Kathleen Thompson (2)

Kathleen Thompson packs a lot of deconstruction into this short book, which is nonetheless the first full-length study of the Order of Tiron. The first half focuses on the Vita Bernardi, Thompson tests this hagiography against other sources and convincingly concludes that it doesn't date to ca. 1140 but rather to the late thirteenth century. The Vita is not, as historians have previously thought, an attempt to accurately record the life and achievements of the founder of the Tironensian Order, but rather to secure the position of Tiron as the head of a monastic affiliation in the late thirteenth century. The latter half of the book then reassesses the history of the Tironensians in the light of this new reading of the sources. I thought this part of the book could have been fleshed out a little more, because there were more than a hundred daughter houses and other dependencies in the order, but I never got a clear sense of them. However, Thompson's clear-eyed analysis here of the motherhouse sets the stage admirably for further studies of the order.… (més)

This is a solid, if rather old-fashioned, political history of the Perche—a small county in west-central France which came into being in the eleventh century, flourished in the twelfth, and then ceased to exist in the early thirteenth century after the failure of the comital family's male line. Kathleen Thompson draws on manuscript sources from both France and England to argue that the counts and countesses of the Perche rose to power, despite the relative paucity of their territory's resources, due to their ability to play off the Angevins against the Capetians. They were powerful precisely because theirs was a border lordship. Power, too, came through marriage—Count Rotrou I married an illegitimate daughter of Henry I, while his grandson Geoffrey III married Richenza, granddaughter of the Empress Matilda. Thompson's analysis doesn't really break any new ground, but as a case study provides much useful evidence that can be employed in other larger scale or comparative studies.… (més)