Troie; see Rady’s remarks in GH, pp. xxii—xxiii
43
and xxix.
GH, 22–3.
41
42

37

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
the great warrior king and his dominion over the ancestors of the Rus’
was a more convincing argument for their fearful attitude and eventual submission than the Hungarians being recipients of the grace ofGod. Divine grace was never far away, however, and it was actually
the combined fear of the Hungarians’ descent from Attila and the factthat ‘divine grace was in them’ that later made another people, theSlavs, surrender to the Hungarians without battle.44 Though the fear
the Hungarians instilled in many people, which helped them conquer
many towns and regions, derived from Attila, it remained importantto the author of the Gesta to stress that all of these successes were only
possible because God was with them.
Another notable echo of Old Testament symbolism in the Gesta is
the first sighting—the ‘in-Sicht-Nahme’45—of the promised land fromthe top of a mountain. When the Hungarians eventually arrived inPannonia, Prince Árpád and his company rested at the castle of Ung
for a couple of days. While there, he and his men, ‘seeing the fertilityof the land and the abundance of all beasts and the fullness of thefishes in the rivers Tisza and Bodrog, loved the land more than canbe said.’46 Again, this passage is reminiscent of biblical narratives, inthis case Deuteronomy 34:1: ‘Then Moses went up from the plains ofMoab upon Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah over against Jericho,
and the Lord shewed him all the land of Gilead as far as Dan.’ The’in-Sicht-Nahme’ in the Gesta thus portrays the Hungarian leader—
this time Árpád instead of his father Álmos—as resembling Moses
viewing the Promised Land. The castle of Ung was furthermore significant because, according to Anonymous, it gave the Hungarians
their name. It was their first resting place when they entered Pannonia
after conquering the Slavs, and this was why the peoples around themstarted calling their leader ‘the Prince of Hungary and his men Hungarians’.47 There is a similar instance of the ‘in-Sicht-Nahme’ further
on in the narrative, when three of the Hungarian warriors climbed
a high mountain and from the top could see ‘as far as . . . the human
eye the land on all sides from the summit of the mountain, [and they]
loved it more than can be said.’48 Another naming took place there,
44
47

GH, 72–3.
GH, 12–13.

45

Kersken, Geschichtsschreibung, 645.
48
GH, 44–5.

38

46

GH, 39.

Migration and Origin in the Gesta Hungarorum
though this time it was the mountain that received the name of oneof the warriors, Tarcal. This is part of a more general trend in the narrative whereby Anonymous attempted to clarify the toponomy of
Hungary and the surrounding area by connecting them to fictional
people and events.49
The attentive reader may have noticed the repeated use of thephrase ‘loved it more than can be said’. Anonymous repeats it anumber of times throughout the text, and it too is derived from the
Bible—in this instance Genesis 27, which tells the story of how Jacob
tricked his father Isaac into blessing him instead of his brother Esau.
In the Vulgate, this phrase was translated as bewilderment rather thanlove, which would work equally well in communicating the awe the
Hungarians felt in viewing their new land.50 Maybe taking this phrasefrom Genesis was another way for Anonymous to create a connection
between the Hungarians and the Israelites, as Isaac was famously the
grandfather of the twelve tribes of Israel.
Finally, there is one more aspect to the depiction of the Hungar­
ians’ arrival in Pannonia that is worth investigating. Chapter fourteen,
which describes the scene at the castle of Ung, also marks a sudden
shift in the narrative that sees the leadership of the Hungarians passfrom Álmos to his son Árpád. In the previous chapter, An­onym­
ous mentions that Álmos crowned his son as his successor while he,
the father, was still alive. According to Rady, this practice was notuncommon and was still happening in Hungary close to An­onym­ous’
lifetime.51 What is strange, however, is that in the next chapter the
narrative continues with Árpád as the leader, but there is no mention of his father’s death in the meantime. The Hungarian Chronicle,
a fourteenth-century compilation of Hungarian history composed of
information possibly predating the Gesta, reports that Álmos died inTransylvania and never entered Pannonia.52 This may itself have carried further biblical connotations in relation to Moses dying just after
seeing the Promised Land and not having the chance to enter withSee Rady’s explanation of the Gesta as a ‘toponymic romance’; GH, p. xxvii.
51
Gen. 27:33.
GH, 36–7 and 37, n. 3.
52
The relationship between the Gesta and this so-called Hungarian Chronicle
is further explored in C. A. Macartney, Studies on Early Hungarian and Pontic
History, ed. Lóránt Czigány and László Péter (Farnham, 1999), 65–560.
49
50

39

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
his fellow Israelites.53 Though this final biblical allusion would havestrengthened his narrative even further, Anonymous did not include
it, so the reason behind this lack of any description of Álmos’ death in
the Gesta remains a mystery.

Conclusions
The Hungarian origin story is the culmination of more than a millennium of intellectual mixing of ethnography and historiography,
incorporating elements from biblical history, Greek and Roman literature, and stories from the early medieval past. Although An­onym­ous
was a notary at court, not a monk with direct access to a monastic library, the themes and topoi he used to underpin his narrative
were varied and made the Gesta Hungarorum a worthy first attempt
at an official history of the Hungarians. Though for a long time
it was thought that the Gesta had been all but forgotten very soonafter it was written, research from the 1970s has shown that Simonof Kéza’s late thirteenth-century chronicle borrowed extensively from
it. Simon’s version of events was recycled in the fourteenth-century
National Chronicle and later histories, but ironically, it was the episodes he omitted that drew renewed attention to Anonymous’ Gesta
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Gesta’s emphasis on
the relationship between Álmos and his son Árpád and their nobles,for example, became what László Veszprémy has called ‘symbols of amythical medieval Hungarian constitutional system.’54
For modern historians, literary tools may be useful for understanding how medieval writers constructed their narratives and conceivedof the past of the peoples for whom they set out to write, and, more
broadly, how they operated in their societal as well as their intellectual environment. By looking at typical topoi, for ex­­ample, we cansee what kinds of sources were deemed worth imitating, while direct
László Veszprémy, ‘Christian IdenDeut. 34.
tity versus Heathendom: Hungarian Chroniclers Facing the Pagan/Nomadic
Past and the Present’, in Walter Pohl, Veronika Wieser, and Francesco Borri(eds.), Historiography and Identity V: The Emergence of New Peoples and Polities in
Europe, 1000–1300 (Turnhout, 2022), 305–20, at 314.
				5453

40

Migration and Origin in the Gesta Hungarorum
quotations from or indirect allusions to those sources tell us something
about the transmission of ideas and the circulation of documents.
Although Anonymous himself does not seem to have had access toa large repository of texts, he was still able to create a narrative that
conformed to the standards of the time because of the ideas he had
become familiar with through his education (he mentions in the introduction that he had copied Dares Phrygius’ story of Troy while inschool).55 In his work at court he probably continued to engage withliterary traditions through travel and his social network. Perhaps‘N’, the friend mentioned in his introduction and described as a man‘steeped in the knowledge of letters’, provided the Notary with someof the popular readings that we encounter in the Gesta.56
Classical and biblical sources were of great importance to themedieval authors of origines gentium, who sought not only to adapt
these models but also to emulate their style. At the same time, however, medieval authors shaped their work to meet their readers’expect­ations and understanding of their past. The most important
purpose of an origin story was to resonate with its audience. Indeed,
it is important to remember Plassmann’s caution that the use of a particular topos was far less significant for the function of the narrative
than the overall effect of the actual origins and further history of thegens.57 After all, as Nancy Partner has noted in her seminal work on
history writing in twelfth-century England, medieval readers of historical treatises were not looking for a dry overview of dates and facts.
Instead, they wanted to be amused ‘with scenes of great triumphs andfailures, inside information about princes both secular and ecclesiastical, . . . scandalous gossip, tales of exotic places, and, of course,
accounts of exemplary lives and evidences of God’s continuing interest in human affairs.’58
What then was the purpose of a migration story in an origo
gentis, and how did it contribute to a common understanding of anation’s origins? One of the most important functions was that ofidentity building, and this identity can be split into several different
GH, 2–3.
57
GH, 2–3 and pp. xix, xxii–iii.
Plassmann, ‘Das Wanderungsmotiv’, 63.
58
Nancy F. Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in TwelfthCentury England (Chicago, 1977), 2.
55
56

41

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
categories. A sense of belonging to a community is perhaps the onethat comes most immediately to mind. The Anonymous Notary’s
text was called the Deeds of the Hungarians, after all, and it sought toestablish the Hungarians firmly as a nation. Following long-standing
Christian tradition, written histories consolidated existing groups inthat they described those groups as historical units. Certainly, the lackof such sources seems to have caused great anxiety. This is potently
displayed by the Anonymous Notary’s use of imagined people andevents to make up for the absence of sources on the more remote
Hungarian past. While before conversion one’s historical consciousness could have pertained solely to one’s own kin or clan, under the
influence of Christianity a sense of being part of a wider Christiansociety became more prevalent. The Hungarians very much needed
to locate themselves within the Christianitas, and this could well beseen as one of the motives for writing the Gesta. The migration narrative was particularly useful in this community-building project
because it described the ancestors of the Hungarians as members ofa biblical group: the Scythian descend­ants of Magog who decided tosettle in Pannonia.
This biblical heritage brings us to another aspect of identity, that ofreligion. Although the Gesta only ever discusses the Hungarian pagan
past, it is set in a firmly Christian framework. The Hungarians’ predestination as a Christian people feeds into the migration narrative byemulating the journey of Moses and the Israelites, and is also madeexplicit in the biblical genealogy of the first Hungarian leader Árpád.
By claiming divine support for their victories, the Anonymous Notary
further softened the line between pre- and post-conversion Hungar­
ians and confirmed that the grace of God had been with them from thevery beginning. Finally, while the Scythian and biblical identifications
were powerful and carved out a place for the Hungarians in universal
Christian history, it was the suggested links to their desired homelandthat gave them their unique Hungarian identity. These links wereforged through genealogical association with the legendary Hunnish
King Attila and confirmed by the names of places such as mountains.
These toponymic explanations in particular would have been recognizable to a thirteenth-century reader and would have helped themclaim their own place in the historical landscape.
42Migration and Origin in the Gesta Hungarorum
Movement was thus a key factor in most origines gentium. First, it
explained where and how a people originated, locating them spatiallyas well as historically, and making them part of a larger Christian trad­
ition. Second, it showed the development of a given group through theencounters they had during their travels, contrasting them with otherpeoples and showcasing examples of their customs and achievements.
Finally, the people’s settlement created a link between them and theland they inhabited, reinforcing their unique identity and confirming their claims to the area. Mobility had positive connotations andwas essential for nation building, especially for those peoples who
could not find their ancestors in the established classical and biblicaltraditions. Throughout the Gesta Hungarorum, the people of Hungary
are cast as Scythians, Magog’s kin, Attila’s warriors, and more. But it
was their journey, from their departure from Scythia to their travels
through foreign lands and their arrival in their preordained homeland,that made them true Hungarians.

KIRI KOLT undertook a Ph.D. at Aberystwyth University on reflections of identity and community in the origin narratives of thetwelfth-century German Kingdom. She now works at the Cardiff
University Library Service.
43

MARGINAL PEOPLE, MARGINAL HISTORY:A HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MEDIEVAL ROMANIIMMIGRATION
Lane B. Baker

Fig. 1: ‘Von den swartzen getouften heiden die miteinandern gen Bernn
kament’ (Of the black, baptized heathens who came together to Bern). Illustration in Diebold Schilling the Elder’s Spiezer Chronik, BurgerbibliothekBern, MS.h.h.I.16, fo. 749v (c.1484–6). Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/].

44

Marginal People, Marginal History
Across the Holy Roman Empire, fifteenth-century chroniclers wrote
of strange visitations. In 1417, ‘Tatars’ came to Magdeburg.1 The nextyear, ‘Egyptians’ arrived in Augsburg.2 The year after that, hundredsof ‘baptized heathens’ travelled through the cities of the Swiss Confederation.3 It was much the same in other places. ‘Greeks’ appeared inFrank­furt (1422), ‘Indians’ in Bologna (1422), ‘Saracens’ in Paris (1427).4
Writers throughout Western Europe chronicled these un­
expected
guests with a mixture of amazement and suspicion. By the end of the
fifteenth century, most observers had concluded that these immigrants
actually belonged to a single people, hitherto unknown in this part of
the world. These late medieval texts gesture towards the immigrationof the Roma, the largest voluntary popu­lation movement into Central
and Western Europe since the Magyars in the tenth century.5
1
Magdeburger Schöppenchronik (written c.1420–30). See Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.), Die Chroniken
der deutschen Städte vom 14. bis ins 16. Jahrhundert, vol. vii: Die Chroniken derniedersächsichen Städte: Magdeburg. Erster Band (Leipzig, 1869), 345–6. Unlessotherwise noted, all translations are the author’s own.
2
Anonymous Chronicle of Augsburg (written c.1420–40). See Ferdinand Frensdorff (ed.), ‘Chronik von 1368–1406 mit Fortsetzung bis 1447’, in Historische
Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.), Die
Chroniken der deutschen Städte, vol. iv: Die Chroniken der schwäbischen Städte:Augsburg. Erster Band (Leipzig, 1865), 1–200, at 119.
3
Conrad Justinger, Berner Chronik (written c.1421–30). See Gottlieb L. Studer(ed.), Die Berner-Chronik des Conrad Justinger (Bern, 1871), 286.
4For Frankfurt, see Institut für Stadtgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main, Fonds
H.02.05, Extrakte aus den Rechen- und anderen Ratsbüchern 1341–1618, no. 1,
fo. 59v. For Bologna, see Lodovico A. Muratori (ed.), Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, 25 vols. (Milan, 1723–51), xviii. 611. For Paris, see Collette Beaune (ed.),Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris de 1405 à 1449 (Paris, 1990), no. 468.
5
As affirmed by the First World Romani Congress in 1971, ‘Rom’ (pl. ‘Roma’,
adj. ‘Romani’) is the preferred ethnonym of various diasporic communities withlinguistic and genetic ancestry in northern India. These words derive from anative word for ‘person’ and are etymologically unrelated to Rome or Ro­­mania.
With some exceptions, most notably in Great Britain, Romani communities
disavow ‘Gypsy’ and its Continental equivalents (Zigeuner, Tsigane, Gitano, Zingaro, Cygan, etc.) as slurs. Throughout this essay, I use ‘Roma’ and ‘Romani’ todescribe the people referenced in medieval sources by various other names,
even as I engage with those constructs in their historical context. See Matt T.
Salo, ‘The Expression of Ethnicity in R̰om Oral Tradition’, Western Folklore 36/1

45

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
Despite the many historical traces left by these immigrants, Ger­
ald­ine Heng has recently described the Roma as ‘a people whose lives
and histories, unlike those of premodern Jews and Muslims, are as yet
under-researched in medievalist scholarship.’6 Even this understates
the severity of the problem. The bibliography of medieval Romani
immigration into Western Europe amounts to perhaps two pages ofcitations.7 Not a single modern monograph exists. When detailing thisperiod, most surveys of Romani history make do with a smatteringof recycled references to sourcebooks or print editions. Despite theRoma’s entanglement with many threads of late medieval history, theirfirst decades of life in Western Europe continue to attract little attention from those who specialize in that period. For decades, scholarsof minorities, mobility, and marginality in pre­modern Europe havenoticed and lamented this silence.8 Far fewer have explained the gap’s
persistence or offered constructive advice on how to fill it.
The Roma’s earliest years in Western Europe remain poorly understood despite a flowering of scholarship on other periods of Romani(1977), 33–56; Albert Thomas Sinclair, ‘The Word “Rom”’, Journal of the Gypsy
Lore Society (hereafter JGLS): New Series, 3/1 (1909), 33–42; and ‘Gypsy’ and‘Roma’ in RomArchive, at [https://www.romarchive.eu/en/terms/], accessed 4
July 2023. See also ‘RomArchive Ethical Guidelines’, at [https://blog.romarchive.
eu/english/romarchive-ethical-guidelines/#fn1], accessed 4 July 2023.
Geraldine Heng, ‘ “Gypsies”: A Global Race in Diaspora, A Slave Race for
the Centuries’, in ead., The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2018), 417–55, at 417.
7
For introductions to the literature, see János M. Bak, ‘Gypsies’, in Robert
E. Bjork (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 4 vols. (Oxford, 2010),
ii. 758; Robert Jütte, ‘Zigeuner’, in Lexikon des Mittelalters, 10 vols. (Munich,
1980–99), ix. cols. 610–12; and Joseph R. Strayer, ‘Gypsies’, in id. (ed.), Diction­
ary of the Middle Ages, 13 vols. (New York, 1982–9), vi. 40–1.
8Maria R. Boes, ‘Unwanted Travellers: The Tightening of City Borders in Early
Modern Germany’, in Thomas Betteridge (ed.), Borders and Travellers in Early
Modern Europe (Aldershot, 2007), 87–111, at 96–8; Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller
(ed.), Randgruppen der spätmittelalterlichen Gesellschaft: Ein Hand- und Studienbuch, 3rd edn (Warendorf, 2001), 8, 56, 103; Strayer, ‘Gypsies’, 41; Franz Irsigler
and Arnold Lassotta, Bettler und Gaukler, Dirnen und Henker: Randgruppen undAußenseiter in Köln 1300–1600 (Cologne, 1984), 167–78; František Graus, ‘Die
Randständigen’, in Peter Moraw (ed.), Unterwegssein im Spätmittelalter (Berlin,1985), 93–104, at 97, n. 25; and Werner Danckert, Unehrliche Leute: Die verfemten Berufe (Bern, 1963), 9, 267, 282.
6

46

Marginal People, Marginal History
history. Especially since the Roma Civil Rights Movement, scholars
from a variety of backgrounds have documented six centuries ofRomani survival against Western European prejudice, assimilation,and violence.9 Historians and activists have channelled much of thisenergy towards a reckoning with the atrocities of the Holocaust,
which claimed the lives of nearly half of all European Roma.10 From
this vantage point, scholars have increasingly examined the plight ofRomani communities in earlier periods.11 Within the German world,
A helpful overview of the modern field, with special emphasis on Britain and
Ireland, is Becky Taylor and Jim Hinks, ‘What Field? Where? Bringing Gypsy,
Roma and Traveller History into View’, Cultural and Social History, 18/5 (2021),
629–50. Notable surveys and introductions to Romani history include Becky
Taylor, Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (London, 2014); Klaus-Michael Bogdal, Europa erfindet die Zigeuner: Eine
Geschichte von Faszination und Verachtung (Berlin, 2011); Leo Lucassen and Will
Willems, ‘The Weakness of Well-Ordered Societies: Gypsies in Western Europe,
the Ottoman Empire, and India, 1400–1914’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center),
26/3 (2003), 283–313; Ian Hancock, We Are the Romani People / mes am e Rromanedžene (Hatfield, 2002); Angus Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford, 1992); and Jean-Pierre
Liégeois, Les Tsiganes (Paris, 1983). For a diverse archive of diasporic Romani history, see Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma e.V.,
RomArchive, at [https://www.romarchive.eu/en/], accessed 4 July 2023.
10
See Arnold Weiss et al. (eds.), Zwei Welten: Sinti und Roma. Schritte zur Anerkennung als NS-Verfolgte und antiziganistische Kontinuität (Berlin, 2022); Eliyana
R. Adler and Kateřina Čapkova (eds.), Jewish and Romani Families in the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New Brunswick, NJ, 2020); Ari Joskowicz, ‘Separate
Suffering, Shared Archives: Jewish and Romani Histories of Nazi Persecution’,History and Memory, 28/1 (2016), 110–40; Anton Weiss Wendt (ed.), The Nazi
Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration (New York, 2013); Gilad
Margalit, Germany and its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal (Madison, WI, 2002);
id., ‘The Uniqueness of the Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies’, Romani Studies,
10/2 (2000), 185–210; Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (Oxford,
2000); Michael Zimmerman, Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische ‘Lösung der Zigeunerfrage’ (Hamburg, 1996); Donald Kenrick and Grattan
Puxton, Gypsies under the Swastika (Hatfield, 1995); Sybil Milton, ‘Nazi Policies
towards Roma and Sinti, 1933–1945’, JGLS: Series 5, 2/1 (1992), 1–18; and Gabrielle Tyrnauer, ‘Holocaust History and the Gypsies’, Shofar, 7/2 (1989), 13–24.
11
For broad-ranging studies of anti-Romani prejudice and exclusion, seeMichael Hayes and Thomas Acton (eds.), Travellers, Gypsies, Roma: The Demon­
isation of Difference (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2007); Jim MacLaughlin, ‘European
Gypsies and the Historical Geography of Loathing’, Review (Fernand Braudel
947

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
the history of anti-Romani legislation goes back to at least 1497, when
the Holy Roman Empire ordered the mass expulsion of all so-called
Zigeuner.12 The preceding eighty years, in which no state-wide policies
controlled Romani life in Western Europe, have proven more difficult to integrate into the existing frameworks of Romani history. Thisera of energetic westward immigration, a period of Romani history
that linguist and activist Ian Hancock has dubbed O Buxljaripe (‘TheExpansion’), cries out for fresh analysis.13
This essay will critically assess the ways in which scholars haveapproached the initial years of Romani immigration. What have welearned so far? What remains to be learned? How might we deepenand broaden our histories of the medieval Roma? In order for the Roma
to take their rightful position in the mainstream of medieval scholarship, we must reflect upon the long-standing tendency of scholars
to overlook or avoid this chapter of European and Romani history.
My analysis will centre on the German-speaking world, which produced some of the earliest historical evidence for westward Romani
immigration and played an instrumental role in the creation of both‘gypsiology’ and modern Romani studies.14 Even so, the diasporicCenter), 22/1 (1999), 31–59; Ian Hancock, The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of
Gypsy Slavery and Persecution (Ann Arbor, 1987); and Rüdiger Vossen and Wolf
Dietrich, Zigeuner: Roma, Sinti, Gitanos, Gypsies zwischen Verfolgung und Romantisierung (Frankfurt am Main, 1983).
9 Feb. 1497 (Diet of Lindau); Heinz Gollwitzer (ed.), Deutsche Reichstagsakten: Mittlere Reihe, vol. vi: Reichstage von Lindau, Worms und Freiburg 1496–1498(Göttingen, 1979), 344, no. 51. Reiterated on 4 Sept. 1498 (Diet of Freiburg im
Breisgau); ibid. 737, no. 119. Reissued on 10 Sept. 1500 (Diet of Augsburg);
Johann Jacob Schmauß and Heinrich Christian von Senckenberg (eds.), Neueund vollständigere Sammlung der Reichs-abschiede, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main,
1747), ii. 80, no. 28. For a timeline of the Roma in Germany, see Ian Hancock,‘Gypsy History in Germany and Neighboring Lands: A Chronology to the
Holocaust and Beyond’, Nationalities Papers, 19/3 (1991), 395–412.
13
O Buxljaripe is the final chapter in Ian Hancock’s four-part periodization of
Romani migration history. It follows the departure from India (O Teljaripe),
the journey through Western Asia (O Nakhipe), and the immigration intoBy­zan­tine Europe (O Aripe). Hancock, We are the Romani People, 29–33.
14
Regarding the relationship between the Roma and Germany, see Susan
Tebbutt (ed.), Sinti and Roma: Gypsies in German-Speaking Society and Literature(New York, 1998).
12

48

Marginal People, Marginal History
nature of Romani history demands that we transcend the national
divisions that have long fragmented the study of European history.
This goes doubly for the immigration period, in which Romani groups
moved with relative ease between various states. Studying Romani
history requires an embrace of mobility, both as a historical concept
and a research practice. The long academic marginalization of themedieval Roma points to the ways in which national and disciplinary
boundaries limit our knowledge of the past. This essay sounds a callfor scholarly collaboration across and despite these borders.

Sources
Every study of the medieval Roma must grapple with the dearth of written sources from a Romani perspective. Indeed, Romani communities
have historically relied upon oral traditions to preserve and transmit
community knowledge.15 It is only in the last fifty years that some communities have adopted alphabetic scripts for the Romani languages(rromani ćhib), previously attested only in transcriptions by outsiders.16
For various approaches to Romani oral history, see Julia Blandfort, ‘Moving
Stories: Roma and the Oral Tradition of a Transnational People’, in Medardus
Brehl, Andreas Eckl, and Kristin Platt (eds.), The Mediterranean Other—The
Other Mediterranean (Leiden, 2019), 69–77; Jake Bowers, ‘Gypsies and Travellers Accessing their Own Past: The Surrey Project and Aspects of Minority
Repre­sentation’, in Hayes and Acton (eds.), Travellers, Gypsies, Roma, 17–29;
Jelena Čvorović, ‘Gypsy Oral History in Serbia: From Poverty to Culture’,
Oral History, 33/1 (2005), 57–67; Paloma Gay y Blasco, ‘ “We Don’t Know Our
Descent”: How the Gitanos of Jarana Manage the Past’, Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, 7/4 (2001), 631–47; and Michael Stewart, The Time of
the Gypsies (Boulder, CO, 1997). On Romani orality in other social contexts, seeJelena Čvorović, ‘A Gypsy, a Butterfly, and a Gadje: Narrative as Instruction
for Behaviour’, Folklore, 119/1 (2008), 29–40; ead., ‘Gypsies Drown in Shallow
Water: Oral Narratives among Macva Gypsies’, Journal of Folklore Research,
43/2 (2006), 129–48; Walter O. Weyrauch, ‘Oral Legal Traditions of Gypsies
and Some American Equivalents’, American Journal of Comparative Law, 45/2
(1997), 407–42; and Béla Gunda, ‘Gypsy Medical Folklore in Hungary’, Journalof American Folklore, 75/296 (1962), 131–46.
16
Yaron Matras, ‘The Future of Romani: Toward a Policy of Linguistic
Plur­alism’, Roma Rights Quarterly, 1 (2005), 31–44; id., ‘Writing Romani: The
15

49

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
As a result, most histories of Romani life before the twentieth century
rely entirely upon the testimony of texts written by non-Roma (gadje),which range from the literary to the administrative. The biases ofsuch sources have prompted vigorous debates on the (im)possibilityof accessing historical Romani experiences through European repre­
sentations of ‘Gypsies’.17 This challenge is especially daunting forthe medieval period, from which no texts have survived written by
Romani authors or in a Romani language. In this respect, writing
medieval Romani history differs fundamentally from the study of literate European minorities like Jewish or Muslim communities, andmore closely resembles the study of non-writing communities suchas peasants or enslaved people.18 Recent scholarship has complicatedPragmatics of Codification in a Stateless Language’, Applied Linguistics,
20/4 (1999), 481–502; Donald Kenrick, ‘Romani Literacy at the Crossroads’,
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 119 (1996), 109–23; id., ‘The
Development of a Standard Alphabet for Romani’, The Bible Translator, 32/2
(1981), 215–19; Vania de Gila Kochanowski, ‘Romani Language Standard­
ization’, JGLS: Series 5, 5/2 (1995), 97–107; and Siegmund A. Wolf, ‘Zur Frageeiner normierten Zigeunersprache (Basic Romani)’, Phonetica, 5 (1960), 204–9.
On the discursive category of the ‘Gypsy’ and its complex relationship tohistor­ical Romani communities, see the essays in Wulf D. Hund (ed.), Faul,
fremd und frei: Dimensionen des Zigeunerstereotyps (Münster, 2014); Klaus-Michael
Bogdal, Europa erfindet die Zigeuner; id., ‘“Dieses schwartz, ungestaltet und wildschweiffige Gesind”: Symbolische Codierung und literarische Diskursivierung
der “Zigeuner” vor 1800’, in Michael Zimmermann (ed.), Zwischen Erziehung
und Vernichtung: Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 2007), 71–108; Wilhelm Solms, Zigeunerbilder: Ein dunkles
Kapitel der deutschen Literaturgeschichte. Von der frühen Neuzeit bis zur Romantik(Würzburg, 2008); David Mayall, Gypsy Identities 1500–2000: From Egipcyans andMoon-Men to the Ethnic Romany (London, 2004), esp. 54–118; Wim Willems, In
Search of the True Gypsy: From Enlightenment to Final Solution (London, 1997);
Jacqueline Giere (ed.), Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion des Zigeuners: Zur Geneseeines Vorurteils (Frankfurt am Main, 1996); Judith Okely, ‘Constructing Difference: Gypsies as “Other”’, Anthropological Journal on European Cultures, 3/2(1994), 55–73; and Kirsten Martins-Heuss, Zur mythischen Figur des Zigeuners in
der deutschen Zigeunerforschung (Frankfurt am Main, 1983).
18
The ever-growing scholarship on medieval unfreedom, especially theMedi­terranean and Black Sea slave trade, offers many useful points of comparison. For an overview of the topic and some of its debates, see Samuel S.
Sutherland, ‘The Study of Slavery in the Early and Central Middle Ages: Old
17

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Marginal People, Marginal History
this picture by suggesting that early Romani perspectives are not completely inaccess­ible. For instance, Kristina Richardson has challenged
the assumption of medieval Romani illiteracy by noting the presenceof book and block-printing traditions in a related community from
Egypt, the Banū Sāsān.19 Likewise, Andreas Zajic has explored Romani
self-representation in the inscriptions of premodern tombstones.20
Paola Toninato notes the ways Romani immigrants could make useof writing without authoring texts themselves.21 Nonetheless, insofar
as historians of the medieval Romani rely on the traditional methodsof interpreting primary texts, they have no choice but to work with a
corpus written by outsiders, shaped by their agendas, and coloured bytheir prejudices.
Late medieval chronicles supply some of the earliest and most widely
cited evidence for Romani immigration.22 As Romani families travelled
Problems and New Approaches’, History Compass, 18/11 (2020). For a small
sample of recent work, see Hannah Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise:
The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260–1500 (Philadelphia, 2019);
Alice Rio, Slavery After Rome, 500–1100 (Oxford, 2017); Perry Craig, ‘The Daily
Life of Slaves and the Global Reach of Slavery in Medieval Egypt, 969–1250
CE’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Emory University, 2014); Kate Lowe, ‘The
Lives of African Slaves and People of African Descent in Renaissance Europe’,in Joaneath Spicer (ed.), Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe(Baltimore, 2012), 13–34; and Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery
and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca, NY, 2009).
Kristina Richardson, Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture,
and Migration (London, 2022), esp. 103–38; and ead., ‘Tracing a Gypsy Mixed
Language through Medieval and Early Modern Arabic and Persian Literature’, Der Islam, 94/1 (2017), 115–57.
20
Andreas H. Zajic, ‘Alienness and (Religious) Otherness in Late Medieval Inscriptions: A Case Study on the Epigraphic Shaping of ChristianSelf-Representation’, medieval worlds, 16 (2022), 229–62, at 248–54.
21
Paola Toninato, Romani Writing: Literacy, Literature and Identity Politics(London, 2014), 7–24.
22
On late medieval chronicles as a genre, especially in the German-speaking
world, consult Gerhard Wolf and Norbert Ott (eds.), Handbuch Chroniken
des Mittelalters (Berlin, 2016); Regula Schmid, Geschichte im Dienst der Stadt:
Amtliche Historie und Politik im Spätmittelalter (Zurich, 2009); Peter Johanek,‘Weltchronik und regionale Geschichtsschreibung im Spätmittelalter’, inHans Patze (ed.), Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewußtsein im späten Mittelalter (Sigmaringen, 1987), 287–330; and Heinrich Schmidt, Die deutschen
1951

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migrationen masse through the cities of the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, France,and Iberia during the fifteenth century, dozens of European chroniclers
remarked upon the newcomers.23 Nearly all such chronicles concerned
the history of particular cities, preserving highly localized traditions
about the many first arrivals of the Roma. As we have already seen,
these early texts never actually refer to ‘Roma’. Instead, they record theunexpected appearance of ‘heathens’, ‘Tatars’, ‘Egyptians’, and othersuch exotic groups. With increasing frequency, chroniclers deployed
new words derived from ἀτσίγγανοι (atsíngani), a Byzantine Greek term
applied to the Roma perhaps as early the eleventh century.24 From thisword, hitherto unattested in Western Europe, there quickly evolved aplethora of new vernacular exonyms for the Roma: Zigeuner, Tsigane,
Zingaro, and more. During the early modern period, these terms
would come to encompass a broad range of itinerant groups. In theirfifteenth-century origins, however, they still designated a particularwave of immigrants and their immediate descendants.
While a handful of the earliest chronicles qualify as contemporary
texts and possibly eyewitness accounts, most of the chronicle evidence
first appears in manuscripts from the mid fifteenth century, decades
after the stated years of immigration. With each new manuscript ofa chronicle, scribes could edit its text, renegotiate local memory, andinscribe their own socio-political agendas upon the past. As a result,
Städtechroniken als Spiegel des bürgerlichen Selbstverständnisses im Spätmittelalter(Göttingen, 1958).
23
For an overview of the chronicle evidence and its interpretative challenges,
see Reimar Gilsenbach, ‘Quellen zur Geschichte der Roma und ihrer Interpretation, dargestellt an Beispielen aus dem 15. Jahrhundert’, Gießener Hefte
für Tsiganologie, 85/1 (1985), 8–16; and 85/2–3 (1985), 3–11.
24
For the Greek etymology of this term, see Benedikt Wolf, ‘Helfer desFeindes: Von der Häresie der Athinganoi zum “Stamm” der Atsinganoi’, inThomas Baumann (ed.), Antiziganismus: Soziale und historische Dimensionenvon ‘Zigeuner’-Stereotypen (Heidelberg, 2015), 18–37. Further historical context
is in Karin White, ‘Metal-Workers, Agriculturalists, Acrobats, Military-People
and Fortune-Tellers: Roma (Gypsies) in and around the Byzantine Empire’,
Golden Horn, 7/2 (1999); Ilse Rochow and Klaus-Peter Matschke, ‘Neues zu
den Zigeunern im Byzantinischen Reich um die Wende vom 13. zum 14.
Jahrhundert’, Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik, 41 (1991), 241–54; andGeorge C. Soulis, ‘The Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire and the Balkans in the
Late Middle Ages’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 15 (1961), 141–65.

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Marginal People, Marginal History
different manuscripts of a single chronicle might retell the Romani
immigration in starkly different ways.25 Chronicles chart the ways inwhich many local traditions drifted toward antiziganist rhetoric. In the1410s, chroniclers could write with benign curiosity about the appearance of ‘heathen’ travellers. Already by the mid century, the tenor hadchanged. Prominent humanist and pope-to-be Enea Silvio Piccolomini(1405–64) summarized the emerging consensus on Western Europe’s
newest inhabitants, who ‘wander Europe with their women and children, are called the Zigari, are notorious thieves, and live amongst ourpeople in the way of nomads.’26 Given the fluid and propagandistic
nature of these texts, fifteenth-century chronicles are perilous sources
to use in the reconstruction of Romani immigration ‘as it happened’. At
the same time, they offer valuable glimpses into the evolution of elite
mindsets and the public memory of Romani immigration.
An overwhelming historiographic emphasis on chronicles has
obscured the untapped wealth of archival sources for medieval Romani
history. The Roma typically appear in three archival contexts: grants
of safe conduct, city council books, and municipal financial records.
Corroborating the anecdotal evidence of many chronicles, surviving
safe conduct letters (Geleit­briefe) record legal immunities granted bynoblemen, emperors, and even popes to various Romani leaders andtheir retinues.27 These grants, which might survive in original copies or
For an example, see Lane B. Baker, ‘From Little Egypt to Zürich: Chronicling Romani Immigrants with Late Medieval Manuscripts’, in Johannes
Junge Ruhland (ed.), Making History with Manuscripts (Berlin, forthcoming).
26
Enea (Aeneas) Silvio Piccolomini (1405–1464) wrote what later editors
would title Asiae Europaeque elegantissima descriptio sometime in the 1450s,
shortly before his assumption of the papacy as Pius II in 1458. It was firstprinted in Venice in 1477. Quotation from Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Asiae Europaeque elegantissima descriptio (Paris, 1534), lib. 2, cap. 27, 62.
27
For examples of these safe-conducts in print, see Wolfgang Wippermann(ed.), Geschichte der Sinti und Roma in Deutschland: Darstellung und Dokumente (Berlin, 1995), 54–5; Olav van Kappen, ‘Three Dutch Safe-Conducts for“Heidens” Granted by Charles Duke of Egmont’, JGLS: Third Series, 41/3–4(1962), 89–100; and id., ‘Four Early Safe-Conducts for Gypsies (1442–1454)’,
JGLS: Third Series, 44/3–4 (1965), 107–15. See also comments in Toninato,
Romani Writing, 8–11; Angus Fraser, ‘Juridical Autonomy among Fifteenthand Sixteenth Century Gypsies’, American Journal of Comparative Law, 45/2
(1997), 291–304; and id., The Gypsies, 63–76.
25

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Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
as transcriptions in cartularies, designated a par­ticu­lar Romani headman by name and title, granted temporary freedom to move withina territory, and promised legal protection from harassment and tolls.
Council books (Rats­proto­kolle) record actions that urban governments
took towards the Roma, frequently pertaining to acts of expulsion andother curtailments of legal rights within their jurisdictions. Municipal
financial records, especially the expenditure books (Aus­gabe­bücher)
kept by many German city councils, record both charitable disbursements to Romani groups and payments to officials to expel them.28
Each of these textual genres point toward different socio-politicalprocesses at work. They do not always align in their terminology or
attitudes towards the Roma. Nonetheless, they provide crucial information for on-the-ground activity and balance the more sensational
testimony of chronicles.29 So too, these sources reveal that exclusionary attitudes competed and coexisted with hospitality, charity, andlegal toleration.
Late medieval manuscripts are the original repositories for chronicle and documentary evidence of Romani immigration. Despite thecentrality of manuscripts in late medieval culture, scholarship on the
medieval Roma has tended to approach this handwritten body ofsources via print. The most frequently cited chronicle evidence is usually drawn from nineteenth- and twentieth-century critical editions,with the unfortunate consequence of eliding noteworthy manuscript
variations. Many scholars have also freely mixed the claims of earlymodern print chronicles with those of late medieval manuscripts.
These choices largely reflect the modernist bent of Roma studies, inwhich most scholars have not been trained to find or read medieval
documents in their original form. This disengagement from manuscripts has encouraged most scholars of the Roma to rely upon two
For examples in print, see Eric Otto Winstedt, ‘Some Records of the Gypsiesin Germany, 1407–1792’, JGLS: Third Series, 11/3–4 (1932), 97–111, at 106–11;
and Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer, ‘Gypsies in Basle’, JGLS: New Series, 2/4 (1909),
368–9.
29
Archival documentation can both corroborate and belie chronicle testimony. For an example, see Hoffmann-Krayer, ‘Gypsies in Basle’: in Basel,
financial records confirm the testimony of the contemporary Rötteler Chronik
by noting a visit by Roma in the summer of 1422, but also reveal even earl­ier
arrivals in 1414 and 1418.
28

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Marginal People, Marginal History
German sourcebooks for early Romani history, both compiled by
non-historians. The theologian and sociologist Reimer Gronemeyer’s
Zigeuner im Spiegel früher Chroniken und Abhandlungen: Quellen vom 15.
bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (1987) has been a major access point for manyscholars of the Roma.30 Gronemeyer’s sourcebook compiles the texts
used by the Enlightenment scholar Heinrich Grellmann (see below).
While plenty of Gronemeyer’s assembled sources specifically discuss
Romani immigration, the bulk of his material hails from the age ofprint. His sourcebook includes only three sources written before 1500,
all drawn from print editions. Just seven years after Gronemeyer, thejournalist and environmental activist Reimar Gilsenbach published a
new sourcebook for early Romani history, the first of an envisioned (butnever completed) four-volume series.31 His Weltchronik der Zigeuner:
Von den Anfängen bis 1599 (1994) contains several hundred references
culled from a variety of European languages and genres. Despite its
unmatched breadth, Gilsenbach’s Weltchronik runs up against someof the same limitations as Gronemeyer’s sourcebook. It relies uponcritical editions for most of its medieval material and arranges its
sources according to the date of the events described, thus mixing
together texts generated in very different periods. A dependence on
sourcebooks and other printed texts has led some Roma scholars to
the faulty assumption that such resources contain the sum total of all
medieval evidence.32 On the contrary, many fifteenth-century sourceson the Roma still remain unpublished in manuscript.
30
Reimer Gronemeyer (ed.), Zigeuner im Spiegel früher Chroniken und Abhandlungen: Quellen vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Giessen, 1987).
31
Reimar Gilsenbach (ed.), Weltchronik der Zigeuner, vol. i: Von den Anfängen
bis 1599 (Frankfurt am Main, 1994). Volumes two and three were not completed. Volume four covers the Holocaust and mid twentieth century: Von
1930 bis 1960 (Frankfurt am Main, 1998). For Gilsenbach’s approach to theearly historical evidence, see Gilsenbach, ‘Quellen zur Geschichte der Roma’.
32
E.g. Donald Kenrick, ‘The Origins of Anti-Gypsyism: The Outsiders’ View
of Romanies in Western Europe in the Fifteenth Century’, in Nicholas Sauland Susan Tebbutt (eds.), The Role of the Romanies: Images and Counter-Images of‘Gypsies’/Romanies in European Cultures (Liverpool, 2004), 79–84, at 79: ‘Together
with the town clerks’ reports we have in total some 62 contemporary records
for the period in question (1400–1450) (see De Meneses 1971, Gilsenbach 1994,
JGLS Series 1 and 2 [passim], Van Kappen n.d. and Vaux de Foletier 1970)’;55

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
Past Historiographical Approaches
Within a century of the Roma’s first appearances in Western Europe,
chroniclers were already revisiting this initial wave of immigration.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts reflect the hardening
attitudes of the early modern period, during which Romani communities throughout Western Europe suffered from widespread
violence, expulsions, and accusations of criminality.33 Early modern
writers filtered late medieval chronicles through their own antiziganist stereo­types, sometimes with incongruous results. Confronted withtexts from the Middle Ages that described the Roma as humble pilgrims or exiled lords, some concluded that the early modern ‘Gypsies’
had stolen the identity of these medieval migrants.34 According to one
persistent theory, these ‘Gypsies’ were actually a band of European
and Willems, In Search of the True Gypsy, 13: ‘Closer reading of these sources[in Gronemeyer] reveals that the written tradition concerning the earliest identification of Gypsies in western Europe rests entirely on the testimony of two
witnesses from that era [Hermann Korner and Andreas von Regensburg].’
33
Miriam Eliav-Feldon, ‘Vagrants or Vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies in
Early Modern Europe’, in ead., Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (eds.), The
Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge, 2009), 276–91; Stephan Steiner, ‘The
Enemy Within: “Gypsies” as EX/INternal Threat in the Habsburg Monarchy
and in the Holy Roman Empire, 15th–18th Century’, in Eberhard Crailsheim
and María Dolores Elizalde (eds.), The Representation of External Threats:
From the Middle Ages to the Modern World (Leiden, 2019), 131–54; Karl Härter,‘Kriminalisierung, Verfolgung und Überlebenspraxis der “Zigeuner” im frühneuzeitlichen Mitteleuropa’, in Yaron Matras, Hans Winterberg, and Michael
Zimmermann (eds.), Sinti, Roma, Gypsies: Sprache—Geschichte—Gegenwart(Berlin 2003), 41–81; and Stefan Arend, ‘Zigeuner und Zigeunergesetzgebung
in Deutschland im 16. Jahrhundert’, Tsiganologische Studien, 2 (1990), 71–87.
34
For examples, see Heinrich Brennwald’s Schweizerchronik (written c.1508–
16), in Rudolf Luginbühl (ed.), Heinrich Brennwalds Schweizerchronik, 2 vols.
(Basel, 1908–10), ii. 495–6; Johannes Stumpf, Gemeiner loblicher Eydgnoschafft
Stetten, Landen und Voelckeren Chronick wirdiger thaaten Beschreybung (Zurich,
1548), 425b; id., Schwytzer Chronika (Zurich, 1554), 199b; Heinrich Bullinger’s
Tigurinerchronik (written 1572–4), 9.18, in Hans Ulrich Bächtold (ed.), Heinrich
Bullinger Werke: Vierte Abteilung. Historische Schriften, pt. i: Tigurinerchronik,
3 vols. (Zurich, 2018), ii. 741–2; Johannes Guler von Wyneck, Raetia (Zurich,1616), 156b–7a; and Fortunat Sprecher von Bernegg, Pallas Rhaetica armata et
togata (Basel, 1617), 91.

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Marginal People, Marginal History
criminals who darkened their skin with oil, spoke an invented
language, and play-acted as Egyptians.35 Heinrich Brennwald (1478–
1551), a Swiss historian and early proponent of this theory, claimed
that the migrants of 1418 had ‘upheld Christian order’ and departed
after seven years.
Since then, however, a ragtag people has cobbled itself together.
They travel around the country, claiming that they can’t go backacross the sea because of the Sultan, stealing whatever they can,and causing truly great harm to the world. None of them has
ever even been to Egypt. These are the Zigeuner, and all of themwould be worthy of hanging at the very least.36

Not all early modern scholars posited such a complete rupture
between medieval and modern. Some scholars, like the cosmographer
Sebastian Münster (1488–1552), accepted the medieval wanderers asancestors of the ‘Gypsies’ of his time, but still dismissed their eastern
heritage as nothing more than ‘fictions [fabellae]’.37 Others acceptedthat the ‘Gypsies’ were a people of their own with at least some ancestry outside Europe.38 Even as perceptions of the Roma coalesced into
On the ‘replacement’ theory, see John Morgan, ‘ “Counterfeit Egyptians”:
The Construction and Implementation of a Criminal Identity in Early Modern
England’, Romani Studies, 26/2 (2016), 105–28; Shulamith Shahar, ‘Religious
Minorities, Vagabonds and Gypsies in Early Modern Europe’, in Roni Stauber
and Raphael Vago (eds.), The Roma: A Minority in Europe. Histor­ical, Politicaland Social Perspectives (Budapest, 2007), 1–18; and Willems, In Search of the True
Gypsy, 14–16.
36
Luginbühl (ed.), Heinrich Brennwalds Schweizerchronik, ii. 495–6.
37
Sebastian Münster, ‘De Gentilibus Christianis, quos vulgò Züginer vocant,et latinè Errones’, in id., Cosmographia universalis, (Basel, 1544), lib. iii. Origin­ally published in German and subsequently in Latin (1550), French (1552),
Czech (1554), and Italian (1558). For the Latin text and a reflection on Münster’s depiction of the Roma, see D. M. M. Bartlett, ‘Münster’s Cosmo­graphia
Universalis’, JGLS: Third Series, 31/3–4 (1952), 83–90. Münster borrowed muchof this account wholesale from Albert Krantz, Saxonia (Cologne, 1520), 11.2.
For similar theories, see Cyriacus Spangenberg, Mansfeldische Chronica (Eis­leben, 1572), 1.308; and Christoph Besold and Johann Jacob Speidel, ‘Zigeiner’,in eid., Thesaurus practicus (Tübingen, 1629), 867.
38
For examples, see Bayerische Chronik (s.l., 1522), 8.122; Achilles Pirmin
Gasser, Annales civitatis ac rei publicae Augsburgensis (Augsburg, 1576), 312;35

57

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migrationa pan-European prejudice, no single account of the medieval immigration prevailed. The first arrival of the Roma persisted for overa century as a topic for casual speculation by encyclopedists andregional historians. In 1677, the German professors Jakob Thomasius
and Johann Christoph Schmidt were still debating the basics: whetherthe ‘Zigeuner’ were an ethnic group of their own, where in the world
they had originated, and how long they had lived in Europe.39
In the late eighteenth century, Enlightenment scholars grappled
anew with the question of Romani origins. Johann Christoph Christian Rüdiger, a German humanist and political economist, mounted amajor revisionist argument in 1782.40 In contrast to much prevailing
speculation of the previous two centuries, Rüdiger believed that theRoma were a nomadic South Asian people who had immigrated into
Europe and fallen into poverty through systematic exclusion. Even as
he judged contemporary Romani society as ‘a contemptible, scattered
lot of foul fortune tellers, poor beggars, and wicked rogues’, Rüdigersuggested that this had not always been the case:According to the accounts of Aventinus and other historians,
at the beginning of the fifteenth century [the Roma] came ingreat hordes through Syria and Anatolia up to the Danube,
and then spread out further into France, Spain, and Italy.
They were divided into tribes under dukes and equipped withdraft cattle and money. They were an orderly but nomadic
people, like present-day Bedouin Arabs or Mongolians, likethe former Normans, Goths, and Saxons under their chiefs,
or like the Israelites under Moses. To some extent, they were
Christian Wurstisen, Bassler Chronick (Basel, 1580), 4.23; Martin Crusius,
Annales Suevici (Frankfurt am Main, 1595), 7.3; and Johannes Limnaeus, Juris
publici imperii romano-germanici, 2nd edn (Basel, 1645), 3.9.1.
Jacobus Thomasius and Johann Christoph Schmidt, Dissertatio philosophicade Cingaris in disputationem (Leipzig, 1677). See also Ahavaser Fritsch, Diatribe
historico-politica de Zygenorum origine, vita ac moribus (Jena, 1680); and Job Ludolf,
Ad suam Historiam Aethiopicam antehac editam commentarius (Frankfurt, 1691).
40
Johann C. C. Rüdiger, ‘Von der Sprache und Herkunft der Zigeuner aus
Indien’, in Neuester Zuwachs der teutschen, fremden und allgemeinen Sprachkundein eigenen Aufsätzen, Bücheranzeigen und Nachrichten, 6 vols. (Leipzig, 1782–96),
i. 37–85. On Rüdiger, see August Leskien, ‘Rüdiger, Johann Christian Christoph’, in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 56 vols. (Leipzig, 1875–1912), xxix. 468.
39

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Marginal People, Marginal History
met with friendliness—so much that (according to Aventinus)
Emperor Sigismund gave them letters of safe conduct, and that
(according to Crusius) their lords received respectable grave
inscriptions with the title of ‘duke’ and ‘count’. But of course, inmost places this must have quickly given way to quarrels withthe long-established inhabitants.41

Rüdiger went on to argue that private property rights, the erosion of
the commons, and rigid state laws had doomed the nomadic Romato opprobrium and criminality. In this way, he could explain theirapparent transformation from tolerable medieval nomads to despised
criminals without recourse to theories of replacement or fraud. It was
early modern society, with its ‘arbitrarily invented lordship, property,
and love for fatherland’, that had created the modern ‘Zigeuner’.42
Rüdiger’s account heralds a number of shifts in the academic
treatment of Romani history. His work was among the first to
approach the question of Romani origins from a linguistic angle.43
Rüdiger’s primary evidence for a South Asian homeland consistedof the phon­etic and lexical similarities between Romani and Hindi.44
By arguing for the Roma as an ethnolinguistic group with their own
language and premodern history, Rüdiger discredited the notionof the ‘Gypsies’ as a confederation of European thieves. His Rousseauian views on the clash between nomadism and private property
also allowed Rüdiger to integrate modern, medieval, and ancient
Romani populations into a seamless historical narrative, however
different their various historical situations might first appear. Rü­­diger’s account also signals the shift towards linguistics and social
theory as the major disciplines for understanding the Romani past.
As demonstrated by his hasty citation of only two sixteenth-century
Rüdiger, ‘Von der Sprache und Herkunft der Zigeuner aus Indien’, 37–8.
Ibid. 38.
43
See Yaron Matras, ‘Johann Rüdiger and the Study of Romani in 18th-Century
Germany’, JGLS: Series 5, 9/2 (1999), 89–116; and id., ‘The Role of Language in
Mystifying and Demystifying Gypsy Identity’, in Saul and Tebbutt (eds.), The
Role of the Romanies, 53–78. Rüdiger was not, strictly speaking, the first European scholar to hypothesize an ethnolinguistic origin in India; cf. ChristianWilhelm Büttner, Vergleichungs-Tafeln der Schriftarten verschiedener Völker, in
denen vergangenen und gegenwärtigen Zeiten, 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1771–9).
44
Rüdiger, ‘Von der Sprache und Herkunft der Zigeuner aus Indien’, 63–77.
41
42

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Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
sources—Martin Crusius and Johannes Aventinus—Rüdiger did not
directly consult a single medieval text. His historical knowledge ofthe fifteenth-century immigration was mediated entirely by a small
corpus of sixteenth-century writings.
While Johann Rüdiger was one of the first scholars to make asystematic case for Romani origins in India, it was Heinrich Moritz
Gottlieb Grellmann (1756–1804) who transmitted the idea to a wider
audience.45 One year after Rüdiger, Grellmann hypothesized that
the Roma were descended from members of the Indian sudra caste.46
The details of their medieval history were less certain. ‘History has
not precisely noted in which years and in which province of Europe
the Gypsies first appeared’, he admitted in his influential 1783 study.47
On Heinrich Grellmann and his contributions to ‘gypsiology’, see Katrin
Ufen, ‘Aus Zigeunern Menschen machen: Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb Grellmann und das Zigeunerbild der Aufklärung’, in Hund (ed.), Faul, fremd undfrei, 70–90; Joachim Krauss, ‘Die Festschreibung des mitteleuropäischen
Zigeunerbildes: Eine Quellenkritik anhand des Werkes von Heinrich M. G.
Grellmann’, in Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 19(Berlin, 2010), 33–56; Claudia Breger, ‘Grellmann: Der “Zigeunerforscher” derAufklärung’, in Udo Engbring-Romang and Daniel Strauss (eds.), Aufklärung
und Antiziganismus (Seeheim, 2003), 50–6; Wim Willems, In Search of the True
Gypsy, 22–92; id., ‘Außenbilder von Sinti und Roma in der frühen Zigeunerforschung’, in Giere (ed.), Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion des Zigeuners,
87–108; Martin Ruch, ‘Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der deutschsprachigen“Zigeunerforschung” von den Anfängen bis 1900’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, 1986), 94–134; Friedrich Ratzel, ‘Grellmann, Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb’, in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, ix. 636–7;
and R. Pallmann, ‘Grellmann (Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb)’, in Johann Samuel
Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber (eds.), Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste: Erste Section (Leipzig, 1818–89), xc. 136–7.
46
Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb Grellmann, Die Zigeuner: Ein historischer Versuchüber die Lebensart und Verfassung, Sitten und Schicksale dieses Volks in Europa,
nebst ihrem Ursprunge (Dessau, 1783), sect. 2, chs. 3–6, 176–274. Republishedfour years later as Historischer Versuch über die Zigeuner: Betreffend die Lebensart und Verfassung, Sitten und Schicksale dieses Volks seit seiner Erscheinung inEuropa und dessen Ursprung (Göttingen, 1787) and in English translation as
Dissertation on the Gipsies: Being a Historical Enquiry, Concerning the Manner ofLife, Œconomy, Customs and Conditions of these People in Europe, and their Origin,trans. Matthew Raper (London, 1787).
47
Grellmann, Die Zigeuner, sect. 2, ch. 1, 155.
45

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Marginal People, Marginal History
Grellmann assumed that the answers to these questions lay in ‘old
annals [alte Jahrbücher]’, but a perusal of his work reveals few medieval
texts among his sources. Like Rüdiger, Grellmann built his picture of
the immigration almost exclusively from early modern print histories,
merely alluding to the anonymous manuscripts that had inspired thoseworks.48 Unlike Rüdiger, Grellmann decried the Roma as an ethnic
group with intrinsic antisocial tendencies. For Grellmann, there had
been no early modern transformation of Romani society: the Roma had
inherited these parasitic cultural patterns from their origins in India’s
labouring caste and brought them to Europe in the fifteenth century.49
In his interpretation of events, the immigrants had simply managed totrick authorities into granting them legal protection. To the extent thatearly chroniclers portrayed the Roma as pious or lordly, they too had
been deceived. Eventually, Grellmann argued, the fraud ran its course:‘The golden age of the Gypsies lasted quite a while, but after people
had been lenient toward them for over half a century, the old preconception finally gave way.’ Despite Romani efforts to secure tolerance,‘people saw all too clearly that they were the dregs of humanity insteadof holy pilgrims.’50 Although subsequent scholars critiqued and refined
Grellmann’s particular hypotheses, his disengagement from medieval
evidence, total reliance on early modern print texts, and portrayal of
medieval Romani immigrants as ‘thieves, frauds, and rascals’ set thetone for the emergent field of ‘gypsiology’.51
The medieval history of the Roma occupied a small corner within
nineteenth-century European gypsiology. It was philologists, ethnog­
raphers, and folklorists who dominated this growing field.52 The
Ibid. chs. 1–2, 155–76. See e.g. the vague reference to a ‘manuscript chronicle’ used by Johannes Stumpf, which, in Grellmann’s view, had misled the
Swiss chronicler with its claims of ‘bogus virtuousness and honour’ among
the medieval Roma.
49
For a comparison of Rüdiger and Grellmann’s paradigms, with an eye
for their modern analogues, see Yaron Matras, ‘Scholarship and the Politics
of Romani Identity: Strategic and Conceptual Issues’, European Yearbook of
Minority Issues, 10 (2011), 211–47, at 212–16.
50
51
Grellmann, Die Zigeuner, sect. 2, ch. 2, 172.
Ibid. 175.
52
For overviews of nineteenth-century gypsiology and gypsylorism, see David
Cressy, Gypsies: An English History (Oxford, 2018), 148–207; Jeremy Harte,‘Romance and the Romany’, History Today, 66/1 (2016), 30–6; Judith Okely,
48

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Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
Romani languages, along with their implications for Romani origins,
continued to engross linguists.53 Many other gypsiologists, especiallyin Britain, directed their attention to the products of vernacular culture: Romani songs, poems, and stories. An administrative desire forsurveillance merged with fetishizing exoticism in the popular books
and articles of the period,54 many of the latter appearing in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society (1887–92, 1902–present, rebranded in 2000
as Romani Studies).55 Apart from questions of ethnolinguistic origins,most gypsiologists engaged with the textual particulars of Romani
history only in passing. In keeping with the nostalgic conservationism
of folkloristics, many instead portrayed the Roma as a people outside‘Retro­spective Reading of Fieldnotes: Living on Gypsy Camps’, Behemoth: A
Journal on Civilisation, 4/1 (2011), 18–42; Michael Hayes, ‘Nineteenth-Century
Gipsilorism and the Exoticisation of the Roma (Gypsies)’, in id. (ed.), Road
Memories: Aspects of Migrant History (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2007), 20–35;
Mayall, Gypsy Identities, 152–87; Ken Lee, ‘Orientalism and Gypsylorism’, SocialAna­lysis, 44/2 (2000), 129–56; and Ian Duncan, ‘George Borrow’s Nomad­ology’,
Victorian Studies, 41/3 (1998), 381–403.
53
Key texts in the ensuing linguistic debate include Johann Erich Biester,‘Über die Zigeuner: Besonders im Königreich Preußen’, Berlinische Monatsschrift, 21 (Feb. 1793), 108–65 and (Apr. 1793), 360–93; August Friedrich Pott,
Die Zigeuner in Europa und Asien: Ethnograpisch-linguistische Untersuchung, vornehmlich ihrer Herkunft und Sprache, 2 vols. (Halle, 1844–5; repr. Leipzig, 1964),
and Franz Miklosich, Über die Mundarten und die Wanderungen der Zigeuner
Europa’s, 8 vols. (Vienna, 1872–7).
54
For examples of typical texts from this period, see Theodor Tetzner,
Geschichte der Zigeuner: Ihre Herkunft, Natur und Art (Weimar, 1835); George
Borrow, The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain (London, 1841); id.,
Lavengro (London, 1851); id., The Romany Rye (London, 1857); Jean-Alexandre
Vaillant, Les Romes: Histoire vraie des vrais Bohémiens (Paris, 1857); Richard Liebich, Die Zigeuner in ihrem Wesen und ihrer Sprache (Leipzig, 1863); Walter andJames Simson, A History of the Gipsies: With Specimens of the Gipsy Language(London, 1865), 302; Henry Woodcock, The Gipsies: Being a Brief Account of
their History, Origin, Capabilities, Manners and Customs, with Suggestions for
the Reformation and Conversion of the English Gipsies (London, 1865); Charles
Leland, The English Gipsies and their Language (New York, 1873); and Francis
Hindes Groome, In Gipsy Tents (Edinburgh, 1880).
55
For a reflection on the journal’s history and turn-of-the-century transition,
see Yaron Matras, ‘From Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society to Romani Studies:
Purpose and Essence of a Modern Academic Platform’, Romani Studies, 27/2
(2017), 113–23.

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Marginal People, Marginal History
modernity and the ordinary course of historical time.56 To the extent
that scholars discussed the medieval Roma, they rehashed Grellmann’s early modern sources and antiziganist interpretations.
On the topic of medieval immigration, the first serious revision
to Grellmann’s account came from French archivist Paul Bataillard(1816–94). Bataillard was neither a folklorist nor a gypsiologist per se,
having studied under the eminent French historian Jules Michelet andtrained at the prestigious École des chartes. In an article publishedin the Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes (1843–4), Bataillard nonetheless endeavoured to reconstruct a new itinerary for medi­eval Romani
immigration.57 Forty years later, Bataillard expanded his work,translated the article into English, and republished his hypotheses
in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society.58 Armed with newly acquiredRo­­manian and Greek charters that predated the fifteenth century,
Bataillard pushed against mainstream gypsiology by arguing that
the Roma had lived in South-Eastern Europe since the early Middle
Ages, perhaps even antiquity, and had contributed to the adoption of
metal­lurgy in Europe.59 On the subject of western immigration, Bataillard engaged in further revisionism. He interpreted the visitationsof 1417–38 as stops on a single exploratory campaign led by a small
handful of Romani headmen, only followed by mass migration in the
middle of the century.60 Bataillard fell into some of the same traps
as gypsiologists before and after him: neglecting important manuscripts, relying upon sixteenth-century histories for fifteenth-century
56
Katie Trumpener, ‘The Time of the Gypsies: A “People without History” in
the Narratives of the West’, Critical Inquiry, 18/4 (1992), 843–84.
57
Paul Bataillard, ‘De l’apparition et de la dispersion des Bohémiens en
Europe’, Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes, 5 (1844), 438–75, 521–39. Followedby id., ‘Nouvelles recherches sur l’apparition des Bohémiens en Europe’,
Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes, 11 (1850), 14–55; and id., ‘Les débuts de l’immigration des Tsiganes en Europe occidentale’, Bulletin et mémoires de la Sociétéd’anthropologie de Paris, 3/12 (1889), 255–65.
58
Paul Bataillard, ‘Immigration of the Gypsies into Western Europe in the
Fifteenth Century’, JGLS, 1/4 (1889), 185–212; ibid. 1/5 (1889), 260–86; ibid. 1/6(1889), 324–45; and ibid. 2/1 (1890), 27–53.
59
See id., État de la question de l’ancienneté des Tsiganes en Europe (Paris, 1877).
60
Paul Bataillard, ‘De l’apparition’, 4, 44–7; id., ‘Nouvelles recherches’, 36–7;
id., ‘Immigration’ (Apr. 1889), 194–6.

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Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
events, and too often trusting the assertions of politically motivatedchron­iclers. While Bataillard managed to introduce some new chronicle and documentary evidence, his most enduring innovation was
his harmon­ization of various local traditions into a single, coherent
itinerary. In the decades following Bataillard’s article, a handful ofstudies continued discussions of early Romani history and announced
the discovery of hitherto unnoticed archival sour­ces.61 These works
enriched the basic narrative without changing it: preserving ancient
cultural forms, and ill-equipped for Western modernity, the Roma
had entered late medieval Europe under the leadership of adventurous chieftains and maintained their obsolete lifeways ever since.62
In the wake of the Holocaust, a new generation of scholars and activists cast a wary eye on old paradigms.63 At best, gypsiology seemed of61
Michael Jan de Goeje, ‘Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis der Zigeuners’, Verslagen en mededeelingen der Koninklijke Akadamie van Wetenschappen, Afdeeling
Letterkunde, 2/5 (1875), 56–80; id., Mémoire sur les migrations des Tsiganes àtravers l’Asie (Leiden, 1903); Adriano Colocci, Gli Zingari: Storia d’un popolo
errante (Turin, 1889); Henry Thomas Crofton, ‘Early Annals of the Gypsies inEngland’, JGLS, 1/1 (1888), 5–24; id., ‘Supplementary Annals of the Gypsies inEngland, before 1700’, JGLS: New Series, 1/1 (1907), 31–3; Hoffmann-Krayer,‘Gypsies in Basle’; Richard Pischel, ‘The Home of the Gypsies’, trans. Dora E.
Yates, JGLS: New Series, 2/4 (1909), 292–320; John Sampson, ‘On the Origin
and Early Migrations of the Gypsies’, JGLS: Third Series, 2/4 (1923), 156–69;
and Winstedt, ‘Some Records of Gypsies in Germany’.
62
For a survey of the field in the early twentieth century, see George F. Black,
A Gypsy Bibliography (London, 1914).
63
Writings from and about the Romani Civil Rights Movement are too vast to
encompass here. For helpful summaries, see Jean-Pierre Liégeois, ‘The Emergence of the Roma Civil Rights Movement in France’, trans. Thomas Acton,
RomArchive (2019), at [https://www.romarchive.eu/en/roma-civil-rightsmovement/emergence-roma-civil-rights-movement-france/], accessed 6 July
2023; Thomas Acton, ‘Beginnings and Growth of Transnational Movementsof Roma to Achieve Civil Rights after the Holocaust’, RomArchive (2018), at[https://www.romarchive.eu/en/roma-civil-rights-movement/beginningsand-growth-transnational-movements-roma/], accessed 6 July 2023; Matras,‘Scholarship and the Politics of Romani Identity’, 217–22; Margalit, Germany
and its Gypsies; Grattan Puxon, ‘The Romani Movement: Rebirth and the FirstWorld Romani Congress in Retrospect’, in Thomas Acton (ed.), Scholarshipand the Gypsy Struggle: Commitment in Romani Studies (Hatfield, 2000), 94–113;
and Yaron Matras, ‘The Development of the Romani Civil Rights Movement

64Marginal People, Marginal History
secondary importance to the concerns of European Romani communities fighting for legal recognition in the post-war political landscape. At
worst, the entire field appeared to be mired in racist constructions andimplicated in fascist regimes.64 In the context of activism, several writers
revisited earlier chapters of Romani history.65 For some, the medieval
past presaged twentieth-century violence. Only a year after the end of
in Germany 1945–1996’, in Susan Tebbutt (ed.), Sinti and Roma: Gypsies inGerman-Speaking Society and Literature (Oxford, 1998), 49–63.
Jan Selling, ‘Assessing the Historical Irresponsibility of the Gypsy Lore
Society in Light of Romani Subaltern Challenges’, Critical Romani Studies,
1/1 (2018), 44–61; Thomas Acton, ‘Scientific Racism, Popular Racism and the
Discourse of the Gypsy Lore Society’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39/7 (2016),
1187–204; and Herbert Heuss, ‘Wissenschaft und Völkermord’, Bundesgesundheitsblatt, 32 (1989), 20–4. For discussions of the specific intellectual continuity
between Nazism and ‘Gypsy specialists’, see Fritz Greußing, ‘Die Kontinuität
der NS-Zigeunerforschung’, in Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ed.), Sinti
und Roma: Ein Volk auf dem Weg zu sich selbst (Stuttgart, 1981), 385–92; Joachim
S. Hohmann, Robert Ritter und die Erben der Kriminalbiologie: ‘Zigeunerforschung’im Nationalsozialismus und in Westdeutschland im Zeichen des Rassismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), 351–79; id., ‘Die Forschungen des “Zigeunerexperten”
Hermann Arnold’, Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts,
10/3 (1995), 35–49; and Arnold Spitta, ‘Deutsche Zigeunerforscher und die
jüngste Vergangenheit’, in Tilman Zülch (ed.), In Auschwitz vergast, bis heuteverfolgt: Zur Situation der Roma (Zigeuner) in Deutschland und Europa (Reinbek
bei Hamburg, 1979), 183–8.
65
On France, see François de Vaux de Foletier, Les Tsiganes dans l’ancienne
France (Paris, 1961); id., ‘Le pèlerinage romain des Tsiganes en 1422 et leslettres du Pape Martin V’, Études tsiganes, 11/4 (1965), 13–19; id., Mille ans
d’histoire des Tsiganes (Paris, 1970); and Jean-Pierre Liégeois, ‘Bohémiens etpouvoirs publics en France du XVe au XIXe siècle’, Études tsiganes, 24/4 (1978),10–30. On the Netherlands, see Olav van Kappen, Geschiedenis der Zigeunersin Nederland: De ontwikkeling van de rechtspositie der heidens of Egyptenaren in
de noordelijke Nederlanden, 1420–1750 (Assen, 1965). On Spain, see Amada
Lopéz de Meneses, ‘La inmigración gitana en España durante el siglo XV’, inAsoci­ación Nacional de Bibliotecarios, Archiveros y Arqueólogos, Martínez
Ferrando, archivero: Miscelánea de Estudios dedicados a su memoria (Barcelona,1968), 239–63; and ead., ‘Noves dades sobre la immigració gitana a Espanya al
segle XV’, Estudis d’història medieval, 4 (1971), 145–60. For a look at scholarshipat the end of the 1970s, consult Andreas Hundsalz, Stand der Forschung überZigeuner und Landfahrer: Eine Literaturanalyse unter vorwiegend sozialwissenschaftlichen Gesichtspunkten (Stuttgart, 1979).
64

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Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
the Second World War in Europe, the Romani author Matéo Maximoff
denounced Germany by evoking the betrayals of the fifteenth century:‘Their crime goes back through the centuries. For since 1417, when the
Gypsies first made their appearance in Germany, persecution of the“Zigeuner” has never ceased, despite the privil­eges granted to themby Emperor Sigismund.’66 Activists could also marshal the ethos of theimmigration period to support new polit­ical initiatives, as evidenced
by Maximoff’s calls for the reinstatement of medieval travel privileges
and a voluntary emigration of Roma out of Germany.67 For the English
activist Thomas Acton, the spirit of post-war Romani politics—which
led to the First World Romani Congress in 1971, the Second in 1978, andthe establishment of the International Romani Union68—echoed efforts
by medieval Romani immigrants to secure legal recognition from ‘transnational and local feudal monarchs.’69 At the same time, many scholars
in the 1960s and 1970s took a newly sceptical stance towards medieval
gadje texts. As Jean-Pierre Liégeois asserted in 1978, every history of the‘Gypsies’ was built upon a bedrock of repressive docu­ments, written
by power­ful outsiders, and motivated by their fears of ‘troublemakers
66
Matéo Maximoff, ‘Germany and the Gypsies: From the Gypsy’s Pointof View’, JGLS: Third Series, 25/3–4 (1946), 104–8, at 105. For an interesting
comparative text from a few years prior, see R. A. Scott Macfie, ‘Gypsy Persecutions: A Survey of a Black Chapter in European History’, JGLS: Third Series,
22/3–4 (1943), 65–78. For context, see Gilad Margalit, ‘The Representation of
the Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies in German Discourse after 1945’, German
History, 17/2 (1999), 221–40.
67
Maximoff, ‘Germany and the Gypsies’, 106–8.
68
See Grattan Puxon, ‘The First World Romani Congress’, Race Today, 3/6(1971), 192–9; Donald Kenrick, ‘The World Romani Congress’, JGLS: Third
Series, 50/3–4 (1971), 101–8; Matéo Maximoff, ‘Réflexions sur l’avenir de l’organisation internationale tsigane’, Études tsiganes, 17/4 (1971), 10–11; Donald
Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies (London, 1972);
Thomas Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change: The Development of Ethnic
Ideology and Pressure Politics among British Gypsies from Victorian Reformism to
Romany Nationalism (London, 1974); and Jean-Pierre Liégeois, Mutation tsigane(Brussels, 1976).
69
Acton, ‘Beginnings and Growth’: ‘In the pre-1600 feudal era in Europe andthe Middle East, we do find examples, much mocked by the 19th century
Gypsy-lorists, of Roma attempting to negotiate with transnational and local
feudal monarchs. The leadership that was capable of doing this, however,vanished in the 16th century outside the heartlands of the Ottoman Empire.’66

Marginal People, Marginal History
on the margins’.70 For the first time, specialists reckoned more seriouslywith the shortcomings of the historical sources that previous gener­
ations had used so freely.
By the 1980s, most scholars had joined Maximoff in framing‘Gypsy’ history as a long series of injustices against the Roma. Thisnarrative found one of its clearest proponents in Romanichal linguist
and activist Ian Hancock. With the publication of The Pariah Syndrome(1987), Hancock staged an academic and moral intervention:
In Romani, there is the saying that kon mangel te kerel tumendar
roburen chi shocha phenela tumen o chachimos pa tumare perintonde,‘he who wants to enslave you will never tell you the truth about
your forefathers.’ We cannot wait for others to document thistruth; our forefathers’ history must be told by ourselves.71

Many scholars have taken Hancock’s call to heart, critiquing thelong-standing dominance of gadje voices within Roma history andturning towards Romani perspectives.72 The last two decades of the
Liégeois, ‘Bohémiens et pouvoirs publics en France’, 11.
Hancock, The Pariah Syndrome, 1.
72
For recent reflections on positionality in Roma Studies, see Saga Weckmann,‘Researching Finnish Gypsies: Advice from a Gypsy (1983)’, in Diane Tong(ed.), Gypsies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (New York, 1998), 3–10; Imre Vajda,‘The Gypsies–The Roma and Scientific Research: Some Thoughts about theRole of Gypsy Intelligentsia in the Wake of the “Who is a Gypsy?” Debate’, inErnő Kállai (ed.), The Gypsies/The Roma in Hungarian Society (Budapest, 2002),
149–56; Ken Lee, ‘Belated Travelling Theory, Contemporary Wild Praxis: A
Romani Perspective on the Practical Possibilities of the Open End’, in Saul andTebbutt (eds.), The Role of the Romanies, 31–49; Caroline Mellgren, ‘The Other
Way Around: The Roma Minority’s View on Doing Research on Sensitive
Topics’, International Journal of Social Science Studies, 3/4 (2015), 14–24; Ethel
Brooks, ‘The Importance of Feminists and “Halfies” in Romani Studies: New
Epistemological Possibilities’, Roma Rights, 2 (2015), 57–61; Marett Katalin
Klahn, ‘Knowing Differently: On Thinking and Doing “Roma” ’, ibid. 63–9;
Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, ‘Challenging Anti-Gypsyism in Academia: The
Role of Romani Scholars’, Critical Romani Studies, 1/1 (2018), 8–28; and Lucie
Fremlova, ‘Non-Romani Researcher Positionality and Reflexivity: Queer(y)ing One’s Own Privilege’, Critical Romani Studies, 1/2 (2018), 98–123. See also
the essays in Lorely French (ed.), Roma Voices in the German-Speaking World(London, 2015).
70
71

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Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
twentieth century witnessed several new historical studies informed
by a social justice framework, alongside the aforementioned sourcebooks by Gronemeyer and Gilsenbach.73 However, this renewedinterest in Romani rights and culture did not necessarily lead to newinterpretations of the medieval period.74 Even in a field that had
moved on from nineteenth-century gypsiology in many respects, areliance upon shopworn citations and old scholarship has continued to plague treatments of the fifteenth-century immigration. In theprocess, old biases—for instance, the idea of Romani immigrants asinveterate fraudsters—have persisted into the twenty-first century.
In the last twenty years, new voices have engaged with medi­
eval Romani history. A few of these entries have appeared within the
traditional fold of Romani studies.75 Increasingly (and belatedly), however, this period has attracted the attention of specialists in medieval
73
Olímpio Nunes, O povo cigano (Porto, 1981); Liégeois, Les Tsiganes; Vossen
and Dietrich, Zigeuner; Nicole Martinez, Les Tsiganes (Paris, 1986); Patrick
Williams, Tsiganes: Identité, évolution (Paris, 1989); Joachim S. Hohmann,Geschichte der Zigeunerverfolgung in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1981);
id., Verfolgte ohne Heimat: Geschichte der Zigeuner in Deutschland (Frankfurt
am Main, 1990); Fraser, The Gypsies; Giorgio Viaggio, Storia degli Zingari in
Italia (Rome, 1997); Giere (ed.), Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion des Zigeuners;
Thomas Fricke, Zigeuner im Zeitalter des Absolutismus: Bilanz einer einseitigenÜberlieferung (Pfaffenweiler, 1996); and Donald Kenrick and Colin Clark,
Moving On: The Gypsies and Travellers of Britain (Hatfield, 1999). On Romani
immigration specifically, see Bronisław Geremek, ‘L’arrivée des Tsiganes en
Italie: De l’assistance à la répression’, in Giorgio Politi, Mario Rosa, and Franco
Della Peruta (eds.), Timore e carità: I poveri nell’Italia moderna (Cremona, 1982),
27–45; id., ‘Cyganie w Europie średniowiecznej nowożytnej’, Przegląd Histor­
yczny, 75/3 (1984), 569–96; Angus Fraser, ‘The Rom Migrations’, JGLS: Series
5, 2/2 (1992), 131–45; and id., ‘Juridical Autonomy’. For a historiographicalsurvey written in this era, see id., ‘The Present and Future of the Gypsy Past’,Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 13/2 (2000), 17–31.
74
See too the broader critiques in Romani Rose, ‘Die neue Generation unddie alte Ideologie: Zigeunerforschung—wie gehabt?’, Tribüne: Zeitschrift zum
Verständnis des Judentums, 21/81 (1982), 88–108.
75
E.g. Aaron C. Taylor, ‘A Possible Early Reference to the Gypsies in Spain
Prior to 1420: Ms. 940 of the Trivulziana Library in Milan, Italy’, Romani Studies, 26/1 (2016), 79–86; Kenrick, ‘The Origins of Anti-Gypsyism’; and Elisa
Novi Chavarria, Sulle tracce degli Zingari: Il popolo rom nel Regno di Napoli, secoli
XV–XVIII (Naples, 2007).

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Marginal People, Marginal History
literature and history.76 For these scholars—Kristina Rich­ard­son, Geraldine Heng, and David Abulafia among them—the medieval Roma
have dovetailed naturally with work on marginality, race-making, andcross-cultural encounters, all themes of interest within medieval studies since the 1990s. From these perspectives, fifteenth-century rhetoric
about the Roma resembles long-standing medieval preju­dices against
ethnic outsiders and the itinerant poor. With fresh engagement frommedievalists have also come new questions and new transregional
interpretations.

Taking Stock and Moving Forwards
Chroniclers wrote about the arrival of exotic ‘dark’ foreigners within
their own neighbourhoods, directly likening the newcomers to
all manner of distant, racialized others; yet the Roma feature only
sparingly in the impassioned debates over medieval race-making.
Crowds of ‘baptized heathens’ supposedly practised divinationand syncretic religion in an age of heterodoxy; yet the Roma appear
Richardson, Roma in the Medieval Islamic World, 103–38; Heng, ‘ “Gypsies”: A
Global Race in Diaspora’; David Abulafia, ‘The Coming of the Gypsies: Cities,
Princes and Nomads’, in Peter Hoppenbrouwers, Antheun Janse, and Robert
Stein (eds.), Power and Persuasion: Essays on the Art of State Building in Honourof W. P. Blockmans (Turnhout, 2010), 325–34; Erwin Pokorny, ‘The Gypsies
and their Impact on Fifteenth-Century Western European Iconography’, inJaynie Anderson (ed.), Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, and Convergence(Melbourne, 2009), 597–601; Peter Bell and Dirk Suckow, ‘Lebenslinien: Das
Handlesemotiv und die Repräsentation von “Zigeunern” in der Kunst desSpätmittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit’, in Iulia-Karin Patrut and Herbert
Uerlings (eds.), ‘Zigeuner’ und Nation: Repräsentation—Inklusion—Exklusion(Frankfurt am Main, 2008), 493–549; Ernst Schubert, ‘Duldung, Diskriminierung und Verfolgung gesellschaftlicher Randgruppen im ausgehenden
Mittelalter’, in Sigrid Schmitt and Michael Matheus (eds.), Kriminalität undGesellschaft in Spätmittelalter und Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 2005), 47–69, at 64–6;
Christian Kleinert, ‘Pilger, Bettler, edle Herren: Frankfurter Spuren zum
Leben der Roma im 15. Jahrhundert’, in Heribert Müller (ed.), ‘Ihrer Bürger
Freiheit’: Frankfurt am Main im Mittelalter. Beitrage zur Erinnerung an die Frankfurter Mediävistin Elsbet Orth (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), 197–229; and Baker,‘From Little Egypt to Zürich’.

76

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Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
almost nowhere in countless studies of medieval religious diversity.
Members of a highly mobile Indic diaspora explored and establisheda permanent presence in Western Europe during its own ‘Age of Discovery’; yet the Roma do not often crop up in the reams of literature
on mobility, diaspora, and encounters on the cusp of early modern­ity. Within many academic subfields, some of them burned over bydecades of debate, we might expect to find the Roma centre stage. In
almost every case, the Roma have been relegated to the margins or
ignored entirely. Existing scholarship on medieval Romani history
too often relies on hastily cited surveys, old gypsiological articles,
and a handful of regurgitated early modern chronicles largely
unchanged since Grellmann selected his ‘old annals’. How do we
explain the ongoing marginalization of this chapter in Romani andEuropean history?
Since the late Enlightenment, most new work on medieval Romani
history has taken place within the interdisciplinary but isolated fieldof ‘Gypsy’/Romani studies, sequestered from the mainstreams of its
constituent disciplines.77 The gypsiologists of the nineteenth century
comprised an especially small and inward-looking group, within
which historians were always a minority. Most historical questions
fell to folklorists and linguists without the requisite technical skills
to deal directly with medieval documents. The same can be said
for much of the twentieth century, in which sociology emerged as
the reigning paradigm. Scholars have haggled over the ‘poverty’ ofmodern Roma studies, with many defending the reinvented field’sscholarly rigour against charges of sloppiness.78 Even so, the methods
On the field’s interdisciplinarity, see Xavier Rothea, ‘Piste pour une histographie [sic] des Tsiganes en France’, Études tsiganes 39–40/3–4 (2009), 14–41.
78
For a modern debate on the intellectual merits of modern Roma Studies,
begin with the critiques of Zoltan Barany, ‘The Poverty of Gypsy Studies’,
NewsNet: The Newsletter of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic
Studies, 40/3 (2000), 1–4; and id., The East European Gypsies: Regime Change,
Marginality, and Ethnopolitics (Cambridge, 2002), 5–9. Critical responses toBarany include Colin Clark, ‘What Poverty? A Response to Zoltan Barany’,
NewsNet: The Newsletter of the AAASS, 40/5 (2000), 7; and Thomas Acton,‘Response to Zoltan Barany’s “The Poverty of Gypsy Studies” ’, ibid. 8–9. See
too Zoltan Barany, ‘In Defense of Disciplined Scholarship: A Response from
Professor Zoltan Barany’, ibid. 9–12.
77

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Marginal People, Marginal Historyof premodern history remain ancillary to the interests and discip­
linary training of most Roma specialists, for­cing many sincerely
motivated scholars to rely upon secondary or tertiary materials
when writing on this period.79 If the gypsi­ologists and their activist successors have not read or written much history—much lessmedieval history—the converse is equally true: most historians
have not engaged with the work of Romani specialists. Indeed, even
Bataillard, a historically trained archivist of medieval manuscripts,
published his most ambitious study in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore
Society, thereby garnering little attention from other medieval historians. This trend has continued well into the twenty-first century,with new work on early Romani history clustering in a handful of
specialist journals (such as JGLS/Romani Studies, Études tsiganes, andGießener Hefte für Tsiganologie).
Since the 1960s, historians beyond Romani studies have shown
growing interest in the early centuries of Romani life in Western
Europe. However, these conversations have centred on the twin
themes of state-sanctioned violence and literary construction, drawing primarily on texts from the sixteenth century and later.80 Medieval
sources, in contrast, do not yet show evidence of wide-scale state persecution and often do not feature the concept of the ‘Gypsy’ at all.
Donald Kenrick, pre-eminent scholar of twentieth-century Romani
history, admitted of the fifteenth century that ‘this is a period inwhich we have no poems, plays or fiction mentioning Gypsies. The
literary stereotype of Gypsies had not yet evolved.’81 In medieval
material, the Roma are rarely defined with precise conceptual boundaries. Such sources have proven resistant to research methods like
See Michael Schenk, ‘Tsiganologie und Historische Forschung: Von den
Unzulänglichkeiten einer produktiven Verbindung’, in Joachim S. Hohmann,
Handbuch zur Tsiganologie (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), 37–47.
80
See e.g. Cressy, Gypsies: An English History; id., ‘Marginal People in a Stressful
Culture: Gypsies and “Counterfeit Egyptians” in Margaret Spufford’s England’,in Trevor Dean, Glyn Parry, and Edward Valance (eds.), Faith, Place and People in
Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of Margaret Spufford (Woodbridge, 2018),
202–21; Bogdal, Europa erfindet die Zigeuner; Chavarria, Sulle tracce degli Zingari;
Richard Pym, The Gypsies of Early Modern Spain, 1425–1783 (Basingstoke, 2007);and David Mayall, English Gypsies and State Policies (Hatfield, 1995).
81
Kenrick, ‘The Origins of Anti-Gypsyism’, 79.
79

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Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
digital word searching and unsuitable to many of the questions that
historians of the early modern period typically pose.
The reluctance of medieval historians to write about Romani
immigration may be the most surprising of all. Here too, several
forces have kept the Roma at the fringes of academic discourse.
The chronology of Romani immigration has one part to play. The
fifteenth century has traditionally occupied historians of Europe
with several major themes: the rise of humanism, maritime explor­
ation, Ottoman expansion, and religious dissent. With the erosion of
Renaissance studies as a bridge between medieval and early modern
history, the fifteenth century has increasingly fallen into a no man’sland within anglophone history departments. The very thematic
trends that would encourage a closer look at Romani immigration
have also diverted attention away from the relevant sources. Much
work on medieval alterity has concentrated on literary texts, andmost scholarship on the ‘persecuting society’ of medieval Europe
has focused on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.82 The studyof Romani immigration through contemporary documents often
demands specialized knowledge of regional vernacu­
lars, which
renders them uninviting to historians trained primarily in medieval
Latin. Especially in North America, the number of medievalists who
study fifteenth-century social history through vernacular sources—in other words, the subset of historians most equipped to investigate
Romani immigration—has dwindled. In Europe, ongoing interestin local and regional history has exposed a larger swathe of scholars to the relevant sources, but questions of race-making, diaspora,and mobility have gained less traction in the Continental academy.
Although the later twentieth century saw fruitful work in Europe on‘marginal groups’ (German Randgruppen), this scholarship tended to
On alterity as a research theme for medieval studies, see Paul Freedman
and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of
Alterity in North American Medieval Studies’, American Historical Review,
103/3 (1998), 677–704. For the classic study of the medieval ‘persecuting society’, with a focus on clerical literati of the twelfth century, see R. I. Moore,
The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe
950–1250 (Oxford, 1987). Cf. John H. Arnold, ‘Persecution and Power in Medieval Europe: The Formation of a Persecuting Society, by R. I. Moore’, American
Historical Review, 123/1 (2018), 165–74.
82

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Marginal People, Marginal History
focus on socio-economic niches rather than ethnolinguistic identity
groups.
The pragmatic challenges of working on the medieval Roma canalso explain why so few scholars have thrown themselves into thisarea of research. In fifteenth-century sources, the Roma flit into view
briefly, unpredictably, and under a host of different names. With
no repertories apart from Gronemeyer and Gilsenbach, it remains
a laborious task to locate these needles in the haphazardly indexedhaystacks of archival material. The geographic scope of these references, when combined with their incredibly low frequency within any
single archive, has discouraged the engagement of many other­wise
qualified and interested scholars. As with other diasporic groups, thehistory of the Roma continues to be obscured by the overwhelming
influence of national and regional borders, which affect everythingfrom language training to research grant allocation.
The Roma—a relatively late, scarce, far-flung, and conceptuallyslippery group within medieval sources—have proven difficult to
integrate into many research programmes. How, then, might weheed the call of so many scholars to expand our knowledge of theirimmigration? I would like to offer five suggestions for this work:
Focus on medieval evidence: Since the eighteenth century, scholars
have fallen back on the more accessible and sensational testi­monies of chronicles from the age of print. This practice distorts
our understanding of the immigration by importing early modern
prejudices into a period that had not yet invented them.
Focus on manuscripts: Scholars relying on sourcebooks or print
editions have failed to observe the sometimes drastic vari­ations
between different manuscripts of single chronicles. Insteadof treating these sources as monolithic, authoritative ‘texts’, amanuscript-centred approach would highlight the ways in which
medieval scribes developed their image of the Roma in a piecemeal, heterogeneous fashion.
Engage with archival material: Despite the difficulties enumerated
above, historians must recognize archives as wellsprings of73

Stories of Medieval Travel and Migration
unpublished, hitherto unstudied evidence for Romani immigration. Administrative sources do not promise ‘objective’ truth, butthey can balance the more literary perspective of chronicles withevidence for on-the-ground social and legal developments.
Engage transnationally: Despite the international nature of modern
Romani political activism, much new scholarship continues tofocus on the communities that reside within particular states. Thisapproach does not square well with the medieval reality, in which
a variety of political forms existed on multiple scales, borders had
not coalesced into modern nation states, and the Roma moved
with speed and ease across these borders.
Root out antiziganist assumptions: Historians must continue toexamine the inherited antiziganist biases in their own scholarship. Here, the authority of Romani communities and scholars
plays a vitally important role in unlearning pernicious habits ofthought. The assumption of Romani criminality and asociality
should not inform our scholarship. So too, we must guard against
more insidious forms of Romani erasure. Studies on the literary and administrative construction of the ‘Gypsy’ have at times
unintentionally denied the presence of the Roma as an actual
ethnolinguistic group.83 Likewise, condemnations of antiziganist
violence can overshadow the active resilience of Romani communities amidst those conditions. As a corrective to such trends,
thoughtful scholarship must always recognize Romani presence
and agency in their own history.
In the late Middle Ages, Romani communities immigrated into
Western Europe. They charted their own courses in a strange landand survived in the ways they deemed best. As historians, we willoften encounter them in the records much as medieval Europeans
saw them: briefly, incompletely, and with many questions that willgo unanswered. Even so, their presence in the annals of European
history should not be ignored. The challenges that come with the83

See Matras, ‘Scholarship and the Politics of Romani Identity’, 212–16.

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Marginal People, Marginal History
study of medieval Romani history should be a cause for excitement,
not surrender.

LANE B. BAKER is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Stanford University. He studies the social history of medieval Europe, with particularinterest in marginality, social control, and urban landscapes. He iscurrently writing a dissertation on the social history of the Roma inthe fifteenth-century Holy Roman Empire.
75

CLASSICS REREAD
BRINGING THE MIDDLE AGES TO LIFE
Levi RoachArno Borst, Lebensformen im Mittelalter (Berlin: Ullstein, 1997; 1st pub.
Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1973), 796 pp. ISBN 978 3 548 26513 1.
€ 14.99
Arno Borst (1925–2007) was one of the most active and influential
German historians of the post-war era. He cut his teeth studying
under Percy Ernst Schramm in Göttingen, where he completed his
Ph.D. in 1951. But whereas Schramm and much of the German scholarly establishment remained wedded to political history, even whenbranching out into questions of symbolism and the history of ideas (asdid Schramm), it was above all social history and the history of mentalities that drew the young Borst. This can already be seen in the topic
of his Ph.D. thesis: the Cathars, a choice that prioritized the study of
belief and local society over that of monarchs, lords, and govern­
ment. The Cathars also took Borst away from traditional ‘German’historiography, opening him up to important currents within French
intellectual culture—above all, the fruits of the Annales school andits focus on mentalités. The resulting book put Borst on the map forFrancophone scholars, earning a French translation in 1974.1
These interests would stay with Borst throughout his subsequent
career. When the time came to do a habilitation in the mid to late
1950s, he chose to focus on the figure of the Tower of Babel and ideas
about the origins of language in the Middle Ages. This work was completed at the University of Münster under Herbert Grundmann, theArno Borst, Die Katharer (Stuttgart, 1953). Published in French as Les cathares,
trans. C. Roy (Paris, 1974).

176Bringing the Middle Ages to Life
leading scholar of heresy and religious movements in the Germanophone world at the time, and went on to be published as an imposing
four-volume work, spanning some 2,300 pages of printed text.2 However, the book under review here—marking the fiftieth anniversaryof its publication—is that which would earn Borst wider acclaim:
his Lebensformen im Mittelalter (‘Forms of Life in the Middle Ages’, or
perhaps better simply ‘Living in the Middle Ages’). As a work, it combines Borst’s early commitment to the history of belief and mentalities
with a new-found desire to speak to a wider audience—a desire
which would accompany Borst for the rest of his career, finding its
final expression in a posthumously published memoir.3 It also first
demonstrated the full breadth of Borst’s knowledge. While his habili­tation had already spanned the entire Middle Ages, here Borst sought
to encompass the lived experience of a millennium within the confinesof a single volume. The result was an immediate bestseller, which
remains in print to this day. What attracted readers—and continues
to do so—was in no small part the originality of Borst’s proposition.
Whereas many earlier works of popular non-fiction had tackled thepolitics of what Wilhelm von Giesebrecht famously called the ‘German
imperial era [deutsche Kaiserzeit]’,4 few if any had sought to shed lighton the lived existence of much of humanity in these years. It was thishuman element of the Middle Ages that Borst sought to capture, as
he emphasizes in his programmatic introduction—the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of people from across social classes throughout
the period.
Of course, it would be impossible to encompass the lived ex­peri­ence of an entire society in any single volume, even one as long as
this one (which boasts an impressive 700 pages of text and anotherninety-six of appendices and index). Borst’s response to the challengeof this material was both pragmatic and enlightening. He eschewed
linear narrative history, electing to approach the subject by meansof a series of carefully chosen snapshots derived largely from someArno Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung
und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker, 4 vols. (Stuttgart, 1957–63).
3
Arno Borst, Meine Geschichte, ed. G. Seibt (Lengwil, 2009).
4
Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, 6 vols. (Braun­schweig and Leipzig, 1855–95).
2

77

Classics Reread
hundred or so primary source extracts. These vary enormously intone, length, and nature, from the Venerable Bede’s vivid accountof the conversion of the Northumbrian court through to the bloody
pages of the Latin epic Waltharius. Most sections start with a source,which is offered in an elegant modern German translation (in almost
all cases by Borst himself) and then contextualized in light of therelevant specialist literature. Those wishing to know more can thenturn to the appendices at the back, where Borst lists a selection of themost relevant literature at the time of publication (1973). The sources
themselves are drawn from across the Middle Ages, and while Borst
is alive throughout to variation and change, the attempt is not to becomprehensive, but to offer a feel for the period—a sense of how certain moments in life were experienced and what sorts of beliefs wereshared. This is the key to the book’s success. Rather than building onor simply summarizing the scholarly consensus of his day, Borst went
back to the sources, letting them speak directly to his readers, before
offering an interpretation.
This close focus on sources is also the feature which has saved Borst’s
volume from the fate of so much popular non-fiction: that of dating
quickly, in line with received wisdom. For with occasional exceptions,
Borst’s conclusions rest not on wider theories of medieval society, economy, or politics, but on what sources from the period themselves say.
Of course, Borst is not immune to changes in scholarly opinion, and it
is no coincidence that those sections in greatest need of revision are theones which do not derive from a direct consideration of the sources.
Thus under the heading ‘lordship [Herrschaft]’, Borst is happy to speakof ‘the established gestures and forms of feudalism’ (p. 465)—words
few modern scholars would utter without multiple caveats.5 Still, what
The essential work is Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford, 1994). Initial responses to Reynolds’ revisionism
in the Germanophone world were quite hostile, but more recently the gistof her criticisms has been accepted: Jürgen Dendorfer and Roman Deutinger(eds.), Das Lehns­wesen im Hoch­mittel­alter: Forschungs­konstrukte—Quellen­be­funde—Deutungs­relevanz (Ostfildern, 2010); Steffen Patzold, Das Lehns­wesen(Munich, 2012); Karl-Heinz Spieß (ed.), Aus­bildung und Ver­breitung des Lehns­
wesens im Reich und in Italien im 12. und 13. Jahr­hundert (Ost­fildern, 2013);
Jürgen Dendorfer and Steffen Patzold (eds.), Tenere et habere: Leihen als soziale
Praxis im frühen und hohen Mittel­alter (Ostfildern, 2023). For historiographical
578

Bringing the Middle Ages to Lifeis surprising is not so much that a few sections creak half a century
on as that it is only a few that do. Indeed, were the volume ever to be
published in updated form, it is largely the appendices that would needrevising to incorporate important recent work.
Borst’s choice to focus on sources and themes also makes this abook one can happily dip in and out of. Some readers, not least reviewers such as myself, will wish to read it cover to cover. But many more
will enjoy treating it as a coffee-table book—the kind of work one canread in small snippets, depending on one’s mood and interests at any
moment. The only downside of this is that there is not a strong overarching narrative thread; what the various sections have in common is
simply Borst’s fascination with life in Middle Ages. Yet this, too, is astrength in disguise, for any thesis-driven book from 1973 would now
be sorely out of date, whereas Borst’s volume remains one of the best
introductions to daily life in the period available in any language.
In the end, it is the sheer humanity of Borst’s work that stands out.
This is a book written by someone passionate about people and mentalities of a bygone age. Marc Bloch, another great social histor­ian of
the Middle Ages (and not coincidentally, one of Borst’s own inspir­
ations), once evocatively compared the historian to a fairy-tale ogre
(or giant) stalking the scent of human flesh.6 Here, Borst shows himself
to have an unusually fine nose for his prey. Be it in the pages of Bede,the food renders of Carolingian polyptyques, or the poetry of Dante
Alighieri, he time and again finds ways of bringing the Middle Agesto life. Fifty years on, this volume remains an inspiration. It throws
down the gauntlet to a new generation of historians to see if they cancome any closer to this most evasive of quarries. Let us hope that they,
now more attuned to the complexities of gender and identity, will riseto the challenge. I, for one, look forward to seeing them try. In themeantime, they would do well to start with Borst.

orientation: Susan Reynolds, ‘The History of the Idea of Lehnswesen’, German
Historical Institute London Bulletin, 39/2 (2017), 3–20.
6

Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester, 1992), 22.

79

Classics Reread
LEVI ROACH is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the
University of Exeter. He has published widely on the political andreligious history of Western Europe (particularly England, Germany,and northern Italy) in the tenth and eleventh centuries. His most recent
monograph, Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium, waspublished by Princeton University Press in early 2021.

80

BOOK REVIEWSSARAH GREER, Commemorating Power in Early Medieval Saxony: Writing and Rewriting the Past at Gandersheim and Quedlinburg, Studies inGerman History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), xiii + 206 pp.
ISBN 978 0 198 85013 7. £75.00
Sarah Greer’s study is not the first time that the ‘fascination type’1 ofcanoness houses in Saxony in the Early and High Middle Ages hasformed the subject of a book. But Greer’s Ph.D. thesis, supervised by
Simon MacLean at the University of St Andrews, is the first workon the phenomenon of female monasteries in this area to cover thecommemoration strategies of the Liudolfing family and the Ottonian
dynasty from 852 to 1024. On the one hand, Greer raises the questionof why and how this noble and royal family (including individual
members) used religious institutions to gain political power and solve
conflicts and crises. On the other, she asks how those institutions
profit­ed from the actions of their noble and royal relatives in the secular world. Although Greer does not say so herself, her book constructs
an entangled history of religious and secular institutions during theperiod in question.
In her first chapter, Greer traces the rise of female monastic houses
in Saxony from the ninth to the early eleventh centuries on the basis of
traditional scholarship. She counts nineteen female convents founded
between 800 and 900, and thirty-one between 900 and 1024 (pp. 17–18).
She then considers Karl Leyser’s, Michel Parisse’s, and Gerd Alt­hoff’s
hypotheses concerning demography, the accumulation of property
by women (nuns and widows), and prayer as a form of memoria as
reasons for the extraordinary and unparalleled number of female
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘Faszinationstyp Hagiographie: Ein historisches
Ex­periment zur Gattungstheorie’, in Christoph Cormeau (ed.), Deutsche Lit­er­a­tur im Mittel­
alter: Kontakte und Perspektiven. Hugo Kuhn zum Gedenken(Stuttgart, 1979), 37–84.

181

Book Reviewsmonasteries in that period, particularly in Saxony.2 But because she
is not satisfied with these explanations, she tries to find an alternativemodel. In Greer’s opinion, the rise and success of the Saxon female
spiritual houses is due to the rather late Christianization of the easternborders of the Frankish realm, the high percentage of canoness houses
compared to Benedictine monasteries, and the inclusion of religious
women in historiography and hagiography as both authors and subjects (pp. 24–6, 29).
Greer explores this hypothesis in a comparative study of Gan­ders­heim (chs. 2–3) and Quedlinburg (chs. 3–4). Her investigationof each house’s commemorative tradition and involvement in Ottonian politics is based mainly on charters and historiographical andhagio­graph­ic­al narratives rather than on liturgical sources, since few
of these survive from Gandersheim and Quedlinburg. Greer distinguishes two phases of constructing the past: the founding phase(Gandersheim: c.852; Quedlinburg: 936), and the mid tenth- to early
eleventh-century phase in which the past was rewritten.
Based on her analysis, Greer posits that the Liudolfings and Otto­
nians were not a collective group that consistently followed a plannedand coherent strategy of power and memory in Saxony. According toGreer, each convent reacted individually to the challenges of unforeseen biological and demographic events (such as sudden deaths or
the birth of several daughters); of conflicts between the Saxon andBavarian Ottonian lineages; of conflicts between rulers; and of rebellions by disadvantaged brothers and sons (such as Liudolf and Henry
the Quarrelsome). Finally, Greer argues, discourses on elitist hier­arch­ies—the ‘Gandersheim controversy’, for instance—led to crisis. In her
understanding, the Liudolfings’ and Ottonians’ government was characterized by fluctuation, discontinuity, and contingency. This can beseen, for example, in the continually changing locations of memorial
2
Karl Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony(London, 1979); Michel Parisse, ‘Die Frauen­stifte und Frauen­klöster in Sachsen vom 10. bis zur Mitte des 12. Jahr­hunderts’, in Stefan Wein­furter andFrank Martin Sie­farth (eds.), Die Salier und das Reich, vol. ii: Die Reichs­kirche
in der Salierzeit (Sigmaringen, 1991), 465–502; Gerd Althoff, Adels- und Königs­
familien im Spiegel ihrer Memorialüberlieferung: Studien zum Toten­gedenken derBillunger und Ottonen (Munich, 1984).

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Commemorating Power in Early Medieval Saxony
spaces: each ruler chose his own burial place, and there was no single
site for the whole dynasty like that of the later Salians in Speyer. Greer
makes it clear that political representatives and monastic institutions(along with their abbesses) used different media and commemoration
strategies. It was not only the lay elite who asked relatives in religious
institutions to support their propaganda by praising the dynasty in
written narratives. In fact, these institutions also instrumentalized
their commemorative function in order to intervene in political affairs
and gain economic support from the lay elites. But the more the convents intervened in politics, the more they risked becoming embroiled
in political conflicts. Greer’s investigation clearly demonstrates thatcommemoration strategies were developed first and foremost duringphases of internal family conflict, and not so much in struggles withexternal groups.
Greer’s general hypothesis on the fluidity, discontinuity, and contingency of the dynasty and its commemoration practices is striking.
Particularly innovative is Greer’s view of the Gandersheim controversy. While in German historiography this long-lasting conflict isjudged to have been a disruptive factor in secular and ecclesiasticalpolitics, Greer demonstrates how the Ottonian abbess Sophia profited
from the controversy, bringing her institution back to the main stageof power and politics after a period on the sidelines.
Some details in Greer’s work need to be annotated, criticized, andcorrected, however. Greer has not solved the enigma of Henry I’s lackof interest in Gandersheim after he was elected king. As monarch, heneglected the residence of his ancestors in Brunshausen and ignored
the competence of the canonesses in constructing memory (pp. 16, 80).
In a recently published article,3 I argue that Henry supported Corvey
and other houses in West­phalia much more than the eastern parts of
Saxony as he sought to expand west into territory that had not been
under his ancestors’ control. He acquired power in this region only
through his wife’s inheritance and not from his own family. As forhis disregard for Gandersheim’s production of commemoration lists,
I argue that Henry thought the monks in Reichenau (and not only St
Hedwig Röckelein, ‘Heinrichs I. Verhältnis zu Kirchen und Klöstern’, inGabriele Köster and Stephan Freund (eds.), 919—Plötzlich König: Heinrich I.
und Quedlinburg (Regensburg, 2019), 87–103.

3

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Book Reviews
Gall!) were much more accomplished and efficient than the Ganders­heim canonesses and canons. By studying his itinerary, we can seethat he generally relied much more on the secular palaces and lay
elites in Saxony than on religious institutions.
Greer laments the lack of liturgical evidence in Gandersheim
and Quedlinburg. It is true that less liturgical and memorial evidence has been preserved from these two convents than from othermale or female institutions of the period. But some sources are still
slumbering in the archives, and it would have been worth tracing
the originals, not only the published versions. The most importantof these unpublished texts is the Younger Necrology of Gan­ders­heim.
It survives only in a sixteenth-century copy, but preserves a significant number of memorial notes from the High Middle Ages. Christian
Popp and Thorsten Henke are in the final stages of editing this list for
publication. A minor, but nonetheless important source is the Regis­
trum chori ecclesie maioris Gan­dersem­ensis, a liber ordin­arius from late
fifteenth-century Gan­ders­heim.4 Christian Popp has tracked down
and interpreted the manifold texts and fragments on commemor­ationfrom Qued­lin­burg.5 His argument strongly contradicts Greer’s assessment of the Merseburg list (p. 13).
Although we cannot be sure which religious houses followed theRegula Benedicti in the Carolingian and Ottonian period and which
adhered to the rule for the sanctimoniales, Greer is right to differentiate
between these two forms of female religious institution (pp. 27–30).
But Greer’s assertion that the canoness houses in Saxony were ‘overlooked in scholarship’ (p. 26) in the past is absolutely incorrect. Greer
ignores the intense research on Saxon canoness houses in Germany
undertaken over the last few decades, following the pioneering studies of Leyser, Parisse, and Althoff. I could also draw her attention to
the annual meetings of the Essener Arbeitskreis zur Erforschung der
4
Christian Popp, ‘Liturgie im Frauenstift Gandersheim: Zur Über­liefe­rungsund Text­geschichte sowie zum Quellenwert des Registrum chori ecclesie mai­or­isGandersemensis’, in Klaus Gereon Beuckers (ed.), Liturgie in mittelalterlichen Frauenstiften: Forschungen zum Liber ordinarius (Essen, 2012), 113–30.
5Christian Popp, ‘For the Living and the Dead: Memorial Prayers of theQued­lin­burg Canonesses in the High Middle Ages’, in Karen Blough (ed.), A
Companion to the Abbey of Quedlinburg in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2023), 122–41.

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Commemorating Power in Early Medieval Saxony
Frauenstifte, an interdisciplinary working group whose detailed andin-depth studies of female religious institutions have been publishedin the fifteen-volume series ‘Essener Forschungen zum Frauenstift’
between 2002 and 2018.6 Likewise, in her discussion of the preponderance of female religious houses in Saxony, I missed the arguments
made in two articles by Caspar Ehlers and myself.7
On page 51, Greer comes back to the historiographic discourse
on Fulda’s influence on the early Gandersheim convent. Although
she accepts Klaus Naß’s refutation of the notion that monks from
Fulda founded Bruns­hausen,8 she tries to defend the argument that
Fulda influenced the convent during the ninth century with reference to the insular script on the Salvator­tüch­lein, an early textile relic.
As I argue in a recently published article,9 Fulda is one option forthe provenance of the inscription; the other, more likely one is theLateran Basilica in Rome. Since Greer tries to play down Corvey’s
influence on Gandersheim, she ignores the fact that St Stephen was
patron of the early church in Bruns­hausen, and further overlooks the
On Gandersheim, see vol. 4: Martin Hoernes and Hedwig Röckelein (eds.),
Gandersheim und Essen: Vergleichende Untersuchungen zu sächsischen Frauen­stiften(Essen, 2006); on Quedlinburg, vol. 14: Stephan Freund and Thomas Labusiak(eds.), Das dritte Stift: Forschungen zum Quedlinburger Frauenstift (Essen, 2017);
on memoria, vol. 6: Thomas Schilp (ed.), Pro remedio et salute anime peragemus:
Toten­gedenken am Frauenstift Essen im Mittel­alter (Essen, 2008); and on liturgy,
vol. 10: Klaus Gereon Beuckers (ed.), Liturgie in mittel­alter­lichen Frauenstiften:
Forschungen zum Liber ordinarius (Essen, 2012).
7
Caspar Ehlers, ‘Franken und Sachsen gründen Klöster: Be­obachtungen zu
Integrations­prozessen des 8.–10. Jahr­hunderts am Beispiel von Essen, Gan­ders­heim und Qued­lin­burg’, in Hoernes und Röckelein (eds.), Gan­ders­heim undEssen, 11–31; Hedwig Röckelein, ‘Bairische, säch­sische und main­fränk­ische
Kloster­gründ­
ungen im Ver­gleich (8. Jahr­
hundert bis 1100)’, in Eva Schlot­
heuber, Helmut Flachenecker, and Ingrid Gardill (eds.), Nonnen, Kanon­issen
und Mystiker­innen: Religi­öse Frauen­gemein­schaften in Süd­deutschland. Bei­träge zur
inter­disziplinären Tagung vom 21. bis 23. September 2005 in Frauenchiemsee (Göt­tingen, 2008), 23–55.
8
Klaus Naß, ‘Fulda und Brunshausen: Zur Problematik der Missionsklöster
in Sachsen’, Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte, 59 (1987), 1–62.
9
Hedwig Röckelein, ‘Reliquienauthentiken des Frühmittelalters aus dem
Frauen­stift Gandersheim (Niedersachsen)’, in Kirsten Wallenwein and Tino
Licht (eds.), Reliquienauthentiken: Kulturdenkmäler des Frühmittelalters (Regens­burg, 2021), 225–53.
685

Book Reviews
inscription on the late ninth- or early tenth-century wooden box used
as a reliquary in Gandersheim. The relics of some of the (rare) saints
identified by an ink inscription on the exterior of this box were also
kept in a monstrance in Corvey, as I demonstrate in my article.10
On pages 35 and 87, Greer mentions a monastery in Seesen thatwas founded by the canoness house of Gandersheim. This is obviously an error—one that possibly goes back to Parisse. The monasterymeant here, which was founded by Wendelgard and Gerberga II, isthe Benedictine house of St Mary’s in Gandersheim, not in Seesen.
Eberhard’s chronicle on Gandersheim is also constantly cited as the‘Reimschronik’; the genitive ‘s’ is unnecessary. In the bibliography, I
missed Theo Kölzer’s 2016 MGH edition of Louis the Pious’ charters.11
A lot of the page numbers given in the index are incorrect, presumably because the index was completed before the final proofs. Finally,
Walbeck and Kalbe are also inaccurately located on the map on page
31. They are both in the Harz, not west of the Rhine and south of theElbe, as Greer’s map suggests.

Ibid. 234–41.
Theo Kölzer (ed.), Die Urkunden der Karolinger, pt. ii: Die Urkunden Ludwigs
des Frommen, 3 vols. (Wiesbaden, 2016).
10
11

HEDWIG RÖCKELEIN retired in 2022 from her Professorship for
Early and High Middle Ages at the University of Göttingen. She is thehead of the project ‘Germania Sacra’ at the Academy of Sciences andHumanities in Lower Saxony. Her main research subjects are gender,
monastic houses, saints, and relics in the Middle Ages.
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JASON T. ROCHE, The Crusade of King Conrad III of Germany: Warfare
and Diplomacy in Byzantium, Anatolia and Outremer, 1146–1148 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2021), 365 pp. ISBN 978 2 503 53038 3. €94.00
The starting point for Jason T. Roche’s study is the brief but consequential assessment of the German King Conrad III (1093/4–1152)
in the historiographical discourse of the nineteenth century. The
negative view of the first Hohenstaufen king held by German historians stemmed from the anachronistic categories by which theymeasured medieval monarchs against contemporary political hopes
and desires. Nineteenth-century historians cast medieval rulers as
heroes or failures in a story of progress and modernization that culminated in the modern nation state. Their verdicts were based on
how much those rulers contributed to the centralization of monarchical power in the Middle Ages, a process they saw as essential
to the rise of the nation state. Conrad III did not measure up wellin this respect; not only was he accused of being unable to settle
his conflict with the Guelphs to the advantage of the kingdom, but
he was also held responsible for the disaster of the Second Crusade(1147–9). Nineteenth-century accounts of his reign revolved aroundthe idée fixe of a ‘decisive battle’ against the Guelphs and the Seljuks,
the lack of which seemed to demonstrate Conrad’s personal incompetence and weakness as a leader. In this way, historians establishedthe notion that the king had ‘failed’, in part due to his supposedly
spontaneous decision to join the crusade in Speyer in 1147 under the
influence of the monk, scholar, and preacher Bernard of Clairvaux(c.1090–1153).
This picture is only now beginning to change in modern German
historiography. And British and American historians in particularhave been reassessing the image of Conrad’s crusade in recent years,
in line with the greater interest traditionally shown in the crusades byEnglish-speaking researchers.1 Roche takes this trend to a new highTrans. by Jozef van der Voort (GHIL).
E.g. Jonathan Phillips and Martin Hoch (eds.), The Second Crusade: Scope
and Consequences (Manchester, 2001); Jonathan Phillips, The Second Crusade:Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (New Haven, 2007); Jason T. Roche and187Book Reviews
point and a provisional conclusion. His book—which is well worth
reading—is a reinterpretation of the historical accounts written by
the French monk Odo of Deuil and the Byzantine imperial secretary
John Kinnamos (c.1143–85), the two main sources for the history of
the Second Crusade. His close examination of the intentions of these
two authors allows him to develop a new understanding of their narratives. By modelling the challenges involved in supplying both theGerman and French armies and by adopting a range of interdiscip­
linary approaches, he manages to produce an overall picture withmany persuasive new interpretations that also take into accountcontempor­ary ideas of rank and honour.
The introduction situates the topic in the wider research literature,offers a brief guide to the contents, and summarizes the book’s ten
chapters (pp. 28–31). The first chapter is then devoted to the sources.
Roche departs from older research in asserting that the early hints
at national difference that have often been noted in Odo of Deuil’s
history are primarily a product of the author’s desire to ascribe thecrusade’s failure to Greek treachery and a lack of dis­cip­line among
the Germans, thereby holding his own admired and pious kingabove reproach. Instead of finding more reasonable explanations,
Odo decided to present the Greeks and Germans as malicious scapegoats, thereby subscribing fully to the negative ethnic stereotype
of furor teut­onicus, or Teutonic fury, established by Abbot Suger ofSaint-Denis in Paris (c.1081–1151) in his Gesta Ludovici Grossi—a workof which Odo’s own account was intended as a continuation. Thiswas his solution to the unenviable task of explaining the failure of his
godly king’s venture in the Holy Land.2
The history by John Kinnamos, by contrast, emerges here as a kindof prose encomium. Drawing on his deep familiarity with the trad­itionof panegyric speeches at the Byzantine imper­ial court, and against
the background of tensions between Holy Roman Emperor Fred­erick I Barbarossa (c.1122–90) and the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I
Janus Møller Jensen (eds.), The Second Crusade: Holy War on the Periphery of
Latin Christendom (Turnhout, 2015).
On Odo of Deuil, see also Michael Kister, ‘Die Bewältigung des Zweiten
Kreuzzugs: Odo von Deuil und der schuldlose König’, Portal Militärgeschichte,
20 Feb. 2023, at [https://doi.org/10.15500/akm.20.02.2023].

2

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The Crusade of King Conrad III of Germany
Komnenos (1118–80), Kinnamos’ account, which was written around
1176, tells the story of the Second Crusade with the same rhet­orical,
cultural, and historical self-understanding that had shaped andinformed the Ancient Greek view of foreigners as ‘barbarians’. The
barbarian crusaders’ arrogance, cowardice, and inability to mastertheir emotions are contrasted with Manuel’s imperial virtues, which
lend themselves to victory. In this way, Kin­namos perpetuates therhetorical strategies deployed by the anonymous author known asMan­ganeios Pro­dromos in numerous verse encomia written to legitimize Manuel’s unexpected accession to the imperial throne in 1143.
The Byzantine official and histor­ian Niketas Choniates (c.1155–1217)
drew on Kin­namos’ narrative in his own work, but did so withvery different intentions and in light of the sack of Constantinople
in 1204—a disaster he ascribed to the sinfulness of the Kom­nenianemperors, as reflected in their response to the crusaders’ godly enterprise. For different reasons, but in consistent ways, the three main
sources thus obscure the histor­
ical events and therefore need tobe read very critically. This calls the standard account of Conrad’s
crusade into question, given that it rests largely on straightforward
retellings of these three texts.
The rest of the book runs chronologically from Conrad’s depart­ure on crusade to his return from the Holy Land. The second chapter
discusses how the ground was prepared for the crusade politically.
Roche follows recent scholarship in viewing Conrad III’s decision tojoin the crusade in Speyer not as a spontaneous act, but as a carefully
prepared decision that was dependent on Bernard of Clairvaux’s
success as a peace broker. He rightly describes the securing of peaceand a line of succession in the empire ‘as a major success for Conrad
III’ (p. 78). Yet when he claims, echoing Eleni Tounta,3 that Conrad
sought to emulate the Byzantine example and free his imperial sovereignty from papal influence (see especially pp. 65 and 75), Roche
underestimates the influence of the tradition, dating back to the reignof Otto I (912–73), that the East Frankish and German king should becrowned emperor by the Pope.
3
Eleni Tounta, ‘Thessaloniki (1148)–Besançon (1157): Die staufischen-byzantinischen Beziehungen und die “Heiligkeit” des Staufischen Reiches’, Historisches
Jahrbuch, 131 (2011), 167–214, at 177.

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Book Reviews
Drawing on the Database of Crusaders to the Holy Land,4 chapter
three highlights thirty-one nobles—some from the Hohenstaufen–
Babenberg kinship group surrounding Conrad III and others from thecompeting Guelph group around Welf VI (1115–91)—alongside a further fifty-five participants in the crusade. By comparing informationon the 1184 Diet of Mainz provided by the French cleric and chronicler
Gislebert of Mons (c.1150–1225) with Frederick Barbarossa’s account of
his first expedition to Italy, Roche estimates the total number of participants in Conrad’s crusade to have been 9,000 combatants and 3,000
non-combatants. Models of the logistical challenges show that when
this army camped outside a small town (kastron) for just five days,
it would have consumed enough provisions to feed the town for amonth (p. 100). As such, the crusaders’ hope of being able to purchasesupplies overwhelmed the networks between small towns and theirrural surroundings, especially in western Anatolia. The advancing cru­
saders must have made logis­tical arrangements along the Via militaris
to Constantinople that were similar to those known to have been usedby the Byzantine emperor to supply his own troops, although these are
not expli­citly mentioned in the sources. Yet Emperor Manuel’s add­
itional gifts of food could not defuse the potential for conflict causedby poor exchange rates and increased food prices.
Chapter four is devoted to the march to Constantinople. Specificincidents, such as in Philippopolis and Adrianople, and Conrad’s
arrival in the palace and park complex known as the Philo­pation,
illustrate the extent to which the chroniclers’ narratives were distortedby their failure to understand the logistical strain the crusaders were
under. This also underpins Odo’s depiction of the unreliable Greeks
and the greed and furor of the German crusaders, who marched onahead of the French army.
The fifth chapter, on the German crusaders’ encampment outside
Constantinople, contains several astute new interpretations. Based on
his essentially convincing argument that the armed clashes between
the crusaders and Byzantine troops during the former’s advance were
not due to enmity between Conrad III and Manuel I, but a productof logistical difficulties (p. 141), Roche rejects the typical assumption,
J. S. C. Riley-Smith et al. (eds.), A Database of Crusaders to the Holy Land: 1095–
1149, at [https://www.dhi.ac.uk/crusaders/], accessed 22 Feb. 2023.

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The Crusade of King Conrad III of Germany
derived from Odo of Deuil and John Kinnamos, that the two rulers did
not meet in person. Instead, he suggests that a ‘clandestine meeting’took place (p. 153; see also p. 156) and argues that the version of events
put forward by the chronicler Arnold of Lübeck (c.1150–1211/14),
who claimed that the two monarchs met outside the city on horseback, is historically accurate because ‘it was in their mutual interests
to meet’ (p. 141; see also p. 330). Roche’s suggestion that the earlier
meeting between Emperor Alexios Kom­nenos (1057–1118) and theleaders of the First Crusade may have served as a model for Manuel’s
meeting with King Louis VII of France (1120–80) is just as worthy of
consideration as his highly plausible assertion that Manuel Komnenos
and Conrad worked together closely. All in all, the idea that the twoemperors met is by no means far-fetched.
Yet Roche’s arguments in support of his case are unconvincing in
multiple respects. First and foremost, his discussion of the sources on
this point is unsatisfactory. Although he explains away the version of
events presented by Odo of Deuil and John Kinnamos by suggestingthat their Byzantine informers were simply unaware that a meeting
between Manuel and Conrad III had taken place, we are supposed
to believe that eyewitness accounts nonetheless reached Arnold ofLübeck and other Latin authors. This is circular reasoning, which takes
as a given what has yet to be proved. Furthermore, a review of the texts
that Roche only cursorily summarizes in his footnotes and does notdiscuss in depth (p. 142, n. 10 and p. 154, n. 53) shows that—contrary
to his assertions—some of them do not mention a personal meeting at all. This is true of the Historia Welf­orum Wein­gartensis (c.1170),
Hel­mold of Bosau’s Chron­ica Slav­orum (1163–72), Ger­hoch of Reichers­
berg’s De investi­gatione Anti­christi (1160–2), and the Notae Pisanae of1128, 1148, and 1154. A few texts do state that Conrad and his entirearmy(!) were ceremonially received by the rex Grec­orum (the Annales
Pali­denses of c.1164–1421, the Chron­icle of Peters­hausen, and the Annales
Magde­burgenses of 1176–88); yet this would not have involved a personal
meeting and refers only to the activities of Manuel’s envoys, who acted in
his name. For the same reason, Roche’s interpretation of Conrad’s message to Abbot Wibald of Corvey is also unconvincing (p. 153, n. 52).5 As
5Friedrich Hausmann (ed.), Die Urkunden Konrads III. (Hanover, 1969), no. 194.

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Book Reviews
for the few sources that do mention a meeting between the two em­­perors (the Annales Herbipolenses, the Chronicon of Romuald of Salerno
around 1180, and Arnold of Lübeck), it is important to keep thenarrative function of this claim in mind. After all, the portrayal of apersonal relationship between Manuel and Conrad makes for a highly
effective contrast with the Byzantines’ subsequent treachery. Indeed,
Arnold of Lübeck goes so far as to cite Conrad’s refusal to visit Manuelas a motive for the Greek betrayal. Is this an accurate reflection of historical events, or merely a narrative pattern that contrasts friendshipwith treachery? A more in-depth analysis is required here. Second,Roche is undoubtedly correct to argue that the crossing of the Bosporus
must have been negotiated in advance and that the crusaders’ supply
shortages forced their hand. Yet a personal meeting would not havebeen necessary for this—or indeed for the presentation of gifts. Third,
Roche underestimates the cere­monial barriers to what would havebeen the first ever meeting between a Western and an Eastern Romanemperor. Would a secret meeting before the walls of Constantinople,
attended by just a few high-ranking witnesses (p. 153), really havebeen compatible with the strict ceremonial protocols of the By­zantine
court, which Roche rightly emphasizes (pp. 144–6)?6 The later meeting between the two emperors after Conrad’s return to Constantinople
from Ephesus was no doubt facilitated by the relative privacy of his
arrival by boat.
However, these objections do not detract from Roche’s per­sua­
sive suggestion that Conrad III crossed the Bosporus before
Louis VII’s arrival simply because the already difficult logisticalsitu­ation would not have permitted two large armies to be supplied
simultaneously. Roche also rightly casts doubt on Kinnamos’ accountof Conrad’s defeat at the hands of Byzantine troops at his camp in
Pikridion (modern-day Hasköy).
The sixth chapter, which is structured thematically rather thanchrono­logically, is devoted to the topographical and geopoliticalconditions in western Asia Minor, as well as its settlement history.
Supplying an army on the largely depopulated and infertile Anatolian plateau, which had been settled by Turkish nomads, would have6
See Martin Vučetić, Zusammenkünfte byzantinischer Kaiser mit fremden Herrschern (395-1204): Vorbereitung, Gestaltung, Funktionen, 2 vols. (Berlin, 2021).

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The Crusade of King Conrad III of Germany
involved almost insurmountable logistical challenges. In his reconstruction of Conrad’s march to Nicaea, his failed advance to Iconium,
and his subsequent return to Constantinople in the seventh, eighth, andninth chapters, Roche identifies the difficulty, not to say impossibility,of supplying the troops as a common theme and the Achilles’ heel ofthe entire expedition. By placing these logistical challenges centre stageand exploring them in great detail, he convincingly and permanently
disproves the standard his­torio­graphical speculations over Conrad’s
personal shortcomings as a leader, the lack of discipline among theGerman crusaders, and Byzantine–Seljuk alliances as reasons for thedisastrous course of the crusade. Instead, the operation was doomed
by a combination of supply shortages, physical exhaustion, and theunfamiliar fighting style of the Turks. Odo presumably learned that
Conrad and his council of princes had discussed these factors, and thatthe decision to retreat had been accompanied by the usual reflections
over questions of honour and disgrace, not from some survivor of thefailed campaign (pp. 262 and 265), but from Barbarossa, whom Conrad
later sent as an envoy to Louis VII’s camp in order to inform the Frenchking of what had happened.
In chapter ten Roche offers a political explanation of Conrad andLouis’ attack on Damascus in July 1148—a move that historians havealways seen as problematic—claiming that it was motivated by a desire
to avert the threat of an alliance between Aleppo and Jerusalem. In
order to explain the subsequent failure of the expedition, he once again
stresses reports of logistical difficulties that have long been ignoredor misunderstood. Evidently, the Christians, who had set out at short
notice and without adequate supplies, planned to feed themselvesfrom the gardens outside Damascus during what they hoped would
be a short siege. When the Damascenes managed to thwart these plans,
the crusaders still hoped to storm the walls after improvising a newencampment in a different location. Yet here too they encounteredwater and supply shortages, forcing them to abandon the siege. Thisaccount can be verified with reference to the sources—something thatcannot be said for the usual speculation that the crusaders withdrew
for fear of encountering an approaching Muslim relief force.
Roche’s book impresses with its broad research base, as well as its
author’s historiographical sensitivity and comprehensive knowledge
93Book Reviewsof the sources. Above all, he avoids many of the errors committed
in older research by convincingly analysing the intentions behind
the three main historiographical sources and exposing their skewed
and biased perspectives. (A similarly cautious reading of the Annales
Herbipolenses, written by an anonymous crusader, could deliver further insights.) Roche’s detailed discussion of the logistical and supply
problems that dogged Conrad’s crusade are also of fundamental
importance for research on military history and the crusades in general. The only flaw at the end of this smart, exciting, and inspiring
book is that it lacks an index of people and place names.

KNUT GÖRICH is Professor of Early and High Medieval History
at LMU Munich. He specializes in the history of the Hohen­staufen
dynasty, medieval historiography, and forms of communicationin the Middle Ages more generally. His many publications include
Cappenberg 1122–2022: Der Kopf, das Kloster und seine Stifter (2022) andFriedrich Barbarossa: Eine Biographie (2011).
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WILLIAM D. GODSEY and PETR MAŤA (eds.), The Habsburg Monarchy as a Fiscal–Military State: Contours and Perspectives 1648–1815,
Proceedings of the British Academy, 247 (Oxford, 2022), 390 pp. ISBN
978 0 197 26734 9. £95.00
Around thirt y-five years ago, when John Brewer coined the term ‘fiscal–
military state’ to describe ‘the sinews of power’ in eighteenth-century
Britain,1 its success and lasting influence on historical scholarshipwere hardly foreseeable. Yet it was clear from the beginning that
Brewer’s ‘heuristic device’2 would engender debate, as it offered a
provocative reinterpretation of British state formation. In a nutshell,
Brewer argued that in the war-torn long eighteenth century, England,
like the Con­tin­ental European monarchies, faced rising military costs.
If the English crown wanted to compete in the great power contests ofthe time, it had to extract financial resources from its subjects throughtaxation and credit. To pay for war, England, not unlike Prussia,3 built
up a powerful state apparatus. Brewer thus debunked several myths:
that of the peaceful, polite eighteenth century in opposition to the ironage of religious warfare which preceded it; that of less oppressive tax­
ation and lighter government in Britain than in ‘absolute’ monarchies;
and the grand narrative opposing British commercial and naval interests to brute Con­tin­ental army power. His book also invited further
investigation of fiscal and military mechanisms across early modern
Europe—and beyond. Critical voices have been raised against efforts
to extend the concept globally and across epochs, which threaten
See the first edition of Brewer’s classic The Sinews of Power: War, Money andthe English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989).
2
See Brewer’s recent recapitulation of his original intentions and his engagement with the extensions and critical adaptations of his concept in past
research: John Brewer, ‘Revisiting The Sinews of Power’, in Aaron Graham andPatrick Walsh (eds.), The British Fiscal–Military States, 1660–c.1783 (London,
2016), 27–34, quotation at 27.
3
A connection between military expenditure and fiscal–administrative development was drawn as early as 1910 by Otto Hintze for the rising Continental
power of the Hohenzollern state; see ‘Der Commissarius und seine Bedeutung
in der allgemeinen Verwaltungsgeschichte’, in id., Gesammelte Abhandlungen,vol. i: Staat und Verfassung, ed. Gerhard Oestreich, ext. 2nd edn (Göttingen,1962), 242–74.
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Book Reviews
to render it too vague for precise analysis. Yet its application to the
Habsburg Empire, as in the volume under review here, certainly
works well.
In a way, the book, edited by Vienna-based historians William
Godsey and Petr Maťa, returns to the origins of the debate. Brewer’s
influential book built on the work of, among others, P. G. M. Dickson on the financial revolution in England and on Austrian financeand government under Maria Theresia.4 His concept thus implied acomparative view of fiscal–military arrangements in the Habsburgmonarchy from the beginning. Yet, as Godsey and Maťa point out,the ‘Habsburg Myth’5 of a weak, fragmented state and a non-bellicose
foreign policy based on dynastic marriage by felix Austria has long
prevented further research in this direction. Traditionally contrasted
with its rival Prussia, the Habsburg monarchy appeared as a rather
weak, perhaps peaceable actor in the emerging international system.
Recently, however, some important German-language research hasconnected Habsburg fiscality to the monarchy’s considerable militaryefforts. Godsey and Maťa’s volume aims to introduce this regional
expertise into English-language research on the fiscal–military state.
It presents a convincing summary of the international debates andsuccessfully connects them to historical area studies of the Habsburgmonarchy both as a whole and in its component parts.
Godsey and Maťa structure the volume with two basic prop­os­
itions. First, they regard the Habsburg dominions as a composite
monarchy. Although this peculiar polity might have possessed someof the characteristics implied by alternative concepts such as dynastic agglomerate, polycentric monarchy, or empire, it was, the editors
argue, primarily a monarchical state centred on the Habsburg court,with regional and local representative bodies intimately involved inshared yet contended processes of fiscal and military state formation.
P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London, 1967); id., Finance and Government
under Maria Theresia 1740–1780, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987).
5
Michael Hochedlinger, ‘The Habsburg Monarchy: From “Military–Fiscal
State” to “Militarization” ’, in Christopher Storrs (ed.), The Fiscal–Military Statein Eighteenth-Century Europe: Essays in Honour of P. G. M. Dickson (London,2009), 55–94, at 58.
4

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The Habsburg Monarchy as a Fiscal–Military State
Second, Godsey and Maťa propose an overarching early modern
chronology for these processes, marked by four systemic shifts infiscal–military arrangements. After a basis for central fiscal andmilitary institutions had been created with the Hof­kammer (Aulic
Chamber) in 1527 and the Hof­kriegs­rat (Aulic War Council) in 1556,
the mid sixteenth-century war against the Ottoman Empire caused
the first important shift, initiating efforts by the central state to establish a permanent border defence. The Thirty Years War, during which
the General­kriegs­kommissariat (General War Commissariat) was established, brought more central control of the armed forces, especiallyafter the elimination of Albrecht von Wallenstein in 1634. Godsey andMaťa identify a third shift in the wars of the 1680s, when Emperor
Leopold I faced simultaneous threats from the east and west. These
conflicts brought wider recruitment, institutionalized in the Landrekrutenstellung (provincial recruitment system), and they turned theContribution, ori­gin­ally exacted for troop upkeep during warfare, into
a permanent tax. A last set of shifts occurred from the 1740s, when newwars required men and money on an unprecedented scale, bringing
the established system to its limits and beyond. Credit and the mon­et­ization of regalian rights (especially tolls) were gaining importance.
Moreover, recruitment was reorganized with the Werbbezirkssystem in
1781, which introduced conscription by regiment in fixed recruitment
districts.
This framework informs the selection and organization of theessays in the volume. The first three, by Hamish Scott, Guy Rowlands, and Peter H. Wilson, offer reflections by distinguished expertson the general debate. Scott recapitulates the genesis and development of the concept, reminding us of the fundamental distinction
between fiscal states, which exacted taxes for military spending,and fiscal–military states, which mobilized more resources throughcredit and borrowing. Comparing the paradigmatic British modeland other early modern European fiscal–military states with the
Habsburg monarchy, Scott draws out the latter’s specifics—for
example, the importance of Jewish financiers. Yet there were also
structural similarities, such as the extension of governmental reachand resource extraction across a composite monarchy in the British
Isles and the Habsburg case. For both, the integration of local elites
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Book Reviews
and regional representative bodies should not be taken as evidenceof weak statehood.
Rowlands likewise stresses that comparing fundamental char­acter­
istics offers a remedy against conceptual over-extension. He
focuses on individual states’ internal ‘fiscal–military constitution’ inorder to determine their ‘fiscal–military advantage’ (p. 61). In thisregard, France developed an impressive system very early, gaining
a considerable advantage over its rivals. Yet during the heyday of its
international power around 1700 under Louis XIV, serious problems
emerged in matching the exploding costs of warfare to the amount ofrevenue raised. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Frenchmonarchy lost its prominent position and suffered the financial problems which would ultimately lead to the revolution. Wilson proposes
an alternative to Rowlands’ internalist approach. Considering theimportance of early modern contractor states and powerful coalition
armies, he suggests taking a holistic look at a European ‘fiscal–militarysystem’ from 1530 to 1870. Within this framework, ‘which extended toa whole variety of semi-sovereign and non-state actors’ (p. 86), theHabsburg monarchy appears as a crucial player, drawing on the commercial and financial resources of the Viennese hub, but also of theHoly Roman Empire and beyond.
The following chapters turn to the specifics of the Habsburg monarchy. István Kenyeres and Géza Pálffy demonstrate that the need todefend the Hungarian border against Ottoman expansion required
efforts to institutionalize standing armed forces as early as the sixteenth century. Thomas Winkelbauer sketches the long-neglected yet
crucial role of the General War Commissariat in military finances andlogistics from its origins in the Thirty Years War to the mid eight­eenth
century.
The next four chapters jointly depict the functioning of the monarchy’s fully formed fiscal–military structures after the Peace ofWest­phalia in 1648. They expose differences between the reliable‘fiscal–military core’ (much of the Austrian hereditary lands and theBohemian crown’s territories; p. 27) and other parts of the Habs­burg
dominions. Petr Maťa finds that the supposedly fixed tax quotas of
the Austrian and Bohemian provinces were continually renegoti­ated
between the central government and the provincial Estates after the98The Habsburg Monarchy as a Fiscal–Military State
mid seventeenth century. The ensuing discussions did not weaken
the Habsburg fiscal–military constitution, but actually stabilized it, as
demonstrated for Moravia by Jiří David. The great lords dominating
the territorial Estates were willing to grant tax payments because theirrole as collectors and administrators of royal funds strengthened theirtraditional authority within their lands. In contrast, Hungary did notmeet the increase in standing forces after 1648 with similar willingness. András Oross demonstrates that the resistance of the Hungarian
Estates through repeated uprisings and protests was nonethelesscount­ered by the individual army contracting activities of Hungarian
magnates. More lasting arrangements were eventually found in theeighteenth century. Peter Rauscher, finally, notes the opposite trend
in relations between the Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire,
where the reliability of grants by the imperial estates was declining
over time. While the emperor could still draw on resources from
specific imperial allies after 1600, Rauscher confirms the classic interpretation of an ‘advan­cing disintegration of the Reich’, paralleled by‘the consolidation of the Habsburg Monarchy’ (p. 216).
The following two chapters shift perspective, regarding fiscal–
military arrangements not from the point of view of the central
state, but from that of noble actors within the complex constitutionalsettings. While Horst Carl traces the changing social function of regi­
mental proprietorship for the Swabian barons of Neip­perg from themid sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries, Veronika Hyden-Hanscho
delineates the pivotal role played in the early eighteenth century
by Léopold Philippe, duke of Arenberg, who mediated Habsburg
relations with the Estates of the Southern Netherlands and facilitated access to the wider financial world of Western Europe. The
last chapter by Orsolya Szakály takes up this actor-centred approach
once more by analysing the saltpetre monopoly exercised by Baron
Miklós Vay, demonstrating the importance of military contracting
as a commercial opportunity for Hungarian aristocrats in the Napoleonic era.
The three chapters preceding Szakály’s shed light on changes tothe Habsburg monarchy’s fiscal–military constitution in the eight­
eenth century. William D. Godsey traces the successful employmentof medium- and long-term borrowing from around 1700, when the99Book Reviews
newly established City Bank of Vienna, foreign financial markets,and the provincial Estates were tapped for credit. Direct public borrowing by the Universal-Staats-Schulden-Cassa (Universal State Debt
Treas­ury) from the 1770s complemented this system until its breakdown with the Napoleonic Wars and the paper currency inflationof the in­­famous Banco-Zettel. On the military side, Ilya Berkovich
traces the personnel composition of the Austrian regiments fromthe era of the Landrekrutenstellung to the introduction of the Werbbezirkssystem. Consecutively, these systems—despite differencesin detail—amounted to wide military conscription long before theFrench revolutionary levée en masse. To pay for their huge armies, theHabsburgs relied on taxation and credit, as well as on subsidies byother powers. Patrick Swoboda sheds light on the practical problemsof transferring subsidy money during the Habsburgs’ western wars
in the eighteenth century, pointing out that the sums which Austria
variously received from its British, Dutch, and French allies never
covered more than 15 per cent of its war expenses. On the whole,subsidies were an investment by financially stronger partners into
joint troop strength.
Links across this rich volume are created by the introduction, with
its helpful maps, and by the index, which includes thematic entries
that allow for quick cross-referencing. It would, however, have beeninteresting to see the individual essays engage with the overarching
chronological and conceptual framework more expli­citly. Does it holdup against the fine-grained studies in this book, which approach the
topic from such diverse perspectives? How do the essays connect
to the suggested conceptual variations on the fiscal–military state—
namely, the intern­al fiscal–military constitution and the European
fiscal–military system? How do fiscal–military developments relate
to other fields of change, such as commerce, labour, and the exploit­
ation of humans, as well as nature, ideas, or diplomacy? The volume
succeeds in tying in a wealth of existing research on the Habsburgmonarchy with the influential concept of the fiscal–military state, andit raises important wider questions about the linkages between warfare and money. Ideally, the volume will also achieve its third goal of
creating a basis for new discussions of an ageing concept. After all,the comparative approach raises important further questions that also
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The Habsburg Monarchy as a Fiscal–Military State
touch on other polities in early modern Europe. In any case, it willcertainly become an important point of reference for future teaching
and research on Austria and its fiscal–military constitution.

ANKE FISCHER-KATTNER is a Lecturer at the University of theBundeswehr Munich. Her research interests include the history of
warfare and violence as well as early modern Europe and its encounters with the wider world. Among her publications are ‘Violent
Encounters at Ostend, 1601–1604: Spatiality, Location, and Identity
in Early Modern Siege Warfare’, in Anke Fischer-Kattner et al. (eds.),
Room for Manoeuvre: (Cultural) Encounters and Concepts of Place, a special issue of Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende
Gesellschaftsforschung, 28/2, 21–40; and Spuren der Begegnung: Europäische Reiseberichte über Afrika, 1760–1860 (2015).
101

SIMON HUEMER, Die europäische Wahrnehmung des Königreichs Dänemark nach der Einführung der Lex Regia: Die Rezeption von und Debatteüber Robert Molesworths Account of Denmark als Diskurs über die absolute
Monarchie anhand seiner Deutung der danske Enevælde von 1694 bis ca.
1770 (Kiel: Solivagus, 2022), 617 pp. ISBN 978 3 943 02562 0. €48.00
The centrepiece of Simon Huemer’s Ph.D. thesis is Robert Molesworth’s(1656–1725) pamphlet An Account of Denmark, published in 1694, twoyears after he was recalled as the British Crown’s envoy to the Danish
court—a position he had held for three years. Denmark was an ally of
the new British King, William III of Orange, and remained so in the years
that followed. Molesworth’s publication, on the other hand, presented
Denmark to the British public as a cautionary example of a formerly
free country that had enjoyed individual liberties since the time of theGoths, but which had abandoned those liberties as a result of complacency, corruption, and degeneracy. The Danish had instead officiallyconceded that their king could rule Denmark as an absolute monarchor, in Molesworth’s terms, as a tyrant over slaves. In his study, Huemer
first traces the genesis of the Lex Regia, which marked Denmark’s transition to absolute kingship, before situ­ating Robert Molesworth in thecontext of the debates at the time of the Glorious Revolution (1688–9).
He then summarizes the contents of Molesworth’s Account of Denmark,and finally looks at the intense debate over the treatise in Britain andsubsequently in Denmark. Huemer’s work focuses in particular on
the central ideas and concepts, rhetorical strategies, and legitimation
narratives of these debates, and he refers to the Cambridge School ofpolitical thought in his approach. In particular, Quentin Skinner andJohn Pocock are extensively used as authorities.
Molesworth saw the disunity of the Estates as the main reason for
the Danish king’s authorization of tyrannical rule via the Lex Regia.
Danish subjects wanted to free themselves from the slavery that the
nobility had imposed on them, and so the king appeared to them as anally. Courtly nobles also participated in the plot because of their service relationship with the king. Furthermore, Molesworth argued, thedesire for absolute power did not come from the reigning King Frederick III himself, but from his wife, Sophie Amalie. The clergy likewise
supported the Lex Regia because they hoped that the new constitution
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Robert Molesworth’s Account of Denmark
would give them greater authority and strengthen their own leadership position in the church.
Molesworth portrayed the events surrounding the Lex Regia in sucha way that they could be understood as a warning against the dangersof popish tyranny. In this context, the hostile image of popery could
easily be expanded to include the claim of Protestant clergymen to aleadership position in the church. He further concluded that Denmark
had given away all rights and freedoms and submitted to governmentby the king in the ‘Turkish manner’ (p. 197). From then on, Molesworth
claimed, the king’s main goal was to use the new constitution to build
a standing army, and ultimately to create a monster: a head without abody; a state with soldiers, but no subjects.
Molesworth’s terrifying portrayal of royal rule in Denmark gave
rise to a wide-ranging debate in Europe. Huemer addresses this controversy by first examining in more detail three counter-arguments
made by a Hamburg physician, two English authors from the Tory
camp, and certain Huguenots in Danish service. In particular, thesefigures criticized Molesworth’s antagonistic juxtaposition of kingshipand liberty, arguing that wise and virtuous kings were the best guarantors of liberty. They also attacked the sweeping equation of healthand liberty, arguing that unrestrained freedom led to dis­order andthus to disease in the body politic. The two Tory authors also emphasized the ius divinum with regard to the English church hierarchy andthe need for subjects to obey their monarchs. Molesworth was, in theireyes, a republican agitator and a proponent of the Commonwealth, orin other words, the kingless period in England.
In the final chapter, Huemer then addresses Danish contributions to this debate, which can largely be classified as belonging to
the genre of ‘country descriptions’ (Landesbeschreibungen) and which
set out Denmark’s history and contemporary political conditions for
Danish as well as European readers. In these texts, the Lex Regia wasdefended with a variety of arguments by authors who were in one
way or another connected to the Danish royal house through patronage relations.
Huemer’s book provides an overview of the debate on the Lex Regia
in Denmark by discussing in detail the main responses to Molesworth’s
Account of Denmark. His analysis, however, is not always convincing.
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Book Reviews
For example, the comparative authors used to outline the context ofthe political debate in England at the time of the Glorious Revolution
are not coherently chosen. Molesworth’s account is set in relation to
texts from the 1650s by Marchamont Nedham and James Harrington,presumably because both authors were used by Quentin Skinner as
key witnesses to his concept of English republicanism (Skinner called
them neo-Roman authors). A much more logical choice would havebeen John Locke and his Two Treatises of Government, written during the
Exclusion Crisis and published immediately after the Glorious Revolution, and containing numerous parallels to Molesworth’s discussion of
the right to resist a ruler who disregards the will of the people. Locke,
however, is not mentioned at all in Huemer’s presentation of the context surrounding the debate over the English monarchy.
The contextualization of Molesworth in the network of politicalgroups and actors at the time is also not entirely convincing. Huemer
takes terms such as ’Whig Junto’, ‘Old Whig’, and ‘court and country’from the research debate and uses them uncritically, as if they wereclearly defined groups of people. There is no detailed discussion ofwhat these party terms could mean, the extent to which they wereactually associated with clearly distinguishable groups, how far they
could be assigned to different world views, or whether they were infact primarily pejorative, polemical terms used to mark out oppon­ents
in the controversies of the 1690s, which were characterized by rapidchanges in the political loyalties of many participants.
Above all, however, reading Huemer’s work is extremely arduous,
as one has to slog through lengthy summaries of texts that teem withredundancies. The length of the study could have been reduced by half
without loss of substance. It would also have done the book good if
Huemer had been less inclined to load his analysis with technical terms
from the sociology of knowledge, even where these are neither ne­cessary nor useful. There is talk of discourses (Diskurse) where debates
are meant. When foreign lands are presented in ‘country descriptions’,
this has little to do with the concept of the ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt;
p. 152), which has its place as a technical term in studies of phenomenology. To point out that Molesworth perceives the Lex Regia from a
specifically English perspective—one that was strongly shaped by theevents and conflicts surrounding the Glorious Revolution—does not104Robert Molesworth’s Account of Denmark
require terms such as ‘knowledge constitution’ (Wissenskonstitution;
p. 191). At the end of the book, after 574 pages, the final conclusion isthat Molesworth’s opponents ‘defended the monarchy per se throughthe semantic–conceptual and historical–argumentative mechanismsof the early modern metastructure’ (p. 574). With these interpret­
ations, Huemer overambitiously presents his study as a contribution
to the sociology of knowledge, instead of offering concrete answers toconcrete questions.

ANDREAS PEČAR is Professor of Early Modern History at the Martin
Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, where he is Chair of the ‘Enlightenment—Religion—Knowledge’ research cluster, and President of theHistorical Commission for Saxony-Anhalt. He has published on theimperial court in Vienna; political biblicism in England and Scotland;
the Enlightenment and its relationship to modernity (with DamienTri­coire); Frederick the Great as author and philosopher; and recently(with Marianne Taatz-Jacobi) on the University of Halle’s historicallinks with the Prussian government.
105

TOM TÖLLE, Heirs of Flesh and Paper: A European History of Dynastic
Knowledge around 1700, Cultures and Practices of Knowledge in History, 11 (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022), xv + 322 pp. ISBN 978
3 110 74452 1. £63.50
This Ph.D. thesis, completed at Princeton University, aims to answer
two major questions: ‘How did political embodiment work in practiceand how did early modern subjects deal with unpredictable princely
illness in an age of planning?’ (p. 235). The study focuses on the years
1699 to 1716, a period rife with dynastic crises in Europe due to ser­ious
succession problems within the great Houses of Habsburg, Stuart,and Bourbon—problems that were of far-reaching consequence andclosely interwoven with the outbreak and course of the War of the
Spanish Succession (1701–13/14). Tölle has chosen this relatively brief
period because, in his view, it represents an ‘extreme manifestation’(p. 5) of what he calls the ‘old regime of princely corporeality’ (p. 4),
with the term ‘corporeality’ construed here as ‘a concept defined bysocial practices, albeit with biological limitations’ (p. 3).
Sickness, physical weakness, frailty, a lack of heirs, and (premature)
death were unquestionably among those features of the early modern
dynastic political system that had considerable potential—precisely
because of their unpredictability—to create destabilization and precipitate war. Researchers are in agreement on this point. Tölle’s aim,
however, is to find new perspectives on this. He consciously moves
away from the narratives and research objectives of older histori­
ography and its oft-described fixation on the protagonists of events as
actors within the power state (Machtstaat). His central research questionis that of how early modern subjects dealt with a fundamental politicaluncertainty: the generally unpredictable physical health of rulers andtheir families. First, as he emphasizes in the introduction, he turns to theeveryday practices of contemporaries. Second, he focuses on the media
aspects of this topic, specifically, and with good reason, in the context
of the rapid shift in the European media landscape around 1700. Thirdand last, he emphasizes that the aim of his study is to bring together
questions and approaches from the history of knowledge ‘regarding
Trans. by Marielle Sutherland (GHIL).

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Heirs of Flesh and Paper
political planning, temporality and probability’ (p. 13) on the one hand,and (traditional) political history on the other.
The study is structured as follows: each of the five large chapters,
which are based on in-depth case studies, foregrounds one particular
practice: ‘seeing, healing, writing, interacting, feeling’ (p. 16). Moreprecisely, the chapters focus on the observation of court life and pol­it­ics (ch. 1), medical aspects (ch. 2), attempts to resolve dynastic crises
through different forms of writing and court interaction (chs. 3 and4), and how subjects dealt emotionally with existential questions suchas birth, sickness, frailty, and death (ch. 5). This well thought out andclear structure does not, however, mean that the topics are presented
as strictly distinct from one another. Rather, the various overlaps
between the different practices and case studies are very apparent,
and, taken together, they offer a more comprehensive panorama.
The study cites a satisfyingly broad range of qualitative and quantitative sources. This encompasses many different source types, including
numerous print sources and unpublished archive material from fivecountries (Germany, the UK, France, Austria, and the USA). The bibliography meets the requirements of a Ph.D. thesis, despite the author
not having incorporated a number of standard works one would expect
to find here.1
In any event, the structure, weighting, sources, and chosen casestudies are certainly impressive. The thesis is a significant contribution
to European history around 1700. Its particular merit is that, throughthe integrative combination of several historical subdiscip­lines, itfinds new angles on a period which is already very well explored interms of diplomatic and political history, and it enriches the existing
research with new questions and fresh perspectives. The book focuseson discourses about the last Habsburg ruler on the Spanish throne, thephysically and intellectually disabled Charles II (ch. 1); the succession
problem in the House of Stuart under Queen Anne (ch. 2); the 1701 Act
of Settlement (ch. 3); the epidemic-driven succession crisis in France inthe late reign of Louis XIV (ch. 4); and the short life of Leopold Johann
of Austria, the oldest child and only son of Emperor Charles VI, who
No reference is made, for example, to Christopher Storrs’ The Resilience of the
Spanish Monarchy 1665–1700 (Oxford, 2006), which is about the rule of Charles
II of Spain.

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Book Reviews
died before his first birthday (ch. 5). In the process, all these far fromunfamiliar themes are newly inflected as the author probes the interfaces between political history, the history of knowledge, the history of
the body, the history of emotions, and the history of communication.
On the whole, Tölle sets out persuasively, and based closely on thesources, the serious problems experienced by the European powers
around 1700 as a result of the unpredictable dynastic breakdowns he
describes (namely lack of heirs, illnesses, premature deaths, and so on);how these events were perceived by contemporaries; and the impact ofthe practices under focus on political decision-making. However, his
exposition and theories are not always convincing. For example, hisargument, drawing on the history of emotions, that the Holy Roman
Empire was a ‘community of feeling’ (p. 232) is too narrow; additional
aspects should be taken into account, such as imperial patriotism andthe impetus towards integration, which was the result of external
threats.2 The conclusion, too, leaves some questions unanswered: ‘The
dynastic body was not . . . an appendix of the modern state; superfluous and only noticeable when in crisis. It was itself one of the mostimportant sites for changing the political’ (p. 253). A more detailed
explanation is needed here of what ‘changing the political’ means in
concrete terms. In my opinion, Tölle’s argumentation on this point issomewhat vague.
It is also regrettable that he does not include, by way of com­pari­son, a few prominent early modern rulers whose lives and impact
have already been analysed by researchers interested in similar questions. Possibilities here include Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), whosestate of health was the subject of intense contemporary debate, orDukes Wil­helm V (1516–92) and Johann Wil­helm of Jülich-Kleve-Berg(1562–1609), who have only recently returned as the focus of morein-depth studies on, for example, early modern medical teaching andthe physical and mental health of rulers.3 Another criticism is that
See in particular Martin Wrede, Das Reich und seine Feinde: Politische Feindbilder in der reichspatriotischen Publizistik zwischen Westfälischem Frieden undSiebenjährigem Krieg (Mainz, 2004).
3
See the contributions in the anthology Guido von Büren, Ralf-Peter Fuchs,
and Georg Mölich (eds.), Herrschaft, Hof und Humanismus: Wilhelm V. vonJülich-Kleve-Berg und seine Zeit (Bielefeld, 2018).
2

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Heirs of Flesh and Paper
there are some oversights in terms of form and content. One exampleof this is that Prussia only became a kingdom in 1701, so in 1700 there
was as yet no ‘king in Prussia’ (see the footnotes on pp. 66, 84, 90, and234). The study’s inclusion of an index, in addition to a few usefulappendices, is very welcome; however, spot checking has shown thatthe page numbers recorded in the index are often incorrect by exactly
one page, which makes it somewhat difficult to use.
It should be noted, however, that none of these points of criticism
are of a fundamental nature, and that Tom Tölle’s study is therefore
worth a read. It raises some interesting questions, provides food forthought, and ultimately demonstrates the potential of an integrativemodel that brings together different theoretical, methodological, anddisciplinary approaches. At all events, the angle set out programmatically in the title of the introduction, ‘Rethinking the Body Politic’,proves to be a productive approach to a phase in European history
in which the ‘société des princes’4 was repeatedly shaken up by theuncertainties of human life and experience.

4

Lucien Bély, La société des princes XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1999).

MICHAEL ROHRSCHNEIDER is Professor of Early Modern History
and Rhenish Regional History and also Director of the Centre for
Historical Peace Studies at the University of Bonn. His most recent
publications include as editor (with Florian Helfer, Peter Geiss, andSandra Müller-Tietz) Overcoming Conflict: History Teaching—Peacebuilding—Reconciliation (2023); (with Peter Geiss and Peter Arnold
Heuser) Christen und Muslime in Mittelalter und Frühneuzeit: Ein
Schlüsselthema des Geschichtsunterrichts im transepochalen Fokus (2022);
and (with Irene Dingel, Inken Schmidt-Voges, Siegrid Westphal, andJoachim Whaley) Handbuch Frieden im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit /Handbook of Peace in Early Modern Europe (2021).
109

MICHAEL KLÄGER, Zivilisieren durch Strafen: Britisch-Indiens Gefängnisse in der globalen Wissenszirkulation über die strafende Haft, 1820–1889,
Beiträge zur Europäischen Überseegeschichte, 113 (Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner Verlag, 2022), 377 pp. ISBN 978 3 515 13217 6 (hardcover),€69.00; ISBN 978 3 515 13221 3 (open access e-book)1
Michael Kläger’s first monograph is a nuanced study of the development of the penal system in nineteenth-century British India, with afocus on Madras, the North-Western Provinces, and Punjab. It contributes to a body of literature on crime, punishment, and penology
in colonial South Asia that has grown significantly in the past two
decades. For instance, Taylor Sherman’s call to consider penal institutions as part of a wider ‘coercive network’ of the colonial state hashelped to broaden the conceptual framework and connect the histor­
ies of prisons and of colonial violence.2 Kläger does not dispute thefact that prisons were part of a patchy but powerful system of coercion
and violence, but neither does he adopt this framework in his study.
He concentrates exclusively on the prison as an institution that was
introduced and reformed during the colonial period in India. Whatappears to be a conceptual limitation, however, must be read in lightof the book’s main purpose: to write a history of knowledge on theprison in colonial India from a global perspective. Zivilisieren durch
Strafen joins a generation of histories of knowledge that, in contrast
to earlier works, give greater attention to the vectors of knowledgetransfer and the agency of people previously considered merely passive receivers.3 The effects of these new studies on this dynamic fieldof historical research are its liberation from national and imperial
Can be downloaded at [https://www.steiner-verlag.de/Zivilisieren-durch-Strafen/9783515132213].
2
Taylor C. Sherman, ‘Tensions of Colonial Punishment: Perspectives on
Recent Developments in the Study of Coercive Networks in Asia, Africa andthe Caribbean’, History Compass, 7/3 (2009), 659–77; ead., State Violence andPunishment in India (London, 2010).
3
To give just two examples: Rebekka Habermas and Alexandra Przyrembel (eds.), Von Käfern, Märkten und Menschen: Kolonialismus und Wissen in derModerne (Göttingen, 2013); Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen, Wie man Mikroben auf
Reisen schickt: Zirkulierendes bakteriologisches Wissen und die polnische Medizin
1885–1939 (Tübingen, 2018).
1

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British Indian Prisons, 1820–1889
frames of analysis on the one hand, and the decentring of Europe as asite of knowledge production on the other.
It is in this context that Kläger traces the emergence and dissemin­
ation of knowledge about prisons in British India, as well as the impact
of external stimuli on the development of the Indian penal systemand, lastly, the influence of knowledge generated in India on penal
practice throughout and beyond the British Empire. Readers expecting to learn about the enduring legacy of the British Indian penal
system on the management of prisons and the punishment of convicts
outside India will, however, be disappointed, as will those wanting toread about the gradual modernization of prisons in India under the
influence of British colonialism. As Kläger convincingly argues, thedissemination of knowledge did not inevitably bring about a change
in practice. Building on previous historians’ admission that identifying connections and entanglements is merely the first step in writing
global histories, Kläger seeks out the parallel forces of integration(Verflechtung) and disintegration (Entflechtung). He does so in order
to discuss in detail the extent to which the British Indian penal systemevolved in conversation with (mostly) European and North American
debates and practices of prison management and institutional punishment—a conversation that did not result in greater conformity,
however. Colonial officers explained the difficulty of applying European standards to Indian prisons by pointing to the particularities ofa colony which ostensibly defied modern­ization and hence requireda penal system that met Indian needs (as defined by the colonizer).
The study is organized chronologically into nine chapters (including the introduction and conclusion) that link the early history ofprisons in colonial South Asia to the post-1857 period, demonstrating
the continuity of penal practice across this divide. Chapter two deals
with the early history of colonial prisons in Madras from the 1800s to
the 1830s. It demonstrates that the reform of the prison system in thisperiod of company rule did not result in a fundamental overhaul ofpenal practice. Although the colonizers sought to buttress their legit­
im­acy early on by promising to modernize the penal system in Madras,
it was only from the 1820s onwards that a gradual institutionalizationof penal practice indicated actual reform. Prison reform in Madras was
already inspired by new ideas on punishment eman­ating from Europe
111Book Reviews
and North America at this time, but the inability to reconcile the needsof the administration in Madras with changing notions of corrective
punishment prevented a transfer of practices. As Kläger reveals, theintroduction of treadmills—touted as a modern means of instilling discipline through labour in Britain and across Europe—largely failed in
Madras. Prisons instead adopted the ‘road gang system’ from Bengal,
which pressed hundreds of prisoners into groups who built roads andcamped near labour sites under the supervision of engineers from theMilitary Board. The author therefore concludes that ideas developedor tested in India itself had a greater influence on prison reform thanthose popular in Europe at the time.
Kläger examines the report by the colonial Committee on Prison
Discipline (1836–8) in chapter three, identifying the concepts andbodies of knowledge that informed its work and findings. In congruence with dominant colonial appraisals of the allegedly ‘oriental’
nature of Indians and their supposed resistance to modernization,and due to opposition to rising investments, the committee’s reform
recommendations were rejected by the East India Company direct­
ors. Kläger acknowledges the limited impact of the Committee on
Prison Discipline on the penal system in India, as attested by earlier
historians; but he also demonstrates how later sporadic experiments
in prison reform were informed by the committee’s findings anddesigned to assess the applicability of its recommendations. Theseexperiments come into focus in the fourth chapter of the book.
The building of modern prisons based on the model of Penton­ville in London and the introduction of new dietary regimes were tworecommendations tested in India. Both were sub­­sequently deemed
unsuitable for wider application. The building of new institutions
was never taken beyond the planning stage in northern India and wasseverely delayed in Madras, where it fell far short of the committee’s
recommendations. The introduction of messing, which substituted
the previous practice of financial allowances for prisoners with theprovision of cooked meals, resulted in more deaths and revolts andultimately led to a reassessment of the practice. Prison reform in India,
as noted in chapter five, took off in the 1840s and 1850s with the creation of the new position of the prison inspector and the appointmentof William Woodcock in the North-Western Provinces in particular.
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British Indian Prisons, 1820–1889
Woodcock oversaw the expansion of administrative structures andthe exchange of information on prison management between Indian
institutions. The introduction of central prisons in Madras, theNorth-Western Provinces, and Punjab, as well as the emergence of agroup of colonial prison experts, are reasons why Kläger dates the professionalization and institutionalization of penal knowledge in colonial
India to the 1840s and 1850s. Previously siloed Indian prisons were
now integrated into a British Indian penal system—a process helpedby the circulation of institutional reports, which allowed for practices
tested and approved in one particular prison to be applied in another.
From the 1860s onwards, strict control and physical labour werethe main modes of discipline and punishment employed in exertingcolonial rule over the convicts’ bodies in Indian penal institutions. But
as Kläger notes in chapter six, colonial expectations of prisons andthe actual conditions inside them differed considerably. Reports on
Indian prisons led to a public outcry in Britain in 1864 and, according
to Kläger, sparked an interest in Indian prison administration that had
been conspicuously absent in Britain in earlier decades. Against thisbackground, the seventh chapter explores the role of the penal system
in India within global debates on penal institutions in the 1860s and1870s. Despite growing interest in Indian prisons outside the subcontinent, no increased transfer of knowledge to and from India wasdiscernible. The opposite was the case: the emphasis on India’s other­ness and distinctiveness resonated with earlier statements on theparticularities of the colonial environment that supposedly prevented
the transfer of models and technologies. Indian prisons were primarily cited to denote difference in this process.
In keeping with the chronology of the book, the last chapter(prior to the conclusion) zooms in on the 1870s and 1880s. The drivefor reform and experimentation waned after the establishment of aparticular colonial penal system in India. Modernization was now
focused on the inner life of individual institutions, which became
increasingly repressive. The density of information gen­erated on
prisons in colonial India continued to grow in these decades. The
introduction of European-style penal institutions was still considered impracticable, as was the transfer to other countries ofknowledge acquired about prisons in India.
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Book Reviews
Despite the length of the book, Kläger skilfully maintains thethread and summarizes intermediate findings at the end of eachchapter. Occasional excursions, for example into the organization ofprisoners’ daily lives, the responses of inmates, or the career pathsof prison inspectors, bring a welcome change of pace and perspective. Zivilisieren durch Strafen is written in German (and in the format
of a Swiss-German dissertation), which is likely to limit the book’s
appeal and accessibility. However, specialist readers will find thedetailed analysis, including a compilation of primary materials in
the appendix, particularly useful. The monograph caters to a wide
audience, including historians of South Asia and the British Empire,as well as scholars interested in the global history of prisons. Becauseof its perceptive methodological considerations, the book will alsofind favour with historians of knowledge.

JOANNA SIMONOW is a historian of modern South Asia and an
Assistant Professor at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University. She is the author of Ending Famine in India: A Transnational
History of Food Aid and Development, c.1890–1950 (2023) and has contributed articles to the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,
South Asia, and Studies in Contemporary History.
114

ISABELLA LÖHR, Globale Bildungsmobilität 1850–1930: Von der Bekehrung
der Welt zur globalen studentischen Gemeinschaft, Moderne europäische
Geschichte, 21 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021), 413 pp. ISBN 978 3 835
35020 5. €42.00
In May 2023, the UK government announced that it would limit theright of foreign students to bring dependents into the country. In
debates on ‘net migration’, university students had begun to attract
scrutiny because of their inclusion in official immigration statistics.
Pronouncements by Home Secretary Suella Braverman exemplified
this conception of mobile students as migrants: addressing parliament,
she attacked ‘unscrupulous education agents who may be supporting
inappropriate applications to sell immigration not education.’1 However, such language is only one element of the present-day discourseon student mobility. After all, both the Department for Education
and university leaders regularly cast the large number of UK-based
international students in more positive terms, viewing it as evidence
for the appeal and competitiveness of the country’s higher education
system. This is not just a matter of prestige, as income from inter­national student fees is increasingly central to the financial survival of
British universities. Moreover, some groups of mobile students havebecome the focus of very different efforts: in the wake of the Russian
invasion of 2022, several organizations and institutions establishedschemes for Ukrainian refugee students, in some instances buildingon earlier ‘sanctuary scholarship’ programmes.
These contemporary examples highlight the multilayered nature of
student mobility—a phenomenon that involves actions and responses
by politicians, officials, educational institutions, civil society, and students themselves. Unsurprisingly, then, historical investigations of
this subject easily reach beyond the history of higher education. Isabella Löhr’s empirically rich and analytically thorough study Globale
Bildungsmobilität is an excellent case in point. Rather than concentrating on the responses of governments and university leaders or
analysing the everyday experiences of students, her book examines
Suella Braverman, ‘Immigration Update: Statement Made on 23 May 2023’, at[https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-statements/detail/202305-23/hcws800], accessed 23 June 2023.

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how mobile students attracted the attention of Christian activists inthe period from the 1890s to the 1920s. Through the prism of the World
Student Christian Federation (WSCF)—an international organization
founded in 1895—she explores educational migration, cross-cultural
encounters, varieties of Christian lay activism, and changing practicesof humanitarian aid.
The main body of Löhr’s monograph comprises three parts thatmake for a broadly chronological approach. Löhr first considers the
WSCF’s history in the context of changing patterns of student migration before 1914. A second section then traces the challenges forProtestant student activism during the First World War. The final part
focuses on humanitarian ventures that originated with the WSCF andsoon transcended its institutional frameworks. Taken together, thesechapters make for a sophisticated study: Löhr adroitly shifts between
different levels of investigation and theatres of action.
At one level, one can read this book as a story centred on the
WSCF. Prior to 1914, the missionary impulses of its members led
to an engagement with mobility in two major ways. On the one
hand, WSCF representatives—especially from the United States andBritain, the two countries that played a central role within the federation—travelled abroad to spread their Christian message. On theother hand, the WSCF saw mobile students as a target audience andlaunched various welfare initiatives on their behalf, for instance byrunning halls of residence for Chinese students in both Japan andthe United States. As was the case for other international organizations, the First World War drastically affected the WSCF, with ‘war
patriotism and national partisanship’ posing an ‘existential challenge’(p. 173) to its work. However, rather than halting its activities, the conflict led to a broadening of its field of action: national WSCF branches
set up periodicals and mobile libraries for the troops, while theinternational organization launched educational endeavours among
different groups, such as interned ‘enemy aliens’ and prisoners of war.
The extension of WSCF activities reached new levels and dimensions
after the war: in 1920, WSCF members launched a humanitarian venture, European Student Relief (ESR). ESR initially supported students
suffering hardship in Central Europe, then undertook wide-ranging
work in Russia and Ukraine, and ultimately adopted a global remit.
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Global Educational Mobility, 1850–1930
Löhr shows how in the early 1920s, a secular emphasis on students inneed overshadowed the religious dimensions of the WSCF’s work. In
1925, ESR turned into an entirely separate actor, International Student
Service—and by this point the WSCF had begun to reconsider its ownrole in a changing world.
Löhr’s study is more than an institutional account; it makes sig­nifi­
cant contributions to wider research debates in four major ways. The
first concerns the nature and practice of internationalism. Historians
such as Akira Iriye, Glenda Sluga, Patricia Clavin, Jessica Reinisch, andDavid Brydan have shown that internationalism involved a variety ofactivities and actors, which meant that efforts to forge international
cooperation were highly variegated in terms of their substance, orientation, and direction.2 In 2012, a pioneering volume edited by Abigail
Green and Vincent Viaene traced different varieties of religious internationalism, and Löhr offers fresh insights into this phenomenon.3
Her book highlights the scale of Christian lay activism in the international realm, with the WSCF representing 200,000 students fromforty national branches by 1919 (p. 72). The federation concentrated
on a relatively select constituency—university students—yet it valued
this target audience for its potential to shape future society. Crucially,
the WSCF maintained a symbiotic relationship with two larger youth
organizations, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and theYoung Women’s Christian Associ­ation (YWCA). From this angle, Löhrshows how a particular form of Protestant internationalism evolved
over time. During the 1920s, the WSCF interacted with the growing
ecumenical movement, yet it also began to reflect more critically on the
global dimensions of Christian activism, especially regarding its role indifferent cultural and colonial contexts.
The second research contribution of this monograph concerns thecomplex transition from war to peace. Löhr’s work resonates with
Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, 1997); Glenda
Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History(Cambridge, 2017); Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia, 2013); David Brydan and Jessica Reinisch (eds.), Internationalists in
European History: Rethinking the Twentieth Century (London, 2021).
3
Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene (eds.), Religious Internationals in the Modern
World: Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750 (Basingstoke, 2012).
2

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Book Reviews
established research perspectives on the ‘long’ First World War, andshe traces the impact of the myriad conflicts that continued or arose
after the Armistice of November 1918.4 The Russian Civil War features
prominently in Löhr’s book, yet her account reaches further. Reflecting her emphasis on student mobility, she considers students among
the millions of people who were displaced by the conflicts and border
redrawings after 1918. The book offers new material on this subject,
for instance by considering ESR’s role in providing aid to refugee students. Moreover, the study shows how after the emergencies of theearly 1920s, the transition to peace was reflected in a growing emphasis
on a different form of student mobility—one that involved the promotion of exchanges, study trips, and scholarship programmes. To many
activists, such undertakings were central to building a more peaceful
future. As Löhr notes, ‘educational mobility increasingly became acipher for international understanding’ in this period (p. 349).
Third, Löhr’s book makes a fresh contribution to the burgeoning
research on humanitarianism. A vibrant scholarly literature treats
the First World War and its aftermath as a transformative moment in
the history of humanitarianism.5 Löhr’s analysis of ESR draws attention to a specific humanitarian actor that, apart from shorter accounts
by Georgina Brewis and Benjamin Hartley, has barely been touched
on by scholars.6 Löhr notes that between 1920 and 1925, ESR supported around 105,000 students from seventeen countries, reaching
See e.g. Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to
End (New York, 2016).
5
See e.g. Julia Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a
Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York, 2013); Friederike Kind-Kovács,
Budapest’s Children: Humanitarian Relief in the Aftermath of the Great War(Bloomington, IN, 2022); Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of
Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge, 2014); Davide Rodogno, Night on
Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930(Cambridge, 2022).
6
Georgina Brewis, A Social History of Student Volunteering: Britain and Beyond,
1890–1980 (New York, 2014), 41–66; Benjamin L. Hartley, ‘Saving Students:
European Student Relief in the Aftermath of World War I’, International Bul­letin of Mission Research, 42/4 (2018), 295–315. See also my attempt to situate
ESR alongside other currents of student-based internationalism: Daniel Laqua,‘Student Activists and International Cooperation in a Changing World, 1919–
60’, in Brydan and Reinisch (eds.), Internationalists in European History, 161–81.
4

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Global Educational Mobility, 1850–1930
an estimated fifth of the students in East-Central Europe (p. 213).
By considering a particular case of humanitarian action, the bookestablishes students as a distinct category of aid recipients—a groupwhose members faced hunger and in some instances homelessness,being deprived of some of their usual livelihoods, at a time when
univer­sities themselves were experiencing ongoing turmoil. Given
the scale of the problem, Löhr notes the ‘everyday overburdening’(p. 211) of ESR employees and volunteers. Cooperation with larger
organizations was central to ESR’s modus operandi. Accordingly, thismonograph offers a broader perspective on humanitarian actors in
the 1920s, tracing ESR’s relationships with, inter alia, the International
Committee of the Red Cross, the American Relief Administration, andBritain’s Imperial War Relief Fund.
Löhr’s account highlights potential tensions between ESR’s internationalism and the national visions that characterized various British
and US relief efforts. Moreover, Löhr unpicks some of the contradictions and unintended consequences of ESR’s humanitarianism. For
instance, in determining which Russian students to prioritize in its
aid provision, ESR ‘reproduced the state division of students into different categories’ (p. 247). Interactions with the Soviet authorities and
ESR’s work in the contested border regions of Central and Eastern
Europe both demonstrated that impartiality was far easier in organ­
izational rhetoric than in humanitarian practice: on various occasions,
ESR implicitly took sides, even if unconsciously. Moreover, withregard to ESR’s underpinning rationales, Löhr notes a duality or ‘false
bottom’ (p. 298): the relief venture foregrounded secular concerns yet
maintained close ties with the world of Protestant internationalism.
While ESR did not emphasize Christian motivations, its humanitarianefforts provided Christian activists with a particular opportunity—
namely, a growing presence in parts of Europe where Roman Catholicor Orthodox denominations were predominant.
The latter observation takes me to the fourth major aspect of thisbook, namely its qualities as a work of transnational history. Notwithstanding the decisive role of British and US activists (and funding)
within the WSCF and ESR, the existence of branches and partners
in different places rendered transnational cooperation intrinsic tothese undertakings, as did the activists’ concern for those who had
119Book Reviews
crossed borders out of necessity or in search of opportunity. Löhr’s
subject matter means that activities in Central and Eastern Europe
figure particularly prominently, but in ways that connect them todevelopments elsewhere. Moreover, the book clearly situates Europe
and the United States within a global context. For instance, the study
shows how the development of ‘foyers’ (p. 147)—as meeting spaces
and dormitories—was an important feature of the WSCF’s, YMCA’s,and YWCA’s repertoire in Asia, which helped to influence similar provision in Europe. Löhr also notes that in 1919, China’s May
Fourth Movement—in which students protested against imperialism—shaped debates within the WSCF, with its 1922 conference inBeijing addressing the theme of ‘Christianity and International andInter-racial Problems’ (p. 345).
As my comments indicate, Löhr’s book is a work of great substance, both in terms of its material and the insights that it offers. The
research effort underpinning this monograph is formidable. Drawing on a rarely used source base, the author critically interrogates theaccounts produced by the WSCF, ESR, and their interlocutors. Admittedly, the study is not always an easy read—at least when comparedto academic history publishing in English. In this respect, the length,style, and composition arguably reflect the book’s origins in a German
habilitation thesis, and it therefore takes some time to work throughthe different points, observations, and angles that are provided here.
Yet whoever dedicates their attention to this impressive study will berichly rewarded, as they will benefit from work that is well-groundedin the current research literature and, at the same time, highly original
in its approach. In the conclusion to her monograph, Löhr acknow­
ledges that she has adopted a ‘bird’s eye view’ (p. 365). As a result,
there is the potential to consider personal stories, making more room
for individual experiences of, and resistance to, aspects of Christianinternationalism. Adopting such an approach would make for a different kind of book—but one that could build on Löhr’s pioneeringwork. Clearly, then, expeditions that start on ‘the path to a global student community’ (p. 261) can lead us on to new research avenues.

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DANIEL LAQUA is Associate Professor of European History at
North­umbria University. He is the author of The Age of International­
ism and Belgium, 1880–1930: Peace, Progress and Prestige (2013) andActivism across Borders since 1870: Causes, Campaigns and Conflicts inand beyond Europe (2023). Alongside a range of articles and book chapters on the history of international movements and organizations, hehas (co-)edited three books and six special journal issues.

121

SVEN FRITZ, Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Rassenwahn und Welterlösung. Biographie (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2022), xvi + 873 pp.
ISBN 978 3 506 76067 8. €49.90
The question of the origins and continuities of modern antisemitic
thought in Central Europe, from the second half of the nineteenth century to National Socialism and the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s,
has been raised time and again for decades, not least in the hope ofidentifying ideological and political precursors of the Hitler regime andexplaining how the fringe National Socialist German Workers’ Party(NSDAP) was able to seize power in Germany just over ten years after
it was founded in post-First World War Munich. While it is generally
accepted that pioneers of racial thinking like Arthur de Gobineau andpopulist politicians like Karl Lueger, the anti­semitic mayor of Vienna,
contributed to a new political style that fused authoritarianism with
racism and antisemitism and thus challenged the liberal standards ofthe time, things become more controversial when these thinkers andpoliticians are not discussed in isolation but seen as representatives ofa particular and influential wing of the educated middle classes—inthe German lands, the nationally minded Bildungsbürgertum.
Born in Britain, educated in France and Switzerland, and later Germanized, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) was one of thosenationalist thinkers who became very popular in German-speaking
Central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, but whose writings are nowadays only read by specialists in intellectual and cultural
history. The historian Sven Fritz has now published a comprehensive
political and intellectual biography of the man, which is based on
his Ph.D. thesis and comprises almost 900 pages. At first, one might
wonder about the necessity of such an elaborate undertaking, notleast because Fritz is by no means Chamberlain’s first biographer.
Only a few years ago, in 2015, the renowned German political scientist Udo Berm­bach published a comprehensive biography, and in
the English-speaking world Geoffrey G. Field’s seminal 1981 study
Evangelist of Race remains relevant.1 While these and other earlier
Udo Bermbach, Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Wagners Schwiegersohn—
Hitlers Vordenker (Stuttgart, 2015); Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The
Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New York, 1981).

1

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Houston Stewart Chamberlain
studies have already provided meticulous analyses of the intellectual
world of Chamberlain and his entourage, this new book attempts
to put the political activist and ultranationalist himself centre stage.
In doing so, Fritz refutes all attempts to categorically separate thehighly cultured best-selling author from the sordid world of populist
and nationalist politics. Unlike others before him who lamented that
Chamberlain was unjustly appropriated by the National Socialists
after his death, Fritz aims to show that his protag­on­ist was not only
an ideological mastermind but also a political leader of the German
völkisch right who—together with Richard Wagner’s widow Cosima,
who from 1883 onwards successfully managed the Wagner Festival
in Bayreuth—spread antisemitic hatred in Europe, paving the way
for worse to come.
At the beginning of the book, the author takes his readers on atour of Chamberlain’s former house in Bayreuth. The city administration has turned it into a museum—not for its controversial former
resident, however, but for the novelist Jean Paul, who lived in the cityfrom 1804 until his death in 1825. While the museum occupies theground floor of Wahnfriedstraße 1, Chamberlain dominates the floor
above, where—inaccessible to the public—his personal papers aswell as his extensive private library of about 12,000 books are stowed
away. These personal papers were first organized in the 1950s by
retired psychiatrist Wilhelm Einsle, who, as director of the Erlangensanatorium and nursing home, had been implicated in the murder ofdisabled people during the Nazi period. (But that is another, if notentirely unrelated story.) The extensive collection of Chamberlain’s
papers provides the core archival material for Fritz’s study, allowing
him to reconstruct in detail not only Chamberlain’s networks, but also
his journalistic and political initiatives.
The introduction is followed by seven chronologically structured
chapters. The first of these informs readers about the biography of theyoung Chamberlain, the son of Royal Navy Rear Admiral William
Chamberlain and his wife, the Scottish aristocrat Elizabeth Jane Hall.
As his mother died before his first birthday, Chamberlain, a sickly
and introverted child, was educated mostly on the Continent. In his
auto­biog­raphy, he stated that England remained a distant and foreign country to him. It was the discovery of Richard Wagner’s music
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Book Reviews
and thought that led the young man in his early twenties to identify
with what he regarded as the cultural heritage of Germanness and its
alleged civil­izing mission. ‘The decisive turn in my life was to become
German’, Chamberlain wrote once he was established (p. 65), and while
this was certainly a self-stylization, it is equally true that from the 1880s
onwards his thinking and political actions were shaped by Wagner’s
agenda, which the eager student quickly embraced. Antisemitism wasan essential part of this programme.
How the radicalization of the young Chamberlain took place isshown in an impressively detailed third chapter, which also introduces the reader to the strategic thinking and concrete businessactivities of Cosima Wagner as the new head of the Bayreuth Festival.
Their acquaintance turned out to be a win–win situation: Cosima,
who was then working tirelessly to elevate the festival and her husband’s oeuvre to a national asset, quickly came to appreciate the loyal
and like-minded Chamberlain and used him to help her enterpriseachieve wider popularity and international recognition. For Chamberlain, whose initial academic ambitions had failed, his work forthe festival and his personal friendship with Wagner’s widow provided a meaningful purpose and a sense of belonging that he hadlong missed.
After several years promoting Wagner’s music and philosophy in
fin-de-siècle Vienna, where Chamberlain had begun to make a modest
name for himself as a writer and cultural critic, he finally decided
to move to Bayreuth and quickly became an indispensable memberof his new surrogate family. Fritz takes great pains to show that the
Wagnerian world in the Franconian province was marked not only by
the cult of genius around Richard, but also by obsessive anti­semitism.
The many examples he provides are as impressive as they are shocking. Musicians of Jewish descent were systematically not cast andoften atrociously defamed in order to keep the Wagner temple on theGreen Hill free of any ‘Israelite admixture’ (p. 107) and to set an ex­­ample to the rest of the country that it was possible to exclude Jews
from public life as a means of achieving ‘Germanic regener­ation’(p. 110). Chamberlain shared and propagated such beliefs. As earlyas 1888, he noted that ‘every intelligent and upright German’ would
know that the country was at risk of ‘complete moral, intellectual,124

Houston Stewart Chamberlain
and material ruin’ thanks to the ‘Jewish supremacy’ and their allegedpara­sitic existence at the expense of all other peoples (p. 132).
It was only logical that Chamberlain’s breakthrough as a writer
came with an extensive (and cleverly marketed) book on the life,
works, and philosophy of Richard Wagner. This was first publishedin German in 1895, with an English translation available in 1900. The
fourth chapter gives us a detailed reading of Chamberlain’s interpret­
ation of Wagner, which closely follows what he had discussed with
Cosima and other self-styled Wagner exegetes in the previous decade.
Despite (or perhaps because of) its racial undertones, Chamberlain’s
book was well received, even beyond the inner circle of Wagnerites.
Its success opened the door to societal recognition and further bookcontracts. In 1899, Chamberlain published his most commerciallysuccessful book, the highly influential Foundations of the NineteenthCentury, a racial history of human civilization from its beginnings to1800, in which he advanced the idea that the ‘Aryan race’ was at thecore of all human progress and that its contemporary embodiment
was the Germanic peoples.
The content and the reception of this book are the focus of the fifth
chapter, which argues that both publications—the book on Wagnerand Foundations—should be seen as complementary. Through them,
Chamberlain provided an explanation of the world that not only
promised to make the latest scholarship accessible to a wider educated readership, but was also directly political. He built on ideas
also propagated by other writers of his time, such as Julius Langbehn
with his extremely successful, culturally pessimistic novel Rembrandt
als Erzieher (‘Rembrandt as Teacher’), but radicalized them in light ofcontemporary fears of degeneration. Chamberlain advocated a flex­
ible concept of race, in the sense that he regarded every human being
as the product of a racial mixture. This enabled him to claim that thenational purity he desired could be achieved through racial ‘cleanliness’ and racially informed reproduction. He was, however, less ascientifically driven eugenicist than a racist cultural philosopher witha biopolitical agenda. At the heart of the problems of modern civilization, he believed, was the ‘Jewish menace’. The Germans were called
to deal with the Jews in a way that would not only ‘purify’ and thus
liberate the German nation, but also set an example for the world.
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Book Reviews
The success of this message was immediate and long-lasting. The first
2,500 copies of Foundations sold out on the day of publication; by 1917,
the book’s total circulation exceeded 100,000 copies.
The last three chapters trace Chamberlain’s career as a controversial commentator on political and current affairs after 1900 in over 400
pages. By the turn of the century, Chamberlain’s antisemitic and racist
world view was fully formed, with Foundations providing a kind of
intellectual cornerstone for his thinking. Consequently, Fritz fromnow on focuses less on his subject’s intellectual development andmore on his contributions in the political sphere, which were madebehind the scenes via personal letters to influential people and publicly through shorter essays and newspaper articles. In doing so, Fritz
takes his book beyond a typical biography to offer a broad panoramaof nationalist and antisemitic ideology in Germany at the beginningof the twen­tieth century. In the sixth chapter, he shows how such
racial thinking increasingly reached important figures, including
Kaiser Wilhelm II. Chamberlain’s influence is difficult to measure,
however, at least until 1914. During the First World War, which isdealt with in chapter seven, Chamberlain became further radicalized,
but his concrete influence probably diminished—due to the generalradicalization of German nationalism, but also because his writings
increasingly exhausted themselves in repetition. Never­theless, according to Fritz, he managed to become ‘one of the most prominent war
propagandists’ (p. 578), fully sympathizing with the far-reaching war
aims of the pan-German movement and writing in the most chauvinistic terms about Germany’s opponents, especially his native Britain.
Chamberlain also claimed that the war would serve as a source ofheroism and genius for Germany by the million, which would fundamentally transform the nation. Countless letters he received fromsoldiers testify to the impact his writings had at the time.
From 1917 onwards, Chamberlain’s health deteriorated sharply.
Devastated by the German defeat and the end of the Hohen­zollernmonarchy, he spread the stab-in-the-back myth and began to search
for a new leader of a future völkisch coalition movement. It did not takelong before his attention was drawn to an up-and-coming polit­ician
and brutal antisemite named Adolf Hitler. On 30 September 1923,
Hitler visited Chamberlain in Bayreuth, who a few days later wrote
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Houston Stewart Chamberlain
a personal letter to his guest thanking him for giving him new hopefor the future of Germany. Chamberlain subscribed to the NSDAP
newspaper Völkischer Beobachter and followed the party’s development
closely until his death in early 1927, being kept regularly informedby Winifred Wagner, Cosima Wagner’s daughter-in-law and a closefriend of Hitler. He also became a member of the NSDAP in January
1926, shortly after the party ban was lifted.
Fritz highlights the many parallels between Chamberlain’s polit­ical
writings and the programme of the Nazi party and thus sees him aspart of the direct vanguard of National Socialism. This assessment is
not entirely new, but is based on the most comprehensive and carefulanalysis to date of Chamberlain’s political interventions, his writings,
and their public reception from the 1880s onwards. Sven Fritz has
written an important book. His biography of Chamberlain is a power­
ful reminder not only that intellectuals can be seduced by politicalpower, but that they sometimes even lead the way by shaping world
views and formulating political concepts whose impact only unfolds
over time.

DANIEL SIEMENS is Professor of European History at New­castle University. His recent publications include Hinter der ‘Weltbühne’: Hermann
Budzislawski und das 20. Jahrhundert (2022) and Stormtroopers: A New
History of Hitler’s Brownshirts (2017). He is currently working on thehistory of the United Restitution Organization. In the academic year
2023–4, he is also co-leader (with Iris Nachum and Gideon Reuveni)of the research group ‘Paying for the Past: Reparations after the Holo­
caust in Global Context’ at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies inJerusalem.
127

ITAY LOTEM, The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sinsof Silence, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), x + 428 pp. ISBN 978 3 030 63718 7. £99.99
Over the past two decades, Western European publics have engaged in
major debates about their respective states’ colonial pasts and involvement in slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. During these years, thehistory of colonialism has transformed from a sideshow into a primaryarena in which heads of states, parliaments, societal groups, migrantcommunities, activists of all political stripes, academics, courts, journalists, and diplomats negotiate not only the terms of remembrance,
but also the contours, values, hierarchies, and inner workings of theirsocieties. While the strong scholarly interest in (collective) memory has
already produced a number of fine case studies on particular eventsand countries, transnational and comparative perspectives are still
surprisingly rare. Itay Lotem’s rich and conceptually informed studyof the ways in which colonialism and slavery have been rememberedpublicly in France and Great Britain is an important contribution to abetter understanding of the general patterns and particularities of thesurge in colonial memories across Europe.
In centring his study on France and Great Britain, Lotem uses aclassic comparative framework which has often been dominated bycontrasting depictions of French and British colonial policies and theend of their respective colonial empires. However, the picture of a‘pragmatic’ and, as a result, more peaceful exit from empire by GreatBritain—in contrast to French die-hard intransigence—has in recent
years been shattered by a number of studies that highlight the enormous (‘emergency’-style) violence of British decolonization. In a way,
Lotem applies this critical gaze to the period after (formal) decolon­iza­tion by showing that Great Britain is not exempt from post-colonial
memory conflicts. As he tends to read the British case through theprism of developments in France, Lotem’s readers may even see a certain deficiency in the British memory debates. This is largely due to thebook’s conceptual underpinnings and its main thrust. Lotem is interested in how colonialism became the focus of a particular ‘politicised
memory vocabulary’ (p. 19) derived from the German concept of Ver­gangen­heits­be­wälti­gung, or of ‘introspective memory’ (p. 16), that is, a
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The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France
challenging yet healing societal confrontation with a difficult past. This
memory vocabulary, which began to reach French mainstream media
and high-level political discourse in the early 2000s, makes the colonial past a necessary prism through which to understand present-day
societal issues, in particular as they relate to racism and race relations.
Lotem’s concluding remarks seem to reject the idea that this particu­
lar framework of remembrance is a necessary end point of coming toterms with the colonial past; throughout most of the preceding account,however, it does serve as a kind of telos against which other uses of thecolonial past are measured.
The book’s analysis is based on a variety of sources, in particular
print and online news media, and secondary literature. Lotem alsointerviewed a considerable number of notable memory activists andscholars, both in France and Great Britain. From the references given,
these interviews appear to largely confirm and illustrate knowledge
available in other sources, rather than yielding completely new insights
into the inner workings of memory politics. In the case of Frenchmemory debates in particular, the book also builds on a considerable
body of scholarly publications, and, at times, Lotem could have related
his scholarship more clearly to the existing historiography. Quite anumber of crucial publications, many of which converge with Lotem’s
findings and arguments, are not referenced, including Frank Renken’s
important study of the memory politics of the Algerian War of Independence in France, Dietmar Rothermund’s collection Memories of
Post-Imperial Nations, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s seminal Silencing thePast, the latter taken up by Gert Oostindie in the debates about Dutch
post-colonial memories. Or they get short shrift, such as in Elizabeth
Buettner’s groundbreaking study Europe after Empire (with an entire
part devoted to memories) or Romain Bertrand’s Mémoires d’empire.1
Frank Renken, Frankreich im Schatten des Algerienkrieges: Die Fünfte Republik
und die Erinnerung an den letzten großen Kolonialkonflikt (Göttingen, 2006); Diet­
mar Rother­mund (ed.), Memories of Post-Imperial Nations: The Aftermath of
Decolonization, 1945–2013 (Cambridge, 2015); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing
the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995); Elizabeth Buettner,
Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture (Cambridge, 2016);
Romain Bertrand, Mémoires d’empire: La controverse autour du ‘ fait colonial’(Bellecombe-en-Bauge, 2006); Gert Oostindie, Postcolonial Netherlands: SixtyFive Years of Forgetting, Commemorating, Silencing (Amsterdam, 2011).
1

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Book Reviews
Lotem’s book is divided into two largely parallel accounts of thememory debates in France (part I) and Great Britain (part II), fromthe 1960s through to the late 2010s. In each part, his analysis remains
largely within a national framework. The richness and complexity ofthe material collected and examined by Lotem certainly justify thismethodological choice. Yet, as so often when a national framework is
applied to supranational issues—of which colonial rule and slavery,
as much as the memory conflicts about them, are without doubt primeexamples—there is a risk of jumping to conclusions. This may berelatively insignificant when Lotem names French historian Benjamin
Stora—and not Algerian freedom fighters—as the coiner of the term
‘Algerian Revolution’ (al-thawra al-jaza’iriya; p. 61). It weighs moresignificantly, however, when the international arena and bilateralrelations—and the role of the past in ‘soft’ North–South diplomacy,
restitution claims, and so on—are omitted in an attempt to explain thepolitical and public prominence of the memory of colonialism and its
dynamics over the past two decades.
The two parts of the book, although roughly equal in length,
differ in scope and in structure. The part about France follows largely
well-trodden paths and pursues a clear sequence of arguments; its
chronological scope is centred on memory activism and debatesaround the year 2005, often regarded as a pivotal moment in Frenchcolonial memories, and thus has a clear narrative arc. The part about
Great Britain, by contrast, is slightly less structured, more meandering and complex, more of an open-ended investigation of unfolding
events than a synthesis of a (supposedly) closed chapter in history;
chrono­logic­ally, it moves much closer to the present day, with a strongemphasis on the years around the Brexit campaign in 2016. This difference is not just due to the time gap between events in France andin Great Britain; it is also reflective of the different dynamics of thedebate in the two countries. As Lotem convincingly shows, thanks
to the involvement of the historical profession, the French memory
debates early on bore a strong tendency towards self-reflection andself-historicization, including the production of well-established narratives and a chronology (for ex­­ample, 2005 as a watershed year). In the
British case, such prefabricated narratives are lacking, which makes
part II a more difficult, but also very exciting and rewarding read.
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The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France
Chapter one of part I shows how the French state, seeking to moveaway from the divisive issue of the Algerian War of Independence,colluded with political activists in a ‘de-prioritisation of colonial
history’ (pp. 32, 59) and did not even change course when immigration and racism became political flashpoints in the 1970s and 1980s.
Chapter two retraces the debates surrounding the remembrance of
the Algerian War of Independence, with a focus on the war vet­eransas an important memory lobby. Chapter three then hones in on how
the French state, parliament, and minority groups began to apply the‘duty to remember’ to the histories of slavery and colonial repression,leading to commemorative and legislative action, and shows how thediscourse of victimhood and historical justice was also appropriatedby the repatriate pied-noir community in pushing for the infamous lawof 23 February 2005, which stipulated, among other things, that Frenchschool curricula should put a positive spin on French colonialism inNorth Africa. While most of what Lotem presents in these chapterswill be known to people familiar with the existing literature, he bringsin new aspects, for instance by highlighting the role of historian andpublic intellectual Benjamin Stora in putting forth a conceptual framework of political memory in which debates about the remembrance of
the Algerian independ­ence struggle, and later the entire colonial past,would unfold.
Chapter four shows how the conflicts about France’s colonial pasttransformed into a broader debate about the French Republic and its
colonial legacies in the present. Here, Lotem puts emphasis on newly
emerging memory activists (the Indigènes de la République andthe Conseil représentatif des associations noirs) who used historicalreferences to colonialism and slavery in their attempts to stimulate
discussions about racism, Islamophobia, and the ways to undo them
(reparations, and so on). Chapter five examines how these debates
became a vehicle in French party politics. While Lotem is rela­tively
detailed on how the political camps, especially the Right led by Nicolas Sarkozy, responded to the debate about the 2005 law by mounting
an anti-‘repentance’ discourse, he fast-forwards through the postJacques Chirac presidencies under Sarkozy (2007–12), François
Hollande (2012–17), and Emmanuel Macron (since 2017). It would
have been interesting to explore the ways in which these presidents,
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Book Reviews
and the entire political system, continued to struggle with the on­­going memory controversies, and to what extent their responses weremarked by changes and continuities.
Against the backdrop of the French memorial landscape, part II
turns to the British case. Chapter six shows that, despite the Common­
wealth and the rise of immigration as a controversial issue in British
politics, no coherent remembrance of the British Empire and its leg­acies emerged; for Lotem, ‘short flares of imperial sentiment’ (p. 209),
such as during the Falklands War and the Hong Kong handover, and(mostly critical) references to ‘imperial nostalgia’ (p. 195) in the wakeof the Brexit vote, did not really establish a broader memorial framework. Chapter seven, taking a similarly long-term perspective, argues
that British debates about race and multiculturalism, although rooted
in colonial vocabulary, did not initiate a broader societal reflection
about racism’s colonial history; the few explicitly anti-colonial voices,such as those of Black British activists in the 1960s and 1970s, wereincreasingly muted by what Lotem describes as a future-oriented‘multicultural silence’ (p. 260). Chapter eight shows how, since theearly 2000s, British involvement in the slave trade and slavery has
become an important arena of remembrance, in which official state
commemoration (for example, the 2007 bicentenary of the abolitionof the slave trade) and demands for reparatory justice by minority
groups clashed, leading to still ongoing legal and political struggles
about compensation. Lotem also points to the beginnings of the public
remembrance of slavery and the slave trade in the very different local
settings of Bristol and Liverpool in the 1990s.
Chapter nine moves closer to the present day by arguing that in the2010s, anti-racist activism in Great Britain began to (re)include refer­ences to the colonial past, as illustrated by controversies about art
installations and colonial statues (the Rhodes Must Fall movement)
as well as the emergence of a new generation of writers and public
intellectuals discussing race and Blackness in Great Britain (for ex­­ample, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Afua Hirsch, and David Olu­soga). Chapter
ten discusses ‘the balance-sheet approach’, a public strategy of dealing with the legacies of the British Empire that highlights its positive(that is, modernizing) effects against its wrongdoings, or vice versa.
Originally employed by conservative and right-wing academics and132

The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France
commentators (for example, Niall Ferguson) to re­habili­tate Britishcolonial rule against an alleged left-wing mainstream, it also became
popular among their critics who sought to counter the rehabilitation of
empire by putting emphasis on its victims and crimes. The tragic heroin Lotem’s account is British historian David Anderson, who sought, invain, to steer the debate about British violence during the ‘Mau Mau
War’ in Kenya (1952–60), and later state efforts to cover it up, awayfrom the good empire/bad empire binary and initiate a more complex
debate about the colonial abuses of the British justice system.
Throughout the book, Lotem is well aware of the pitfalls of writing
the history of the present. In most cases, historians rely on the benefitof hindsight—in contrast to the historical actors themselves, histor­ians usually know how the historical processes they study ended.
The historicization of the present cannot be based on this (sometimes
deceptive) certainty of hindsight, and its results may be even moretentative than historians’ accounts generally are. It may be due to thiscautiousness that Lotem’s Franco-British comparison does not end in
the generalized models or theories that comparative historical scholarship often claims. While presenting a host of lucid vignettes andwell-constructed case studies, the part about the British case, in particular, ends in the somewhat anticlimactic discovery that the British
debates (as yet) lack a French-style framework of political memory.
In the book’s concluding remarks, this approach, however, takes aninteresting turn, when Lotem states that despite the widespread useof a politicized memory vocabulary, the ever-increasing presence ofthe colonial past in the public space has not brought about the healing of historical (and social) justice and the overcoming of racismthat was expected—bringing the French case closer once again to the
British one, despite all the differences between their approaches toa difficult past. By the sheer wealth of information and insights heprovides, Lotem proves himself to be an invaluable guide throughthe fast-moving debates about the memory of colonialism that willcontinue to demand the attention of societies and states in Europe andbeyond.

133

Book Reviews
JAN C. JANSEN is Professor of Modern History (Nineteenth–
Twentieth Centuries) at the University of Tübingen. His publications
include Erobern und Erinnern: Symbolpolitik, öffentlicher Raum und fran­zösischer Kolonialismus in Algerien, 1830–1950 (2013) and (with Jürgen
Osterhammel) Kolonialismus: Geschichte, Formen, Folgen (9th edn, 2021)
and Decolonization: A Short History (2017). He is Principal Investigatorof the ERC project ‘Atlantic Exiles: Refugees and Revolution in
the Atlantic World, 1770s–1820s’ and is currently working on thereshaping of (un)belonging and the emergence of exile politics in therevolutionary-era Atlantic world.

134

CONFERENCE REPORTS
Things on the Move: Materiality of Objects in Global and Imperial
Trajectories, 1700–1900. Conference organized by the German Historical Institute London in collaboration with the Prize Papers Projectand held at the GHIL, 8–10 September 2022. Conveners: Indra Sengupta (GHIL), Felix Brahm (Bielefeld University), and Lucas Haasis(University of Oldenburg).
Alongside European imperialism and colonialism, the early modern
and modern periods were characterized by extensive globalization
processes which fuelled the emergence of global trade and markets
and amplified the movement of people—both voluntary and involuntary. As a result of the interweaving of these complex processes,
the movement of objects around the globe increased substantiallyover this period. These ‘things on the move’ were crucial points ofcontact, as they were situated at the centre of global interaction.1
At the same time, they were often produced locally. Their production and circulation at the intersection of processes of imperialism,
colonialism, and globalization meant that they played a key role inglobal as well as local material history. They connected these twolevels, often in uncertain and unpredictable ways.2 A major aim of
the conference was to better understand the complex and ambivalent relationship between processes of globalization and colonialism/
imperialism through a focus on material and object flows and by
Eve Rosenhaft and Felix Brahm (eds.), Slavery Hinterland: Transatlantic
Slavery and Continental Europe, 1680–1850 (Woodbridge, 2016); Judith Becker(ed.), European Missions in Contact Zones: Transformation through Interaction ina (Post-)Colonial World (Göttingen, 2015); Felicia Gottmann, ‘Mixed Company
in the Contact Zone: The “Glocal” Diplomatic Efforts of a Prussian East Indiaman in 1750s Cape Verde’, Journal of Early Modern History, 23/5 (2019), 423–41.
2
Roland Robertson, ‘Glocalization: Time–Space and Homogeneity–Heterogeneity’, in id., Mike Featherstone, and Scott Lash (eds.), Global Modernities(London, 1995), 25–44.
1135

Conference Reports
analysing the significance of those objects’ mobility in this period ofgreat transformation.
As objects are bearers of meaning, it is crucial to consider how andwhy things moved from one place to another. Were they, for instance,
traded, given as presents, inherited, or stolen? In their introductions,the organizers Felix Brahm, Lucas Haasis, and Indra Sengupta outlined the framework for the conference. They highlighted its central
objective, which was to analyse objects and their trajectories fromdifferent perspectives, such as global history, global microhistory,
and colonial history, focusing particularly on where these perspectives intersect. The papers engaged with the following key questions:what everyday practices shaped the material global worlds of theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries? How do we define the role andagency of objects in global, imperial, and colonial contexts? And how
did objects produce, carry, and change meanings and functions incolonial and global trajectories?
The keynote lecture by Anne Gerritsen (University of Warwick)shed light on the complexity of the conference’s topics and the opportunities offered by them. Gerritsen offered an intriguing insight into
the global material world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China
on the basis of a ‘shopping list’ taken from a handbook owned by aChinese merchant trading locally in the city of Canton. While research
usually focuses on the goods exported from China to Europe, thissource lists goods which were imported to China through the port of
Canton and afterwards distributed inland. The handbook is a rather
special source, as it was not public, but semi-private. In addition to thelist of goods, it preserved information about key trading routes anduseful business tips that were supposed to stay within the merchant’s
family. Gerritsen thus highlighted an everyday practice that shaped
the global as well as the local material world.
Proving how significant and fruitful her approach can be, Gerritsen
proposed four crucial measures for further research in this field: first,
expanding the source base by using private and semi-private material,
such as documents from local archives, instead of relying only on central, imperial sources; second, expanding the time period by looking
across and challenging established boundaries in order to understandtrading patterns and the complex process of globalization; third,
136

Things on the Move
expanding the geographical scope of research by shifting the focus
from coastal regions to the hinterland and con­sider­ing the agency ofboth with respect to the movement of objects; and fourth, expanding
the current focus on actors and groups by looking beyond merchantsbased in ports and including, for instance, local merchants in small
towns who were connected to domestic trade. Gerritsen’s keynote
lecture was part of the first panel of the conference, which exploredcommodities and consumption within global and imperial tra­jec­tor­ies. However, these four measures were key issues that shaped thediscussion throughout the conference.
The subsequent papers picked up on the themes that Gerritsen
introduced. Hilde Neus (Anton de Kom Universiteit van Suriname)offered insights into a social practice by free women of colour ineighteenth-century Suriname known as ‘Missys’ that enabled themto exercise agency through the use of luxury objects. Because of
their status as free women, they were allowed to own property andimprove their social status within the colonial setting. Through a kindof public dance party (doe), the Missys displayed their social status bydressing themselves and their slaves in luxurious clothing and jewel­lery, mostly imported from the Netherlands. Neus discussed how
these objects held cultural importance because of their meaning andfunction in this specific colonial context.
Emma Forsberg (Lund University) examined the practice of giftgiving by early modern Swedish diplomats, asking what role they
played in global consumption, and what expectations were put uponthem within their individual spheres. Objects were gifted to people inhigh political positions and clearly had a specific symbolism and meaning, as they were supposed to display Sweden’s wealth and power
within a global context. However, the intended and received meanings
could differ. The practice of gift-giving thus created and shaped earlymodern international connections and interactions.
Artemis Yagou (Deutsches Museum, Munich) completed the panel
by analysing the consumption of commodities through an object-based
research discourse. She demonstrated the correlation between science,technology, and society with reference to the invention of portable
watches in the eighteenth century. Watches gained tremendous popu­
larity, as they not only enabled timekeeping while on the move, but also137

Conference Reportsfunctioned as a fashionable symbol of innovation and distinction. In
addition, watches were an important point of contact between different
parts and societies of the world; for instance, there was a high demandfor European-made watches in Ottoman markets.
The second panel moved from commodities and consumption to
the social practice of colonial collecting and the importance of colonial
knowledge in Western knowledge production. Caroline Drie­ën­huizen(Open University of the Netherlands) criticized the widespread Eurocentric attitude towards Western collectors in this particular field of
research and pointed out that the agency of locals (such as former
owners or informants) is often neglected. According to Drie­ën­huizen,
this perspective does not do justice to the complexity of the collecting
process within colonial structures. With the help of a case study, shedemonstrated how a group of local people in the nineteenth-century
Dutch colony of Indonesia managed to exercise agency by determining which objects Europeans were able to collect. She thus showed
how important and influential the role of locals was for colonial collecting and knowledge formation.
Sarah Longair (University of Lincoln) showed how objects sometimes had the power to resist processes of global commodification. She
used the example of the Seychelles to demonstrate how islands wereplaces of self-sufficiency on the one hand, and of mobility and global
connections on the other. The object at the centre of her paper was thecoco de mer, an enormous double-lobed species of coconut growing
exclusively on the Seychelles. Objects made from these unique fruits
were produced and traded as curiosities around the globe. However,the palm trees on which they grew resisted European-controlled mass
production, as they can only be cultivated on their island of origin,a fact that fundamentally shaped the conditions and processes of
exchange and material culture.
Meenakshi A (Yale University) focused on the making of cement
as a construction material in colonial India and, in general, the British
Empire in the nineteenth century. Her paper examined the production of knowledge about and the circulation of cement across a rangeof sites characterized by differing soil and climatic conditions. She
pointed out that the very materiality of cement produced construction results that differed from site to site. This variation meant that the138

Things on the Movetechnical and engineering knowledge that was generated on the production and use of cement was far from stable or uniform throughout
the British Empire. The specific materiality of cement thus created
what the speaker described as ‘new kinds of mobilities and circulations within the British Empire’.
The third panel shifted the focus to institutions and the afterlivesof colonial collections. The question of how institutions handle theirpast while also considering current debates about the restitution oflooted objects was particularly important for the papers in this panel.
Emile De Bruijn (National Trust) presented a project to catalogue a
National Trust collection which involved reviewing object records
that had been previously described as ‘oriental’. De Bruijn offered a
proposal for reinterpreting problematic and offensive object descriptions: namely, to provide context for critical engagement with theobjects in question by adding extra information such as their place of
production, object groups, materials, and an accurate expert identification. The goal of the cataloguing project was to challenge the useof imprecise Eurocentric terms by identifying new ways of assessing
relations across objects and groups.
Mobeen Hussain (Trinity College Dublin) focused on universities
as institutions which have been actively involved in acquiring colonial collections in the past. She chose Trinity College Dublin as an
example to demonstrate how collectors have gathered wide-ranging
natural history collections in the service of science through brutal
exploitation. Her focus was on how universities and similar institutions today are engaging with their history of collusion with colonialcollecting practices.
The paper by Katherine Arnold (London School of Economics andPolitical Science) pursed this theme further in the following panel,
which was dedicated to objects in global and imperial connections.
She presented two entirely different types of collected object—arare African parasitic plant and human remains—in the world ofnineteenth-century natural history collecting. These objects, which
seem impossible to compare, can nonetheless be brought into thesame analytical frame, offering innovative methods for exploring thefield as a space, fieldwork as a practice, and the ways in which col­lect­ors constructed and interacted with the world around them. Arnold
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Conference Reports
also highlighted the depth and complexity of collections that were,and still are, held in colonial storehouses such as botanic gardens,
herb­aria, and museums around the world.
Oliver Finnegan and Lucia Pereira Pardo (UK National Archives)
and Andrew Little (Prize Papers Project) dedicated their joint presentation with Lucas Haasis to objects and their materiality in the Prize
Papers Project. The project’s goal is to digitize the legal records of over
35,000 British ship captures, which are held by the National Archives.
The collection also contains an enormous amount of undelivered
mail as well as various objects, such as pieces of fabric, jewellery, andsamples of seeds and beans that were captured on their way acrossthe ocean. The project coordinators consider it crucial to preserve theoriginal material condition of these objects during digitization, as
these artefacts have not been touched for centuries and are thus valuable time capsules. Special attention is paid to the material features ofthe objects, such as shape, size, colour, smell, or physical state, as eventhe smallest such features can be significant for understanding certain
aspects and practices of the early modern global world.
Christian Stenz (Heidelberg University) opened the last panel witha striking example of how the meaning of objects can change entirely
as a consequence of being removed from their original setting. His
paper focused on wooden lintels from the Maya city of Tikal that wereextracted from a temple wall. In the process, they had to be literally
cut out of their material context. As a result, not only did their phys­
ical state change drastically, but also their original, intended meaning
and function.
Yu Ying Lee (Yuan Ze University) concluded the conference by discussing the question of how Chinese antiques became desirable in theWest. Her paper focused on Liulichang, a historic trading area in Beijing. During the Second Opium War, British and French troops looted
the city’s Summer Palace and brought a variety of objects to Europe.
One consequence of this was that Western demands for Chinese
antiques grew enormously, resulting in the emergence of Liu­li­chang
as a central trading point for collectors. The looting of the palace thusincreased the global circulation and trade in Chinese antiquities.
To sum up, the conference discussed a variety of topics and areasof research. Although the papers offered very different approaches
140

Things on the Moveand focused on a range of specific objects in various contexts, theyalso highlighted meaningful similarities. The conference clearly
demonstrated the potential of material history on a local and global
scale in an epoch marked by the criss-crossing forces of globalization,
imperial expansion, and the growth in colonial structures.

Lena Potschka (University of Oldenburg)

141

Infrastructures for Social Data in Contemporary History: Pro­posals
for a Better Future. Conference organized by the working group Social
Data in Contemporary History in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London and held at the Werner Reimers Foundation,
Bad Homburg, Germany, 21 November 2022. Conveners: Christina
von Hoden­berg (GHIL), Lutz Raphael (Trier University), and Al­brecht
von Kalnein (Werner Reimers Foundation).
Data from social science research and official statistics from past decades are becoming increasingly important as sources for research inhistory. The project ‘Social Data as Sources of Contemporary History’,funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), has investigatedwhat support contemporary historians need in order to productively
use social data, whether qualitative (mainly transcripts and audio andvideo recordings) or quantitative (mainly surveys and statistics ofvarious origins). The project began by publishing a needs assessment
outlining how research in this area might be enabled.1 In parallel,
workshops were held to explore how working with social data could
lead to new insights for contemporary history.2 Finally, the project
has published a position paper outlining measures for improving
research infrastuctures.3
The aim of the meeting in Bad Homburg was to discuss thisposition paper with representatives of the research community and
NFDI4Memory, the nascent consortium for the historical sciences in
the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI).4 Since theKathrin Zöller, Clemens Villinger, Pascal Siegers, Sabine Reh, Lutz Raphael,
Christina von Hodenberg, and Kerstin Brückweh, ‘Sozialwissenschaftliche
Forschungsdaten als historische Quellen: Welche Infrastrukturbedarfe hat
die zeitgeschichtliche Forschung?’, RatSWD Working Paper Series, 277 (2022),
at [https://doi.org/10.17620/02671.66].
2
See e.g. the special issue on historical social data published in Geschichte undGesellschaft, 48/1 (2022).
3
Kerstin Brückweh, Christina von Hodenberg, Lutz Raphael, Sabine Reh,
Pascal Siegers, Clemens Villinger, and Kathrin Zöller, ‘Positionspapier zu In­
frastrukturen für historische Sozialdaten in der Zeitgeschichte’, Zenodo (2023),
at [https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7781159].
4
An overview of NFDI4Memory’s activities is available at [https://4memory.
de/], accessed 26 Apr. 2023.
1

142

Infrastructures for Social Data
application for the DFG project was submitted on 1 August 2018, theenvironment for research data infrastructures has changed fundamentally. The establishment of the NFDI in October 2020 created a
new framework for the development and integration of research data
infrastructures in Germany. Further proposals for a data infrastructure for research in contemporary history must therefore at least referto the new NFDI structures in the humanities and social sciences, or
ideally be fully integrated with them.
After a warm welcome by Lutz Raphael (for the working groupon Social Data and Contemporary History) and Albrecht von Kalnein(for the Werner Reimers Foundation), the conference began with abrief presentation of the project group’s position paper by Christina
von Hodenberg and Pascal Siegers (GESIS—Leibniz Institute for
the Social Sciences). From its analysis, the project group has identified three pillars on which a supporting structure should rest. In thepaper, this proposed structure is flanked by a discussion of existing
policies for handling social data—specifically, the future preservation of social data by requiring researchers to offer their data to
public archives.
The project’s needs analysis clearly showed that a lack of skills in
dealing with social data greatly increases the effort required to use
it.5 Yet history curricula rarely teach practical skills in data management and analysis. New forms of knowledge and skills transfer are
therefore needed that focus on the forms of social data analysis specific to historical research. It follows that the first pillar should be ateaching and training centre that would develop and offer courses on
the secondary analysis of qualitative or quantitative social data in thehistorical sciences.
The second pillar would be an information portal on histor­ical
social data, with the aim of supporting contemporary historiansin their search for suitable data by bringing together and preparing information from the fragmented social science research data
infrastructure. This would include information on the conditions governing data access, such as the need to comply with data protection
Zöller et al., ‘Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschungsdaten als historische
Quellen‘.

5143Conference Reports
regulations. The information provided would be complemented by aforum for sharing innovative evaluation methods and discussing thechallenges of using historical social data.
Finally, a third pillar—a forum on ethics and law in contemporary
history—would address precisely these aspects of the present-day
use of data collected long before current legal regulations were inplace. The needs analysis showed that researchers currently have nopoint of contact within the historical sciences to turn to with theirlegal and ethical questions. Unlike other disciplines, history lacks
research ethics guidelines for handling data and sources. This third
pillar therefore aims to support the formation of standards, for ex­­ample, by developing a code of conduct for working with historicalsocial data.
One problem with using historical research data is that much of it
is not preserved for the long term. Despite a growing awareness of its
value, there is still no obligation in Germany to store and publish data
in a repository or archive. The DFG’s rules of good scientific practice
only require data to be kept for ten years. At present, however, noaccount is taken of the fact that data from research projects at universities, universities of applied sciences, and non-university research
institutes in Germany is subject to federal and state archive legislation.
Under these rules, the archival value of such data is derived, among
other things, from its significance for ‘research into and understanding of history and the present’. Social science data is an importantmeans of self-observation in society and therefore its archival value
must be examined on a case-by-case basis. This should result in an
obligation to offer social science and other research data to archives
or research data repositories, which in turn can ensure its long-termpreservation and usability.
Finally, von Hodenberg and Siegers emphasized the need to link
new infrastructures for contemporary history with existing structures in the social sciences and to integrate them into the emerging
NFDI4Memory. Infrastructures for using social data as sources canbe conceived of and eventually implemented as a bridge between thesocial and historical sciences.
The presentation of the position paper was followed by a short
introduction of the NFDI4Memory consortium by its leaders,144

Infrastructures for Social Data
Jo­hannes Paulmann and John Wood (Leibniz Institute of European
History). They explained that NFDI4Memory works to promote thedevelopment of a data culture in the historical sciences, to strengthendata literacy (in the sense of basic skills in dealing with data), and todevelop standards for data management and documentation. Legaland ethical issues are also part of the planned work programme. The
NFDI4Memory consortium sees itself as a ‘network infrastructure’linking actors from all periods of historical research. However, theavailable funds are insufficient to provide large-scale technical services for indexing, processing, and storing data. A significant part ofthe budget is flexible, allowing incubator projects to be integrated into
the NFDI4Memory work programme from 2024 onwards through acompetitive process. A major difference to consortia in the social andlinguistic sciences becomes apparent here: because no (research) data
centres have been established in the historical sciences that are comparable with the German Data Forum (RatSWD) or CLARIN-D, thestructures for processing and curating data in historical institutes have
yet to be established or permanently funded. Although the German
Council for Scientific Information Infrastructures (RfII) recommended
the establishment of the NFDI primarily with the aim of developing
more stable funding instruments for data infrastructures, funding for
all NFDI consortia will end in 2028. Complementary initiatives are
therefore needed.
An important aspect of the discussion was the obvious questionof what points of connection there are between the proposals of the
DFG project and the 4Memory consortium. Overlaps were particularly evident in the areas of law and ethics, as well as skill building.
Teaching formats developed for the evaluation of social data as historical sources fit well into the overall concept of the NFDI consortium.
At the same time, there was a call for increased dialogue with representatives and committees of state archives and memory institutions,which face similar challenges to historical research in the course ofdigitization. Archives in particular have an important role to play inensuring that data produced today can be made available to histor­ians in the future. This task goes far beyond obliging researchers tomake social science data available, as archives need to adapt theirwork to new technologies and digital object types. In this context,145

Conference Reports
critical voices were raised about the working group’s position paper
because it does not sufficiently address how to enable the future useof data in the context of digital humanities. Digital sources open up
new possibilities for linking, extraction, and aggregation, which are
not among the clearly stated goals of the social data infrastructure.
The central issue in all discussions about improved research data
infrastructures is the availability of stable funding, as initiatives needa certain longevity to be effective. As the NFDI is not permanent, atleast in its first phase, its prospects remain limited. The only longterm funding instrument available for infrastructure in Germany is
the Strategic Special Fund (Strategischer Sondertatbestand), which theinstitutes of the Leibniz Association can apply for in a competitive
process. The prerequisite for success is a close strategic fit with thegoals of the institutes and their willingness to make a substantial
financial contribution of their own. This path requires medium-term
preparation in order to continue and extend initiatives from university
research. Therefore, implementing the pillars of a research infrastructure for historical social data proposed in the position paper will not
be pos­sible without start-up funding in the form of projects. Under
the current conditions, this path of piecemeal projects seems to be theonly funding option.
Participants agreed that each of the pillars can be implemented
independently. The proposed actions relating to capacity building
and knowledge transfer are particularly important to enable researchers to properly use social data as a source in the historical sciences. The
current situation is that the needs for social data in contemporary history research have been formulated, but the major projects (first andforemost NFDI4Memory) still need to be developed. In the meantime,those responsible for the DFG project do not intend to remain inactive;
instead, as in previous years, they are relying on community building
by organizing conferences within the framework of the ‘Social Data inContemporary History’ working group based at the Reimers Foundation. This means that in the coming years the importance of analysing
social data as historical sources for research in contemporary history
will become clear. The first of these conferences, on social inequality,
will be held in the autumn of 2023, when representatives of various
institutions and disciplines will meet in the established format to146

Infrastructures for Social Data
discuss the potential of social data and its analysis and to place it on
the most secure possible footing.

Kerstin Brückweh (Berliner Hochschule für Technik) and Pascal Siegers(GESIS—Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences)147

Trans-Regnal Kingship in the Thirteenth Century. Conference fundedby the British Academy Global Professorship programme and hosted
by the German Historical Institute London, 23–5 March 2023. Con­
veners: Jörg Peltzer (Heidelberg University/University of East Anglia)
and Nicholas Vincent (University of East Anglia)
The conference ‘Trans-Regnal Kingship in the Thirteenth Century’
focused on the question of how changing ideas and practices of kingship in the thirteenth century (such as the redefinition of the feudal
tie between two rulers, the king as emperor in his kingdom, and theemergence of the communitas regni—the ‘community of the kingdom’)
impacted on the long-established practice of trans-regnal rule, and theextent to which personnel-related, organizational and ma­terial findings showed the development of ties between kingdoms. ‘Trans-regnal
kingship’ was defined in broad terms here, referring to kings rulingover at least two kingdoms, but also to kings ruling over a kingdom
and other geographically more distant territories. The organizers
emphasized that their intention was not to use this term as a substitute for established terms, such as unions, composite monarchies,
or empires, but to draw attention to the changing characteristics ofkingship in the thirteenth century. The geograph­ic­al focus was on
the Angevin Empire, the lands of Charles of Anjou, France, the Holy
Roman Empire, and the Papacy. Thirteen researchers from Europe andthe USA explored these questions from different perspectives.
The topic of trans-regnal kingship is barely touched upon in thecontemporary theoretical treatises examined by Frédérique Lachaud(Sorbonne University). The ‘monarchical’ character of kingship may
have been a significant argumentative hurdle here; yet sovereignty
over multiple realms was not seen in an entirely positive light either.
After all, one could recognize a tyrant by his zealous attempts to
subjugate other territories. As William Chester Jordan (Princeton University) argued in his evening lecture, scepticism also prevailed in thetheological understanding of trans-regnal kingship at the court of theFrench King Louis IX. According to Jordan, this may have been one
Trans. by Marielle Sutherland (GHIL). This conference report is translated
from the German version published in H-Soz-Kult, 20 June 2023, at [https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-136956], accessed 24 July 2023.

148

Trans-Regnal Kingshipreason why Louis himself refused to wear another crown. New linesof thought were also emerging at the papal court. Here, according
to Barbara Bombi (University of Kent), emphasis was placed on the
one hand—and with reference to pertinent sections in the Gospels of
St Mark and St John—on the pope’s sovereignty over worldly rulers,and on the other, after the publication of the decretal letter Novit ille
by Innocent III in April/May 1204, on the pope’s right to act as anarbitrator in disputes between two rulers. This created a concrete tool
for legitimizing the pope’s active intervention in the conflict between
the Angevin and Capetian rulers.
Len Scales (Durham University) and Björn Weiler (Aberystwyth
University) examined the topic of trans-regnal kingship in chronicles
focusing on the Holy Roman Empire. Looking at the evidence fromthe Empire, Scales showed that although there was an awareness thatsovereignty over several kingdoms was a distinctive feature of therealm, this awareness varied considerably by region. This meant rulers
enacted imperial rule in a broad variety of ways. Weiler’s examin­ationof the English perspective on the phenomenon of empire—based
primarily on the prolific writings of the St Albans monk Matthew
Paris—revealed a complex, at times unclear picture. Contemporary
concepts of empire were informed by more or less accurate know­
ledge about both the Roman Empire of antiquity and the Holy Roman
Empire, but the question of trans-regnal kingship was not discussed
in any detail. Was it too self-evident in this context to warrant specificfocus on it?
Ruling practice in the Holy Roman Empire was the subject of
papers by Martin Kaufhold (University of Augsburg) and Lioba Geis
(University of Cologne). Kaufhold began by referring to a qualitative
shift in the wielding of power from the twelfth to the late thirteenth
century. Whereas active rule—with all its associated problems—waspart of the Staufen emperors’ self-understanding and practices onboth sides of the Alps, it was different with the kings of the ‘Inter­regnum’. At this time, active rule was concentrated on the lands northof the Alps, and if rulers were absent for long periods, this led to thedevelopment of new structures, in particular arbitration. Under these
conditions, interlinking the territories north and south of the Alps interms of people and administration would have been inconceivable.
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According to Geis, Sicily was not integrated with the Holy Roman
Empire even under the Staufen rulers; in fact, unlike his father, Frederick II emphasized the kingdom’s independence from the Empire.
Sicily was connected with the Empire but was not a long-standing partof it. The Sicilian administration was also run by natives, althoughFrederick’s provisions for the rigorous separ­ation of Sicily were toned
down before the end of his reign. There was even an exchange of personnel with northern Italy. New dynamics emerged when the crownpassed to Charles of Anjou, whose remarkable accumulation of titles
and claims in the Mediterranean was the subject of the paper by David
Abulafia (University of Cambridge). In Sicily, Charles’ reign led toa succession of French administrators in the kingdom. Furthermore,as shown by Paola Vitolo (University of Naples Federico II), the newrulers clearly left their mark in architectural terms in both the styleand intensity of their building activity—possibly even more so thanFrederick II. But there is little evidence of a strategy focused on closer
integration across his terri­tories. Charles’ trans-regnal rule manifested
primarily in his person.
Charles of Anjou is perhaps the most prominent case of a French
ruler who tried to acquire multiple territories in the Mediterranean,
but he was not the only one. Gregory Lippiatt (University of Exeter)
discussed the reigns of the Lusignans, Briennes, and Montforts, whichwere the result of crusader campaigns. Whereas the Lusignans kept
their relatives in Poitou at a distance, so that there was little questionof trans-regnal rule, the Briennes remained very much anchored in
the Champagne region, a finding which is perhaps evidence of theirvarying strength in the kingdoms of Cyprus (Lusignan) and Jerusalem (Brienne). The Montforts’ approach of keeping all options open
on both sides falls between these two extremes.
Daniel Power’s (Swansea University) contribution analysed
another locus classicus of trans-regnal rule: the Angevin Empire after
1204–6, that is, after the loss of Normandy and Greater Anjou to Cap­
etian France. Overall, little attempt was made to strengthen ties withthe remaining Continental possessions by sending out administratorsfrom England or by creating cross-Channel lordships. Nonetheless, Henry III increasingly had his eye on Gascony, and in 1252 hedeclared the duchy to be permanently and irrevocably part of the150

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English Crown and the royal demesne. His motive here was to create
an appanage for his son Edward. Consequently, the seneschals usually came from England, although the lower-ranking administrativeroles were still held by locals. Administrative rule was also the focusof the paper by Frédéric Boutoulle (Bordeaux Montaigne University)on the practice of inquests in Gascony. There is evidence of the practice in individual cases from the end of King John’s reign onwards; it
increased under Edward from the 1250s, but it was nowhere near as
frequent as in England. However, inquests were widespread, including in Capetian France, so it is not clear how far we can speak of a
specifically Angevin ruling practice here. Lindy Grant (University ofReading) also addressed this ambiguity in her paper on architecture—primarily church buildings—in the Angevins’ (former) Continental
lands. While there has never been any doubt about the political significance of Charles of Anjou’s decision to rebuild the magnificent
castle in Angers, the situation is much more complex with regard
to church buildings. Although it is certainly the case that, from the1240s, regional motifs were replaced with the Rayonnant style associated with the Capetians, this could hardly have been a clear politicalstatement, for it happened not only in conquered domains but alsoin places where the bishops were close to the Angevin kings. Here,trans-regnal kingship interfaced with aesthetic ideas and the competition between bishops within the Church. David Carpenter (King’s
College London) offered conference partici­pants a direct experienceof architecture from the period by taking them on a tour of Westminster Abbey, built by the Angevin king Henry III. With its complex
use of architectural forms and the tombs of Eleanor of Castile (wifeof Edward I and daughter of Joan, countess of Ponthieu) and Aymer
de Valence (the son of William de Valence, a Lusignan half-brotherof Henry III), it impressively demonstrated some of the aspects oftrans-regnal kingship in the thirteenth century addressed by the contributors. A concluding discussion rounded off the conference, andthe papers will be published.

Jörg Peltzer (Heidelberg University)151Beyond the Progressive Story: Reframing Resistance to European Integration. Conference organized by the Hamburg Institute for Social
Research (HIS) in cooperation with the German Historical Institutes
in Rome, London, and Warsaw, held at the HIS, 29–31 March 2023.
Conveners: Philipp Müller (HIS), Wolfgang Knöbl (HIS), Martin Baumeister (GHI Rome), Christina von Hodenberg (GHI London), andMiloš Řeznik (GHI Warsaw).
The conference took an alternative approach to the history of European
integration by focusing on sceptics, critics, and alternative paths andvisions. Part of a project on the history of Euroscepticism funded by
the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, it brought
together Ph.D. researchers, postdocs, mid-career academics, and seniorprofessors from a range of countries, including Greece, Germany, Italy,
Poland, and the United Kingdom. It addressed the history of European
integration from numerous perspectives, including economic, political,
social, international, and institutional, as well as drawing in comments
and contributions from colleagues in history, sociology, and the social
sciences. In terms of chronology, the conference included papers anddiscussions on the interwar and post-war periods, as well as up to
the 1990s and early 2000s. In his opening comments, Philipp Müller
observed that it is essential to analyse and understand the changes
and continuities in European integration over time, and to account notjust for successes but also failures and alternatives. We have to movebeyond the ‘progressive story’, in which integration has often been portrayed as only heading in one direction, as positive and progressive,
and which risks taking the form of a teleological representation of ahighly complex past. A core aim of this conference was therefore to
move beyond such an approach by focusing on scepticism, criticism,and alternative versions of European integration history, with the aimof casting light on underappreciated actors, groups, voices, and themes.
After an introduction by the discussant and chair Philipp Müller,
the keynote lecture by Kiran Klaus Patel (LMU Munich), titled ‘Putting
For the original version of this conference report, see Katharina Troll andAlexander Hobe, ‘Beyond the Progressive Story: Reframing Resistance toEuropean Integration’, H-Soz-Kult, 11 July 2023, at [https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-137414], accessed 19 July 2023.

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the Permissive Consensus to Rest’, addressed a multifaceted and layered history before an in-person and online audience. He tackled the‘permissive consensus’, proposed a moratorium on the controversial
term ‘Eurosceptic’, and observed that there never has been a ‘golden
age’ in European integration history—it has always been contested. He
also exposed his audience to an image of Winston Churchill’s underpants. Thankfully, he provided an immediate explanation: he was nottalking about clothing but the affectionate nickname for the flag of
the European federalist movement, which features a large green E on
the left interlocked with a smaller, reversed white C on the right. The
colloquial reference, though, alludes to the commitment of the former
British prime minister and his son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, to European cooperation and federalism. In 1950, Patel went on, Churchill’sunderpants were waved in the face of Paul-Henri Spaak. Held aloft
as a symbol of the federalist movement, the flag was clearly present
when Spaak spoke on European cooperation in front of a large crowd.
However, he was not being cheered by the federalists, as one might
expect considering his reputation as a founding father and ‘saint’ ofEuropean integration.1 Rather, he was booed by the crowd.
As Patel showed, a considerable part of the European Community institutions’ self-portrayal was based on making resistance tointegration processes invisible. This is evidenced, for example, in thevague style of questioning in the Eurobarometer poll. The surveys
consistently found a high level of support for ‘the idea of European
unification’, even while respondents were unable to name a single
concrete effect of the European Communities (EC). The pollsters took
this as evidence of ‘support for Europe’, concealing the fragile factual
basis of this claim. The conference as a whole was characterized bymany similarly surprising subversions of expectations. It attempted
to find a new framework for histories of European integration beyond
the unbroken, conflict-free history of progress that dominates theself-portrayal of the European institutions. The assumption that Spaakand the federalists would have been on the same side demonstrates
the considerable success of this story, as well as the need for new historical approaches.
1

Alan Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (London, 1999).

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Obscuring resistance certainly was part of the institutions’ polit­ical
modus operandi, and it featured in the paper by Philip Bajon (Max
Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory). He explained
how the 1966 Luxembourg Compromise served as one such mechanism: this ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ between European Economic
Community (EEC) member states guaranteed them the option toblock decision-making on national ‘vital interests’. However, theagreement lacked clarity, and it never set out what might constitutesuch a vital interest. This lack of clarity continued in the subsequent
EC and European Union (EU). Disagreement was concealed behindthe compromise, which facilitated the rise of consensus building(‘silent voting’, in Bajon’s words) as a mode of decision-making. Victor
Jaeschke (University of Potsdam) presented a similar case. In championing ‘subsidiarity’ as a potential ‘cure for the Europe-weary’, theEuropean Commission and the member states introduced yet anothervague and ill-defined concept in the hope of reducing contestation bydelegating to lower levels. It was never clear how and which regional
levels should have the right to their own sphere of decision-making,and different actors, such as the British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher and the French President François Mitterrand, interpreted
the principle in very different ways. This disagreement only became
visible when actors, predominantly national governments, attempted
to influence the way in which the concept would be defined legally, but
was obscured by the ambiguous phrasing of the treaty of Maastricht.
Jaeschke and Bajon provided accounts of two different strategies forcontaining resistance to integration and thereby moved beyond theprogressive story.
Furthermore, moments of enlargement could also offer similar
examples of conflict. After all, the EC and EU were and are projects ofordering space. When a given space is reordered, or when another spatial arrangement comes into interaction with it, one can expect somedegree of contestation. Philipp Müller’s contribution discussed one
such example: in the late 1960s, the EC developed new foreign policy
guidelines (European Political Cooperation) which were challenged bydisagreements between member states over how to deal with Portugal
and the Portuguese Empire. The dissatisfaction of West German andFrench business representatives, as well as foreign policy officials, with154

Beyond the Progressive Story
the EC institutional approach to this question produced an alternative form of Europeanization through bilateral forums, whose spatial
ordering actively bypassed the EC and stood in conflict with it, yet was
no less European.
However, questions of enlargement not only produced alternative
processes of Europeanization but also led to the promotion of new
visions of Europe. In the case of Greece, Eleni Kouki (University ofAthens) demonstrated how strongly Europe was connected to Greek
national identity as a historical concept. When the military junta came
to power in 1967, the EC decided to freeze Greece’s entry negotiations
and to block its association privileges. This led the junta to change
its rhetoric on European integration and to construct a new vision ofEurope that was more in line with its convictions: only a free Europeof nations with strong connections to the United States and NATOwould guarantee the continent’s freedom and save it from Commun­
ism. In both Müller’s and Kouki’s cases, accession, or the prospect ofaccession, provides a window into the contestation of the EC’s spatial
arrangements.
Antonio Carbone (GHI Rome) told a story of conflict between
different territorial scales. He analysed the reactions of Italian andFrench farmers to the EC’s southern enlargement plans (to admit
Greece, Portugal, and Spain) during the 1970s and 1980s. Carbone
demonstrated how the conflict of agricultural interests between
Northern and Southern Europe, which divided not only Italy andFrance but also their respective national farmers’ associations, structured the farmers’ response to the EC’s Common Agricultural Policy.
This became visible in a Europeanization of protest practices. Here,again, different scales for ordering space intersected, leading totension and contestation. As Olga Gontarska (GHI Warsaw) subsequently showed, pre-accession Poland also witnessed contestation
around international cooperation in the 1990s. The journal Arka wasa forum of transnational exchange based on certain networks formed
by Polish historians during the Cold War. Through it, American neoconservative voices were introduced into the debate on European
cooperation, and their networks with Polish historians produced
their own vision of transnational cooperation which was at odds with
Polish membership of the EU.
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Larissa Kraft (University of Glasgow) explored how Frenchpolicymakers created and promoted narratives in response to the re­­arrangement of space during the first British application to join the
EEC in 1961–3. They emphasized the Franco-German relationship overthe Franco-British one, portraying it as more European. As noted in
the discussion, this was all the more remarkable given the backgroundof Second World War alliances. In this sense, Kraft’s contribution wasa further reminder of the contested nature of the different visions of‘Europe’.
Not only were the spaces of the EC/EU rearranged, but there werealso changes to the nature of other European organizations, as well as
questions over which institution would become the dominant forum.
Certain actors felt or anticipated this and reacted accordingly. Here,David Lawton (GHI London) offered an example by focusing on agroup of British lawyers who won the right to a judicial review of theratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993. Lawyers, Lawton argued,
were uniquely qualified to remake British Euroscepticism during theMaastricht period. Their expertise afforded them an awareness of theopportunity provided by treaty reform. However, their reliance onarguments of British legal exceptionalism was founded on a certain
ambiguity, underwritten as it was by their contact with other constitutional challengers of the EC/EU, for instance in Denmark andGermany.
Katharina Troll (HIS) used the example of the Council of European Industrial Federations—founded in 1949 to represent European
industrial interests and to advise the Organization for European Economic Cooperation—to demonstrate how economic actors responded
to European integration and, as a consequence, Europeanized in the
1950s and early 1960s. The work of the council was characterized byconflicts over the correct path of integration and by the articu­lation ofalternatives to supranational integration, mainly within the frameworkof the OEEC. It was a contested area, with competing institutions.
Here, there is a clear dialogue with the work of Alexander Hobe
(HIS), who showed how the plans for the European Defence Community (EDC) in the 1950s incentivized Wehrmacht veterans to form
a European umbrella association. However, their Europeanization
developed its own dynamics, which were not purely reactive, and156

Beyond the Progressive Story
after the EDC failed, their organization set out on a separate path. In
all three of the cases presented by Lawton, Troll, and Hobe, plans forreordering European institutions created the conditions for their contestation. This followed different trajectories: a head-on challenge oftreaty reform, as in Lawton’s case, a tactical weighing of alternatives,
as in Troll’s, or the abandonment of a seemingly dead-end path, asin Hobe’s. The variable relationship between the ‘official’ European
framework and its ‘challengers’ was further underlined by insightsfrom Johannes Großmann (University of Tübingen). He showed thatwhile the ‘Conservative International’—consisting of several elite
circles and including the European Documentation and Information Centre think tank—produced alternative visions of integration,
the post-war decades also saw these groups adapt to the hegemonicframework as an unintended consequence of their interactions.
During the lively three-day conference, all of these examples ofcontestation over the extent and form of European integration and co­­operation revealed a remarkably conflicted history. Whether exploring
conflicts over attempts to render resistance invisible, spatial elements,
or alternative forms of cooperation and integration, the conference wasrich with accounts and papers that went beyond the progressive story.
Actors, groups, governments, organizations, and themes all revealed
the contested past of European integration, and, as Kiran Klaus Patelargued, there was no ‘golden age’ to be found. What is clear, though,is that when it comes to moving beyond the progressive story, muchremains to be explored and accounted for.

Katharina Troll (HIS), Alexander Hobe (HIS), and William King (GHIL)

157

Behind the Wire: Internment during the First World War. The Global
German Experience. Exhibition funded by the German History Society
and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with a launch eventat the German Historical Institute London, 26 April 2023. Con­veners:
Stefan Manz (Aston University) and Matthew Stibbe (Sheffield Hallam
University).
The German Historical Institute London unveiled its latest exhib­ition,‘Behind the Wire’, on 26 April 2023. With the subtitle ‘Internment
during the First World War: The Global German Experience’, theexhibition aims to shed light on the lesser-known history of German
civilians who were interned as ‘enemy aliens’ in various locations
across the British Empire during the First World War. Comprisingeight­een panels, the exhibition also provided visitors with an immersive ex­peri­ence through a virtual reality depiction of Fort Napier campin South Africa. This addition allowed viewers to gain a deeper understanding of the conditions faced by German internees during the war.
The opening symposium commenced with an introduction by
GHIL Director Christina von Hodenberg. Panikos Panayi (De Montfort University) then discussed the global dimensions of internment
in the British Empire during the First World War. He highlighted
the significance of considering the dispersed community of Germaninternees as part of the ‘imperial turn’ in internment studies. Panayi
emphasized that the global aspect becomes particularly evident when
examining the internment network across the British Empire, such as
in Canada, West and South Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand,and Ahmednagar in India. The main internment camp was located in
Knockaloe on the Isle of Man, housing an astonishing 22,000 prisoners. It is worth noting that retaliatory measures led to the internmentof British citizens, both White and non-White, in Ruhleben campnear Berlin, bringing the global experience of internment back to theGerman home front.
One significant consequence of internment experienced by civilian internees worldwide was the deterioration of their mental health,often referred to as the ‘barbed wire disease’. Matthew Stibbe emphasized this aspect during his presentation, using the case of Ruhleben
to illustrate the impact on internees. The camp, situated at a German
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racecourse, held 5,500 individuals, including Germans with British
nationality. Stibbe drew attention to the fact that some individuals
had acquired British citizenship to avoid conscription but found themselves labelled enemy aliens in their own country after the outbreakof war. The camp’s occupants represented a diverse range of backgrounds, including sailors, academics, Shakespeare experts, scientists,football coaches, criminals, journalists, and colonial subjects.
Michelle Kiessling (Sheffield Hallam University) presented a separate research project focusing on the intriguing story of David andAnna Russell. David, a lower-class British–Jamaican man, had married
his German girlfriend, Anna, in Leipzig. Anna had lost her German
citizenship upon marriage and subsequently acquired British citizenship. Kiessling movingly described the challenges faced by this family
resulting from the differential treatment of the family members bydifferent states. David’s life as a Black British man in Germany was
already difficult enough, and then during the First World War he wasinterned with one hundred other people of colour at Ruhleben campin Germany, which resulted in further physical and psychological suffering. He tried to contact relatives in Jamaica via the US embassy in
Berlin. Meanwhile, Anna, as the wife of a British man, was forced toleave Germany for Hull, where she lived in a workhouse and faced
harsh working conditions and an enforced separation from theirchildren. A surviving letter penned by Anna in German to the British colonial authorities requesting that David be allowed to return toJamaica showed their efforts to improve the family’s situation, but also
revealed the differences in their status, as David was likely illiterate.
Eventually, David was allowed to return to Jamaica, but the rest of
his family were not, and he passed away there in 1946. Anna died in
Nottingham in 1965.
Returning to the discussion of mental health, Matthew Stibbe
explored the concept of ‘barbed wire disease’ that emerged from theinternment experience. He referred to Adolf Vischer, who spent considerable time in two internment camps studying life behind bars, andalso to a lesser-known study titled ‘On the Psychology of Transitional
Periods’ (1919).1 Drawing parallels with contemporary discussions
1

Adolf Vischer, Zur Psychologie der Übergangszeit (Basel, 1919).

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around long Covid as an emotional assault, Stibbe highlighted thesimilarities in terms of the amorphous temporality experienced inboth situations.
Susan Barton’s (De Monfort University) presentation focused oninternment in Switzerland, where individuals experienced a peculiar
blend of luxury and deprivation. Barton is usually interested in tourism and winter sports, but she delved into this topic after learningthat around 68,000 people went through the internment experience in
Switzerland during the First World War. While this may sound like asmall number given the nine million or so POWs interned worldwide,
Barton emphasized how the international character of the internee
population in Switzerland not only makes this group a valuable casestudy in global history, but also highlights questions of continuity andchange vis-à-vis peacetime social history in areas such as tourism.
The symposium concluded with discussions on the multimedia
aspect of the exhibition. Paul Long, the director of MBD, the company
responsible for producing the accompanying film, and Stefan Manz,
the academic director, discussed the technical features and challenges
encountered during the project. Long mentioned being inspired by
the Internment Research Centre in Harwick, Scotland, which motiv­
ated his deeper involvement in internment research. This exhibition
originally launched in Scotland and subsequently travelled to Canada,South Africa, and Barbados.
The exhibition ‘Behind the Wire’ and the virtual reality experience was on display at the German Historical Institute London until
the end of September 2023. It provided visitors with a fresh perspective and innovative formats for presenting the history of wartime
internment, with a particular focus on the global dimensions of thisoften-overlooked aspect of the First World War.

Dina Gusejnova (London School of Economics and Political Science)

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NOTICEBOARD
Scholarships Awarded by the German Historical Institute London
Each year the GHIL awards a number of research scholarships toGerman postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers to enable them tocarry out research in Britain. The scholarships are generally awarded
for a period of up to six months depending on the requirements of
the research project. Scholarships are advertised on [www.hsozkult.
de] and the GHIL’s website. Applications should include a CV, educational background, list of publications (where appropriate), and an
outline of the project, along with a super­visor’s reference confirming
the relevance of the proposed archival research. Please address applications to Dr Stephan Bruhn and send them by email to stipendium@ghil.ac.uk. Please note that due to the United Kingdom leaving theEU, new regulations for research stays apply. Please check the scholarship guidelines for further information. If you have any questions,please contact Dr Stephan Bruhn. German scholars pre­sent their pro­jects and the initial results of their research at the GHIL Colloquium
during their stay in Britain.
In the second round of allocations for 2023 the following scholarships
were awarded:
Lisa Bork (University of Bremen): Henry Purcells Kirchenmusik: Die
Entwicklung seines Kompositionsstils im Rahmen der englischen
Geistesgeschichte des 17. Jahrhunderts
Victoria Fischer (University of Bonn): Deutsche und britische Ausstellungen als Medium transnationaler feministischer Zusammenarbeit
im 19. Jahrhundert
Catharina Hänsel (University of Göttingen): ‘The Ahmedabad Experi­ment’: Technological Change and the Emergence of Scientific Wage
Categories
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Elisa Heuser (University of Tübingen): ‘Wundersame’ fastende Frauen
des 19. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, Großbritannien und den USA:
Performance und Politiken des Wunders
Riley Linebaugh (HU Berlin): ‘Caesar’s Wives’: Female Secretaries andSpies in the British Empire
Janis Meder (HU Berlin): Business verändert die Welt: Das verantwortungsbewusste Unternehmen der 1970er und 1980er Jahre
Chandni Rampersad (University of Duisburg-Essen): Ladies of the Gentleman’s Magazine
Damiana Salm (University of Freiburg): Energiearmut und die Krise
der Wohlfahrt in Großbritannien der 1970er und 1980er Jahre
Kay Schmücking (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg): Sterben
und Tod als mediales Ereignis: Eine Mediengeschichte des heroischen
Opfertodes, 1930–50
Pappal Suneja (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar): The Modern Architecture Discourse of Design (1957–88) through a Postcolonial Lens
Leonie Wolters (ZZF Potsdam): Decolonization and its (Dis)Content:
Alternative News Agencies Making the Third and First Worlds,
1960s–1990s

Visiting Scholars at the German Historical Institute London
The GHIL is delighted to welcome three new visiting scholars thissummer and autumn.
Professor Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, the Director of the Centre for
Research on Antisemitism at the Technische Universität Berlin, wasappointed the Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor for the academic year
2023–4. She is the fifteenth incumbent since the inception of the visiting professorship, a joint project of the Department of International
History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, theGerda Henkel Foundation, and the GHIL. During her time in London
she will teach at the LSE and also work on a major book project on the
longue durée history of hostility towards the Jews.

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On 1 October Dr Yorim Spoelder (Freie Universität Berlin) started his sixmonth Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, which is awarded
by the GHIL in cooperation with the Institute of Advanced Studies atUniversity College London. Each academic year the fellowship offers
one outstanding early-career scholar from a German university theopportunity to pursue independent research in the stimulating intellectual environment of the two host institutions. Dr Spoelder will
devote his time to research for his new project ‘Eurasians and Colonial
Urban Culture East of the Cape, c.1800–1940s’.
Back in August, Dr Felix Lüttge (University of Basel) joined the GHIL
until autumn 2024 on a Feodor Lynen Fellowship awarded by theAlexander von Humboldt Foundation. A historian of science andinformation, he will write a book about paper technologies in British
archaeology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

New Library Catalogue
The GHIL library’s new online catalogue [https://library.ghil.ac.uk]
was made available to the public in the summer. It offers advanced
options to search for items and filter results, and will hopefully help
many readers find the research materials that they require.
Feedback on the new catalogue is welcomed by the librarians at
library@ghil.ac.uk.

Ph.D. Conference 2024
The GHIL’s twenty-eighth Postgraduate Research Students’ Conference will take place on Thursday 11 and Friday 12 January 2024. The
conference is intended for postgraduate research scholars working on
German history from the Middle Ages to the present at a UK or Irish
university, and aims to give them the opportunity to present theirwork in progress and to discuss their research with other students
working in the same field. Ph.D. students at all stages are encouraged
to apply. All participants will be expected to briefly present their
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research projects, but if capacity is limited, preference will be given tosecond- and third-year students. A course on German palaeography
is planned for the first day of the conference.
Should you wish to take part, please indicate your interest in yourapplication. Please note that places will be assigned on a first-come,first-served basis.
Application Details
If you are interested in attending, please send an email to
PGconference@ghil.ac.uk by Wednesday 15 November 2023 andinclude the following:• full contact details: name, address, email address, and telephone number• the exact title of your Ph.D. project• the date you started your Ph.D. project (and whether you areenrolled part- or full-time)• the name, address, email address, and phone number of youruniversity and supervisor• an indication of whether you have undertaken research inGermany• an indication of whether you wish to participate in the palaeography course scheduled for the morning of 11 January 2024
The GHIL will arrange accommodation for participants from outside
the Greater London Area and offer a lump sum towards the cost of
travel to London.

Forthcoming Workshops and Conferences(De)Constructing Europe. Workshop to be held at the German Histor­
ical Institute Warsaw, 18–20 October 2023. Organized by the researchgroup EU-Scepticism in European Integration.

Sozialdaten der Ungleichheit in historischer Perspektive. Workshop to beheld at the Werner Reimers Foundation, Bad Homburg, 6–7 November
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2023. Conveners: Dr Albrecht Graf von Kalnein (Werner Reimers
Foundation), Professor Lutz Raphael (Trier University), and Professor
Christina von Hodenberg (GHIL).

Other Histories, Other Pasts. Conference to be held at ICAS:MP, New
Delhi on 4–6 December 2023. Conveners: Indra Sengupta (GHIL) and
Neeladri Bhattacharya (Ashoka University).
The conference will focus on the world of popular histories that circulate in the public sphere, outside the domain of academic history, andwill seek to examine the ways in which they constitute people’s historical consciousness of people. Our premise is that the common sense of
the general public is far less influenced by what academic historians
write than by conceptions of the past that such ‘popular’ histories help
produce. The historical consciousness constituted in this way thendefines how people act, how they think about themselves and others,
their social vision, and their political being. The objective of the conference is to explore how such narratives work, and the way they are
mediated by and constitute the political. The conference will bring
together scholars from India, Germany, the UK, and other countries
to discuss the topic in a transnational perspective.

History as a Political Category. Workshop to be held at ICAS:MP, New
Delhi on 7–8 December 2023. Conveners: Indra Sengupta (GHIL), ShailMayaram, and Ravikant (both CSDS, New Delhi).
Over the so called ‘long twentieth century’, politics and power havefundamentally mediated history writing, and the politics of histor­ic­alinterpretation has been entangled in larger political conflicts. This final
workshop of Thematic Module 1 of ICAS:MP—‘History as a Political
Category’—will bring together all project partners from India, Germany, and elsewhere to reflect, debate, and discuss from their own
research the module’s intellectual agenda: to understand the mutuallyconstitutive and ever-changing relationship between historiograph­ical practices and the political, and how the rethinking and rewriting
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Noticeboardof histories has contributed to the reconstitution of the political in
the course of the long twentieth century. The following themes will
be explored: history and the politics of identity and recognition; the‘popu­lar’ as a political category and the writing of history; transform­
ations of democracy and the writing of history; metamorphoses of thepolitical and the politics of archives and memorialization; and the politics of the production, circulation, and reception of history.

Gender Regimes in History. Workshop to be held on 18–19 December
2023 in London. Please note that this workshop will take place at an
external venue due to renovation works (venue TBA).

Euroscepticism. Workshop to be held at the German Historical Institute Rome, 19–22 March 2024. Organized by the research group
EU-Scepticism in European Integration.

Workshop on Medieval Germany. Organized by the GHIL in co­oper­ation
with the German Historical Institute Washington DC and the German
History Society, to be held at the GHIL, 12 April 2024. Con­veners: Len
Scales (Durham University) and Marcus Meer (GHIL).
This one-day workshop will provide an opportunity for researchers
from the UK, Continental Europe, Canada, and the USA working on
topics broadly related to medieval Germany to meet in a relaxed andfriendly setting.

Public Lectures
Gerda Henkel Foundation Visiting Professorship Lecture 2023. Lecture to
be given by Professor Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (TU Berlin) on 28
November 2023, 6:00 p.m., at the London School of Economics.

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The Royal Historical Society Lecture at the German Historical InstituteLondon. Lecture to be given by Professor Clare Anderson (Universityof Leicester) on 23 January 2024. Please note that this lecture will takeplace at an external venue due to renovation works (venue and time
TBA).

After Colonial Forms of Knowledge and Post-Colonial Technoscience: Re­visiting the Historiography of Techniques and Technology. The fourth Thyssen
Lecture, to be given by Professor Dhruv Raina (Jawaharlal Nehru
University) on 13 May 2024 at the GHIL and on 14 May 2024 at the
University of Warwick. Organized by the GHIL in cooperation with
the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.
Dhruv Raina is a leading philosopher and historian of science andtechnology in India. He is currently Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi, where he teaches the history and philosophyof science. He studied physics at the Indian Institute of Technology,
Mumbai, and received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from the
University of Gothenburg. His research has focused upon the politics
and cultures of scientific knowledge in South Asia both in historicaland contemporary contexts, as well as the history and his­tori­og­raphyof mathematics. Important publications include Needham’s Indian
Network (2015); co-edited with S. Irfan Habib, Domesticating Modern
Science (2004) and Social History of Sciences in Colonial India (2007); andco-edited with Feza Gunnergun, Science between Europe and Asia (2010).
His most recent publication is co-edited with Hans Harder, Disciplines
and Movements: Conversations between India and the German-Speaking
World (2022).

Please consult our website [www.ghil.ac.uk/events/lectures] for the
regular GHIL Lecture Series, which takes place in three series of fivelectures per year.

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To consult the GHIL Library catalogue, visit:https://library.ghil.ac.uk
Links to recent acquisitions of print and e-books can be found on the
top left of the page, under the heading ‘The GHIL and its library’For an up-to-date list of the GHIL’s publications, see our website:www.ghil.ac.uk/publications