The pagan religions of the ancient British isles: their nature and legacy (review)

212 Reviews Eisenstein's methodology, which appears so often to privilege secondary material over the books themselves, and with her repudiation of the primacy of archival research in printing history. Eisenstein also constructs arguments which are based on an elite fragment of books produced during thistime,rather than attempting to account for printed book production as a whole. Of course, this is a problem which is not limited to work on the fifteenth century or even to the entire hand press period. The relative lack of serious work on early m o d e m paperbacks, for example, remains a source of frustration for anyone interested in recent cultural history. The problem is, and it is a problem which this book admirably attempts to address, that cultural elites can only define themselves in terms of the non-elite. Even if w e are only interested in elite culture, we have to define it in relation to what is popular. Printing the written word is divided into three sections which conceptually offer themselves to an artefact-based study of this kind: 'Printers', 'Authors and artists', and 'Readers', each section having three or four chapters. Each section is strongly constructed, even if thefinalfour essays on readers are particularly impressive. Paul Saenger and Michael Heinlen's chapter on incunable description shows how a fuller knowledge of provenance can help to reconstruct patterns of ownership and reading. Lotte Hellinga's excellent chapter on the importation of continental books into England and Scotland provides fascinating evidence about patterns of universitytibraryacquisitions. This is a stimulating collection of essays about early publishing history which suggests that despite the huge amount of scholarship already devoted to incunabula, we are only just beginning to learn what was entailed, broadly speaking, in printing the written word. Geraint Evans Centre for Celtic Studies University of Sydney Hutton, Ronald, The pagan religions of the ancient British isles: their nature and legacy, Oxford , Blackwell,1991; cloth; pp. xviii, 397; 57 figures; R.R.P. AUS$59.95 [distributed in Australia by Allen and Unwin] Ronald Hutton is an amiable man who has written an interesting book but the book will inevitably disappoint for he has little to say about the 'nature' of pagan religion and the 'legacy' consists not of folk survivals but of current alternative beliefs. Hutton has conscientiously worked through the prehistoric and early historic record of the British Isles and culled from it key sites and artefacts ofritualtype but comes to no conclusion about religion except that it can be thought to have existed. His greatest strength is in the concise presentation of complex evidence and argument.His reading has been prodigious and his analyses are marked by a Reviews 213 cheerful commonsense. H e is at his best in the very solid discussion of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages for which he has written a useful synthesis. However, the chapters on the Iron Age, on Roman Britain and on the early medieval period are much thinner and more derivative. His viewsfitwell with those recently published by Kim McCone in Pagan past and Christian present (An Sagart, 1990), which have conclusively debunked the notion that pagan Celtic myth was integrally incorporated into early Christian Irish writing. McCone goes so far as to suggest that some supposedly Celtic behaviour such asritualdecapitation was actually derived from the Bible. Hutton is less cynical butreliesovermuch on the generalising work of Miranda Green. To the historian the most valuable part of Hutton's book is his analysis of the alternative views of the pagan past, put forward by a variety of specialinterest groups, from feminist mystics to N e w Age cultists. H e has taken the trouble to read widely and to explore these views with sympathy. He explains the historical basis of the alternative interpretations and shows how scholarly theories have been misunderstood or distorted to fit particular world views, pointing out that archaeologists have only themselves to blame if their theories are misrepresented and gives some telling examples of unguarded statements about, for instance, mother goddesses which have spawned what amounts to a whole new religion. Discussion of each alternative view is integrated into the relevant chapter: archaeo-astronomy with the Bronze...