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1Reflecting on modern historiography in 1978, Hayden White wrote that “history has become increasingly the refuge of all those ‘sane’ men who excel in finding the simple in the complex and the familiar in the strange” (cited in Kramer 100). The comment was predicated on the assumption that what historians did was to produce narrative. The characteristic problem for modern historians was therefore epistemological: how might their merely narratological tools be used to approach, capture, and express the realities of the past? Whatever ‘meaning’ is, it must at some level be approached via narrative. For readers of works of book history and material culture, we seem now to live in a world diametrically opposed to White’s. Exponents of this now well-established sub-discipline would no doubt cheerfully reverse his dictum, and aver that the ‘sane’ historian today is the one who ignores the abstraction of narrativity in considering a text, and focuses instead purely upon its materiality. Not just the materiality of x title, but of y edition of x title, and perhaps even of z copy of y edition of x title. The meat is in the infinite variety available from plunging ever deeper into the specific and the local. These sorts of historians excel in finding the complex in the (apparently) simple and the strange in the (apparently) familiar. We are not looking at abstract ‘text’ and trying to reduce it to patterns of meaning; we are looking at concrete texts and contexts in all their multiplicity, and expansively fitting them together in the giddily boundless task of mapping the parallel universes of local experience; to start again and to repeat, for all places and all times.

2Completeness is, of course unattainable; but this hardly matters. Meaning is no longer imposed downwards from on high, by White’s sane historian. Meaning flows up, democratically, from the grass roots, from locally motivated choices and actions towards some sort of shared ‘culture’ chosen specifically by none, and only ever existing as an unstable dynamic responding to logics of immanent emergence, never as monolithic or globalising systems. ‘Culture’ is no longer a single ‘thing’ whose key is to be sought by White’s gurus of synthetising sensibility, but an ongoing and permanently renegotiated process to which we can only attain approximate access by vast amounts of ongoing empirical spadework. The cynic might note in passing that such a programme will keep armies of post-graduate students busy for ever and ever, amen.

3Global Exchanges of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ideas and Materialities c. 1650-1850, a collection of essays edited by James Raven, is the first title in a projected series at the Boydell Press under the general heading of “Knowledge and Communication in the Enlightenment World.” Raven is one of the series’ three general editors, along with another of the contributors to this volume. As the subtitle of this first offering and the general series title both make clear, it is the particular aim of the project to avoid a schism at the heart of cultural history, and to show by example that the history of material culture might be practised without losing sight of the abstract or idea-driven dimension of ‘culture.’ The focus on structures need not preclude, at least in theory, the retention of ‘ideas’ as one of the structural dimensions of ‘culture’ when envisaged as a dynamic and emergent process, as distinct from a static thing. Treated this way, “materiality effectively becomes animate” (11), while the ideal is demoted from the rank of prime mover with a special status to one consideration among many. Ideologies need have no greater grip over ‘ideas’ than politics, economics or manners; but nor need they be lost entirely to view.

4These intentions seem both inherently commendable, and terrifyingly ambitious. The stated goals of some chapters make for dizzying reading. Despina Magkanari for example seems to promise it all: a “focus on the interaction between local and long-distance exchange,” “the ways in which local knowledge is negotiated and reconfigured … at the intersection of different historiographical traditions (Ottoman, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, European),” as well as “the interaction of material, economic and political realities with knowledge circulation,” and not forgetting “the challenges and filters of different types (political, religious, economic and corporate) related to the production, circulation and validation of knowledge”; the goal of the whole being “to examine the relation between scholarly production and the broader public, and to scrutinize the modes of appropriation, negotiation and adaptation, the horizons of reception as well as the social contexts which make possible but also influence such circulations” (244). For sure, Magkanari, like most of the other contributors, is dealing with only one text – or rather an array of different versions of one text – but it still seems like a lot of ground to cover in twenty-odd pages!

5Just how manageable, really, is this degree of ambition to achieve localised comprehensiveness? The contributors are aware of the challenge, as is plain from the pervasiveness of the notion of “entanglement.” Thus Magkanari, to return to her example, addresses the specific challenge of reconciling “spatial” and “diachronic” approaches to “transnational history of knowledge” by seeking to “locate the entanglement of various temporalities in knowledge circulation and reception” (244-5). Naturally, other entanglements are available too, and the term can come to seem something of a badge of honour: the sign of the grass-rootsy historian who avoids imposing linear narratives on messy phenomena. This sounds good, but is it real? Is it not inevitable that historians of material culture seeking to “locate” their particular bit of the tangle have little choice but to apply a few discreet strokes of the barber’s comb to the tousled mop of culture if we are to make any sense at all of what we think we are looking at?

6Narrative is pervasive stuff; and the coy empiricist who takes refuge from its siren calls in the comfortable grotto labelled “mere factuality” – or perhaps in a large suite of grottoes labelled “entangled realities” – is perhaps weaving the most pernicious narrative web of all: one the author professes not to perceive. It is at any rate ironic that historians of material culture can end up sounding as though they would be more at home with sociologists or anthropologists than with humanists.

7For my taste, the most engaging chapters in this volume are those that do not shy away from humanistic engagement. It may be that the choice of subject-matter has a significant role to play here. Some material lends itself more naturally than others to an opening out, even if only by implication, towards generalising (and narrativizing) humanistic analysis.

8Take for example Sean’s Moore’s chapter, exquisitely focused on a minute bit of evidence, a single piece of paper found in the personal effects of one Timothy Pickering, a relatively obscure Patriot militiaman at the time of the American War of Independence. On the sheet of paper is a list of book titles ostensibly ordered by Pickering from London, only the whole document is in fact a satirical or even libellous scam, featuring a number of invented or actual pornographic works, presumably for the sake of embarrassing Pickering. Among the works included on the scam list is Richardson’s Clarissa, and a number of the fabrications in the list evoke the characters of that novel. The nature of this document, who produced it and why, and why it ended up among Pickering’s personal effects are all questions that Moore decides cannot be answered. But in the process of unpicking the details of this minute case, all sorts of fascinating general themes are evoked as a part of the accompanying baggage: the nature of the illicit text, its status in different social and national contexts, and in particular here, its weaponisation in the rivalry between Loyalist and Patriot agendas in shaping an emergent national identity.

9Other chapters have similar potential, but without necessarily managing the transition from minute empirical detail to (implied) generalisation. The chapter by Isabelle Baudino on the illustrations in the different editions of English translations of Rapin de Thoyras’ early 18^th-century History of England is a case in point. A detailed story is told about rival schools of engravers offering different sorts of “heads” – royal portraits – as illustrations for the rival editions of Rapin’s text; all of which leads up to an appreciation of one engraver’s skill in imbuing these heads with a semblance of life. Frustratingly for me, however, the chapter treats the work of these engravers more or less within their own bubble, and independently of the ideology of the text they were designed to accompany. Given how instrumental Rapin’s text was to the subsequent evolution of whiggish historiography, itself central to English national identity right up to the current day, this seems a missed opportunity. It is quite possible that these engravers would be found not to be engaging with Rapin’s Whig ideology, or – conceivably – actively hostile to it. It hardly matters what precise stand they took, if any; but it seems problematic to treat such illustrations as producing meaning in themselves, as images, independently of the text in which they are imbedded. As historians of material culture are well aware, context matters: only here it is the text itself which has become the forgotten context!

10Richard Coulson’s chapter on James Petiver, the late 17^th - early 18^th century collector of natural history specimens, is similarly fascinating in its reconstruction of the detail of an individual’s practice, focusing particularly on his correspondence with collaborators who contributed to his collection, but reticent to engage with more general considerations about the systematicity of Petiver’s collection. We learn a great deal about how Petiver built up his collection; rather less about why. Coulson makes a brief excursion into this territory to explain that Petiver’s collection was “not a work of systematic taxonomy” after the manner of Linnaeus in the following generation, but only “one of deliberate curation” (25). Nevertheless, the names Petiver assigned to his specimens are described as “Pre-Linnean polynomials … with a generic name that approximates to the modern family or genus determination, so this method partially arranges similar species together” (24). I want more on this. How is it possible for Petiver to be classing his collection using a method and producing results similar to the Linnean, and yet for the whole to be denied any engagement with the considerations of taxonomy? Surely even the most practical of curators is also to some extent a theoretical taxonomist, even if not in ways that would be recognised as such by later generations. Here is another missed opportunity to treat early practically-minded systems seriously, and to explore the logical workings of their incipient systematicity.

11In these two chapters, and several others, further investigation of the abstractions perceptible beyond the material structures that occupy the foreground of each study would have better served the book’s general ambition to link materialities to ideas.