480 | DENISE PHILLIPS brief historical period at the center of his analysis, the usefulness of this “deep time” approach is questionable. Sax sometimes offers arguments about centuries-long pathological divergences in German cultural devel- opment, presenting an extreme version of a narrative that (even in less severe forms) has largely lost its persuasiveness for German historians since David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German His- tory (Oxford, 1984).

Methodologically, Sax presents his work as a “paradigm shift” in Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/3/480/1695651/002219502320815406.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 Holocaust studies, offering the study of myth as an escape from the ex- planatory impasse that he believes inevitably to confront specialized his- torical research. His call for attention to metaphor, meaning, and ritual is admirable, but his broad-brush approach to the study of cultural symbols sometimes falls into unhelpful overgeneralizations. In his ªnal chapters, for example, Sax speculates about the causes of the Holocaust and the sources of Germans’ support for Adolf Hitler, attributing both, in large part, to a “cult of death” that permeated all of German culture. This pic- ture differs signiªcantly from the one offered in other recent work on public support for Hitler (much of which has also been sensitive to myth and meaning). In The Hitler Myth (Oxford, 1987), for example, Ian Kershaw found that many of Hitler’s most abhorrent ideological obses- sions did not ªgure prominently in the fabricated public image that se- cured him such widespread popularity in the 1930s. Rudy Koshar’s study of civic life in Marburg, Social Life, Local Politics and Nazism (Cha- pel Hill, 1986), found that the Nazis attracted large portions of the mid- dle classes by using an already widespread rhetoric of apoliticalism. Meanings and symbols are historically speciªc things, and Sax’s book suffers from its lack of attention to the different communicative spaces and constituencies that existed in the Third Reich. Denise Phillips Harvard University

Unjust Seizure: Conºict, Interest, and Authority in an Early Medieval Society. By Warren Brown (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001) 224 pp. $39.95

Unjust Seizure is a study of dispute resolution in eighth- and ninth-cen- tury , a region that extended roughly from the on the Danube south to Salzburg and beyond in modern Austria. The choice of topic responds to an ongoing debate among medievalists about the effectiveness of Carolingian institutions—in particular, the comital court—as mechanisms for securing public order. Since Frankish rule ar- rived in this region only in the late eighth century, the choice of Bavaria means that Brown can study disputing before the Carolingians, observe the effect of the imposition of Carolingian forms of government under , and trace the subsequent history of Carolingian institu- REVIEWS | 481 tions in Bavaria across the reigns of , Charlemagne’s son, and Louis the German, Charlemagne’s grandson. Brown ªnds that in the eighth century, under the Agilolªng dukes of Bavaria, disputes were generally resolved without recourse to the courts. Some conºicts resulted in violence, and others were compro- mised. The outside authorities who did intervene were as likely to be local bishops as dukes. In either case, the bishop’s or duke’s role was that of a mediator rather than a judge. Carolingian rule, beginning in 791, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/3/480/1695651/002219502320815406.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 introduced a new factor in the form of royal missi. These individuals were often members of the same local families that had been prominent under the Agilolªngs, but now they acted with the enhanced authority of a royal or imperial mandate, employing formal judicial proceedings on a regular basis. Archbishop Arn of Salzburg, to whose activities Brown devotes a chapter, appears in records of ªfteen judicial assemblies during this period, acting widely throughout the territories in his capac- ity of missus. The formulaic character of the evidence leaves room for suspicion that judicial decrees often, or usually, ratiªed settlements al- ready reached, rather than imposing new judgments. Other evidence (discussed in Chapter 5) suggests that older patterns of compromise and submission survived alongside the new Carolingian institutions. After the death of Charlemagne, however, the role of royal representatives ap- parently receded; records of court actions become progressively rare during the reigns of Louis the Pious and Louis the German. Brown con- cludes that the ability of Carolingian kings “to inºuence people’s behav- ior, through a set of statelike institutions, was relatively short-lived” (197). Although the book jacket promises a work that draws upon studies of dispute resolution and colonization by anthropologists and political scientists, the author himself makes no such claims. In fact, Unjust Sei- zure is principally devoted to the careful analysis of the various kinds of evidence available—mainly charters but also some capitularies, saint’s lives, and other narrative sources. It is hard to see how another strategy would have been possible; the difªculties of the available evidence are formidable. Not only is most of the documentary evidence drawn from a few large collections, but the rules governing the preparation of docu- ments appear to have shifted over time. It is not always certain whether the facts have changed or the formulas employed to describe them. The author does a good job of linking his ªndings with those who have writ- ten about dispute settlement in the early . Specialists in this area will principally beneªt from this study. Charles Radding Michigan State University