Contested Spaces of Early America

124

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 119e130

performance in public spaces, which she sees as an important moment that ultimately promoted the advance of literacy. In Salzberg's account, the world of Venetian literary culture becomes a three-way matrix that juxtaposes the interests of political and religious authorities in exploiting the informative and propagandistic power of print while still retaining control over its subversive potential; printers, publishers, peddlers, and performers who perceive the print mainly through the prism of their personal profit; and the general populace that sees in cheap print a source of information and amusement. The author repeatedly emphasizes that ephemeral print must be ‘seen as an element of the changeable urban environment, part of the living history of the city at a particular moment’, rather than ‘a timeless and static corpus of “folk” literature’ (p. 8). Salzberg admits that her main challenge was the lack of comprehensive collections of documents that would allow a researcher to paste together compelling and comprehensive personal stories of printers and peddlers who were protagonists of the often semiclandestine world of the ephemeral print. In the introduction to his Nicholas Jenson and the Rise of Venetian Publishing in Renaissance Europe (1991), Martin Lowry acknowledges that even trying to paste together the life of such an iconic printer as Jenson was often a ‘long and fruitless’ enterprise (p. viii). How much more challenging it must have been, therefore, for Salzberg to put together personal histories of those who populate her mundane world where obscurity was a means of survival for those whose primary interest was to evade authority, and whose call to fame was mediocrity. Yet, the author argues, when compared in total numbers of output and circulation, the knightly ballads, love songs, fiery religious polemics, pamphlets promising to divulge scientific secrets, or those offering the latest news in verse must have had a much bigger cultural impact than all the fancy editions of the classics printed by Jenson or Manutius. Salzberg sees this as ‘two cultural systems’ (p. 32) that were rubbing against each other: the lofty world of Renaissance humanism and the commercial culture that was swiftly developing around one of the earliest mass-produced cultural artifacts, which cheap print undoubtedly was. And the author does a remarkable job revealing this obscure world by picking up little pieces of the mosaic from contemporary chronicles, government ledgers, and lawsuit records. Her characters gradually ‘appear from the shadows’ (p. 8), giving the reader a rare opportunity to mentally recreate the murky atmosphere of printers' shops, bringing back to life the ambiance of Venetian bridges and piazzas where the products of their toil were sold by peddlers and pranksters often in a hurry to avoid the omnipresent eye of the proverbially suspicious government. In doing so, Salzberg states that her effort is not unlike the challenges that future generations of researchers will face in order to piece together the history of another medium that is ephemeral by its very naturedthe internet (p. 3). One does not even know where to start to untangle the story in which the protagonists are not fully aware of the historical importance of their own actions and therefore do not care about preserving historical evidence for posterity. However, throughout her narrative, Salzberg inadvertently yet systematically conflates the emergence of ephemeral print in Venice with the period that followed the arrival of the first German printers who brought with them to Venice the technology of the movable typeset in the late 1460s (cf. pp. 4, 38, and 49). And her espousing of this basic tenet of the canonical narrative may be the only vulnerable point of a book that otherwise very successfully challenges the established orthodoxies. To her credit, the author briefly acknowledges (pp. 113e114) that the ephemeral press in Italy had a long pre-history defined by woodblock print, but never elaborates on this train of thought. Yet the late medieval collection

of documents for the canonization of St. Catherine in Siena, edited most recently by Tito S. Centi and Angelo Belloni under the title Il Processo Castellano (2009), offers a very rare glimpse into the early fifteenth century world of mechanical reproduction that relied on woodblock matrices consisting of combinations of simple texts and images. In his deposition, made sometime between 1411 and 1412, Fra Tommaso di Antonio Caffarini testified that ‘thousands of images [of Catherine of Siena and other objects of veneration] are being produced every day’ in Venice and distributed not only in the city proper, but all across Italy and Europedall the way to Greece, Romania, Dalmatia, Poland and Germany (pp. 95e96). With great probability, their manufacturers relied on the same technology that had already established Venice as a key center of the production of playing cards. This realization does not diminish Salzberg's achievement under any circumstances. It just reveals that even scholars who are acutely aware of our enduring propensity to see social history through the prism of technological-determinism sometimes cannot avoid the trap. Lisa Gitelman in her book Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (2006) cautions that we should stop looking at the history of technologically mediated communication as a sequence of separate ‘ages’ that are defined by technological ruptures; instead she offers an alternative perspective of a slowly changing cultural system that at some point articulates the need for more efficient mediations by encouraging the development and adoption of new technologies. The medium itself becomes, therefore, a product of a vast system of social, cultural, economic, political, and material relationships. As Salzberg points out, the new and old mediadthe manuscript and print in this case, but by the same token also the woodblock and movable typedalways coexist; the newly developed technology never completely replaces the old one. At the time of its launch, the new technology inevitably mimics the established set of protocols associated with its predecessorddue to the limits of imagination of the society within which it operates. This does not preclude the fact that once launched, any new technological advancement has a potential to create new synergies that may lead to unintended consequences in its social implementation. This realization makes Salzberg's book fascinating not only for those concerned with the relatively remote history of the Renaissance, butdkeeping in mind the obvious traps of presentismdalso for those who are keenly interested in understanding the principles that tend to animate any new mediating technologies, the ones associated with the digital age notwithstanding. Juraj Kittler St. Lawrence University, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.02.001

Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman (Eds), Contested Spaces of Early America. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, ix þ 427 pages, US$49.95 hardcover. Historians of colonial-era America have begun of late to dispense with geographical terms of marginalization in vogue for more than a century. Most indigenous and colonizing peoples have long been relegated by American historians to imperial borderlands or, more recently, to fringes of the Atlantic World, at the implicit periphery of dominant political, economic, and cultural centers e first of Europe, then of Anglo-America. In their day, both borderlands

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 119e130

studies and the Atlantic World model served useful functions by enabling a few bold scholars to insinuate the histories of indigenous peoples, non-Anglo European colonizers, and enslaved Africans into prevailing narratives that took the rise of modern nation states as teleological inevitabilities. A century of criticism has steadily undermined that old Eurocentric (and largely Anglocentric) perspective. Now rising numbers of scholars with cross-disciplinary inclinations and training (in geography, history, anthropology, archaeology, First Nations studies) are revisiting stale narratives of European conquest and Native American subjugation. In their place, as volume editors Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman explain, they are exploring complex ‘parallel histories and historiographies of European and Indian spaces created throughout the hemisphere during the “colonial era”’ (p. 23). Following the lead of their brilliant mentor and lamented colleague, the late David J. Weber, to whom this edited collection is dedicated, Barr and Countryman asked contributors to strip away notions of ‘imperial cores, Native peripheries, and modern national borders’ from the historical landscape of America (pp. 23e24). By no longer privileging the European gaze from coastline to interior, American Indian perspectives deeply rooted in place and in millennia-long indigenous histories are regaining an equal footing that more accurately reflects the realities of life in colonial-era America. More than a few authors of this volume's dozen chapters on ‘contested spaces’ still retain the old vocabulary of borderlands, which suggests it will take some years more for proponents of a balanced view of ‘early America’ to recast American history as a whole in this new image. This reflects the generally conservative nature of history departments in academia, and in a sense this slow-motion debate over an inclusive history of all peoples in the Americas has been productive, no matter how frustrating the pace of change. Every bit of the Americas was, in fact, at one time or another a borderland of one or more empires, though such imperial claims manifested on the ground in remarkably varied ways. One great strength of this book derives from its nuanced case studies that demonstrate how little the various imperial borderlands had in common. Alan Taylor's comparison here of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century colonial trajectories in Louisiana, Upper Canada, and Texas neatly exemplifies how ethnically complex settler immigrations often undermined imperial efforts to exert centralized control in contexts where colonial relations with Native peoples were not easily managed. As readers are probably aware, Taylor anticipated the balanced approach to American history advocated in this volume in his influential continent-wide survey, American Colonies, first volume in the Penguin History of the United States series (New York, 2001). Many chapters in Contested Spaces in Early America are bound to surprise readers, no matter how well informed, with unfamiliar stories of resilience and imaginative response. Elizabeth Fenn tracks the Mandans, whose history she documents in her book, Encounters at the Heart of the World (Hill and Wang, 2014), from expansive multiple settlements of the sixteenth century to their coalescence in the mid-nineteenth as refugees with the Hidatsas and Arikaras at Like-a-Fishhook village. In one corner of that crowded town, they built ‘a medicine lodge, central plaza, and shrine that staked out Mandan spiritual terrain’ (p. 114), thereby reasserting their distinct identity and traditions, which proved remarkably adaptive in the face of recurrent epidemic disease and near perpetual warfare. Cynthia Radding examines the intersections of indigenous and colonial peoples, whose labors in the mines and ranches of seventeenth-century New Spain created a space called the province of San Ildefonso de Ostimuri, between Sonora and Sinaloa. On the social and geographical landscape she maps overlapping

125

communities of settled Indians subject to the repartimiento, free migratory indigenous laborers, African slaves, and increasing numbers of ostensibly free ‘mulatos libres’ e elements of the ‘heterogeneous populations of colonial society’ (p. 140). Chantal Cramaussel's broader geographical perspective, in a complementary chapter, reveals how forced long-distance transfers of Yaquis and slave raids on the pueblos in the upper Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico furnished workers for the mines of Nuevo Vizcaya (modern north-central Mexico). No one willingly worked in colonial mines, Cramaussel concludes. In one of the most insightful chapters of this volume, Allan Greer compares treaties negotiated with indigenous leaders by Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British colonial officials. Since treaties negotiated by the United States, which routinely involved Native American land cessions, derived from English/British precedents, the absence of such clauses in treaties negotiated by the Catholic imperial systems signals a major divergence of considerable historical importance. From early in the seventeenth century onward, English (as well as Dutch) colonial officials offered manufactured goods in exchange for Indian land. As Greer notes with a wry sense of irony, ‘consent versus conquest, purchase as opposed to theft: Anglo-American colonization at least made an effort to do right by Natives’ (p. 74). In contrast, Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonizers simply occupied land for their own use while leaving substantial areas of New Spain, Brazil, and New France in Native possession. Under all three Catholic colonial systems, constant demands for Indian labor called for subsuming Native populations under imperial hierarchical control, not for driving Indians from zones of colonial settlement. This consequential difference in approach inherent in the British-American treaty system ‘concealed a drastic and absolutist ambition to clear Indians from the field of property’ (p. 92). €la €inen's Perhaps the most original chapter of all is Pekka H€ ama sweeping reimagining of colonial-era North America from the mid-continental perspective of the Iroquois, Comanches, and Lakotas e three Native confederacies that became dominant regional powers due to their favorable geographies in relation to coastal colonizer enclaves, their abilities to project overwhelming violence, and their development of effective foreign policies. Contested Spaces of Early America offers readers a cross section of thoughtful new approaches to American history, which is finally beginning to fulfill its promise as a history of all Americans. Gregory A. Waselkov University of South Alabama, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.04.003

Paul Dobraszczyk, Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain: Myth and Modernity, Excess and Enchantment. Farnham, Ashgate, 2014, xvi þ 310 pages, £70 hardcover. In the 1860s, the parish church of St Mary's in the expanding London suburb of Ealing was knocked down and replaced. In the words of Bishop Tait at the consecration of the new building, ‘a Georgian monstrosity’ had been replaced by a ‘Constantinopolitan basilica’. Subsequent architectural responses to St Mary's have been rather different, with Nikolaus Pevsner being predictably sniffy about the substitution of Georgian simplicity for Victorian decoration and ornament. For contemporaries, anxiety was less about the style of the new church, than the materials used in