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  • Gypsies: An English history by David Cressy
  • Ann Ostendorf (bio)
Gypsies: An English history. David Cressy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2018. 411 pp. ISBN 9780198768135 (hbk)

Though a number of scholars have narrated long histories of diverse Roma people within a national or imperial framework, until David Cressy's Gypsies none have done so for England.1 As something of a neophyte to Romani Studies, yet a scholar with a long career exploring the histories of everyday life, marginalized people, textual construction, and public discourse in early modern England, Cressy is well positioned to engage in and evaluate some of the field's debates with a fresh, if disciplinarily specific, eye. Gypsies is a work of social history, a field that Cressy has worked in over the course of his career. His facility with diverse early modern English archival and published accounts allows the author to incorporate primary source evidence written about English Gypsies unconsidered by other scholars. Cressy achieves his stated goal of treating "English Gypsies as people rather than as constructs or categories" (p. 276), through a chronological narrative encompassing nearly 500 years of English Gypsy history.

The eight chronological body chapters parse the narrative into monarchical or century-long segments. Chapters include those on the Tudor, Elizabethan, Stuart, and Victorian periods, as well as ones on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Within each era, the author remains primarily concerned with: the relationship between Gypsies and the state; representations of Gypsies in the media; and Gypsies' experiences resulting from these legal and cultural expectations. Gypsy marginalization under the law, the recycling of stereotypical images about them, and the experiences emergent from a life of itinerancy appear consistent across English Gypsy history even as they took unique forms during different eras. Some particular topics examined in greater depth include: Renaissance literary constructions, Tudor legislative initiatives, ambivalent Stuart-era law enforcement, high profile court cases, Gypsylorist scholarship, missionary activities, and contemporary activist movements.

Chapters 2–9 are bookended by an introductory and summative chapter. Chapter 1 considers the "reception, representation and rejection of Gypsies," as [End Page 119] they arrived to and spread through Europe "as both prelude and background to their experiences in England" (p. 1). Most of this chapter will be familiar to Romani Studies scholars. It is drawn from the secondary historical scholarship published in English, French, Italian, and German. This chapter culminates with a short section on European representations of Gypsies, a theme consistently revisited for each English historical era. Although Cressy grounds the experiences of the men and women under study into the particulars of the era in which they lived, he nonetheless recognizes some consistencies across the centuries. These are handled most explicitly in the final chapter, "Lives and Livelihoods." Here the author notes some trends suggestive of assumptions held about Gypsies as well as experiences shared across the centuries. These trends relate to appearance, dress, housing, transportation, employment, mobility, language, beliefs, and relationships with members of the broader communities. In the end, however, Cressy concludes that generalizations about Gypsies are "invariably wrong" (p. 242), noting "many of the things we might wish to know about Gypsies – about their historical beliefs, values, and domestic practices – remain unknowable" (p. 230).

Anyone new to the subject will find considered in this book the major scholarly debates being argued in Romani Studies today. The author is firm in his position that extensive and diverse evidence points to an Indian origin for European Gypsies. Some descendants of these immigrants may have intermarried with English women and men, yet there always remained a distinctly identifiable population. Gypsies were never merely tropes or synonymous with English vagrants. In addition, Cressy choses the term "Gypsy" in full awareness of its contemporary contentiousness and discusses the history and politics of naming.

Because Cressy is most interested in uncovering the diverse phenomenal experiences of the many different people called Gypsies over the course of English history, he largely refrains from explicit considerations of Gypsy identity and ethnicity. Nonetheless, his position is clear: "it is neither racist, essentialist, nor 'primordialist' to treat Gypsies as an ethnic group, provided we recognize ethnicity to be variable and contingent" (pp. xiv–xv). He concludes...

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