This document summarizes a book review of "Germany Under the Salian and Hohenstaufen Emperors" by Karl Hampe, translated by Ralph Bennett. The review provides background on Hampe and his classic account of medieval German history. While some of Hampe's conclusions have been modified by newer research, his main arguments have been confirmed. The reviewer praises Bennett's introduction for analyzing Hampe's work in light of modern scholarship. However, he notes some shortcomings like a lack of footnotes and bibliography. Overall, the reviewer recommends the book as a useful resource for those teaching courses on German, medieval, or European history.
This document summarizes a book review of "Germany Under the Salian and Hohenstaufen Emperors" by Karl Hampe, translated by Ralph Bennett. The review provides background on Hampe and his classic account of medieval German history. While some of Hampe's conclusions have been modified by newer research, his main arguments have been confirmed. The reviewer praises Bennett's introduction for analyzing Hampe's work in light of modern scholarship. However, he notes some shortcomings like a lack of footnotes and bibliography. Overall, the reviewer recommends the book as a useful resource for those teaching courses on German, medieval, or European history.
This document summarizes a book review of "Germany Under the Salian and Hohenstaufen Emperors" by Karl Hampe, translated by Ralph Bennett. The review provides background on Hampe and his classic account of medieval German history. While some of Hampe's conclusions have been modified by newer research, his main arguments have been confirmed. The reviewer praises Bennett's introduction for analyzing Hampe's work in light of modern scholarship. However, he notes some shortcomings like a lack of footnotes and bibliography. Overall, the reviewer recommends the book as a useful resource for those teaching courses on German, medieval, or European history.
This document summarizes a book review of "Germany Under the Salian and Hohenstaufen Emperors" by Karl Hampe, translated by Ralph Bennett. The review provides background on Hampe and his classic account of medieval German history. While some of Hampe's conclusions have been modified by newer research, his main arguments have been confirmed. The reviewer praises Bennett's introduction for analyzing Hampe's work in light of modern scholarship. However, he notes some shortcomings like a lack of footnotes and bibliography. Overall, the reviewer recommends the book as a useful resource for those teaching courses on German, medieval, or European history.
Germany under the Salian and Hohenstaufen Emperors by Karl Hampe; Ralph Bennett Review by: John B. Freed The History Teacher, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Aug., 1975), pp. 678-679 Published by: Society for History Education Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/492711 . Accessed: 22/06/2014 05:25
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 678 BOOK REVIEWS
"Mostly this book is about school, and about community, and about people, and about the great adventure life can be when lived intensely" (Foxfire2, p. 10). Second, these volumes can be conceived as a practical manual on the teaching of history. The editorial introductionsindict currenteducationalpractice as much as they celebrate a new approachto teaching. Instead of providingstudents with "the infinite variety and ingenuityof nature and man, we are still allowingthem to be drownedin the Franco-Prussianwars" (Foxfire 2, p. 10). Wigginton'spedagogical goal, of course, is student interest, student involvement,student enthusiasm,whateveryou want to call it. The means in one perspective is the magazine idea, on another it is community involvement. In this light, Foxfireis in the centerof the currentmovementtowardsocial history, material culture, local studies, folklore, and "historyin the streets." On a third level these volumes are a primarysourceon Americancivilizationin the 1970's.They wereconceived,written,read, and endorsedby peoplewith a profoundsense of loss, sensing an earlierway of life slipping away-a style of plain living in which men were rooted in a particularplace, sharingthe joy and the struggleof living in tune with nature, derivinga sense of self fromthe basic tasks of survival,and performingthe job of "just plain living" as a creative encounter and humane education. The editor nostalgicallycomments, "Somewherealong the way, we've lost somethingfine" (Foxfire 2, p. 16). The sentiment is widely shared. One hopes that Wigginton'sdedication to creative teaching, which proceededfrom this sense of loss, will spread as widely. Perhapsthat is what the Bicentennial celebration should be all about. By the way, I missed the Bicentennial emblem on these volumes. The National Commission missed a golden opportunity.
University of Illinois, Chicago Circle GERALD A. DANZER
Ancient Greece, by Mortimer Chambers. Washington: American
Historical Association, 1973. 51 pages. $1.00, paper. Here we have a literate, urbane,ratherbland essay describingthe outstandingevents of Greekhistory from Minos to the Hellenistic monarchsand some of the great worksof Greek literature. It is a safe book to recommendfor a course in Western Civilization, perhaps too safe. There is nothing eccentric in it, nothing personal, no strong central theme. Although he occasionally lets a student know that scholars disagreeon various points of fact and interpretation,Chambershas tied Greekcivilization into a nice, neat package for him and does nothing to encouragehim to explore furtheron his own. For all its professionalcompetence,the bookis unbalanced,forit is concernedalmost exclusivelywith Greekintellectualsand political leaders,with nothingabout the ordinary Greek,rich or poor,and the materialbasis of his life. Thus it is strongon the philosophers and Thucydides, abysmal on Greek religion;it has much about drama, nothing about slavery or the savagery of civil war. The buffooneryand obscenity of Aristophanesis beneath notice, although surprisinglywe find a fine appreciationof the exuberanceof Minoanart. While the book can be used by itself, it wouldbe moreeffectiveto combineit with something more adventuresome,like E. R. Dodds' The Greeksand the Irrational.
University of California,Davis WESLEY E. THOMPSON
Germany Under the Salian and Hohenstaufen Emperors, by Karl
Hampe. Translated with an introduction by Ralph Bennett. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973. 315 pages. $15.00, cloth. English-speakingscholarshave paid little attention to medieval Germany,the most
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE HISTORY TEACHER 679
powerfulcountryin Europefrom the tenth to the thirteenth centuries.Ralph Bennett of
Magdalene College, Cambridge, has partially filled this gap in our knowledge by translating Karl Hampe's classic account of the Salian (1024-1125)and Hohenstaufen dynasties (1138-1250), Deutsche Kaisergeschichte in der Zeit der Salier und Staufer, which was first published in 1909and last revised in 1943by Hampe's student, Friedrich Baethgen. Hampe (1869-1936),who was a professorat Heidelberg from 1902 until his voluntary resignationat the Nazi assumption of power, describedthe repeated clashes between the Empire and the Papacy that ultimately destroyed the two supernational institutions of medieval Christendom.Inevitably, some of Hampe's conclusions have been modifiedby subsequentresearch,and his political approachis clearlyold-fashioned. He neglected the crucial, and in the long run more important, social, economic, intellectual, and religious changes that transformed German society during these centuries. In an illuminating introductoryessay, perhaps the most valuable part of the book, ProfessorBennett analyzesHampe'sinterpretationof the Salian-Hohenstaufenera in the light of more recent scholarship.Karl Bosl's studies of the imperialministerials, administrators and knights of servile origin, have altered Hampe's unfavorable assessments of Henry IV and ConradIII, whose territorialpolicies often foreshadowed those of Germany'snational hero, FrederickBarbarossa.The movement to reformthe Church in the High Middle Ages was more complicated than either Hampe's text or Bennett's introductionsuggest; it is no longerpossible to speak merelyof the conflicting goals of Cluniacs and Gregorians.But Hampe's main conclusions have largely been confirmed. While most teachers will probably prefer to assign Geoffrey Barraclough'sThe Originsof Modern Germany,which covers the entire span of medieval Germanhistory and which is readilyavailable in paper,this moredetailed but lucid accountshouldbe an extremely useful tool to any non-specialist who teaches a college course in German, medieval, or Europeanhistory.This edition has a numberof shortcomings.Hampe'sbook was originallyintended to be part of a largerseriesand it thus presupposesa knowledgeof the Saxon emperors. It might have been helpful if Bennett had included in his introduction an explanation of the Ottonian ecclesiastical system to which Hampe occasionallyrefers.Bennett has not translatedHampe'sextensive footnotes,presumably because many of them are outdated, but has wisely substituted referencesto English collections of documents. Even so, while most readerswill recognizethe name of Ranke, they may well be perplexed by undocumentedreferencesto the views of such eminent nineteenth-century scholars as Hauck, Nitzsch, and Lamprecht. At the very least, Bennett should have supplied the necessary citations in these cases; also, a selected bibliographywould have been greatly appreciated.On the whole, we should be grateful, however,that Bennett has at long last made availableto a wideraudiencethis important book about a crucial period in the history of a major European country.
Illinois State University, Normal JOHN B. FREED
The Meaning of the Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Richard
L. DeMolen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. 385 pages. $5.95, paper. The Meaning of the Renaissance and Reformation is a collection of eight essays by scholars in a variety of fields, providing a comprehensive overview of the major movements of the Renaissance and Reformationera. The editor, Richard DeMolen, a researcherat the Folger Shakespeare Library and the editor of similar volumes on Erasmus and the Middle Ages, begins with an introductoryessay characterizingthe period as one "in which man's mind was freed from a metaphysical position of dependencyon God to a transcendentalvision." Althoughit sets the stage, this essay is largelysuperfluous;this reviewercould not decide for whom the essay would be of value. Lauro Martines wrote the essay on "The Italian Renaissance," which attempts to describe the Renaissance movement as a whole by studying the urban environment. Noting that "humanity... seemed to have no reality outside a civil context," Martines
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