Reviews 527

Thereafter Forest-Hill takes up the relationship between bad language and characteriza-
tion, forbidden speech and the English biblical plays (from York, Chester, the West Riding
of Yorkshire, and East Anglia), and transgressive language in the fifteenth-century English
morality plays. The distinction between evil and sin is crucial here, for evil characters such
as Satan and Herod are incapable of reformation, while sin is qualitative and may be
succumbed to or overcome. Corruption or reformation of language therefore is a prime
indicator of character, but it would involve also the matter of social class and position.
Low language by a highborn character is especially to be seen as an offense against the
linguistic decorum that served as a prime indicator of spiritual status in the plays. Char-
acters capable of goodness may slip into bad language, but they may also use harsh and
normally prohibited words to punish—a "function of transgressive language [that] has to
be interpreted according to the known or perceived conduct of the character who is abused"
(p. 47).
Forest-Hill recognizes that not all audience members would have responded alike to the
transgressive language spoken by the characters in the biblical plays, but her analysis in
this regard is not very highly nuanced, in part because she has a limited view of these
dramas as primarily didactic in intent and written "in the service of theological doctrine"
(p. 51). There was a didactic element, sometimes overtly as in the exposition of the Ten
Commandments in the N-Town Moses, but it is vastly overshadowed by the plays' mne-
monic purpose, designed to help the audience to imagine themselves as if present at the
events (not the doctrine) at the center of salvation history. In this respect the biblical plays
were consistent in purpose with the Meditations on the Life of Christ (widely known in
the translation of Nicholas Love) and to my mind support the complaint of the author of
the first part of A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge that some members of the audience were so
engaged as to be "movyd to compassion and devocion, wepinge bitere teris" (quoted p.
78). Audience response is not easy to determine several hundred years after the fact, though
it is difficult to see the York plays, for example, as carnivalesque: the dramatic records
indicate that every effort was made to see that the pageants would reflect well on the city's
reputation and that they would be done appropriately to the glory of God. In this context
transgressive speech had its role, and in the Passion sequence the executioners were ex-
pected to encircle the suffering Savior like the dogs specified in Psalm 23, read on Good
Friday. Bad language, directed along with physical violence against Christ, thus served a
role in uniting the members of the community in their knowledge of salvation history.
In the early morality plays a different kind of corrupted speech appears, at its worst
characterized by "unshamfulnes" and even, as in Mankind, identified with excrement. Vir-
tue and decorously virtuous speech go together. Forest-Hill then charts some important
changes in later examples of the genre. In Skelton's Magnyfycence transgressive language
is introduced to criticize the folly of "change for its own sake, or for the sake of fashion"
(p. 135). But most interesting is the way in which John Heywood, writing for the court of
Henry VIII, which was not noted for its delicacy of verbal expression, turns transgressive
language on its head, and then John Bale in Kingjohan perversely uses transgressive speech
as an agent of desacralization in propaganda favoring royal supremacy.
The book is not illustrated, but the dustcover has a fine photograph of Tutivillus, the
demon designated to write down inappropriate words spoken in church, on a misericord
at Ludlow, Shropshire.
CLIFFORD DAVIDSON, Western Michigan University

ALEKSANDAR FOTIC, Mount Athos and Hilandar in the Ottoman Empire (15th-17th Cen-
turies). In Serbo-Croatian. Belgrade: Balkanoloski Institut SANU, 2000. Pp. 498; black-
and-white and color figures, maps, and tables.
The rugged thirty-mile-long peninsula of Mount Athos in northern Greece with its dozen
major monasteries, scores of metochia (smaller dependent monasteries), and hundreds of
528 Reviews
cells forms an incomparable natural and supernatural environment. During its thousand-
year history the most significant development from a secular point of view was the Turkish
conquest. Athosfirstcame under Ottoman rule in the 1380s. It briefly returned to Byzantine
control in 1403, but in 1423, after the subjugation of the area around Thessaloniki, the
monks of Athos formally submitted to the Turks, under whose rule they would live until
1912. In the first book-length work on the Holy Mountain during the Ottoman centuries,
Aleksandar Fotic describes the transition from Byzantine to Ottoman authority during the
first three centuries of Ottoman rule as the monasteries accommodated to life within a
greater Muslim society. His focus is on one of the Holy Mountain's largest and wealthiest
monastic establishments, the monastery of Hilandar, founded in 1198 as a Serbian mon-
astery by the former ruler of Serbia Stefan Nemanja. (Reflecting the multinational character
of both the Byzantine Empire and Orthodox Christianity, Mount Athos was home to mon-
asteries with a variety of ethnic identities: Russian, Bulgarian, Georgian, Wallachian, Ser-
bian, and Greek.) The author follows the tradition of postwar Serbian historiography re-
garding Mount Athos and structures his work as an institutional history; those who wish
to learn about spiritual, liturgical, and literary trends will need to look elsewhere.
The book begins with a treatment of the conquest of Athos by the Ottoman Turks
followed by chapters on the relations between the Ottoman authorities and Mount Athos
(taxation, administration, privileges, confiscations, legal aspects of landholding); the inter-
nal organization of Mount Athos and Hilandar; building activity and renovations at Hi-
landar; natural disasters, disease, war, bandits, pirates, and defenses, and the unending
quarrels Hilandar had with other monasteries over property rights; and patronage by the
Serbian nobility and the princes of Wallachia, Moldavia, and, later, Russia and by others.
The heart of the book, about 40 percent of the text, is a chapter on the property holdings
of Hilandar in thefifteenththrough seventeenth centuries. Following the fall of the Serbian
despotate in 1459, Hilandar was deprived of its Serbian metocbia. What was left all lay
within about seventy miles of the monastery. Relying almost exclusively on somefivehun-
dred Turkish documents from the archives of Hilandar, most of which are unpublished,
the author locates these properties (with a dozen maps) and follows their fortunes. In a
series of tables he provides, where possible, the names of former owners and changes in
boundaries, sizes, property values, and tax burdens.
A brief concluding chapter is followed by a seven-page English summary, a list of all of
the Hilandar monks known from the sources for the period 1423-1700, notes on weights
and measures and Ottoman money, a glossary of Turkish terms, a thorough bibliography,
and an extensive twenty-five-page index. A number of color and black-and-white illustra-
tions and numerous Turkish documents in facsimile round out this attractive and well-
produced volume. Aleksandar Fotic has produced a valuable reference work on the status
of monasteries, the Ottoman administrative apparatus, landholding, and the history of
Mount Athos in the early Ottoman Empire.
MARK C. BARTUSIS, Northern State University

DEBORAH A. FRAIOLI, Joan of Arc: The Early Debate. Woodbridge, Eng., and Rochester,
N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 2000. Pp. x, 235. $75.
For readers pondering how it was possible for a seventeen-year-old peasant girl to persuade
her king and his entourage that she was sent by God to lead their party into battle against
the English invaders and their Burgundian allies, Deborah A. Fraioli's Joan of Arc: The
Early Debate will constitute a welcome resource. Since the mid-nineteenth century, count-
less biographies of Joan of Arc have repeated the same familiar details about the heroine
from the same classic sources: the transcripts of Joan's trial for heresy in Rouen in 1431,