Book Reviews

some based on census data but others improvised from less obvious sources and covering such topics as Highland sporting estates and Shetland fishing.

Apart from the sheer range of material which has been ably synthesised, the undoubted strength of Turnock’s book lies in the way he has coped with the regional dimension of change. During each phase of modernisation, he identifies a distinct spatial trend. Thus, the period 1707-1821 saw attempts to spread change as widely as possible and a concern for the social consequences of change. The period 1821-1914, meanwhile, saw an increasing concentration of change in the central belt of the country whereas the development problems of the Highlands and Islands became more manifest. From 1914 onwards, the focus of change shifted more and more to the major cities. During each of these phases of change, Turnock considers who were the main agents of change, with the well-intentioned landowners of the eighteenth century giving way to the industrial-capitalists of the nineteenth century who, in turn, have had to share the stage increasingly with governmental planning agencies in this century. The force of Turnock’s discussion is enhanced by his analysis of particular case studies in which the role of such agents is laid bare. Thus, the efforts of major territorial landlords like the Dukes of Argyll and Gordon during the eighteenth century are covered in depth no less than the efforts of governmental bodies in modern-day Glasgow. Transport and accessibility to resources and markets are rightly seen by Turnock as having a decisive influence on which regions gained most from modernisation.

Altogether, this is a well-constructed argument, one carefully and consistently developed throughout the book. Its interpretative value makes the author’s claim to have provided an empirical study somewhat modest. There can surely be no other geographer or economic historian better able to link the changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to Scotland’s present-day planning problems.

University College of Wales, Aberystwyth Robert A. Dodgshon

Kultur der einfachen Leute. Bayerisches Volksleben von 16. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Richard van Diilmen (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1983), 265 pp.

The study of popular culture has begun rather hesitantly in Germany, by contrast with the boom the subject has experienced in France and the Anglo-American world. What work there has been has concentrated largely on the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. This volume of six essays on various aspects of popular culture in Bavaria from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century is significant not just for its breadth in chronology and subject-matter. In the range of its interests, the complexity of the questions posed and the interdisciplinary method with which they are tackled, it shows that the study of popular culture is now being taken seriously in Germany in a way that scarcely seemed possible a few years ago.

Hermann Heidrich studies the boundaries constructed around house and house- hold, effectively showing how material space can be related to symbolic space: the integrity of spatial boundaries delineated and protected a notion of honour. Here he shows how fruitfully a theme from folklore studies can be married to ideas from anthropology to cast new light on a neglected aspect of popular culture. The theme of honour also features strongly in the essays by Bernhard Miiller-Wirthmann (on village brawls) and Helga Ettenhuber (on the Haberfeldtreiben, the German version of the

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charivari, and the only contribution to deal exclusively with the nineteenth century). In a suggestive essay, Rainer Beck investigates the problem of premarital sexuality, setting the debate about the nineteenth-century increase in bastardy in the context of village courtship practices. Angelika Baumann discusses the shifts in social policy in Bavaria at the turn of the nineteenth century, focusing on changes in the ideological preconceptions of the poor and how they influenced poor relief. In the most intriguing essay in the volume, Wolfgang Behringer discusses a Bavarian witchtrial from the beginning of the seventeenth century which demonstrates that witch beliefs were not always imposed by the judges, but could spring out of the accused persons’ own perceptions of the world.

There is no space to discuss all of these excellent studies in detail, and to do so would perhaps be unfair to them, for they are all extracts from more extensive works in progress. Thus, while they are well-researched, they are also careful not to overextend their arguments, and for this reason are sometimes inconclusive about the wider theses they pose. This indicates one of the weaknesses of the volume as a whole. The editor presents the essays as attempts to combine an examination of theoretical problems with ‘empirical reconstruction’, but in many of the contributions this proves to be a very muted theme. Theoretical reflections appear as illuminating asides, but rarely supply the heuristic framework for their investigations. In such microstudies, it is understandable that the authors should not wish to be lured into attempting to fit their material into a general framework for which their data is inadequate, but it does beg the question about the feasibility of the editor’s aspirations for the volume as a whole. There is a second limitation to the usefulness of these essays: their concentration on Bavaria. It would have been most informative had the contributors faced the question of how representative their findings were, for example, in contrast to a Protestant society (or to one which was confessionally mixed). Baumann’s essay would certainly have benefited from some comparative perspective, since her description of Bavarian poor law regulation makes it appear as a belated catching-up on what the Reformation occasioned and assisted in Protestant parts of Germany at an earlier period. Similarly, we would like to know how far the concept of honour discussed by Muller-Wirthmann (as he mentions, a strong characteristic of mediter- ranean societies) was as strong in German Protestant society.

This is less a matter of criticism of these essays and more an indication of how we might use their contribution to broaden our enquiries. The signal importance of these essays is that they show an awareness of popular culture as a complex process of varying interactions: between elites and popular classes (in some instances, as with the Haberfeldtreiben, a very hostile interaction, where some groups attempted to preserve the custom against the full weight of disapproval of the state and the church); or between the material conditions of daily life and the values which common folk worked out for themselves to deal with those conditions. Although the editor disclaims any suggestion that these grouped essays present any kind of ‘research programme’, they clearly show that Munich has become an important centre for the study of popular culture in Germany.

Clare College, Cambridge Bob Scribner