Book Reviews 1009

William Perkins in the late 162Os, those of Robert Baillie, Joseph Caryl and Stephen Marshall in the 164Os, and of Vavasor Powell in the early 1650s. Even if we restrict our focus to the 164Os, was it really the case that Puritan political theology remained largely unaffected by political developments in what was, after all, one of the most turbulent decades of English history, and regarded by many historians as being a period of considerable ideological flux? And without more context, the book has no chance of establishing what it purports to be its main aim, namely, an understanding of the popular appeal of religious radicalism. Not only is no attempt made to assess how the audience might have responded to the messages they heard in the sermons (admittedly a difficult task), but we do not even get a clear sense of who might have been exposed to these messages. On the assumption that many of the sermons were delivered before members of the Long Parliament (that is people from the traditional ruling elite of English society), we may wonder what this source can tell us about the popular appeal of Puritanism.

Brown University, RI Tim Harris

Social Memory (New Perspectives on the Past), James Fentress and Chris Wickham (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), xii + 229 pp., $35.00 H.B, $11.95 PB.

The focus of this provocative new study, jointly written by an anthropologist (Fentress) and a historian (Wickham), is human remembering within a social context, what ancient rhetoricians called memoria ret-urn. Taking as their starting point the work of F.C. Bartlett and Maurice Halbwachs, the authors insist that ‘memory, too, is a social fact’, and that ‘[a]ny attempt to use memory as a historical source in a sensitive way must confront the subjective, yet social, character of memory from the outset’ (p. 7). The ‘social’ aspect of memory comes in the form of ‘collectively held ideas’ that ‘are the result of [and subject to] historical and social forces’ (p. 7). These collective ideas are supported and embedded within narratives and other sorts of mnemonically valuable ‘maps’ by means of which they are disseminated and ‘translated’ over time and geography. Because people remember not for the sake of retaining facts about the past, but for the needs of the present, ‘the way memories are generated and understood by given social groups is n direct guide to how they understand their position in the present [my emphasis] . . . Analyses of social identity of all kinds could well give more attention to memory as one of its major constituent elements, and as one of the clearest guides to its configuration’ (p. 126).

Unlike a number of recent studies of the role of memory in the writing of history, Fentress and Wickham begin with two overview chapters on the psychological mechanisms of remembering. The value of such a discussion is that it brings out what one might call the technical requirements of remembering, such as the need for structures within which to ‘attach’ memories, and hence the predominant role played by narratives, pictures, oral formulae and other kinds of mnemotechnical ‘maps’, as Bartlett called them (the mediaeval mnemotechnicians spoke offormae). The dominance of topography and of narrative pictures as mnemotechnical aids in all sorts of remembering is accounted for by this apparent human requirement. The authors analyse the episodic, paratactic narrative structure of the Chunson de Roland and the ‘kaleidoscopic’ structures of

Volume 18, No. 6, November 1994

1010 Book Reviews

traditional folk tales, with their characteristic mixing and ‘recontextualising’ of stable story elements or topoi, in order to show how group remembering can be studied as an historical process, even among those groups, such as peasantries, which have been supposed by many historians, to be somehow ‘outside’ history altogether, clinging to their orally-retained ‘timeless’ memories.

Fentress and Wickham have brought together a great variety of ethnographic, literary, and sociocultural studies in support of their thesis. In three fascinating chapters, they present a series of case studies (put together from their wide range of reading) to demonstrate ‘that the resequencing, decontextualizing, and suppressing of social memory in order to give it new meaning is itself a social process, and one, moreover, whose history is sometimes recoverable’ (p. 201). Their material ranges across ‘Class and Group Memories in Western Societies’, from the peasant stories of the bandit-hero Lompiao of northeastern Brazil to British miners’ stories of the strike of 1910 (and itsvillain, Winston Churchill) to the ‘national’ remembering of the French Revolution, in France and elsewhere in Europe. A particular high point is their stunning analysis of the mutations of the mafia legend. First constructed to articulate a Sicilian ‘national character’ in terms of a spontaneous uprising of ‘the people’ against illegitimate Bourbon rule (hence its early narrative incorporation of folk memories of the Sicilian Vespers of 1282), the majia after 1860 (when the new Italian state came into being) became a conspiratorial organisation of elite criminal padroni, and crossed the Atlantic to enter the legend of the American FBI and now of Hollywood. Memory ‘underpin[s] every aspect of what historians often now call mentaIiti& the authors assert (p. 201): this book demonstrates richly the truth of their claim.

Taking issue with ethnographers and oral historians who have sought to produce the equivalent of an ‘oral document’ by sifting through layers of fiction in order to ‘recover’ a ‘residuum’ of ‘facts’, Fentress and Wickham reveal the essential weakness of much historiography based solely upon theories of Orality and Literacy. They point out that the ‘opposition between a historical text and a literary text. . . is essentially artificial’, leading to ‘methodological traps’. One way to avoid these ‘is by concentrating on the analysis of social memory’ (p. 145). I applaud their focus and their conclusions. But one critically relevant term is missing from their hypothesis, though they come close to articulating it. In discussing the formation of the French Revolution as a ‘myth of national origin’, they comment that ‘social memories’, though widely shared, are a ‘substratum of historical consciousness, a largely uncontrollable rhetoricalfield inside which’ politicians and other actors (such as historians) must operate (p. 129; my emphasis). This statement is one a Roman rhetorician would have recognised, the ‘rhetorical field’ of social memories being what he knew as his florilegium of dicta et facta memorabilia, the res of memory from which he invented the matter of any given oration. Fentress and Wickham, without quite saying so, have returned intelligently to a rhetorically-based analysis of political and social history. This emphasis is reflected in their extensive bibliography, which contains a large number of literary studies as well as work by ethno-historians. The very concept of ‘social memories’ derives from rhetoric: ‘groups construct themselves through remembering’ (p. 86) is an observation that underlies the political rhetoric of Cicero as thoroughly as it accounts for the political durability of the narrative topos of Roland and his douze Peres in Romance-language cultures, from eleventh-century France to twentieth-century Sicily and Brazil. Historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars alike-indeed, anyone seriously interested in the politics, the living social matrix, of narrative-should thoroughly digest the method and examples which Fentress and Wickham have so fruitfully demonstrated in this book.

New York University, NY Mary J. Carruthers

History of European Ideas