1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 441 many sidelights the book throws on terms of Norse constitutional history is the demonstration that the notion of visere so far from forming a contrast to leding, as Munch, Hertzberg, and Taranger have taught, as a comprehensive denomination of the whole fixed royal income even embraces leding in so far as this had been commuted into a money tax (pp. 84 ff.). The two concluding chapters on the decline of the leding service and the rise of the leding tax illustrate the close parallelism between these two sides of one and the same process, first in the corresponding relaxation of the universal levy and tightening of taxation, as the king's administration seeks to hold its own against the feudal estates, and then in the emergence both of reminiscences of the old service laws and of all sorts of new military taxes, as the modern monarchy develops its direct rule over the whole country. C. Brinkmann. II Chronicon di Benedetto, Monaco di S. Andrea del Soratte ; e il Libellus de Imperatoria Potestate in Urbe Roma. A cura di Giuseppe Zucchetti. (Fonti per la Storia d'ltalia. Rome : Istituto Storico Italiano, 1920.) The Istituto Storico Italiano stands nearly supreme among publishing societies for the luxurious splendour of its productions. But this opulence has its dangers ; for the editors seem to be placed under no restrictions as to the scale of their treatment. In the volume before us the works printed occupy hardly one-third ; the remaining two-thirds are made up of introduction and notes. The short Libellus de Imperatoria Potestate was printed by Pertz in three pages of the folio Monumenta Germaniae : in the new edition it extends to sixty-four pages. We do not, however, complain of the voluminous foot-notes, for it is of great interest to trace the sources accessible to writers of the tenth century and to examine the use they made of them. But it is a fault in method to load the introduction with excursus on points of detail, and it is tedious to have the various opinions of modern scholars as to authorship and date recounted with excessive elaboration. None the less are we grateful to possess what is in one sense the editio princeps of the chronicle of Benedict of Soracte ; for though the book was published by Pertz in 1839, he omitted fully a quarter of it as containing mere excerpts or abridgements from known sources. These passages have a real interest on account of the little changes Benedict made in his quotations. We read him in his earlier parts not in order to learn the facts, but in order to know how the history was understood in an Italian monastery towards the end of the tenth century. It is not until we reach that century that Benedict's narrative acquires an independent value, and its local notices add not a little to our information about an obscure period. Signor Zucchetti is probably right in excluding the Liber Pontificates from the list of Benedict's authorities. All his earlier quotations from it are made through the channel of Bede's Chronicle. The Liber Pontificalis itself ends defectively with Stephen V (885-91). It was supplemented at a later time by a bare Catalogue, giving the origin and parentage of each pope and a statement of the duration of his pontificate. Monsignor Duchesne has made it clear that Benedict could not have been acquainted
