The establishment of human antiquity

Camporesi integrates into his account insights from social and cultural anthropology (not least, Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas), and maintains a wholesome balance between a concern with the symbolic meaning of the cultural systems of the flesh, food, etc., and, on the other hand, a more materialist account banausically concerned with what people ate, what made them sick, and what they died of. What Camporesi shows particularly well is that-at least throughout the Middle Ages and early modern times-attitudes towards the flesh were shared over a social continuum which spread up the scale from popular to ecclesiastical religion, from vernacular folklore (concerned with monsters, the terms of health, the signs of death) right up to the theories and investigations of the learned. The history of medicine and the history of biology are most frequently written as ropes of theory and interpretation stretching back to Aristotle and Hippocrates and forward to today's science. What we less often see are attempts to integrate medico-scientific doctrines (e.g., on generation, on fermentation, on death) within the vernacular culture of their own times. But that is precisely what Camporesi has attempted, suggesting many ways in which popular attitudes towards the body should be seen as part of a continuum which includes the speculations of the philosophers and the experiments of the scientists, and trying to relate (for instance) the Bernardine vision of man as a sack of worms to seventeenth-century natural philosophers peering down their new microscopes for intestinal worms to resolve the spontaneous generation issue. Not least, rather in the manner of Dulumeau and Mandrou, he suggests that in various important ways, both the post-Tridentine Catholic Church and secular elite culture were attempting, from the seventeenth century, to distance "proper thought" from the vulgar materialism of the people. This is a valuable point. The liberal historiography we took in with our mothers' milk told us that medieval thought was idealistic and other-worldly, and that one of the legacies of the so-called Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century has been the emergence of "materialism". Camporesi's study-with its obvious affinity here to Montaillou or The cheese and the worms-shows us just how inadequate such a reading would be. Camporesi's book, deeply stimulating though it is, is not without its shortcomings. Its method relies heavily upon narrative and evocation; there is little formal analysis, and no systematic presentation of factual material. It is a shame that Camporesi chooses …