Book Review: Robert Darnton

Posted by Paula Stiles Sep 10, 2006

Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History is a series of articles about late Reformation and Enlightenment (17th and 18th century) social history in France. At times, it is entertaining, lewd, crude or just plain boring.

Anyone interested in medieval history should check out the first two articles. The first is about 17th century European peasant tales (notably Little Red Riding Hood) and the second about an incident in which a bunch of printer's apprentices and journeymen massacred cats to get back at the master of their shop and his wife.

The chapter on folklore and peasant tales is quite fascinating. Darnton uses these stories as a way to get into the heads of European peasants, who even three centuries ago, left few records. It's a worthy experiment, but it's marred by two errors. First, Darnton's study is too scattershot to justify the way that he classifies attitudes in these tales according to their country of origin. He needs to look at more tales to back up his classifications. Second, Darnton too often extrapolates Reformation-era peasant attitudes back to the Middle Ages by assuming quite old origins for these tales based on little evidence. For Darnton, the "Middle Ages" are the beginning of the 17th century or earlier. This lack of precision in dating mars Darnton's theories.

Similarly, in the cat massacre article, Darnton assumes that the extreme cruelty toward animals seen in the Reformation and Enlightenment eras was an older attitude deriving from the Middle Ages. If the cultural attitude is nasty and brutish, Darnton tends to classify it as "medieval" in origin. However, medieval stories of affection between humans and animals support a very different medieval view of animals than the later descartian view of "automatons" without souls. One ninth-century Irish monk, for example, wrote a poem dedicated to his cat Pangur and in 13th century France, a greyhound was honored as a holy martyr.

As in the subject of this week's film review, Darnton conflates his analysis of Reformation Europe too easily with the medieval period. This analysis is based on the idea that people lived their lives in essentially the same way in the late medieval and early modern periods. The problem with this idea is that it ignores why the two periods were separated by historians in the first place. Huge changes were occurring during these two centuries, changes that altered European attitudes in all classes profoundly and disrupted previous historical continuities. We should never assume that any Reformation attitude we don't like is medieval without the medieval evidence to back it up.