Feud practices in medieval Europe have been traditionally viewed by historians as the anarchic behavior of undisciplined nobles, symptomatic of a primitive society with an underdeveloped state. Since the 1970s, however, using analytical tools borrowed from anthropology, historians have formulated a new and more positive perception of feuding as an institution in its own right, in which participants followed a tightly defined set of “rules of the game.” This, it is argued, provided legitimation for and limitations on acts of vengeance, so that the practice actually contributed to social stability. More recent work has retained this more positive interpretation but has sought to modify and expand the originally rather narrow definition of feud, to the point that some historians now prefer not to use the term “feud” at all. This valuable collection of essays revisits the questions raised by these historiographical developments and, at the same time as it highlights the difficulties with viewing “feud” as a monolithic practice, also reveals correspondences between expressions of vengeance in a number of different medieval contexts.

Variety is the keynote of the essays in this lively volume, as medieval vengeance is examined from diverse angles. Máire Johnson examines retributive activity by saints in Irish hagiography, noting how such apparent vindictiveness was legitimated in Irish culture not only by Old Testament parallels but also by the values and penal system of native Irish law. Along the way, she also examines possible differences between male and female vengeance. Jackson Armstrong analyzes a complex dispute between two branches of a leading Anglo-Scottish border family in the fifteenth century and shows how other local families and nobles could be drawn into such a quarrel, as conflicts—and their resolution—became tied up with regional and even national power struggles. Francis Soyer painstakingly reconstructs from fragmentary evidence a feud within the Muslim community of Évora in fifteenth-century Portugal, highlighting the issue of violence between coreligionists in this period. Dominique Barthélemy and Thomas Roche both examine the portrayal of vengeance by chroniclers: Barthélemy analyzes Flodoard and Richer of Rheims in tenth-century France, and Roche looks at Orderic Vitalis in the twelfth century. Roche also examines the role of emotion in medieval vengeance, a recurrent theme in this volume. He advocates an approach of “pragmatic historical anthropology,” which neither dismisses reported emotions as the irrational outbursts of a more primitive era nor feels bound to take them at face value as evidence of what protagonists actually felt and thought. Rather, the expression of emotions (both in real life and in chroniclers' literary reconstructions) is analyzed as part of a “broader social code” (126) that governed political communication in the Middle Ages. This approach, with its echoes of the work of the “Cambridge school” of political thought on the early modern period, thus helpfully locates vengeance in the context of wider medieval political culture. Marina Brownlee's Foucauldian analysis of the “performative efficacy of discourse” (138) in the sixteenth-century Historie of Aurelio and Isabell, a gruesome tale of male versus female vengeance, is less easily comprehensible to the nonspecialist but makes a valuable point about the relationship between verbal and physical violence and the power of words to escalate confrontations. Paul Hyams's conceptually important article (curiously positioned as the penultimate chapter) then asks, “Was there really such thing as feud in the High Middle Ages?” and examines some of the aforementioned problems of definition encountered by historians of “feud,” an issue already implicit in several other essays. Hyams argues for the continued usefulness of the terminology of “feud” to describe patterns of reciprocal vengeance in the Middle Ages. However, Hyams uses the term to denote not a rigid and predictable set of behaviors but, rather, a looser “repertoire” (a phrase helpfully borrowed from the political scientist Charles Tilly) of inherited patterns of behavior and language, which encompassed a range of possible options in response to a perceived wrong. Nonetheless, he argues, there existed across medieval Europe a broad “feud ethos,” which included shared notions of the norms and limits of proper behavior within “a known pattern of tit-for-tat vengeance” (173). Finally, Susanna Throop returns to the theme of emotion, with a detailed analysis of how the notion of vengeance emerged as a motivation and justification for crusading in the twelfth century. In particular, the idea developed in connection with the Latin concept of zelus, which came to include a range of related emotional states compatible with notions of vengeance, including love, jealousy, desire for justice, and a righteous anger.

As Hyams notes in his afterword, to offer a unified summary of such a varied collection of studies of how medieval people articulated, conceptualized, and attempted to execute vengeance risks looking awkward and artificial. Nonetheless, a number of themes can be identified. The definition of “feud” looks to be an issue that will not quickly be resolved, despite the careful attempts of several of the volume's authors to analyze the numerous “feud” words available to contemporaries in the Middle Ages. The authors also highlight some of the difficulties with attempting to reconstruct medieval vengeance out of the prejudices and silences of the available sources—while themselves handling a rich variety of source material with appropriate subtlety. Newer scholarship on the history of gesture and emotion, in particular, has opened up fresh ways to analyze feud, while the relationship between public authority and private justice in this period is inevitably a recurrent and important theme in a study of vengeance. Hyams ends his chapter by commenting on the “multivalence” of vengeance processes in the Middle Ages, noting that “no single approach will capture everything that is important about them” (175). This volume, with its diversity of scholarly approaches, sources, and contexts, will certainly help to elucidate further this blend of complexity and coherence that lay behind processes of feud and vengeance in the Middle Ages.