German Historical Institute London Bulletin Volume XXXI, No. 1 May 2009 CONTENTS Article ‘Rose without Thorn, Eagle without Feathers: Nation and Power in Late Medieval England and Germany’ (Len Scales) 3 Book Reviews Rosamond McKitterick, Karl der Große (Rudolf Schieffer) 36 Joachim Ehlers, Heinrich der Löwe: Eine Biographie (Graham A. Loud) 41 Christian Vogel, Das Recht der Templer: Ausgewählte Aspekte des Templerrechts unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Statutenhandschriften aus Paris, Rom, Baltimore und Barcelona (Jonathan Riley-Smith) 44 Dominik Collet, Die Welt in der Stube: Begegnungen mit Außer europa in Kunstkammern der Frühen Neuzeit (Pamela H. Smith) 50 Dirk van Laak, Imperiale Infrastruktur: Deutsche Planungen für eine Erschließung Afrikas, 1880–1960 (Benedikt Stuchtey) 56 Thomas Morlang, Askari und Fitafita: ‘Farbige’ Söldner in den deutschen Kolonien; Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst, Treu bis in den Tod: Von Deutsch-Ostafrika nach Sachenshausen—Eine Lebensgeschichte (Eckard Michels) 63 Karen Hagemann and Jean H. Quataert (eds.), Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiography (Christiane Eifert) 69 (cont.) Contents Boris von Haken, Der ‘Reichsdramaturg’: Rainer Schlösser und die Musiktheater-Politik in der NS-Zeit; Sven Oliver Müller and Jutta Toelle (eds.), Bühnen der Poli tik: Die Oper in europäischen Gesellschaften im 19. und 20. Jahr hundert (Anselm Heinrich) 74 John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: The Deals. The Spies. The Truth; Bernd Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg 1947–1991: Geschichte eines radikalen Zeitalters (Matthias Uhl) 83 Benjamin Ziemann, Katholische Kirche und Sozialwissenschaften 1945–1975 (Thomas Etzemüller) 88 Anja Kruke, Demoskopie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Mei nungs forschung, Parteien und Medien 1949–1990 (Christiane Reinecke) 92 Peter Barker, Marc-Dietrich Ohse, and Dennis Tate (eds.), Views from Abroad: Die DDR aus britischer Perspektive (Jens Gieseke) 97 Conference Reports Imperial Legacies: The Afterlife of Multi-Ethnic Empires in the Twen tieth Century (Jost Achenbach and Helen Schmitt) 105 Knowledge Production and Pedagogy in Colonial India: Mis sion aries, Orientalists, and Reformers in Institutional Contexts (Indra Sengupta) 113 Engineering Society: The Scientization of the Social in Comparative Perspective, 1880–1990 (Jochen F. Mayer) 120 Visual Representations of the Unemployed (Matthias Reiss) 127 Noticeboard 133 Library News Recent Acquisitions 156 2 ARTICLE ROSE WITHOUT THORN, EAGLE WITHOUT FEATHERS: NATION AND POWER IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND AND GERMANY Len Scales I Deo gracias anglia redde pro victoria Owre kynge went forth to Normandy With grace and myght of chyvalry; Ther god for hym wrought mervelusly, Wherfore Englonde may calle and cry. It is hard at times to take the Agincourt Carol entirely seriously. Patriotism of such brash exuberance seems more properly to belong in a brightly lit Laurence Olivier world of mid twentieth-century medievalism than amid the grim and tangled realities of fifteenth- century politics and war. Yet these words, and the hardly less tub- thumping verses which follow, cannot date from long after the bat- tle; and the assumptions upon which they rest merit some reflection.1 God has favoured Henry V and his cause in France; therefore let England give God thanks. The divinely favoured monarch is paired with his Chosen People, those new Israelites the English, in whose This article is based on a seminar given at the GHIL on 30 October 2008. I have benefited greatly from the comments of Professor Michael Prestwich on an earlier draft of this paper. 1 Printed in Anne Curry, The Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations (Woodbridge, 2000), 283–4; and see V. J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1971), 53, 57. 3 Article name he conquered, and who were made glorious through his glory. By the time of Agincourt, God was not only a Lancastrian; he was an Englishman.2 God, king, and people stand, it seems, in perfect har- mony. And the same God who favoured the English had spurned their French foes: against the Chosen are pitted the damned, con- signed to stew in their own disgrace ‘tyl domesday’. It is instructive to contemplate Henry in his hour of glory along- side another European prince of his day: Rupert of Wittelsbach, Count Palatine of the Rhine and ruler of the western Roman Empire, the close of whose reign (1400–10) overlapped with the start of Henry’s own.3 But there, it seems, the parallels end.4 Rupert was a monarch with no resounding triumphs to his name and few dis- cernible marks of divine favour. It was Rupert’s modest, mostly stay- at-home reign that drew from the conciliarist Dietrich von Niem the tart observation that the king had evidently embraced the student’s maxim, that there is no life outside Heidelberg, site of Rupert’s court.5 While the Agincourt poet lauded Henry, a near-contemporary versifier was heaping scorn upon the goeckelman—the ‘travelling trickster’—on the imperial throne, who made his rounds clutching an 2 John W. McKenna, ‘How God Became an Englishman’, in DeLoyd J. Guth and John W. McKenna (eds.), Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G. R. Elton from his American Friends (Cambridge, 1982), 25–43; and see also D. A. L. Morgan, ‘The Banner-Bearer of Christ and Our Lady’s Knight: How God Became an Englishman Revisited’, in Nigel Saul (ed.), St George’s Chapel Windsor in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2005), 51–61. 3 Ernst Schubert, ‘Probleme der Königsherrschaft im spätmittelalterlichen Reich: Das Beispiel Ruprechts von der Pfalz (1400–1410)’, in Reinhard Schneider (ed.), Das spätmittelalterliche Königtum im europäischen Vergleich, Vor träge und Forschungen, 32 (Sigmaringen, 1987), 135–84; and for context, Peter Moraw, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung: Das Reich im späten Mittelalter 1250 bis 1490 (Berlin, 1985), 355–7. 4 For a powerful comparative study of English and German ‘nation-making’ in the earlier Middle Ages, see Timothy Reuter, ‘The Making of England and Germany, 850–1050: Points of Comparison and Difference’, in Alfred P. Smyth (ed.), Medieval Europeans: Studies in Ethnic Identity and National Perspectives in Medieval Europe (London, 1998), 53–70, reprinted in Timothy Reuter, Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge, 2006), 284–99. 5 Cited in Hermann Heimpel, Dietrich von Niem (c.1340–1418) (Münster, 1932), 63. 4 Late Medieval England and Germany ‘empty purse’.6 That empty purse was at the root of Rupert’s humil- iations. It was only with the aid of handouts from the Venetians that the penniless monarch was able to return to Germany from his shamefully ineffectual foray into Italy in 1401.7 There was no raptur- ous homecoming. What, after all, was there for Rupert to come home to? Certainly no teeming capital, like the London through which, late in 1415, Henry was to pass. Throughout the city’s public spaces, the message of the Agincourt Carol was spelt out for all to see. The royal arms were repeatedly displayed, linked to religious motifs praising God for the English victory. Tapestries portrayed the glorious deeds of the king’s ancestors, merging triumphant present with a glorious and continuous, legitimizing royal past.8 At London Bridge, the figure of a giant proffered the keys to the city. Henry entered like another Brutus of Albion, the realm’s primal founder-hero and conqueror of giants.9 Thus might the rich doctrinal resources of an ancient and illustrious monarchy be combined with an extended urban stage-set and vast public to enact a powerfully patriotic religion of royalty.10 Few locations in Europe offered comparable opportunities; and there appear to have been none in Germany. It was not through an abstract deity alone that Henry’s victory had come, however, but with the aid of the English people’s own heavenly intercessor. Just a few months after Agincourt, Archbishop Chichele elevated the feast of St George, ‘special patron and protec- tor of the nation’, to the status of a ‘major double’ in Canterbury province: people were to leave their work and attend divine servic- es.11 George was a saint for the (English) people, dedicatee of numer- 6 ‘O o der goeckelman ist kumen|hat ein lere taschen praht,|das hab wir wol vernumen.’ Cited in Schubert, ‘Probleme der Königsherrschaft’, 178. 7 Heinz Thomas, Deutsche Geschichte des Spätmittelalters 1250–1500 (Stuttgart, 1983), 342–5. 8 Thus the account of Tito Livio Frulovisi, Vita Henrici Quinti, trans. in Curry, Battle of Agincourt, 267. 9 Gesta Henrici Quinti: The Deeds of Henry the Fifth, ed. and trans. Frank Taylor and John S. Roskell (Oxford, 1975), 102–3. 10 According to the Brut, Henry was welcomed into London with a song, ‘Hail, flower of England, knight of Christ of the world’, Curry, Battle of Agincourt, 267. 11 Ibid. 274; Jeremy Catto, ‘Religious Change under Henry V’, in Gerald L. 5 Article ous parish churches, patron of guilds and confraternities, and minia- turized on mass-produced metal badges.12 His image gazed out from altar screen and wall painting across the realm, decked out in the same red and white arms which adorned the banners and surcoats of the king’s armies in France.13 And not only George, but the Virgin Mary, whose ‘knight’ he was, took the English side. Her much-visit- ed shrine at Walsingham helped sustain a patriotically tinged devo- tion which imagined the realm as her ‘dowry’.14 The rose, Marian emblem of purity and election, was projected onto the English and their land—Anglia regna, mundi rosa, in one fourteenth-century poet’s celebrated formulation. Predictably, the ‘flower without thorn’ was contrasted with a debased and treacherous Francia.15 Long-running war lent polemical urgency to such images and encouraged their rep- etition, drawing from English versifiers a strident horticultural tri- umphalism, in which the English rose trounced that other national- ized Marian emblem, the lily of France.16 Harriss (ed.), Henry V: The Practice of Kingship (Oxford, 1985), 107–8; Christopher Allmand, Henry V (London, 1992), 120.