Michael Jones has established himself, even among Francophone historians, as an authority on the development of the Breton state and its impact on society. He started with Ducal Brittany, 1364–1399 (Oxford, 1970), and more recently his Recueil des actes de Charles de Blois et de Jenne de Penthèvre, 1341–1364 (Rennes, 1996) proved if nothing else that he knows his way around the archival documentation.

His skills and erudition are amply displayed in Between France and Germany. As is typical of a Variorum reprint edition, it consists of twelve papers and previously published articles produced between 1986 and 2000. In some ways it is a sequel to his sixteen articles reprinted in The Creation of Brittany: A Late Medieval State (1988). Jones himself succinctly ticks off the defects of such reprint volumes: unevenness of treatment, gaps in continuity, and repetition of observations and explanations, to which we may add different, and sometimes repellent, type fonts.

Yet, this is a useful book whose graceful trajectory and lucid prose overcome the gravity of these defects. The greatest value of the Variorum approach is the gathering of hard to find essays by one expert in one volume, even translating some into English, although three are as originally published in French. The unifying theme, if there is one, is the nobility of Brittany, caught literally between England and France, tying to hold on to their distinctive Breton world, a nascent nation-state, but inevitably giving in to the gravitational pull of the kingdom of France. Jones is well aware of the distortion in the modern historiography of the medieval period caused by frustrated nationalism that has cut both ways: a pining for an independent Brittany while loving a unified France. He has some interesting observations on Arthur de la Borderie in this respect.

In “Ancenis, Froissart and the Beginnings of the War of Succession in Brittany,” Jones turns his attention to what he calls “Froissart's distorting mirror,” using more workaday records to question the accuracy of what is a great work of art, Froissart's Chroniques, on the events of the summer 1341. While taking great personal delight in this extraordinary writer, he nevertheless concludes that “Froissart's account is seriously flawed (if not a complete travesty),” so that “La Borderie was wrong to defend him so stubbornly and … Plaine's highly critical approach should be the one we adopt” (11). This is typical of Jones: highly critical and exacting in his method, but capable of sitting back and enjoying a good story about interesting people.

This is virtually a work of prosopography, consisting of detailed studies of the lives of significant personages within Breton society. In these carefully controlled studies Jones finds much that is both interesting and illuminating to our picture of a Brittany struggling to emerge as an independent state. His writing is clear and surprisingly vivid for such a scholarly work on an esoteric subject. The first essay, “Tradition, History and the French: A Case of Tunnel Vision” (Jones's 1993 inaugural lecture at the University of Nottingham), is a particularly charming romp through French history. It is rare in a Variorum volume to read anything so personal that leaves the reader with a clear sense of the author's own personality. His second article, “The Capetians and Brittany,” gives an overview of Brittany in the late Middle Ages that almost by itself makes the steep price of the volume worthwhile. In all articles the virtues of Jones's work is evident: meticulous scholarship, precision, passion, and a bit of humor.

Jones always shows an appreciation of the simple humanity of the figures he is investigating. This is, perhaps, the single most salutary lesson in Jones's accumulated work. It is easy for prosopographical studies to reduce individuals to bits of data for a larger, impersonal picture of society. Jones never does this, whether he is studying the likes of Jeanne of Navarre, duchess of Brittany (1386–1402) and queen of England (1403–13), or an obscure military figure such as the English captain Sir John de Hardeshull (1291–1369). Along the way Jones stops to notice the little details that connect us to these dead objects of our scrutiny: when Jeanne of Navarre became engaged to King Henry of England he spoke the words “I plight thee my troth,” recorded for the first time in English, while after his first military campaign in 1312 Sir John was exempted from court cases as long as he was held captives by Scottish rebels. And the duke of Brittany liked haricots verts. It is an approach to be noted and emulated by would be prosopographers.