ARTICLE REVIEWS

Article Reviews



Article Reviews

Sharon Kettering is the queen of early modern patronage studies, and this welcome re-publication of eleven essays on the subject, all written in the decade following her ground-breaking synthesis Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France, allows us to pay homage to her research, to evaluate where the historiography currently stands, and to see what issues require further exploration. Unlike many of the Varorium reprints, the eleven articles reproduced here have a strong intellectual and thematic coherence. The first section contains four essays dealing with the historiography, language, and function of patronage and clientage; section two consists of two studies outlining the role of female patronage; the third section has two studies detailing the development of brokerage; and the final section has three case studies that constitute a narrative of the changing structure of clientage from the Wars of Religion to the reign of Louis XIV (Katia, 1999).

In the 1980s and early 1990s historians of early modern political culture were working in relatively uncharted territory, and their debates revolved around the identification of conceptual problems as they groped for a common language to describe and interpret the phenomena they were studying. Much of Kettering's work has been concerned with the function of noble relationships and defining the terms we ought to use in interpreting them in clear, accessible prose. An opportunity is rarely missed in these essays to reiterate what she understands by the terms patron, broker, and client. She gives fair consideration to other possible categories for describing noble relationships such as fidelité and “affinity” before dismissing the former as too idealistic and the latter as too imprecise (Mark, 1996).

Kettering gives particularly short shrift to Kristen Neuschel's ideas, derived from socio-linguistic theory, which question the existence of clientage altogether, arguing that contemporary psychology and behaviour made such relationships impossible. Neuschel is, perhaps rather unusually, grouped together with Roland Mousnier for favouring the affective nature of relationships over the material. Kettering is a materialist with an firm belief that models initially developed by sociologists and political scientists continue to be a valuable tools for the historian, providing a language and a method that permit comparison across centuries and across disciplines, organize the empirical data, and enable us to test the veracity of the evidence with precision. She has retained an admirable consistency in her view that the relationship between a patron and client is essentially a material bond, but one that did not preclude affective relationships: “Loyalty was one of several determining characteristics of noble patron-client relationships in early modern France. These relationships were personal and emotional, and they were voluntary vertical alliances between two persons who were unequal in status: there was a superior, a patron, and an inferior who was his dependant, a client. The patron-client bond was a reciprocal exchange relationship in which patrons provided material benefits, and clients provided loyalty in return.”

As the influence of Roland Mousnier and his students, who championed the idea of fidelité, has receded and as the intellectual ...