Empty Bottles of Gentilism‪.‬

Empty Bottles ofGentilism: Kingship and the Divine in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (to 1050) by Francis Oakley (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010) Some tend to view academic administrators as failed scholars, or scholars who have published just enough to get what they really wanted, perhaps a dean-ship. Francis Oakley, emeritus professor and emeritus president, has been a teacher, scholar (with a long list of publications), dean, and president of Williams College. He also has held such offices as the presidency of the American Council of Learned Societies, and his career defies all easy generalizations. A historian of ideas, in Empty Bottles of Gentilism, the first of three volumes to treat The Emergence of Western Political Thought in the Latin Middle Ages, Oakley gives the latest fruit of a well-spent life. In this reviewer's view, this volume is best designated by its subtitle, for the subject in view is kingship and the divine. It is not as full a history of "the emergence of Western political thought" like some of its predecessors: the brothers Carlyles standard work has discussions of subjects such as "property" hardly broached here, and fuller treatments of figures such as Cicero. The present volume does not even mention Lactantius. But if the subject is the relationship of kingship and the divine in antiquity and the early Middle Ages, this is a fine book indeed.