From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: The Ghoul of Christmas Past (was: Call For Discussion: rec.arts.books.reviewed)
Date: 16 Dec 92 16:48:56 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie

kamorgan@athena.mit.edu (Keith Morgan) wrote:
> ... there has been somewhat of a falling off in book discussions lately. I
> think of the "funniest books" thread as a good example. I found many good
> titles in that thread. So It was in an attempt to get such a thread going
> that I posted my "Books for Christmas" inquiry on Dec. 3rd. All I was doing
> was asking r.a.b. for your "ten best of the year" list. To start things off
> I posted ten personal favorites. Now "best of" lists are pretty much of a
> staple at year-end and I thought that this group, in all its diversity,
> would produce an interesting sample. There was only one response which was
> good since it indicated the message did get out; however, I remain perplexed.
> The request was pretty open-ended, it didn't have to be ten, they didn't
> have to be newly published.

OK.  I've mentioned these before separately: a bunch of vaguely-related
books that in different ways explore the mentality of the early modern era,
particularly as it affected the culture of the illiterate poor.

- Carlo Ginzburg: The Cheese and the Worms

  This (alluded to in a discussion I had with Mikhail Zeleny) is an
  examination of the trial record of a 16th-century miller who was burned
  for heresy by the Inquisition.  Ginzburg shows that his ideas were a
  complicated mixture of humanist ideas from the elite culture and some
  extremely strange current of folk belief that was so remote from anything
  the inquisitors were expecting that they could not even classify it as
  heretical; like a notion of the world as formed by a process of organic
  decay like cheese formation, otherwise only recorded from the cosmology of
  the Kalmyks (a Mongol people from central Russia).  And where the miller
  did take on Renaissance elite thought, it was transformed almost beyond
  recognition by a process of deliberate misreading.  (I was reminded of
  William Blake's implication in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" that the
  authorized Bible read in its infernal sense would be much more threatening
  than the Bible of Hell).

- Piero Camporesi: Bread of Dreams

  This looks at the physiological influences on the thought processes of the
  17th-century Italian poor: chronically undernourished to the point of
  vitamin deficiency, regularly reduced to eating filthy and adulterated
  food contaminated with mind-altering plants, chronically infested with
  squirming masses of parasitic worms and subject to catastrophic famine and
  epidemics.  All of which makes a culture dominated by charnelhouse imagery,
  dreamlike escapism, and convulsive politics entirely reasonable.

- Paul Barber: Vampires, Burial and Death

  This looks at the physiology of bodily decomposition and its cultural effect.
  He considers a world-wide range of burial practices and folklore relating to
  vampirism and the malign "actions" of the recently-dead: the argument is
  that most of these are rational responses to normal but not naively
  explicable events surrounding decay.  His descriptions of the multifarious
  behaviour of rotting corpses are minutely disgusting and the folklore is a
  *long* way from the movie image of the vampire.

- Carlo Ginzburg: Ecstasies

  I haven't read this yet, it's next on my list.  It examines the witch-trials
  of the Middle Ages for evidence of what the witches actually believed; by
  reading between the lines of the trial records, and comparing statements
  separated by centuries and hundreds of miles, he tries to build up a minimal
  set of ideas that persisted across much of Europe as a real folk religion,
  misinterpreted by the torturers as deviations from Christian doctrine.  And
  from what I've seen so far, it *isn't* much like modern reconstructions of
  "paganism".

Some people might mention Norman Cohn's "Pursuit of the Millennium" in
this context.  All these books go much deeper than that; they might suggest
that the class machinery of Engels' "The Peasant War in Germany" isn't the
whole story, too.  This isn't to say that both Cohn and Engels aren't a
great read.

-- 
--  Jack Campin    room G092, Computing Science Department, Glasgow University,
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