Customer Reviews

Fascinating subject, uneven quality - By: Judy Koren, 31 Jul 2003
The re-issuein paperback by a general publisher of an academic work originally from the CUP is a rare event. But even the original edition cast a sidelong eye at the general public, who might be willing to bear with academic minutiae for the sake of its astonishing revelations (to all but professional historians) on a subject they thought they knew about.

If you're going to write an academic work, footnotes & all, for the "educated layman", you'd better be a good writer, lively & stylish, as well as a good academic. From that point of view, the essaysin this collection are very uneven, ranging from the occasionally tongue-in-cheek polish of Hugh Trevor-Roper (on the invention of the Highland Traditionin Scotland) to the convoluted & occasionally asyntactic sentences of Prys Morgan (on "the hunt for the Welsh past"). The one invites you on an enthralling voyage of discovery, the other requires you to wade through a viscous Sargasso Sea. Nonetheless, both journeys are well worth undertaking, as are the othersin the collection.

But perhaps the most valuable aspect of the book is that it encourages us to reflectin general, quite aside from the specific examples studied, on the human need for a link to the past & evidence of superiority, if not now, then at leastin a prior Golden Age. If human communities divide the world into "them" & "us", how do they define who "we" are? And what makes "us" special? On the lines of Voltaire's famous comment that "if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." we are forced to the conclusion that if a national history & culture do not exist, it is necessary to invent them. (A process traced also by Y. Nevo & myselfin our study of the early history of the Umayyad State). It appears that the need to define one's community as valid -- by reference to an historic past -- is most acute when that community is only just established or isin decline. The lessons of this book should be keptin mind when reading the history of any nation.