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304 Short notices The section on the history of excavation at Sutton H o o provides valuable detail with which to assess the place of this most famous find in Anglo-Saxon studies and in British archaeology. With a feeling for the historical impact of Sutton Hoo upon British archaeology, Evans notes the subsequent fame of even the minor labourers on this site. However, the way in which the discoverer, a 'professional excavator' of lower-middle class origins, was supplanted by more powerful figures, might have warranted a more critical statement. In fact, the style of this book is often rather too coy. Stronger critique could be made of the scholarship surrounding this find and this would make more compelling reading. This volume is something of a transitional work. Though Evans is conscious that the publication of Carver's excavations will soon necessitate a reassessment of this site and its wider context, this edition largely sticks to the older debates. Consequently, while H. M . Chadwick's theory of a possible Scandinavian content to the burial is addressed, more recent questions raised by Ian W o o d and David Whitehouse concerning the possible Frankish and Byzantine influences upon the burial are not. The disclaimer at the beginning as to the evolving nature of our understanding of this site does not entirely excuse the dependency of the volume upon somewhat outdated conceptions and interpretations. While fulfilling its role as a basic guide to the assemblage from Sutton Hoo, this volume also pretends to some historical analysis. In this latter respect we may hope for a fuller revision in the near future. Jonathan M . Wooding University of Western Sydney, Nepean Gal la is, Pierre, La fee a la fontaine et a I'arbre: un archetype du co merveilleux et du recit courtois, Amsterdam and Atlanta, Rodopi, 1992; paper; pp. 355; R.R.P. AUS$?. The marvellous or the magical can never be understood through Frazerianinspired comparative cultural gleaning, backed up with Jungian-style or Freudian-slipped intuition, picking out decontextualized metaphors and themes from a cosmos of mythical systems and universal signs. Yet this is the way that Pierre Gallais attempts to understand a myriad of fantastical images in twelfth- and thirteenth-century, mostly French, tales and courtly romances; from love and lakes, to Christianization, and to Melusina. Gallais' thinking is imbued with the theories of universal archetypes as Short notices 305 worked out by the folklorist Thompson, the philosopher Bachelard, and the anthropologists Durand and Eliade. He happily indexes things such as ponds or woods and then decides whether they are similartoarchetypes of, say, the maternal or the dangerous. Metaphors, for that is what they are, isolated in this way allow for whatever recontextualization an inspired interpreter so chooses. Similarity in such a symbolic free-fall is not sufficient for representing past beliefs in general and the folkloric in particular. Whereas meanings are elusive,resemblancesare ubiquitous. Any two things can have properties in common. Looking for what seems similar over the longue duree can never account for former predictive or inductive practices at all. Only past inductive practices themselves can provide the basis for canons of similarity. Two apparendy similar folkloric myths, two Indo-European symbols, two magical discourses, two popular mentalites, are simply two-a-penny and prove absolutely nothing about the past. Resemblance is never obvious, natural, innate, ahistorical, simple, in the mind, or in the genes. Searching for the similar in time and space may be, in the end, all that the medievalist actually does, but it is nowhere near as easy as it sounds. Gallais' book may be impressive in its exuberence, but it is essentially a conservative argument that ignores the specifity of the past for the superficial ease of the archetype. In the end, the very assumptions that underlie the book are wrong and therefore one learns nothing from it about how medieval men and womentiioughtor imagined. It is the mind of Gallais we see, not theirs. Mark Pegg Department of History Princeton University Halkin, Leon-E., Erasmus: a critical biography, trans. John Tonkin, Oxford and Cambridge Mass., Blackwell, 1994; rpt; paper; pp. xv, 360; R.R.P. A U S $45.00 [distributed in...

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