Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763 by Richard Beale Davis (review)

Book Reviews crisis and was motivated by a profound humanistic idealism. When the academic study of art begins again to view literature as a mirror of human history, this book should stand as the wisest, most temperate guide through a complex era of modern cultural history. JAMES M. KEMPF, USAF Academy Richard Beale Davis. Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978. 3v, 1810 p. $60.00. With an investment of over twenty-five years, Richard Beale Davis has created a masterpiece of intellectual and cultural history that will pay dividends to students of the colonial South for many years. Winner of the 1979 National Book Award, the three-volume Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763 is a model of scholarship: judiciously organized, thoroughly indexed, painstakingly annotated, and gracefully written. Davis's purpose is simple: to demonstrate the existence of an intellectual South and to establish this South as a vital and active participant in the shaping of American culture. Davis's first volume discusses the discovery and history of the colonial South, the role education played in its development , and the presence of the Indian as a force in southern life. The second volume includes a thorough discussion of books, libraries, reading, and printing; religion; the sermon and religious tract; and science and technology . The third volume addresses the fine arts in the life of the southern colonist, the emergence of a literature, and the role of politics and economics . The first volume contains an introduction for the three volumes, while the last contains an epilogue and an index for the study. Also included in the book are over twenty illustrations: bookplates, title pages, maps, drawings , portraits. Throughout his study, Davis blends fact and thesis skillfully. He utilizes scholarly apparatus, but avoids scholarly pedantry. He resurrects from the tombs of neglect the culture of the colonial South and provides readers with an insight into the development of the southern mind in its first 175 years. As Davis suggests, he hopes that his study will be "informative and useful as intellectual history per se, but above all that it will suggest to interested and alert readers scores of investigations which they will pursue, and of studies which they will publish." Davis's Intellectual Life, then, is not an end, but a beginning. JEFFREY B. WALKER, Oklahoma State University Mircea Eliade, The Forbidden Forest. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1977. 596 p. Mircea Eliade, a Rumanian teaching at the University of Chicago, has a central animating purpose that unifies his various interdisciplinary activities . To the rationalistic, linear-thinking speaker of "technical language" (to use Levi-Strauss's term), Eliade brings the information and insights ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW275 ...