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Understanding popular culture: Europe from the middle ages to the nineteenth century
542
Book Reviews
Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L. Kaplan, New Babylon, Studies in the Social Sciences, 40 (Berlin: Mouton: 1%?4), viii + 311 pp., cloth DM 110. The term ‘popular’ is one of those useful historical shorthands which, when put to close scrutiny, reveals its lack of analytical precision. Typically, popular is defined by juxtaposition: popular culture is distinguished from the culture of the dominant elite, and we employ a large repertoire of binary oppositions-high/low, learned/unlearned, etc.-when discussing cultural history. The eleven contributors to this volume find these binary formulations problematic, and question whether the frontier between high and low is an analytically useful line of demarcation. Written by American, French, English and German scholars, this volume presents original research over a wide range of topics-thematically, geographically, and chronologically-and thus deals with matters which will be of specific interest to most European historians. But it is what the sleeve describes as its ‘acute theoretical reflection’, the attempt by the contributors to uncloud the conceptual uncertainties surrounding the notion of popular culture, which makes this book such an important one. Popular culture is an ideologically loaded term, used to refer to beliefs which certain groups in the past sought to deprive of legitimacy. Historians who had thought they had identified popular religion, Chartier tells us, ‘had in fact merely described in different words the fundamental distinction that the Church made to “disqualify” a set ofthoughts and practices’. An additional problem is that the criteria used for assessing legitimacy change over time, as Revel demonstrates in his essay on French intellectuals and ‘popular’ culture in the period 1650-1800, with the result that what is regarded as popular is also redefined. The elite not only defined what constituted popular culture, but they also helped modify it, through a complex series of interactions. For example, Le Goff shows how medieval accounts of journeys to the underworld underwent a process of exchange and modification between learned and unlearned, clerical and lay, Latin and vernacular, written and oral cultures, before they achieved the final form in which they survive for us today. The nature of this interaction is shaped by specific social, economic and political structures, and what Lottes calls the ‘density of domination’ between different groups. Domination is the central theme of Trexler’s essay on missionary theatre in sixteenthcentury New Spain. He shows what we call Mexican popular culture today was in its inception part of the politics of conquest, the result of a transformation of old tribal cultures by imperialism. Is there, then, a separate or distinctive ‘popular’ culture for historians to write about, or have the previous attempts at doing this been misconceived? The contributors are not of one mind. Ginzburg and Holmes both accept that images of witchcraft as revealed in legal records reflect a compromise between elite and popular elements. But they maintain that aspects of the interrogations, depositions and by concentrating on dissonances, commentaries that were not entirely congruent with the legal or theoretical definitions of the crime, we can get at popular belief. Chartier, in his essay on the biblioth>que b/we, demonstrates that these texts had both a learned and unlearned audience, and argues that the search for a specific and exclusively popular culture must be replaced by the search for the differential ways in which common material was used. Others, however, cast doubts upon the value of maintaining a simple binary opposition. We learn from O’Neil’s study of late-sixteenth-century Italian inquisition records that although there existed competing ecclesiastical and superstitious remedies to deal with the problems of malefkium and possession, these alternatives existed within the same mental framework rather than deriving from fundamentally antagonistic world views. Yet antagonistic world views could divide the learned elite, as Midelfort finds in sixteenthcentury Germany, where there existed a fundamental distinction between theological and
543
Book Reviews
medical explanations of madness. If the elite were divided, so too were the people below them. In a superb essay on popular culture and the state in sixteenth-century Germany, Lottes shows that cities often had a distinctive middle-class culture, which was neither elite nor popular, and also discusses the tensions that existed lower down the social scale which deprived popular culture of any alleged homogeneity. Thamer finds the journeyman culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany to be distinct both from peasant culture and enlightenment public opinion. Some may wonder whether the clouds of conceptual uncertainty surrounding the notion of popular culture were as dense as the contributors make out. Previous historians had never argued that European culture could be neatly divided into two layers, but had thought it useful to posit two extremes whilst acknowledging the existence of innumerable intermediary positions. Do we not have to make a basic distinction between high and low before our analysis can proceed and subtleties be introduced? I am not so certain. Surely language does shape our understanding, and I believe that with persistent use our binary formulations have become brittle and lost their flexibility. We might not find it necessary to abandon the concept of popular culture, but after this book what we understand by that term will be significantly altered. Tim Harris Emmanuel College, Cambridge
William Whiston: Honest Newtonian, James E. Force (Cambridge: Press, 1985), xxiii + 208 pp., H.C. s25.00, $37.50.
Cambridge
University
The Newton and Newtonian industry is never at rest. Changing perceptions of Newton himself inevitably affect our understanding of Newtonianism and of the wider implications of Newtonian thought, and James Force’s closely argued study of William Whiston provokes us to further modify our view of this important area of intellectual history. Interpretations of Newton as a man have developed from the stereotyped view of him as the ‘rationalist’ founding-father of modern science, to the broader acceptance of him as a person with diverse interests which included the seemingly ‘non-rational’. This historiographical development exemplifies the breakdown of the rigid categories of ‘Ancient’ and ‘Modern’-a categorisation which admittedly had authentic seventeenthcentury roots, but which tended to encourage the imposition of intellectual straitjackets and to exclude for example, in the case of the archetypal ‘modern’ Isaac Newton, such unacceptable ‘ancient’ pursuits as alchemy, biblical interpretation and millenarianism. It is now recognised that Newton is a Janus-type figure, looking at once forward and backward, and that fully to comprehend the man and his work, we need to accept seemingly disparate aspects of his personality and ideas. The Newtonian corpus is then seen to include more than strictly mathematical principles, and the Newtonian influence to be more diffuse and less tightly circumscribed than we might have expected. It is with a further extension of our understanding of ‘Newtonianism’ that James Force’s book is basically concerned. William Whiston may have been professionally disgraced and consigned to historical denigration as ‘a learned crackpot’ (p.8), but, it is argued, in his admitted Arianism and his anachronistic attempts to defend biblical prophecies and to assert the continuing validity of ‘special providence’, he was showing himself to be in fact a Newtonian more honest than Newton himself. For Whiston paid the price for saying publicly what Newton believed but more diplomatically concealed. Whiston’s concern to demonstrate the mutual compatibility of Newtonian science with the Bible, and his millenarian motives for so doing, may appear bizarre to the twentiethcentury mind-as indeed they did to some in the eighteenth; but in these very respects he
Book Reviews
Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L. Kaplan, New Babylon, Studies in the Social Sciences, 40 (Berlin: Mouton: 1%?4), viii + 311 pp., cloth DM 110. The term ‘popular’ is one of those useful historical shorthands which, when put to close scrutiny, reveals its lack of analytical precision. Typically, popular is defined by juxtaposition: popular culture is distinguished from the culture of the dominant elite, and we employ a large repertoire of binary oppositions-high/low, learned/unlearned, etc.-when discussing cultural history. The eleven contributors to this volume find these binary formulations problematic, and question whether the frontier between high and low is an analytically useful line of demarcation. Written by American, French, English and German scholars, this volume presents original research over a wide range of topics-thematically, geographically, and chronologically-and thus deals with matters which will be of specific interest to most European historians. But it is what the sleeve describes as its ‘acute theoretical reflection’, the attempt by the contributors to uncloud the conceptual uncertainties surrounding the notion of popular culture, which makes this book such an important one. Popular culture is an ideologically loaded term, used to refer to beliefs which certain groups in the past sought to deprive of legitimacy. Historians who had thought they had identified popular religion, Chartier tells us, ‘had in fact merely described in different words the fundamental distinction that the Church made to “disqualify” a set ofthoughts and practices’. An additional problem is that the criteria used for assessing legitimacy change over time, as Revel demonstrates in his essay on French intellectuals and ‘popular’ culture in the period 1650-1800, with the result that what is regarded as popular is also redefined. The elite not only defined what constituted popular culture, but they also helped modify it, through a complex series of interactions. For example, Le Goff shows how medieval accounts of journeys to the underworld underwent a process of exchange and modification between learned and unlearned, clerical and lay, Latin and vernacular, written and oral cultures, before they achieved the final form in which they survive for us today. The nature of this interaction is shaped by specific social, economic and political structures, and what Lottes calls the ‘density of domination’ between different groups. Domination is the central theme of Trexler’s essay on missionary theatre in sixteenthcentury New Spain. He shows what we call Mexican popular culture today was in its inception part of the politics of conquest, the result of a transformation of old tribal cultures by imperialism. Is there, then, a separate or distinctive ‘popular’ culture for historians to write about, or have the previous attempts at doing this been misconceived? The contributors are not of one mind. Ginzburg and Holmes both accept that images of witchcraft as revealed in legal records reflect a compromise between elite and popular elements. But they maintain that aspects of the interrogations, depositions and by concentrating on dissonances, commentaries that were not entirely congruent with the legal or theoretical definitions of the crime, we can get at popular belief. Chartier, in his essay on the biblioth>que b/we, demonstrates that these texts had both a learned and unlearned audience, and argues that the search for a specific and exclusively popular culture must be replaced by the search for the differential ways in which common material was used. Others, however, cast doubts upon the value of maintaining a simple binary opposition. We learn from O’Neil’s study of late-sixteenth-century Italian inquisition records that although there existed competing ecclesiastical and superstitious remedies to deal with the problems of malefkium and possession, these alternatives existed within the same mental framework rather than deriving from fundamentally antagonistic world views. Yet antagonistic world views could divide the learned elite, as Midelfort finds in sixteenthcentury Germany, where there existed a fundamental distinction between theological and
543
Book Reviews
medical explanations of madness. If the elite were divided, so too were the people below them. In a superb essay on popular culture and the state in sixteenth-century Germany, Lottes shows that cities often had a distinctive middle-class culture, which was neither elite nor popular, and also discusses the tensions that existed lower down the social scale which deprived popular culture of any alleged homogeneity. Thamer finds the journeyman culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany to be distinct both from peasant culture and enlightenment public opinion. Some may wonder whether the clouds of conceptual uncertainty surrounding the notion of popular culture were as dense as the contributors make out. Previous historians had never argued that European culture could be neatly divided into two layers, but had thought it useful to posit two extremes whilst acknowledging the existence of innumerable intermediary positions. Do we not have to make a basic distinction between high and low before our analysis can proceed and subtleties be introduced? I am not so certain. Surely language does shape our understanding, and I believe that with persistent use our binary formulations have become brittle and lost their flexibility. We might not find it necessary to abandon the concept of popular culture, but after this book what we understand by that term will be significantly altered. Tim Harris Emmanuel College, Cambridge
William Whiston: Honest Newtonian, James E. Force (Cambridge: Press, 1985), xxiii + 208 pp., H.C. s25.00, $37.50.
Cambridge
University
The Newton and Newtonian industry is never at rest. Changing perceptions of Newton himself inevitably affect our understanding of Newtonianism and of the wider implications of Newtonian thought, and James Force’s closely argued study of William Whiston provokes us to further modify our view of this important area of intellectual history. Interpretations of Newton as a man have developed from the stereotyped view of him as the ‘rationalist’ founding-father of modern science, to the broader acceptance of him as a person with diverse interests which included the seemingly ‘non-rational’. This historiographical development exemplifies the breakdown of the rigid categories of ‘Ancient’ and ‘Modern’-a categorisation which admittedly had authentic seventeenthcentury roots, but which tended to encourage the imposition of intellectual straitjackets and to exclude for example, in the case of the archetypal ‘modern’ Isaac Newton, such unacceptable ‘ancient’ pursuits as alchemy, biblical interpretation and millenarianism. It is now recognised that Newton is a Janus-type figure, looking at once forward and backward, and that fully to comprehend the man and his work, we need to accept seemingly disparate aspects of his personality and ideas. The Newtonian corpus is then seen to include more than strictly mathematical principles, and the Newtonian influence to be more diffuse and less tightly circumscribed than we might have expected. It is with a further extension of our understanding of ‘Newtonianism’ that James Force’s book is basically concerned. William Whiston may have been professionally disgraced and consigned to historical denigration as ‘a learned crackpot’ (p.8), but, it is argued, in his admitted Arianism and his anachronistic attempts to defend biblical prophecies and to assert the continuing validity of ‘special providence’, he was showing himself to be in fact a Newtonian more honest than Newton himself. For Whiston paid the price for saying publicly what Newton believed but more diplomatically concealed. Whiston’s concern to demonstrate the mutual compatibility of Newtonian science with the Bible, and his millenarian motives for so doing, may appear bizarre to the twentiethcentury mind-as indeed they did to some in the eighteenth; but in these very respects he