Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/844

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

834 Reviews of Books with an assortment of facts grouped in one paragraph with no reference as to their dates. Yet these may and do vary from the first century before Christ to the nineteenth century after, and have no more common bearing on the case than a general resemblance in external form. The author has divided his work into chapters. In each he shows a slavish adherence to one or two standard authorities and around the theory of these he has grouped the thoughts of other and sometimes differing au- thorities with strange and contradictory results. Mr. Rullkoetter has, however, made a substantial addition to the ap- paratus by which we may conveniently study woman in the period he has chosen. He has laid a stable foundation for a work upon society in the early Germanic period. By this thesis he has shown ability to pro- duce such a volume. We hope that this ability will find early oppor- tunity and exercise. ^^^ Carletox Lee. Under the title Histoire de P Inquisition au Moyen Age (Paris, Societe Nouvelle de Librairie, 1900, Vol. I., pp. xl, 631) M. Salomon Reinach has begun a translation of Mr. Henry C. Lea's great work on the medieval inquisition. The idea of a French edition was suggested by the proceedings in the Dreyfus case, and the controversies growing out of it, and the publication at a low price is evidently designed to facilitate the use of the book as anti-clerical campaign literature. Mr. Lea has, however, insisted upon the preservation of the scientific spirit of the original, and the pointing of the modern moral is confined to an occasional footnote. In general the French version gives a satisfactory reproduction ; some notes and corrections have been inserted by the author and translator, and the appendix of documents is omitted. Scholars familiar with the American edition will find most to interest them in the brief account of the "historiography of the inquisition" prepared for the translation by Professor Paul Fredericq of the Univer- sity of Ghent, and those among us who take pride in this splendid monument of American scholarship will be gratified at the generous recognition which the eminent Belgian, himself one of the most distin- guished historians of the inquisition, gives to Mr. Lea's work. Appear- ing in 1888, shortly after Molinier had pronounced such an undertaking almost chimerical, the History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages at once took rank as an accepted authority; and it still remains, in the words of a recent German critic whose opinion Fredericq quotes as the judgment of the specialists of every country, "the most extensive, the most profound, and the most thorough history of the inquisition which we possess." Fredericq concludes with an enumeration of the many special studies in this field which have been published in the past twelve years, and expresses the hope that Mr. Lea may some day bring out a second edition which will incorporate their results. Such a revision would be welcome, but a more pressing need is the great history of the Spanish inquisition upon which Mr. Lea has been so long engaged and which only he can write. ^^_^^^^^ ^_ H.^skixs.