Burke Peter. Varieties of Cultural History

Ithaca, New York. Cornell University Press, 1997. — х, 246 p. — ISBN 0-8014-3491-2; ISBN 0-8014-8492-8The aim of this collection of twelve essays is to discuss and illustrate some of the main varieties of cultural history which have emerged since the questioning of what might be called its 'classic' form, exemplifi ed in the work of Jacob Burckhardt and Johan Huizinga. This classic model has not been replaced by any new orthodoxy, despite the importance of approaches inspired by social and cultural anthropology.
The collection opens with a chapter on the origins of cultural history which raises general questions about the identity of the subject. The chapters on dreams and memory are substantive but they are also comparative and they too attempt to engage with general problems in the practice of cultural history.
There follow five case-studies of early modern Italy, which was the main area of my research from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. All these studies are located on the frontiers of cultural history (in the sense of areas only recently explored) and also on cultural fron­tiers - between learned and popular culture, between the public and the private spheres, between the serious and the comic. Then come two essays on the New World, especially Brazil (a new world I discovered only a decade ago). They focus on romances of chivalry and on carnival but their essential concern is with cultural 'translation' in the etymological, literal and metaphorical senses of that term. Particular emphasis is placed on the consequences of cultural encounters, whether they should be described in terms of mixing, syncretism or synthesis.
The volume ends with two theoretical pieces, an essay on men­ talities which offers both a criticism of that concept and a defence of the approach associated with it against recent critics, and a general discussion of varieties of cultural history, compar­ing and contrasting the classic style with the 'new' or 'anthropo­logical' one and attempting to answer the question whether the so-called 'new' cultural history is condemned to fragmentation.Preface
AcknowledgementsOrigins of Cultural History
The Cultural History of Dreams
History as Social Memory
The Language of Gesture in Early Modern Italy
Frontiers of the Comic in Early Modern Italy
The Discreet Charm of Milan: English Travellers in the Seventeenth Century
Public and Private Spheres in Late Renaissance Genoa
Learned Culture and Popular Culture in Renaissance Italy
Chivalry in the New World
The Translation of Culture: Carnival in Two or Three Worlds
Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities
Unity and Variety in Cultural History
Bibliography
Index