The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food by Darra Goldstein

Abstract

principles and the sharp divisions between factions, classes, and interest groups about fact to achieve unity, curtail factions, and define ranks; about who constituted the “all” who should share in offices; about which council or which definition of the people was the “supreme prince”; and about how taxes were to be assessed and what was to be taxed. The principles no doubt rested on what Shaw calls the “core values”—justice, equality, and equity—of republican governance (4), but this fact did not prevent divergent interpretations by different social constituencies. Shaw’s subtle and discerning treatment thus merges close scrutiny of the shared idiom of republicanism with the effects on it of competing, even antagonistic, sociopolitical interests. Shaw also casts new light on Italy’s principalities. Because, she says, the “legitimacy of princely rule” was “equivocal” and not self-generated, it almost always depended either on approval by subjects (however expressed ormanufactured) or on investiture by popes or emperors. Inheritance as a buttress of legitimacy was “complicated by limited acceptance of primogeniture”—noble families often seeing themselves as “equals, rivals, even superiors” to a prince’s family—and by subject cities with their own “histories of self-government” that required princes “to come to terms” with local communities (176–177). Princely regimes lacked a “concept of the crown” as distinct “from the person of the prince,” whereas in republics the “palace” metonymically distinguished the state from the party in power (216). Principalities borrowed republican principles of legitimacy, especially approval by subjects, to bolster their ambiguous status. Shaw further demonstrates the persistence into the sixteenth century of republican values in resistance to princely rule and, after Charles Habsburg became emperor, to imperial pretensions to supreme power over all states within the old boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire. Republics frequently rejected imperial attempts to station garrisons, build fortresses, and demand complete obedience and onerous subventions (276–290). Even after the loss of independence, therefore, deeply rooted republican principles protected long-standing liberties. This original and penetrating study illuminates promising new paths for the history of political ideas.