off each other—or, in another commonplace, that Alfonse (with “une soumission silencieuse,” p. 47) was constantly absorbing Louis’s. These commonplaces arose in large part from the fact that Alfonse governed “from Paris.” I still vividly remember Joseph Strayer using this proximity—both brothers issuing administrative orders to far-flung territories from the capital—as evidence both of harmony of spirit and identical policies and practices on the ground. Yet Chenard shows that what evidence survives—perhaps only suggestive rather than con- clusive, but challenging the commonplaces all the same—makes it seem as if Alfonse was not in Louis IX’s presence as much as scholars have assumed. Paris and its environs constituted a pretty large area. Most often, insofar as one can tell, where Louis was, Alfonse was not, a pat- tern that became more pronounced as time passed. Does enduring and perhaps worsening physical semi-paralysis explain this or is it evidence of a little fraternal testiness between the count and the saint? And how important was the phenomenon, assuming it is not a mis- apprehension based on the fragmentary record? After all, Count Alfonse did set out on King Louis’s last crusade. The king died in the crusader camp outside Tunis. The count and his countess perished on their way back home. Chenard has written a very useful book, one that points other scholars in the direction of reinterpreting thirteenth-century French political history, laying renewed stress on the great aristocrats. Studying “the rise of the state” is important, no doubt, but as Chenard demon- strates, to pursue only that research agenda—basically in a Whiggish sense—is to miss a good deal and to risk serious distortions. William Chester Jordan, Princeton University Christa Clamer, Kay Prag, and Jean-Baptiste Humbert, Colegio del Pilar: Excavations in Jerusalem, Christian Quarter. (Cahiers de la Revue Biblique 88; Series Archaeologica 1.) Leuven, Paris, and Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2017. Paper. Pp. 168; many color and black- and-white figures. €80. ISBN: 978-9-0429-3455-9. doi:10.1086/710651 The present publication offers the results of a salvage excavation conducted in 1996 on the site of the Colegio del Pilar in the Old City of Jerusalem. A stratigraphic survey showed Ayyubid (twelfth–thirteenth centuries) occupation on bedrock. Structural remains of the Mamluk period reflected the growth of the city in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The main contribution of this survey is the discovery and excavation of a Mamluk period cesspit, which provides abundant remains of pottery, most of them from the fifteenth century. Whenever possible, the remains are compared with equivalent items found at other sites exca- vated in Jerusalem, including the Armenian Garden, part of the Armenian Patriarchate (see A. D. Tushingham, Excavations in Jerusalem 1961–1967, vol. 1 [1985]). The book focuses mainly on describing and interpreting the excavation of the latrine. It is divided into nine chapters. After a contextualization of the excavation results by Julien Loiseau, a general pre- sentation of the excavation by Christa Clamer and Kay Prag, and a general interpretation of the toilets by Jean-Baptiste Humbert, the next six richly illustrated chapters describe and inter- pret the types of remains found: pottery (Prag), glass (Alysia Fischer), coins (Bruno Callegher), faunal remains (Hervé Monchot), intestinal parasites in the cesspool (Hui-Yuan Yeh and Piers D. Mitchell), and small finds (Alain Chambon). This review focuses on the contributions of this excavation to the knowledge of Jerusalem’s urban history and coexistence between the different religious communities. On this topic, the two most significant chapters are those on pottery (which make up the majority of the remains discovered and give rise to the longest chapter) and intestinal parasites. In this review- er’s opinion, two historical conclusions merit discussion, the first linked to the existence of a Reviews 1149 Speculum 95/4 (October 2020)