Timothy Reuter died in October 2002, at age fifty-five, having almost completed this collection of papers that now stands as a fitting memorial to an outstandingly talented and creative medievalist. Like so many exceptional historians, Reuter owed his originality largely to a double inheritance: his father was German, he was born and educated in England, and he spent twelve years at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich between teaching appointments at the universities of Exeter and Southampton. That formation engendered a keen sense of the differences between national historiographies and traditions and an almost missionary commitment to improving the mutual acquaintance of the two he knew best.

Reuter was active in both historical communities, and much of his best work, even after his return to England, was published in German and remains unfamiliar among those to whom he wryly referred as his Anglolexic colleagues. In consequence this collection has a value well beyond that of most such collections, for of its twenty-two papers, seven—all among the most substantial—originally appeared in German, and five are published for the first time (indicated below by “G” and “U”, respectively: the number of each paper in the volume is also noted). And these are not merely preliminary or epiphenomenal studies, hors d’oeuvres of unwritten books. An intellectual fastidiousness that allowed nothing to be glossed over and scrupulous attention to every dimension of historical methodology and of source criticism are consistently deployed even in relatively slighter pieces like the review article on “Pre-Gregorian Mentalities” (no. 5), the powerful intervention in the Past and Present debate on the “Feudal Revolution” (no. 4), and “Whose Race, Whose Ethnicity?” (no. 6, U), with its gentle implication that the latter concept amounts to rather less than “Recent Medievalists’ Discussion” has made of it. “The Insecurity of Travel in the Early and High Middle Ages: Criminals, Victims and Their Medieval and Modern Observers” (no. 3, G) shows how comment on those matters is rhetorical, not sociological, and illustrates contemporary evaluation of rulers rather than actual conditions. The case for a broad, comparativist approach is made implicitly and by example throughout, but explicitly and cogently in the Southampton inaugural lecture (no. 1, U) from which this collection takes its title and in “Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?” (no. 2), which insist upon the insufficiency of national perspectives and, in the context of world history, the pertinence and urgency of continuing dialogue between past and present.

Reuter's preoccupation with how political communities worked shaped “The End of Carolingian Military Expansion” (no. 14) and “Plunder and Tribute in the Carolingian Empire” (no. 13), demonstrating the implications of the dependence of political power on the profits of aggressive warfare. In the more recent papers it became a focus on the dynamics of a world in which orality and nonverbal communication were at least as important as the written. That concern is systematically pursued through the technique of “thick description”—Geertz's term is regularly used and his writings frequently acknowledged—and the insights that come with it into the nature and uses of ritual, ceremony, and gesture. Thus, in “Contextualising Canossa” (no. 9, U) we see that Gregory VII needed a resolution of their dispute just as urgently as did Henry IV, and close examination of “symbolic acts in the Becket dispute” (no. 10, G) brings out the critical importance, overlooked by Knowles and Barlow, among others, of Henry II's public penance before the martyr's tomb at Canterbury, in July 1174.

The new and translated papers focus especially on two large, complex, and inextricably interwoven themes, both classically central in the historiography of medieval Europe, and greatly expand what Reuter had published in English. “Assembly Politics in Western Europe from the Eighth Century to the Twelfth” (no. 11), on the nature of the political community of the early Middle Ages and its persistence well into the twelfth century at least, now combines with “Nobles and Others: The Social and Cultural Expression of Power Relations in the Middle Ages” (no. 7, G), “Ottonian Ruler Representation” (no. 8, G), “Sex, Lies and Oath-Helpers: The Trial of Queen Uota” (no. 12, G), “Kings, Nobles and Others” (no. 17, G), and “Peace-Breaking, Feud, Rebellion, Resistance: Violence and Peace in the Politics of the Salian Era” (no. 19, G) to provide a comprehensive examination of the culture and social dynamics of the warrior aristocracy of Europe between the ninth and twelfth centuries, and hence the richest and subtlest account of the nature and conditions of rulership known to this reviewer.

A regular conclusion of these discussions, as from Reuter's classic reappraisal of “The ‘Imperial Church System’ of the Ottonian and Salian Rulers” (no. 18), is that when it is examined rather than assumed, the difference between Germany and other parts of Europe diminishes. This leads ineluctably to the central question, directly addressed in “The Medieval German Sonderweg? The Empire and Its Rulers in the High Middle Ages” (no. 20). Why did German rulers “fail” to develop the centralized systems of taxation, criminal justice, and so on that elsewhere foreshadowed the modern state? Reuter was, of course, not the first to observe that it is a bad question, borne of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the nation-state and an excessively narrow conception of political history—the shallowness of the conventional formulation of questions about the personality and abilities of rulers is effectively brought out in “The Ottonians and Carolingian Tradition” (no. 15, G). But the sharpness of his criticism and the rich texture woven by his method bring new and important answers. “The Making of England and Germany, 850–1050” (no. 16) and “Kings, Nobles and Others” (no. 17, G) show how the contrast between the wealth of administrative records on the one side and the chronicles on the other, and the differences between the interests and perspectives of the respective chroniclers, reflect profound differences in social structure and aristocratic culture as well as in the position of the monarchy. In the concluding essays “Techniques of Rulership in the Age of Frederick Barbarossa” (no. 21, U) and “The Emergence of Premodern Forms of Statehood in the Central Middle Ages” (no. 22, G), those perspectives are harnessed to another insight. For the rulers of eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe—monarchs, princes, and magnates alike—the institutions that have so dominated modern historiography were of secondary importance at best. The raising of taxes was not an end in itself, but a means to the end of securing the resources necessary for the display, generosity, and warfare that the conduct of noble life demanded. If the German emperors did not develop centralized institutions, Reuter suggests, it was largely because they did not need to: it seems that they always disposed (during the period under discussion here) of ample means. From this perspective national and regional differences were relatively insignificant: “the great assemblies, sittings of the royal court, festal coronations and the conduct of ‘international relations’ looked astonishingly similar right across Europe in the central Middle Ages” (453–54). That does not mean that the differences are unimportant, but it does show why every medievalist, irrespective of regional specialism, needs to read and reread this absorbing collection.