Customer Reviews

Varieties of Culture History

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Peter Burke is professor of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and is certainly one of the most prominent figures in cultural history today. This volume is a selection of his essays, most of them previously published, which will certainly bring students up to date on the current practice of cultural history. There are essays on the origins of cultural history, the cultural history of dreams, chivalry in the New World, as well as an excellent discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the history of mentalities. In another essay Burke takes the cultural concept of carnival (one he previously dealt with in his excellent "Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe") and explores it in the context of Brazilian and African societies. Although five of the twelve essays focus on the author's area of specialization --Renaissance and Early Modern Italy-- there is much broader knowledge to be gained from the volume. Burke succinctly narrates the evolution of this type of history, demonstrating the relationship between historians such as Bloch, Burckhardt and Huizinga to the social anthropologists' search for collective representations (Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl), and ending with the myriad ways in which the discipline is practiced today. Although the book is great, I do think it would have benefited from a more thorough discussion of the "new" cultural historians such as Lynn Hunt et al.