Comparative history has its devotees, and indeed Björn Weiler in the past has himself called for more medieval studies in English placing England in a European context. He offers here a comparison between the rebellion of Henry of Germany against his father, Emperor Frederick II, in 1234–35 and that of Earl Richard Marshal against King Henry III of England in 1233–34. His intention is to use these episodes to identify themes in kingship in two disparate monarchies. The fundamental problem with the resulting book is that, rather than being a truly comparative study, it discusses two events that had little in common other than their decade.

The principal value for English readers will be an insight into the regrettably little-known politics of the Staufen empire. Henry was Frederick's eldest son and crowned king of Germany in his father's lifetime. Frustrated in his attempts to rein in the princes and baffled by his father's lack of support, he made an attempt late in 1234 to raise an alliance to seize sole control of Germany, an attempt that failed miserably, leading to the young king's submission to his father in July 1235 and subsequent life imprisonment. He died in 1242. The Marshal rebellion in England arose out of conflicts within the noble factions in Henry III's unstable court and Richard Marshal's perception that he was being isolated and undermined by the king's officers, particularly a group around Bishop Peter des Roches, identified by contemporaries as objectionable foreign advisers. After a fierce but brief conflict, Marshal came to a truce with the king in March 1234, before withdrawing to Ireland, where he was subsequently killed in conflict in an unequal fight with the king's officers.

Weiler's principal contention is that the two conflicts reveal insights into a trait in kingship that he calls “honor.” Royal honor and the honor of the empire was a theme of justification of the actions both of the emperor and his son. The honor of Henry III of England was also a theme of Roger of Wendover, the English chronicler, but here the rebels and the king claimed to be working for it. Magnates, he says, gained their own honor by working for the king’s. Weiler finds other themes less fruitful as comparisons, as for instance the place that objectionable foreign advisers played in imperial politics: the empire was too diverse an entity for the idea to register as it did in an increasingly insular England.

“Honor” is a word that occurs frequently in every genre of medieval source, and it is not surprising to find it here in several contexts. It is useful and instructive to see how Weiler makes use of it. It would perhaps have been more useful had he taken a wider sociological view. In sociological terms honor is one of the ways that the social habitus is imposed on individuals, as a sense of approval of one's actions, which dictates social ambitions. Similarly a feeling of dishonor can force a man into action and occasionally violence to defend his reputation. For instance, on the Marshal rebellion of 1233, Weiler sees the maintenance of the king's honor as the energizing factor, an attempt to compel Henry III to do what his honor demanded. Yet, the concept is far too multivalent to be contained so simply. What of the sense of dishonor that afflicted Richard Marshal when his inability to protect his affinity at court was demonstrated? What of the sense of martial honor that sent him to his death in Ireland against superior odds? For Marshal, other personal imperatives often displaced any concern Wendover says he might have had with the king's honor.

The book continually dissatisfies in its basic positions and reasoning. The chosen rebellions are too diverse to make a satisfactory comparative exercise. Historians of Angevin, England, will naturally leap to ask why the rebellion of the young King Henry against Henry II in 1173–74 was not selected as more likely than the Marshal rising to tell us about notions of rebellion and empire when contrasted with the German experience of 1234–35.

There are other causes for dissatisfaction with this study in its degree of precision in the account of English events. Weiler's treatment does not go far beyond those already published and curiously omits any reference to the most detailed study of the Marshal rebellion (that of Ron Walker, “The Supporters of Richard Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, in the Rebellion of 1233–1234,” Welsh History Review 17 [1994]: 41–66). This leads to some dubious judgments. His contention that the practice of taking hostages was not regarded as tyrannical in England is refuted by several sources on the objectionable conduct of King John, and his assumption that such hostages were restrained physically rather than by fiscal pledges needs examination. His grasp of the personalities involved is not always strong. Richard Siward, a prominent soldier, banneret, and husband of a countess, is characterized as an “undistinguished landholder of limited means” (18). Marshal's enemy, Peter de Rivallis, is invariably called Peter de “Rievaulx” by Weiler, seemingly because the author has simply misunderstood Nicholas Vincent's discussion of his name: “Rendered into English-French translation in the entirely nonsensical form ‘des Rivaux’ perhaps bizarrely by analogy with the Yorkshire abbey of Rievaulx (Rievall)” (Peter des Roches [Cambridge, 1996], 27). Glaring errors of English syntax and spelling are not infrequent: “losing” always appears as “loosing.” The book, as is true for too many nowadays, would have benefited from the sort of editorial proofing that cost-cutting publishers will no longer pay for.

English readers will find this book useful as an introduction to imperial politics at a time when the Angevin and Hohenstaufen dynasties had much to do with each other. But it has too many basic faults of conception to be recommended as an exercise in comparative history.