The Salian Century: Main Currents in an Age of Transition (review)

REVIEWS Stefan Weinfurter, The Salian Century: Main Currents in an Age of Transition, trans. Barbara M. Bowlus, foreword by Charles R. Bowlus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1999) ix + 233 pp. Originally published as Herrschaft und Reich der Salier: Grundlinien einer Umbruchzeit (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Ver- lag 1992). When it appeared in 1992, Stefan Weinfurter’s Herrschaft und Reich der Salier was quickly recognized as one of the most insightful and eminently readable studies of the German monarchy to appear in many years. Barbara Bowlus’s new English translation makes this book, and the important historiographical arguments which underlie it, accessible for the first time to students and researchers who have had to rely upon translations of long-superseded work if they wished to read original German scholarship. Bowlus captures Weinfurter’s pragmatic German prose well, and the book remains concise and well presented, including the maps and illustrations that made the original particularly useful. Professor Charles Bowlus, a historian of early medieval Germany, provides an introductory essay that places The Salian Century in its historiographical context and explains the ways in which it challenges a number of older, but still prevalent, theories about the place of the Salian dynasty in German medieval history. On a basic level, The Salian Century is construed as a diachronic Until now, the most widely-known monograph on the Salian period by a German scholar in English was Ralph Bennett’s translation of Karl Hampe’s venerable 1909 classic Germany under the Salian and Hohenstaufen Emperors (Oxford 1973). Horst Fuhrmann’s more recent Germany in the High Middle Ages 1050–1200, trans. Timothy Reuter (Cambridge 1986) and Alfred Haverkamp’s, Medieval Germany 1056–1273, trans. H. Braun and R. Mortimer (Oxford, 1988) remain two well-received standards, but do not deviate substantially from the essential narrative of politico-religious history laid down by Hampe. A good deal of cutting-edge work on medieval Germany is being done by British scholars like Benjamin Arnold and Timothy Reuter—both proteges of the late German-born Oxford don Karl Leyser. See especially Reuter’s Germany in the Early Middle Ages (New York 1991) and Arnold’s Medieval Germany 500–1300. A Political Interpretation (Toronto 1997). A companion volume on the High Middle Ages by Reuter is forthcoming. Recent synthesizing surveys of the German Middle Ages by native schol- ars conversant with contemporary methods and historiographical debates like Hagen Keller, Friedrich Prinz, and Johannes Fried remain untranslated, making the appearance of Weinfurter’s work here all the more significant. German historiography’s tortuous relationship with its (especially medieval) impe- rial past is discussed with much insight by Timothy Reuter, “The Medieval German Son- derweg? The Empire and its Rulers in the High Middle Ages” in Kings and Kingship in

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