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The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730.

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Daniel Woolf. The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. Pp. xvi, 421. $85.00. ISBN 0-19-925778-7.

Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf, eds. The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500-1850. (Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain.) New York: Manchester University Press; dist. by Palgrave, New York. 2002. Pp. x, 286. $24.95 paper. ISBN 0-7190-5747-7.

Early modern England, like most human societies, was absorbed by its own past. The physical and cultural environment was saturated with historical references, as our own is, if we care to look. The landscape, the ground, the archives, and the memory were rich with reminders, mnemonics, and interpretive cues. Place-names, legends, artifacts, and family stories contributed to a richly historicized ambient cultural noise. Daniel Woolf listens to this noise in The Social Circulation of the Past and provides a reliable guide to its orchestration. This is not another survey of the development of History as a mode of analysis that became an academic discipline, but rather an original and wide-ranging account of the habits of thought, languages, and media that were molded and nuanced by historical consciousness. It is mostly concerned with the historical culture of the gentry, but also addresses popular beliefs about the past that resided in oral tradition.

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