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REVIEW:
'This book is a rare event in modern academic publishing, the culmination of a lifetime's scholarship. Crummey's interest in Iyasus Mo'a's legacy lies, not in the Gospels themselves, but in the margins and flyleaves on which were recorded the details of land transactions affecting the monastery - most of them grants by successive emperors of the right to collect the land tax known as gult, which in highland Christian Ethiopia constituted the most sought-after form of ownership ... Crummey has been able to use this hitherto barely noticed source of documentation to uncover the relationships between crown, clergy and aristocracy in Christian Ethiopia, and in large measure to transform our understanding of them.' - Christopher Clapham in The TLS 'Donald Crummey has assembled an impressive documentation regarding land issues throughout Ethiopia's Solomonic period. His analysis carefully documents a developing class society in which the nobility, and especially the clergy, managed to extract a measure of the produce from a landed peasantry.' - Christopher A. Conte in African Studies Review 'Crummey has .. succeeded in giving our knowledge of Ethiopia's past an important new dimension. Besides throwing valuable light on the historic role of the Ethiopian state, and its traditional, and largely self-perpetuating, hierarchy, he has shown the sophistication of the elite, and has 'fleshed out' a number of hitherto 'faceless' personalities mentioned in the marginalia.' - Richard Pankhurst in African Affairs
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