Reviews 1047

1502, Machiavelli overtook his superior in influence. But in 1512, when Soderini fell and
the Medici returned, Machiavelli lost all, and Marcello Virgilio, ready and eager to serve
a third set of masters, survived.
Seven years later, Machiavelli reemerged as the "bono et fidatto instrumento" (p. 300)
of the cardinal Giulio de' Medici, the future Pope Clement VII—for, Godman speculates,
Giulio came closer to Machiavelli's ideal of the prince than any other contemporary figure.
In subsequent years, the author of the Discorsi and Istorie fiorentine revealed the traces of
his intellectual formation: the rejection of the humanist formalism that reigned in his youth
(which he had mocked in the Latin titles of his vernacular Principe); the repudiation of the
religious mission of Savonarola; and the adoption of the pragmatism and secularism of
chancery culture, which he had imbued from that master pragmatist Marcello Virgilio, his
superior in that office. Thus Godman roots Machiavelli in the intellectual currents of the
generation before his reappearance from disgrace in the service of the Medici.
Godman is a student of the intellectual circles that surround and protect the powerful.
He uncovers the patronage links that impel thinkers to think and speak as they do. Equally,
he lays bare the networks of friendships and rivalries that knit together and disrupt the
communities of the learned who are at once partners and rivals in the generation of culture.
In performing this task for the late quattrocento and early cinquecento, showing how
humanist culture was transformed by the shifts from Medicean to Savonarolan to repub-
lican to revived Medicean rule, he has entered upon new terrain. His earlier work—notably
his 1987 Poets and Emperors: Prankish Politics and Carolingian Poetry (Oxford)—focuses
on the Carolingian era (as do several edited and translated works), when poets and prose
masters wrote to buttress kings whose hold on power was tenuous and who welcomed the
boosting that intellectuals provide to rulers, while his most recent study—The Silent Mas-
ters: Latin Literature and Its Censors in the High Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 2000) —
deals with the issue of the control of thought in the intervening medieval period. Reaching
forward from the ninth to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Godman reveals forcefully
how unified is the whole of Western neo-Latin culture, even as its patterns vary with
variations in political forms.
Godman's work is conspicuous for its erudition, its extended textual analyses, and its
concise, often epigrammatic style. Of the last I offer two examples among hundreds: in the
course of a discussion of his subject's pragmatic stance: "It was the content that mattered—
neither the style, nor the form—in a society that, by the end of the Quattrocento, had lost
Ficino and destroyed Savonarola" (p. 183); and of the same figure's commentary on Dios-
corides: "Marcello Virgilio reveled in the polysemy that arose from an abundance of plants
and a scarcity of names" (p. 226).
Can one point to faults in this masterly volume? Only these: its audience is limited; the
arguments are often baroque in their winding complexity; and the sprinkling of the text
with two- or three-line passages of untranslated Latin will throw all but the few scores of
specialists who will among themselves delight in its fruits of wit and insight.
MARGARET L. KING, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center,
City University of New York

PETER HEATHER, ed., The Visigoths front the Migration Period to the Seventh Century: An
Ethnographic Perspective. (Studies in Historical Archaeoethnology, 4.) Woodbridge,
Eng., and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, for the Center for Interdisciplinary Re-
search on Social Stress, San Marino (R.S.M.), 1999. Pp. vi, 563; black-and-white figures,
tables, maps, and diagrams. $90.
The fourth in a series organized by anthropologist Giorgio Ausenda, this volume includes
the papers and discussion transcripts from a 1996 symposium held under the auspices of
1048 Reviews
the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Stress in San Marino. Ausenda has
achieved an impressive breadth of participation by well-known historians, philologists, and
archaeologists in this series, and this volume is no exception. The combination of this
scholarly vitality and Ausenda's overall purpose makes this collection both fascinating and
frustrating when considered as a whole. As outlined in the first volume of the series, Au-
senda's aim is to develop an interdisciplinary method, which he calls "Historical Ar-
chaeoethnology," for studying the transition from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages.
In his vision this will make possible the recovery of "the customs and beliefs of the pop-
ulations which settled in Europe at the close of the Western Roman empire" in order to
better "understand the nascent stage of those traits and attitudes which are at the base of
present-day Europe." As Peter Heather puts it in the introduction, the paper topics were
"set with an anthropologically analytical agenda in mind," or, as the subtitle has it, from
an "ethnographic perspective."
Most of the twelve authors responded to Ausenda's agenda by linking their topics, in
one way or another, to the issue of Visigothic (or Gothic) ethnicity and cultural heritage.
For instance, Heather, who usefully outlines current scholarship on ethnicity in the "mi-
gration period," argues that a relatively large freeman military elite acted as the bearers of
a continuity in Gothicness during the key years between 376 and 418. In a broad survey
of the evolution of Visigothic political institutions from the fourth through the seventh
centuries, Pablo Diaz asserts that the Visigothic monarchy retained until the end the "es-
sentially Germanic" characteristic of taking its kings from a "warrior caste" with exclusive
rights to the throne. A number of contributors address the question of ethnicity by describ-
ing Iberian society after the mid-sixth century as fundamentally "mixed." For instance, in
an appeal to philological analysis as an antidote to the Germanist/Romanist debates about
Visigothic law, Isabel Velazquez argues that seventh-century lawmakers intentionally
adapted different legal traditions to serve an ethnically mixed society. Gisella Ripoll Lopez
uses archaeological evidence to propose a sixth-century transformation of personal and
group identity symbols from a Germanic to a Mediterranean orientation, reflecting ethnic
mixing in society at large. Ian Wood's demonstration that patronage had replaced kinship
ties as the key social relationship by the later sixth century also contributes to visions of a
"mixed society." Mayke de Jong argues that Julian of Toledo, in his Historia Wambae,
delineated the boundaries of a new Gothicness for the kingdom's elite—an identity rooted
in the circumstances of contemporary society, which was created by blending various cul-
tural traditions and was defined by ritual purity.
Despite the recurring theme of ethnicity, however, it is clear that calling for an "ethno-
graphic perspective" does not mean the same thing to all scholars of this period. Early-
medieval ethnicity has generated a rich literature over the past two decades, but this volume
vividly illustrates that key concepts—ethnicity, identity, tradition, culture—remain under
contention. This is not particularly surprising, given that ethnography and its attendant
conceptual vocabulary are under contention among cultural anthropologists as well. Nor
is it surprising that these concepts should be particularly problematic in Visigothic studies,
a field still emerging from the shadows of Romanist/Germanist models of cultural heritage
and national history. Ausenda's overall project, with its implicit assumptions about the
Germanic antecedents of modern European traits and attitudes, further contributes to the
conceptual dissensus. Various versions of fundamental questions lurk beneath the surface
of the discussions time and again: Was there ethnic continuity between fourth-century
Goths and the Visigoths of later periods? If continuity did exist, how was it transmitted?
What does a shared "sense of identity" have to do with political or cultural change and
continuity? If ethnic identity is a situational construct, or a historical process, how can it
operate as the bearer of cultural tradition? What do law, or marriage, or personal adorn-
ment, or Christianity have to do with ethnicity? Or, as Ripoll Lopez asks in the discussion
 Reviews 1049
of her paper, just what is identity, anyway? Ultimately, the lack of evidence in key periods—
especially the mid-fifth through mid-sixth centuries—means that most of these questions
will probably prove unanswerable. The most convincing and practical viewpoint—at least
in terms of the late-sixth- and seventh-century kingdom—seems to be that voiced by Wood
and de Jong, who advocate discarding our assumptions (especially those of a "Germanic-
Roman opposition") and looking at the material "on its own terms." Yet posing the ques-
tions is part of the process by which such assumptions are recognized, and therein lies the
excitement of this collection.
Unfortunately, that excitement often turns to frustration for the diligent reader—the
discussions of each paper are much too faithfully rendered here; it appears that they have
been transcribed verbatim. This faithfulness probably does help convey the sense of shared
purpose, intellectual creativity, and mutual inspiration that was clearly a part of the sym-
posium, and the comic relief provided by some of the participants' egos and anecdotes is
sometimes worth the effort. However, the inclusion of every comment also reproduces some
of the truly annoying aspects of scholarly exchange. Most frustrating is the fact that the
discussions are organized around a page-by-page critique of each paper, which encourages
the dissection of detail while undermining concerted considerations of the larger issues
involved. Thus some of the fundamental questions go not only unanswered but unarticu-
lated. These discussion sessions needed either a clear set of organizing principles and an
attentive chair or more careful editing before being published. Nevertheless, because it
provides a kind of living snapshot of a historical field in transition, this collection is worth
reading as a whole.
For those who get their fill of scholarly interchange at conferences, however, a number
of the individual essays make important contributions, and even without the discussions
the papers as a group provide a valuable overview of current Visigothic studies—something
that is too often missing from early medievalists' repertoires. The essays range chronolog-
ically from the earliest years of "Gothic" prehistory to the end of the seventh century. The
coverage of the later era is fullest, providing an introduction to most of the main meth-
odological issues and bodies of evidence involved in studying the Iberian Visigothic king-
dom. Given the relative isolation of Spanish Visigothic scholarship in previous decades,
another important contribution lies in the collection's inclusion (in English translation) of
five younger Spanish scholars—Ripoll Lopez, Diaz, Velazquez, Ana Jimenez Garnica, and
Felix Retamero. As all the participants would no doubt agree, the integration of Visigothic
studies into the mainstream of early-medieval historiography is vital to furthering our
knowledge of this period in European history.
RACHEL L. STOCKING, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

COLUM HOURIHANE, ed., Virtue and Vice: The Personifications in the Index of Christian
Art. (Index of Christian Art Resources, 1.) Princeton, N.J.: Index of Christian Art and
Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, in association with Princeton
University Press, 2000. Pp. xviii, 456; black-and-white frontispiece, black-and-white
figures, and tables. $70 (cloth); $35 (paper).
The major part of this useful book (pp. 151-456) is a catalogue of all the personifications
of virtue and vice in the Index of Christian Art, concisely set forth alphabetically—begin-
ning with the virtues—by medium, current location, type of collection (e.g., museum or
church), acquisition or folio number or specific location (e.g., nave window), date, and
context (i.e., primary subject matter). The system, clearly explained and made eminently
accessible for cross-referencing by lists and an index, gives a clear overview of information
documented in greater detail and with accompanying bibliography in the Index itself. With