Welsh Journals

These few clinical objections aside, there is much elsewhere in the book to commend the contemporary approach to mental disorder in its setting and in the review of the medical texts available at the time, which created or reflected the medical climate of opinion. Attitudes may be studied in the case records of the twelfth-century pilgrims to the shrine of St. Bartholomew and in those of the fifteenth century to that of Henry VI at Windsor. In his explanatory preface, the author writes that 'In this phase of the subject it would not in fact entirely distort the purpose of this particular account if the idiosyncrasy of its form led to its being seen as essentially a collection of anthologies of cases and ideas and specialised social and intellectual history at different stages'. The work may be regarded in the words of his subtitle as one of 'exploratory studies'. As such, it is a useful and scholarly source book and its varied searches from Celtic times to the seventeenth century should fulfil the author's wish that it can take its place amongst the prolegomena of a discipline that is only just beginning. JOHN CULE Welsh National School of Medicine, Cardiff THE NORTHERN BARBARIANS, 100 B.C.-A.D. 300. By Malcolm Todd, Hutchinson University Library, 1975. Pp. 232. £ 5.50 In his preface to this volume, the author notes with evident satisfaction the growing interest, 'both general and scholarly', in the peoples who lived beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. With The Northern Barbarians, Malcolm Todd has added his own unmistakably 'scholarly' contribution to our awareness of some of the most important of those peoples, those who occupied the vast and distant tracts of northern and central Europe known to the Romans as Germania. In recent years archaeology has made extensive strides in revealing something of the social and cultural world of the German peoples; and it is the singular achievement of this volume that its author-as a glance at his bibliography will indicate-has meticulously absorbed and digested a fairly hefty diet of German archaeological scholarship; for that alone many students of the subject will be grateful. After an introductory survey of the German peoples in their geographical setting, and their relations with their neighbours-both the influential contacts with the northern provinces of the empire, and the intractable problems of the blurred 'middle ground' between Germans and Celts- the author establishes his main purpose with a chapter defining the 'principal archaeological cultures' of the region. He is committed to the view of post-war archaeology that only in exceptional cases can the link be made from the evidence of some archaeological unity to a known tribal group: the reader is to be given an archaeological study of the Germans, not an investigation of the Chatti or the Cherusci (to name but two). That study follows under the headings of types of settlement and agriculture, technology, arms and warfare, and religion.