Chartres à la fin du Moyen Age by Claudine BillotReview by: John Bell Hennenman, Jr.The American Historical Review, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Oct., 1989), p. 1082Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1906641 .

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1082 Reviews of Books

and their political role in the thirteenth century. While the subordination of Beauvais and Noyon to Philip Augustus in one sense marked their decline, it also opened a "second age" of episcopal lordship in which the protection and prestige of royal affiliation in many respects outweighed the insecurities of the earlier age of independence.

THEODORE EVERGATES

Western Maryland College

CLAUDINE BILLOT. Chartres a la fin du Moyen Age. (Civilisation et societes, number 76.) Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. 1987. Pp. 360. 220 fr.

This volume is in some respects more a work of geography than of history. The author has exam- ined an impressive array of source materials that covers virtually every aspect of human life at Chartres in the late Middle Ages. Yet these mate- rials are too scattered to permit thorough treat- ment of any single aspect of medieval life as it evolved through time. The documents provide information from various years during the four- teenth and fifteenth centuries without permitting a clear sense of chronological development.

To deal with the problem presented by her sources, Claudine Billot has arranged her volume topically. The first part contains two chapters entitled "Time" and "Space." The second part has three chapters-"The Administrative Function," "The Religious Function," and "The Economic Function." A final section, on people, has chapters entitled "The Family," "Mobility," and "The Life of the Mind." Had her sources been more concen- trated and less scattered over time, Billot might have given us one of those "total" histories of a region that have done so much to illuminate our understanding of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Instead, she has had to be content with a portrait of a society during the late Middle Ages or, to use a more accurate metaphor, an album full of snapshots taken at different moments between 1300 and 1500.

If these two centuries had been a period of little or very gradual change, the strategy might have been valid, but, because the period was notable for major upheavals, the reader is frustrated by Bil- lot's inability, in most cases, to document changes at Chartres in a way that permits comparison with findings for other regions in the same period. The scholarly apparatus is also disappointing. There are no notes and only occasional references in parentheses in the text or accompanying a chart. The bibliography gives an impressive list of pub- lished and unpublished sources but only a selec- tive list of secondary works that omits some titles

that Billot surely consulted and others that she ought to have.

These deficiencies make the book rather hard going. It contains a good deal of interesting and useful information, but scholars would have found it more useful if this information had received specific documentation in notes. The principal theme to emerge is that this town's great days were behind it. Once an important religious, artistic, and intellectual center and the capital of a county, Chartres had become primarily a market town in a grain-exporting region, an important part of the trade route between Orleans and Rouen except for the period of Burgundian and English occupation (1417-32) when the town was in a war zone and cut off from its traditional economic partners.

This is a useful book in some respects, but it will not find a place among the great works of regional social history produced in France over the past generation.

JOHN BELL HENNEMAN, JR.

Princeton University

RICHARD C. TREXLER. The Christian at Prayer: An Illustrated Prayer Manual Attributed to Peter the Chanter (d. 1197). (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, number 44.) Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Stud- ies. 1987. Pp. 260. $25.00.

Peter the Chanter (fl. 1170-97), influential scholar and theologian in the Paris schools and author of a summa on the sacraments and the more widely known Verbum abbreviatum, also wrote a work called De penitentia et partibus eius. One book of this larger work is the little-known De oratione et specie- bus illius, which describes the seven postures for praying and is essentially an instruction manual for prayer in words and pictures. Richard C. Trexler (with frequent and gracious acknowledg- ment to John Baldwin's magisterial study of Peter the Chanter published in 1970) here discusses the De penitentia as a whole and the verbal and pictorial texts of De oratione in particular. Trexler's interest in devotional behavior is evident in this most interesting contribution to our understanding of the medieval view of prayer.

Trexler divides his study into three parts. In part 1, there is an analysis of the textual and illustrated contents of the book on prayer and an account of the manuscript tradition of the De penitentia as a whole and the relationship of the De oratione to the larger work. Part 2 consists of the pictures (pp. 133-64) and part 3, the edition of this previously unedited text, the De oratione (see pp. 171-234), based on MS. Stift Klosterneuburg

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