ABSTRACT
These two books claim to be situated within specific discursive formations-in Peggy Knapp’s case this means within current debates about relations between literary text, social context and historicist projects of recovery. Culture and Belief in Europe ‘is an interdisciplinary anthology’ where the disciplines brought into play are essentially, and essentialist versions of, history and literature represented by ‘drama, letters, diaries, parliamentary statutes, works of philosophy and theology, fiction, autobiography, travel literature, poetry and literary criticism.’ Each of these books has a stake in the study of culture. The project they share is that of contextualizing medieval and early modern texts within cultural, rather than simply historical, formations. So these books need to be positioned, as Knapp acknowledges, in relation to cultural studies. It’s this positioning that makes these texts contentious: if cultural studies privileges, among other effects, that of institutional politics and the specificity of cultural situatedness then how do these books read in the context of Australian academic study?
