Meant as a teaching text, Violence in Medieval Europe may fill a hole in the syllabi of undergraduate seminars devoted to violence and dispute resolution in the Middle Ages. The book traces the changing norms of violence from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries, though it narrows its field of vision substantially by looking only at France (including Flanders), Germany, and England. After an introductory chapter, the book's narrative trajectory follows a familiar storyline: the Merovingian feuding of chapter two gives way to Charlemagne's efforts to stake “a claim to a royal monopoly on legitimate violence” (p. 76) in chapter three. Chapter four argues that the Peace of God developed to restrain a new kind of lordship “based . . . on naked violence loosed from the chains of royal restraint” (p. 100). Chapter five describes how the ritual submission of the deditio helped to channel and resolve disputes between Ottonian elites and their kings. Chapters six through eight follow the spread of law and the strengthening of princely power in Flanders, England, and Saxony, before returning to France in chapter nine, by the end of which “The private urge to violence was well on its way to being co-opted by the institutions of public justice” (p. 283). These topics are discussed through case studies devoted to such texts as Gregory of Tours's History of the Franks, Galbert of Bruges's account of the murder of Charles the Good, and the Sachsenspiegel.

The case studies are the book's greatest pedagogical and analytical strengths. They are engagingly written, and they draw primarily on texts that are easily available in English translation, frequently online (URLs are given where available). By focusing on case studies, Brown is able to treat his subject with greater nuance than his overarching concern with an emergent (or reemergent) royal monopoly on legitimate violence would otherwise allow. The chapter on violence and the law in twelfth-century England is particularly good in this respect: through a selection of often amusing court cases, Brown shows that the nascent common law and the king's justice were not simply imposed upon people from above, but were adapted by them for their own ends. Here we see in individual detail how “the ancient dance of vengeance with settlement continued, with the royal courts now one of the tools available to help bring about settlement” (p. 213).

Brown's evident awareness that the law and royal authority were instruments that people used not just to resolve their disputes but also to pursue them, however, is never really reconciled with the book's efforts to trace the rise of a Weberian-style state monopoly on violence. This will surely be the primary criticism of the book. Brown credits the origins of this monopoly to Charlemagne, whose ideas were revived in the centuries after the disintegration of the Carolingian empire. (Although Brown never explains the lines of transmission or the roots of the ideas articulated in the capitularies, he repeatedly characterizes efforts to assert authority over violence in later centuries as “neo-Carolingian”). Yet, it is quite clear from Brown's evidence that neither in Charlemagne's empire, nor in any subsequent medieval polity did statist claims about the control of violence manage to monopolize even so much as the discourse of legitimacy and violence. Such claims were always in competition with other ideas and ideologies of power, violence, and status. Froissart's valorization of chivalric violence (chapter nine) and the almost total absence of any reference to the Sachsenspiegel law code in judicial documents (pp. 372–73) are two indications of just how limited the effect of statist normative ideas was even at the very end of the period. Brown is right in his refusal throughout the book to dismiss references to violence as just a rhetorical strategy of the sources, but he might also have considered how much royal claims to regulate violence were themselves just a rhetorical strategy rather than a reflection of the realities of power.

Again, it seems that at times Brown is aware of this, so why the book climaxes with the submission of private violence to public institutions is a bit puzzling. I suspect it has partly to do with the book's purpose as a textbook: it is useful to give students a master narrative, and in some ways the rise of the state story line works well, even if, as we know from the work of early modernists such as Hillay Zmora and Stuart Carroll (both of whom appear in the bibliography), quite a lot of “private violence” remained outside the purview of “public institutions”—and legitimately so in many eyes—well beyond the Middle Ages. But it also has to do with the way that medieval historiography on violence has developed over the past two decades into a camp that privileges statist and institutional developments and another that privileges developments outside or in the absence of royal authority. Paul Hyams (on whose scholarship much of the excellent chapter seven rests), Claude Gauvard, and Daniel Lord Smail (the latter two both absent from the bibliography) are among the few who instead show how ostensibly competing norms and practices of violence often fruitfully coexisted, with patterns of behavior and thought changing kaleidoscopically as various players sought to advance their individual interests. Smail and Gauvard are both late medievalists, but Brown's case studies show that the important story here is not the gradual supersession of violence by law but the remarkably durable if ever changing ways in which violence and law were used together in pursuit of disputes throughout the Middle Ages.

This is a stimulating book, and it will work well in a teaching context. The case studies will pique student interest, and the analysis will provoke classroom discussion. I suspect, though, that faculty will often find themselves teaching against it rather than to it.