Introdução à História da Agricultura em Portugal: A Questão Cerealífera Durante a Idade Médiaby A. H. de Oliveira MarquesReview by: H. B. Johnson, Jr.The American Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 1 (Oct., 1969), pp. 103-104Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1841944 .

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Medieval 103

EXCOMMUNICATION AND THE SECULAR ARM IN MEDIEVAL ENG- LAND: A STUDY IN LEGAL PROCEDURE FROM THE THIRTEENTH TO THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. By F. Donald Logan. [Studies and Texts, Number i5.] (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. I968. PP. 239.

$8.oo.)

THIS careful and helpful book guides its reader through the process of excom- munication, signification, seizure by the secular arm, and absolution in late medieval England. It casts the information that it has culled from documentary evidence- particularly its 7,600 significations, but much else besides-against statements of the law and the canonists. In passing, it provides helpful discussions of a variety of per- tinent and tangential things: contumacy, prosecution of heresy, jails, the delivery of writs, the intricacies of chancery procedure, and payments of subsidies. As a whole, it is a learned gloss to one aspect of the peaceful cooperation between "church" and "state." It displays both the advantages and the disadvantages of a controlled, rather narrow (except chronologically), and linear view of the historian's job.

University of California, Berkeley ROBERT BRENTANO

INTRODUQAO A HISTORIA DA AGRICULTURA EM PORTUGAL: A QUES- TAO CEREALIFERA DURANTE A IDADE MtDIA. By A. H. de Oliveira Mar- ques. [A marcha da humanidade. Section, Para a historia de Portugal e Brasil, Number i.] (2d ed.; Lisbon: Edis6es Cosmos. I968. PP. 350.)

COMPLETED some eight years ago as a candidate's thesis for the post of Professor extraordinario at the University of Lisbon, Oliveira Marques' pioneering survey of the Portuguese agrarian scene in the later Middle Ages has finally been put before the public in this "second" edition after a series of lamentable vicissitudes to which the author discreetly alludes in his "Final Note."

But far better late than never. Now, for the first time, Iberian medievalists have something to "take hold of" in an area heretofore almost completely obscure. The author "introduces" us to a rich variety of matters concerned with medieval Portuguese agriculture-from climate and soil types to methods of baking and milling-as well as telling us a bit about such varied matters as agrarian techniques, property structures, yield ratios, grain prices, trade, storage, and many others. In fact, so many subjects are mentioned that the book might easily be criticized as super- ficial-a succession of hors d'oeuvres rather than a meal-were it not that the author has specifically, and modestly, called it an "introduction" to the subject and happily acknowledged, at every step of the way, both the enormous lack of previous studies and the need for additional ones.

Apart from possible dissent over certain minor details, such as Marques' ex- planation of the cabefa do casal, his remark that the herdade and the casal "seem to correspond, 'grosso modo,'" and his curiously vague reference to the quinta, there is a more important interpretive question involving the book's basic thesis: that during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Portugal was fated, because of its geographic conditions and special agrarian structure, to be chronically deficient in cereals and unable to feed its population from internal production. To prove his thesis, the author has amassed a large amount of valuable and interesting evidence indicating the steady importation of grain from as early as I282 onward.

But are not these imports (about which there can be no doubt) open to a rather

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104 Reviews of Books

different, less geographically determinist, interpretation? Was not the repeated recourse to foreign grain (aside from the admitted years of crisis that Marques has hunted down so well) indicative, not of any necessary deficiency but rather of certain general transformations in the European economy during the later Middle Ages? For various reasons grain production in Portugal was relatively costly. With sea transport relatively cheap, it was economically more sensible to supply centers of population (mainly seaports, like Lisbon, Oporto, and others) from areas of low cost production (Madeira and the Baltic, among others), and either abandon the marginal lands in the interior no longer needed for subsistence production or convert them to more profitable uses, such as cattle pasture or winegrowing.

Imports of cereals into Portugal before about 1350 might reasonably be attributed to an absolute incapacity to feed a population too numerous for the country's resources as then exploited. But after the plague years, with the consequent decline in the population, continued Portuguese grain imports, it seems to me, must be explained rather by the economics of relative advantage and the growing specialization and economic integration of the various regions of Europe. Thus, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it was uneconomic for Portugal to raise all of its own grain, not, as Marques implies, impossible.

Yale University H. B. JOHNSON, JR.

FROM PETRARCH TO LEONARDO BRUNI: STUDIES IN HUMANISTIC AND POLITICAL LITERATURE. By Hans Baron. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the Newberry Library. I968. Pp. Vii, 269. $I2.00.)

IN this scholarly little volume Hans Baron undertakes a rigorous structural analysis of a group of texts ranging from Petrarch's Secretum through Leonardo Bruni's Laudatio Florentinae urbis, his two Dialogi ad Petrum Histrum, and Gregorio Dati's Istoria di Firenze to a fifteenth-century Venetian chronicle and a humanist copy of Aulus Gellius, the latter two being based on manuscripts in the Newberry Library. An appendix presents, with full scholarly apparatus, the first printed edition of Bruni's Laudatio. Throughout his discussion of the texts Baron emphasizes the importance of determining the date of their original composition as well as of any later revisions. "Unless we know exactly," he writes, "when, where and under what conditions a work was written, and whether it was composed all of a piece or emerged little by little, we cannot judge the author's intention, the seriousness or merely oratorical character of his statements, or the relation of his work to the actual life of the time."

That such knowledge is especially important for the relating of Petrarch's writings to the circumstances of his life, owing to his habit of keeping them in his desk for years and adding to or altering them at intervals, is amply demonstrated in the first two lengthy chapters. Here Baron shows how the identification of later revisions in the Sectetum tends to remove what would seem to be apparent contradictions in Petrarch's thought if the whole work were regarded as having been written at one specific moment in his career. In the three central chapters of the book, Baron applies the same method of structural analysis to the dating of Bruni's Laudatio and Dialogi and Dati's Istoria. This is familiar ground that he has already covered in the two books on Florentine civic humanism in the early quattrocento published in I955. The present review of the evidence meets on their own ground those recent critics of his thesis who tend to stress the rhetorical character of humanist writing to the practical ex-

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