David Levine

David Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe after the Year 1000. University of California Press, 2001.
In a synthetical treatment of vast scope, Levine argues that the roots of the modern may be detected in northwestern Europe in the three centuries following the year 1000. The book traces the complex social roots of the transition away from antiquity and toward modernity before the cataclysm unleashed by the Black Death in 1348. In a work which the committee felt deserved the often-misused label magisterial, Levine studies the transformation both from below and from above. Bottom-up changes in the social order included the demographic relations that structured everyday life, marriage and family formation, the struggle for daily survival in a premodern economy unable to provide enough for the large populations, and the peasant familys adoption of multiple strategies for survival. Top-down changes included the Gregorian Reformation, which encouraged the rise of a public and aggressive Christianity, the consolidation of ruling elites and the centralizing state, and the reproduction of feudalism and its connections to social life. In general, Levine follows threads loosely clustered around the biological, cultural, and material economies at the dawn of modernity. The book is characterized by many insightful juxtapositions. The evolutionary continuity of early modernization was stopped in its tracks and redirected by the outbreak of the Black Death. The resulting massive loss of population throughout Europe created new realms of freedom for social reconstruction amid a context of luxuriant despair which brought all the established verities into question. The Black Death was thus the extermination of an old order, but it left a series of social mutations that would synthesize old characteristics into new combinations as represented by the intensified division of labor, the growth of state structures, the disintegration of feudalism, and most of all, the rise of a new definition of the Holy in the Reformation. The committee particularly commends Levine for his eloquent prose, his graceful accommodation of postmodernist sensibilities, his breadth of multidisciplinary technique, his skillful use of theory, and the scope of his vision. Any historian will find this an exciting book. Rarely can one read a work of such importance with such pleasure.

Honourable Mentions:
Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England. John Hopkins University Press, 2001.
In her fine study Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England, Joy Dixon explores the links between spiritualistic beliefs, race and gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Making extensive use of Theosophical Society records in England and in India, Dixon traces the course of the movement from one dominated primarily by men to its later connection with English feminists and the suffrage movement. Women attempted to extend their spiritual influence to the public, political domain by combining both mainstream religions and alternative spirituality, and militant feminists embraced theosophy for the spiritual strength that it offered. Dixon shows, too, how the dualism inherent in theosophical beliefs further attracted many of its feminist followers. Moreover, Dixons work exemplifies how a study of theosophy, which was taken up by Westerners but had its roots in Eastern mysticism, can enhance our understanding of late nineteenth century ideas about race as well as gender roles. The emphasis on the dual nature of theosophy, therefore, not only allows the reader to gain new insight into the basis of suffragettes arguments for political equality, but also opens up new understanding of forms of gender blurring and offers a way of thinking about Britons ambivalent attitude towards members of their Indian empire. Dixon writes in an absorbing and clearly written manner, and her use of case studies to illustrate the way in which specific feminists took up the theosophical cause is especially effective. The overall strength of the book, however, is its clear insight into and sensitive handling of beliefs in alternative spirituality.

Elizabeth Rapley, A Social History of the Cloister. Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime. McGill-Queens University Press, 2001.
The history of Christianity has always been written about in the masculine, as if there was no need to speak about the other half of the world. No doubt there have been monographs on some convent or other, or this or that religious order, biographies, more often than not hagiographies, on this or that nun, blessed or saint, but these were only scattered efforts which hardly counted in the more general framework of a history of the religious fact. Indeed, these works granted women lay or religious nothing more than an episodic, even derisory, role. For several years, works of great importance have been increasing and, with their renewed methodology and wider perspectives, are contributing strongly to the enrichment, even the modification, of the history of female monasticism. In this regard, Elizabeth Rapley has played an important role since her work on the devout in 17th-century France, published in 1990. A Social History of the Cloister is a major work. The author has followed, through two centuries, the history of three female teaching congregations, the Company of St. Ursula, the Compagnie de Marie Notre-Dame and the Congrgation de Notre-Dame, certainly different from each other, but nonetheless, participating together and as a matter of course in a religious endeavour. Following her first interest in retracing the history of modern French monasticism from its height in the 17th century, until its decline and disappearance at the end of the 18th century, and in carefully examining its multiple facets, the author widened her field of investigation so as to lay out, in the most complete manner, the life of three communities and their members: relations often strained with the bishops, thus making a mockery of the purported docility of the nuns an old clich particularly evident at the time of the Jansenist crisis, financial issues, the internal operation of the convents, the respect of monastic rules, the nature of religious vocations, the training of novices, the spirituality of death, the teaching operation. Based on an exhaustive tabulation of printed and handwritten sources and on a deep knowledge of the bibliography, this work brilliantly traces the portrait of female monasticism, at its lowest level the convent and at its highest the order in its daily life, in its historic evolution and in the more general perspective of the history of the Church of France under the Ancien Rgime. A valuable appendix on the demography of the cloister and a glossary of the most common monastic terms completes the account. The content and methodology of this elegantly written book make it indispensable for anyone who is undertaking research on a subject whose depths are still largely unexplored.