Begging Pardon and Favor is immensely well informed, reasoned, insightful, and stimulating.(Speculum) I learned a lot from this learned, elegant, important book. It bristles with good ideas.(Church History) In this highly original book, Geoffrey Koziol studies the language and gestures of petition and supplication in tenth and eleventh-century northern France. His central argument is that political order, both in the secular and the ecclesiastical spheres, was closely dependent on ritual: kings governed, relations between antagonists were resolved, and monks had their property rights confirmed through grand gestures of humble supplication.(American Historical Review) Koziol's book is of a sort that would permit someone going to medieval Europe on assignment to figure out how things get done there.(Journal of Interdisciplinary History)