In the film 'The Name of the Rose' there is some good old-fashioned self-flagellation by a monk. There is not enough self-flagellation these days, I think. However, I can get on with some after writing these comments. I was determined only to write positive reviews about books I enjoyed on this website, but the rule just has to be broken this time.
Anyway, this is not a review of the book because I didn't understand it very well to tell you the truth. It was laid out in a forbidding way with long paragraphs and an impenetrable font. I persevered because I've often seen it favourably commented on. But right at the death, two pages into the conclusion, I gave up. This is wot done it:
'Above all, and if not by the means proposed, then by others (not least through the systematic identification of various cultural patterns in a spatial sense), it seems to the writer that historians should now be seeking ways in which to discover local 'societies' at the very start of their investigations and therefore before they relate such societies to the landscape, to 'community' or to 'class', or even to the broader historical trends or processes within which these societies had to function and adapt.' (p43)
Wilting badly now, I reached this on the next page: 'From these various considerations, it has been argued that the orders of social relations which are most relevant to English local historians are those that fit informally, in an upwardly logical sequence, into the interstices of our current and, largely formalized, objects of study.'
I know, I know - I'm being so unfair in drawing attention to Mr Phythian-Adams' style. The book was published 21 years ago and the message about prose as dire as this has been clearly heard. No-one writes like this nowadays do they? Well yes, they do. I wish they didn't.
Now. I will not be unkind. I will not be unkind. I will not be unkind.