As Jean-Philippe Genet explains in his very useful introduction, Government and Political Life in England and France, c.1300–c.1500 is the result of a project undertaken in 2002 by a subgroup of the research group France-Îles Britanniques, established at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris in 2000. It came to involve a team of twenty historians—ten English and ten French experts, drawn from leading universities in both countries—to compose a comparative history of what the editors call “government and political life” in the rival kingdoms of France and England from the later thirteenth to the early sixteenth century. The comparisons were to be made not only from the distinct historical and historiographical perspectives of the two countries, but from ten distinct general thematic perspectives, and within each, several more particular ones—social, economic, legal, institutional, religious, and intellectual, as well as political in the narrow sense—each involving a comparative analysis. Almost every aspect of this project was both unprecedented and extremely complex, and its progress was made still more difficult by the fact that none of the contributors was fully fluent in both languages. Nevertheless, the book finally produced, and edited by Christopher Fletcher, Genet, and John Watts, entirely justifies the time and effort put into it and will stand for many years as a monument to collaborative, comparative, and transnational scholarship.

It is impossible to describe adequately, in the compass of a review as brief as this one must be, the richness and complexity of a work with such a large set of themes and such a variety of comparative axes, concerned with two very different kingdoms over a period of rather more than two centuries. As it is one of the duties of a reviewer to indicate what topics are covered and by whom, I begin with a list the topics undertaken by the various authors, in two cases singly and in eight in pairs, and then present a summary of one of them to give an idea of how they are all internally organized.

Chapter 2, by Malcolm Vale, examines royal and princely courts; chapter 3, by Steven Gunn and Armand Jamme, deals with kings, nobles, and military networks; chapter 4, which I discuss below, by Christine Carpenter and Olivier Mattéoni, deals with offices and officers; chapter 5, by David Grummitt and Jean-François Lassalmonie, examines the evolution of royal public finance; chapter 6, by Michelle Bubenicek and Richard Partington, is concerned with matters related to justice, law, and lawyers, whose numbers and importance grew steadily in the period; chapter 7, by Benjamin Thomson and Jacques Verger, deals with the evolving relationship between church and state, and the steady replacement of clerics by university graduates of lay condition; chapter 8, by Fletcher, deals with “political representation” of various types; chapter 9, by Gwilym Dodd and Sophie Petit-Renaud, examines the forms and roles of the petition in political life; chapter 10, by Vincent Challet and Ian Forrest, deals with the political activities of the masses; chapter 11, by Franck Collard and Aude Mairey, examines the political societies defined in the previous chapters as seen and represented by their own members; and chapter 12, by Watts, reflects upon the contributions of the book to the state of our understanding of its themes.

In chapter 4, devoted to the general theme of offices and officers, which I choose as an example, Gunn and Jamme examine first the very different types of officer created in the two kingdoms in the period, on both the central and local levels. They then examine, in numbered sections, the changing scale of office holding in each type of governmental institution, on both levels, in both countries; the provenance, recruitment, and appointment of such officers; the manners in which the different types of office could be acquired, entered, and held, and the general tendencies towards laicization and venality; the various rewards of office; the changing levels of education required of officers; their probity, ability, and adaptability; and, finally, the effects of Aristotelian and Ciceronian philosophy on the conception of office holding in France.

Among the many strengths of the book are the discussions of the historiography of the various themes in both the French and Anglophone traditions—the latter including work done by North American as well as British historians—which, aside from revealing the very different concerns of the two broad schools and the even more divergent ranges of resources on which they have been able to draw, provide concise surveys of the work previously done on the various questions addressed in each chapter. These permit scholars who have worked primarily or exclusively on other themes or in other periods to get a sense of the recent history of research in each, and of the current state of specialist understanding.

Another one of the book's strengths is the inclusion at the end of each chapter of a bibliography listing not only the works cited in it but also the most important studies dealing with its themes in both traditions published since about 1960. In combination with the discussion in the text, the book can therefore serve as a very useful starting point for further investigation of any of its many themes, and the way in which the bibliography is organized will encourage those who do so to think along the thematic and comparative lines the authors have presented—many of them quite novel, and all of them worthy of pursuit.

Given the nature of the work, some degree of unevenness was inevitable, but I found no serious flaws in its conceptualization, organization, or presentation, and my only real quibbles have to do with the maintenance of a number of misleading practices characteristic of modern historiography, especially the use of modernized versions of titles and names, and, in the English context, the use of the late-Tudor distinction between the “nobility” (meaning barons or peers) and the “gentry” (meaning lesser noblemen), which distorts contemporary usage in England and perpetuates a false distinction between the conceptions of noble status in the two kingdoms.