La civilisation mérovingienne d'aprés les sépultures, les textes et le laboratoire by ÉdouardSalinReview by: Lynn White, Jr.The American Historical Review, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Apr., 1959), pp. 616-617Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1905188 .

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6i6 Reviews of Books The questions relating to origins may raise more dispute. For the author the

family was not the basis of the law of the Roman state, and the absolute patria potestas was a secondary development. The minor position of the gentiles in the line of intestate succession refutes the view that a union of gentes was funda- mental for the evolution of the Roman state and the Roman law. The distinction between res mancipi and res nec mancipi was not related to that between real and movable property nor to the value of the objects concerned, but referred to that between rustic property in land, and the things connected with it that were im- portant in a primitive rural economy, and other property of less concern in early times. These conceptions, he maintains, have nothing to do with collective owner- ship or a primitive family sovereignty. The strength of the work lies in its clear presentation of the transitional developments of the third and second centuries before Christ and in the author's position that the nature of these developments resulted concretely from the mentality of the Roman governing class and the social and economic conditions of the time. His sense of historical reality remained vigorous to the end.

Bryn Mawr College T. ROBERT S. BROUGHTON

LA CIVILISATION MLROVINGIENNE D'APRiS LES StPULTURES, LES TEXTES ET LE LABORATOIRE. Volume III, LES TECHNIQUES. By 1douard Salin. (Paris: A. et J. Picard et Cie. I957. PP. 3II. 2,500 fr.)

IN his two earlier volumes (I, Les ide'es et les faits; II, Les sepultures; the fourth will be Les croyances) Salin has contributed greatly to our archaeological knowledge of Gaul between Clovis and Charles Martel. But since medievalists are accustomed to the testimony of graves and texts, this third installment, which emphasizes laboratory analysis of metals, will provide even greater interest, not only because of its results but because of its relative methodological novelty in the historical field. Microscopic photography of the structure of metals and chemical and spectroscopic investigation add new categories of data for our consideration.

That such metallurgical evidence may be important even for the broadest historical problems is indicated by Salin's conclusion that the Germans were better armed than the legions of Rome, despite the fact that Celtic blacksmiths in Roman Noricum were forging excellent laminated longswords for export north- ward. The failure of the Romans, until too late, to grasp-literally-the techni- cal superiority of the new weapons available to them and currently used by some of their barbarian auxiliaries, may have been the decisive blunder of the declining empire. As Salin shows, the armament of the Merovingian period is purely Germanic: the Roman equipment could not stand the competition.

Perhaps in reaction against the habit of modern German scholars to assume that all innovation is Teutonic, Salin seems determined that in metallurgy the credit shall go to the Celts. The evidence, some of which he neglects, will not yet

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Cantor: Church, Kingship, and Lay Investiture 6 I7

permit so definite a judgment. B. P. Lozinski has recently noted in Speculum (XXXIII [July, I958], 420) that the Gothic word for "sword," meki, is derived from a Slavonic tongue. It was therefore presumably picked up from superior swordmakers during that tribe's sojourn in the Black Sea region during the third and fourth centuries. And C. S. Smith of the University of Chicago's Institute for the Study of Metals indicates in Endeavour (XVI [Oct., I957], 200) that in nine- teenth-century Tibet swords were being produced essentially on the Merovingian pattern of forging. Until advanced techniques of analysis are applied to archaeo- logical materials from all Eurasia, we must be cautious in awarding medals for the invention of the improved armament. Whatever the origins of the misnamed "damascened" longsword, the Germans made it their own, and in the period of the eighth to the ninth century, as Salin shows, Siegen and Solingen were manu- facturing them in vast numbers by factory methods (developed in the seventh century to turn out great quantities of cheap jewelry) for sale in the Orient, where they were highly prized.

The book is rich in information entirely new. The skill of Merovingian metallurgists in controlling the zinc content of their brasses within a very nar- row range confirms one's suspicion that Gregory of Tours's dismal record of the Frankish court does not provide the sole possible verdict on that age. Moreover, Salin's discussion of the ballistics of the francisca, which, since it was both a throwing-axe and one used for chopping, arrived at the perfect compromise be- tween two functional forms, is a revelation of ingenuity.

University of California, Los Angeles LYNN WHITE, JR.

CHURCH, KINGSHIP, AND LAY INVESTITURE IN ENGLAND, Io89- II35. By Norman F. Cantor. [Princeton Studies in History, Volume io.] (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press. I958. Pp. xiv, 349. $6.oo.)

IT is stimulating to have the investiture controversy presented as in many ways like other world revolutions that have since then shaped the West's destiny. Here is a painstaking study of what happened in England that casts welcome light on the investiture controversy's Europe-wide stages. Mr. Cantor's thorough coverage of the sources has produced a vivid and at the same time an intelligible story, central in which are the personality of Anselm and the practical necessities that impelled Henry I, unlike his predecessors, to make concessions to the Gregorian reformers.

It seems plain in the context of this story, with the help in particular of a satisfying piece of iconographical argument, that Henry I's concessions in IIOO included with his coronation charter a change of coronation ceremony, from the Anglo-Saxon to the more "Roman" ceremony that certainly was used thereafter in England. What may deserve simultaneous emphasis is how relatively little change this meant, since the earlier ceremony spoke of the king as ab episcopis et

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