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NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES PETER BURKE Emmanuel College

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NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES PETER BURKE Emmanuel College NEW CULTURAL HISTORIES PETER BURKE EmmanuelCollege, Cambridge University Schama, Simon and Alfred A. Knopf, Landscapeand Memory (London: Harper- Collins, 1995; paper edition, Fontana Press, 1996), xi + 652 pp. 45 plates. $23.00 ISBN 0 00 686348 5. Wolff, Larry, InventingEastern Europe: The Map of Civilizationon theMind of the Enlightenment(Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1994),xiv + 419 pp. $45.00 ISBN 0 8047 2314 1. Bermingham, Ann and John Brewer, editors, The Consumptionof Culture1600- 1800: Image,Object, Text (London: Routledge, 1995), xiv + 548 pp. $150.00 ISBN 0 415 12135 3. Shapin, Steven, The SocialHistory of Truth: Civilityand Sciencein Seventeenth- CenturyEngland (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), xxxi + 483 pp. $29.95 ISBN 0 226 75018 3. One of the best travel writers in the English-speaking world today is Simon Schama. Like the others, Jonathan Raban and Paul Theroux, for instance, he tells a good story, has a sharp eye for vivid visual detail and keeps a good balance-better than Theroux, one might say-between involvement and detachment, observation and autobi- ography. The main difference between Schama and the others is his choice of territory: time travel in the past. First in the Dutch Republic, on which Schama cut his scholarly teeth in Patriots and Liberators and The Embarrassment of Riches. Then revolutionary France, in Citizens. And now, in Landscape and History, which is literally as well as metaphori- cally concerned with travel, as well as more richly illustrated and more unashamedly autobiographical than ever before, Schama ranges from Lithuania to California in his search for "Wood, Water and Rock" and the way in which humans have given these physical elements sym- bolic meaning by incorporating them into myths and rituals. As always, he is compulsively readable, lively and digressive. Landscape and Memory has been widely praised for its originality, and it deserves this praise. All the same, the book exemplifies some new trends in historical writing, and others not so new. Schama draws on an amazingly wide range of sources in a number of languages, including recent studies in very different fields (for once the traditional metaphors 78 are reasonably appropriate). Needless to say that he draws on students of landscape painting, from Kenneth Clark to John Barrell and from E.H. Gombrich to W J.T. Mitchell. Schama is also familiar with the work of environmental historians and historical geographers such as Robert Harrison and Yi-Fu Tuan. On memory and myth, his men- tors go back to the beginning of the century, to Maurice Halbwachs and Aby Warburg. How does one summarize a cornucopia? One can at least give a general impression of the kind of book Schama has written by listing a few themes, such as the association of forests with liberty (the German forests, the outlaws in the Greenwood, and so on); the idea of the fountain as the source of wisdom, which inspired the iconography for many Renaissance gardens; the cult of the holy mountain; and the yearning for Arcadia. The effect on the reader of this world tour and its voluble guide is overpowering, even if the book is taken in small doses, a section at a time. When it is closed, one's head remains full of vivid images and phrases. But what does it all mean? Schama begins by defining his enterprise as historical and specific, contrasting it with the timeless, universalist approach to nature myths to be found in the work of Carl Gustav Jung and Mircea Eliade, and of Mannhardt and Frazer before them. All the same, the emphasis of the book falls on what the author calls the "surprising endurance" of landscape myths and memories. To demonstrate continuity is, of course, one of the most important of the historian's tasks. Yet, I could not help feeling, and thinking, that differences in space and time, though certainly not ignored, did not receive enough attention in this six- hundred page essay, or meditation. Readers of Citizens or Dead Certainties will be aware of Schama's narrative powers. One wonders what would have happened if he had tried to present his material as a story rather than as a sequence of snapshots, or slides, with commentaries (the book was originally a series of lectures in which the author played to packed houses in Cambridge and elsewhere). One of his few rivals in this field, Keith Thomas, emplotted his Man and the Natural World (ironically, as Hayden White would say), as a story of changing attitudes to wild nature, which was viewed as beautiful only when it was threatened with destruction by the Industrial Revolution. I was disappointed not to see Schama engage with this argument, at least in a final chapter that might have redressed the balance between continuity and change. Again, in a book that ranges so widely in other directions, it is a pity that the author chose to say so little about landscape, myth, and memory .
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