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350 Four Years of Corruption
CS, finds (in his contribution to the present volume) ‘surprising
common ground in our divergent positions’. Elizabeth and
James Fentress note (p. 209) that the anthropological chapters
seem ‘anomalous in the context of the rest of the book’, and they
comment (p. 218) that a Mediterranean anthropology without
kinship, marriage, inheritance, or social structure is ‘like
archaeology without pots’ (some of those topics will reappear
in LC; others did not lend themselves to the chapters’ particular
purposes). But otherwise the Fentresses seem to accept even
more of our conclusions than does Herzfeld. Henk Driessen
finds an ‘affinity with anthropology’ in our emphasis on the
smaller scale of ‘definite places’ and sees our discussion of
honour in chapter XII as ‘a useful starting point for further
research’. 3
The early medievalists have a Mediterranean, but it remains
different from ours. For both our critics and us, of course,
Pirenne continues to determine the paradigm for debate. His
classic Mohammed and Charlemagne still provides a useful
framework within which to discuss the transition from the late
Roman to the early medieval economy; i.e. from a Mediterranean
world to a north-western European one. As Paolo Squatriti
notes at the start of his review, Pirenne’s stature and clarity of
thought, coupled with post-modern scholarship’s concern to
trace intellectual forebears, and the amount of new archaeology
for this period, all keep the late antique and early medieval
Mediterranean very much alive in academic discussion. Yet
Squatriti devotes surprisingly little of his review to the specifically
early medieval sections of chapter V of CS, and much
more to general issues. ‘Change clearly did take place in the
Mediterranean, even in its more stable eastern end, during ‘‘the
Pirenne period’’ ’ (CS 271)—which we had never denied, characterizing
the period as one of dramatic abatement. We are
credited with a ‘nice reading of the few available documents’
(ibid.). But we also downplay ‘decades of archaeological research’,
even though the low-level connectivity that we were
3 He also, surprisingly, misreads us on some minor matters: we do not
adopt Rappaport’s model of human ecology—rather the reverse; and our
comment that anthropology must be fully historical if it is to shed light on
the longue durée is taken out of context and treated as a general dictum
(Driessen 529, 530; CS 47, 473).