¹ Scott, Joan W., “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 773–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² For perspective on the historical formation of problems posed about English medieval peasants and their village communities see Dewey, Clive, “Images of the Village Community: A Study in Anglo-Indian Ideology,” Modern Asian Studies 6, no. 3 (1972): 291–328CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burrow, J. W., “‘The Village Community’ and the Uses of History in Late Nineteenth-Century England,” in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society, ed. McKendrick, Neil (London, 1974), pp. 255–84Google Scholar; Gatrell, Peter, “Historians and Peasants: Studies of Medieval English Society in Russian Context,” Past and Present, no. 96 (1982), pp. 22–50Google Scholar; see also Brass, Tom, “Peasant Essentialism and the Agarian Question in the Colombian Andes,” Journal of Peasant Studies 17, no. 3 (1990): 444–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. To take two recent studies by historians, contrast Genicot's, LéopoldRural Communities in the Medieval West (Baltimore, 1990)Google Scholar (my review of Genicot appears in Journal of Economic History 50, no. 3 [1991]: 709–11Google Scholar) and Dyer, Christopher, “The Past, the Present, and the Future of Medieval Rural History,” Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture 1 (April 1990): 37–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a metahistory of medieval peasants that would link the origins of English capitalism to the formation of the English state in the ninth century, see the following study by the medieval archaeologist Hodges, Richard: The Anglo-Saxon Achievement: Archaeology and the Beginnings of English Society (London, 1989)Google Scholar. R. B. Goheen questions the category of “peasant” and the problems of agency in his article “Peasant Politics? Village Community and the Crown in Fifteenth-Century England,” American Historical Review 96, no. 1 (1991): 42–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The article remains moored, however, within an anthropological-historical division of labor.

³ Historians and archaeologists of rural England have been slow to engage in the postcolonial critique of history and anthropology. For example, the new journal Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture, although it claims a desire to overcome disciplinary boundaries by invoking approaches ranging from ethnography to women's history, makes no mention of how these disciplines are grappling with a postcolonial critique of their practices. This critique problematizes boundary crossings and appropriations. See the introductory article by Bellamy, Liz, Snell, K. D. M., and Williamson, Tom, “Rural History: The Prospect before Us,” 1 (April 1990): 1–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the commissioned articles by a prehistorian, medieval archaeologist and medieval historian in the same volume: Fleming, Andrew, “Landscape Archaeology, Prehistory and Rural Studies,” pp. 5–16Google Scholar; Hodges, Richard, “Rewriting the Rural History of Early Medieval Italy: Twenty-Five Years of Medieval Archaeology Reviewed,” pp. 17–36Google Scholar; Dyer, Christopher, “The Past, the Present and the Future of Medieval Rural History,” pp. 37–50Google Scholar. The following references offer evocative and by no means exhaustive examples of the postcolonial critique occurring elsewhere, outside of English rural studies: Bhabha, Homi, ed., Nation and Narration (London, 1990)Google Scholar; Dirks, Nicholas B., “History as a Sign of the Modern,” Public Culture 2 (Spring 1990): 25–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988)Google Scholar; Layton, R., ed., Conflict in the Archaeology of Living Traditions (London, 1989)Google Scholar; Pinsky, Valery and Wylie, Alison, Critical Traditions in Contemporary Archaeology (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar; Alonso, Anna Maria, “The Effects of Truth: Re-presentation of the Past and the Imagining of Community,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (1988): 33–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Inscriptions, the journal published by the Group for the Critical Study of Colonial Discourse, University of California, Santa Cruz, no. 1 (December 1985), to current issues, esp. nos. 3/4, devoted to “Feminism and the Critique of Colonial Discourse”; Young, Robert, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London, 1990)Google Scholar. The writings of Michel de Certeau have also deeply influenced my own efforts to grapple with the postcolonial critique of modernist history: The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984)Google Scholar, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis, 1986)Google Scholar, and The Writing of History (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.

⁴ I am using “disciplines” in a Foucaultian sense and understand “objects” as described in Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. Smith, A. M. Sheridan (New York, 1972)Google Scholar, and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York, 1977)Google Scholar. I am also indebted to the thoughts of Donna Haraway on objects and disciplinary boundaries found in her article, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The citation may be found on p. 595.

⁵ See Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983)Google Scholar, for a provocative analysis of how anthropology and history have collaborated to produce boundaries inscribing the primitive and the past.

⁶ Archaeologists have begun to theorize their border crossings with history. See some preliminary work: Hodder, Ian, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology (London, 1986)Google Scholar; see also Hodder, Ian, ed., Archaeology as Long-Term History (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar; and Shanks, Michael, Experiencing the Past: On the Character of Archaeology (New York, 1992)Google Scholar.

⁷ See, e.g., Thorn, Martin, “Tribes within Nations: The Ancient Germans and the History of Modern France,” in Bhabha, , ed., pp. 23–44Google Scholar; Frantzen, Allen J., “Prologue: Documents and Monuments: Difference in Interdisciplinarity in the Study of Medieval Culture,” in Speaking Two Languages, ed. Frantzen, Allen J. (New York, 1991), pp. 1–33Google Scholar.

⁸ Dirks, p. 27.

⁹ For a recent restatement of this problem of silence, see Prakash, Guyan, “Can the Subaltern Ride? A Reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 1 (1992): 175CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts,” Representations 37 (1992): 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Terry, Jennifer, “Theorizing Deviant Historiography,” Differences 3 (Summer 1991): 55–74Google Scholar. The problem of silence points to one of the most difficult problems in postcolonial history. The concluding citation is taken from an essay by Morrison, Toni, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (1989): 11Google Scholar. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak discusses some contemporary problems of writing Indian history in “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in her collection of essays, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York, 1988), pp. 197–221Google Scholar, and her essay “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” History and Theory 24, no. 3 (1985): 247–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where she discusses the “violence of the rift” (p. 253); see the debate in Comparative Studies in Society and History: Prakash, Guyan, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” 32, no. 2 (1990): 333–408Google Scholar; O'Hanlon, Rosalind, “After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World,” 34, no. 1 (1992): 141–67Google Scholar; Prakash, “Can the ‘Subaltern’ Ride?” See also Glissant, Edouard, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville, Va., 1989)Google Scholar; references in Dirks; and Mitchell, Timothy, “Everyday Metaphors of Power,” Theory and Society 19 (1990): 545–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to Lisa Rofel for drawing my attention to the last reference. Historians of women also grapple with this problem of silence; for a searching discussion of “epistemic humility,” see Pierson, Ruth Roach, “Experience, Difference, Dominance and Voice in the Writing of Canadian Women's History,” in Writing Women's History: International Perspectives, ed. Offen, Karen, Pierson, Ruth Roach, and Rendall, Jane (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), pp. 79–106Google Scholar. I am grateful to Judith M. Bennett for pointing out the relevance of this essay.

¹⁰ This reading concentrates on the following article by Hodges, , “Parachutists and Truffle-Hunters: At the Frontiers of Archaeology and History,” in Rural Settlements of Medieval England: Studies Dedicated to Maurice Beresford and John Hurst, ed. Aston, Michael, Austen, David, and Dyer, Christopher (Oxford, 1989), pp. 287–306Google Scholar; the following references include some of Hodges's chief publications: Dark Age Economics (London, 1982)Google Scholar, Primitive and Peasant Markets (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar, The Anglo-Saxon Achievement: Archaeology and the Beginnings of English Society; with Whitehouse, David, Mohammed, Charlemagne, and the Origins of Europe (London, 1983)Google Scholar; with Mitchell, J., eds., San Vincenzo al Volturno (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar.

¹¹ See Frantzen, “Prologue: Documents and Monuments”; and Frantzen, Allen J. and Vengoni, Charles L., “The Desire for Origins: An Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon Studies,” Style 20, no. 2 (1986): 142–56Google Scholar.

¹² Clarke, David L., “Archaeology: The Loss of Innocence,” Antiquity 47 (1973): 6–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Hodges writes in “Parachutists and Truffle-Hunters”: “Sampling horrifies truffle-hunters, as Kent Flannery illustrated most amusingly, and as medieval archaeologists in dinosaur-like mood confirm at annual meetings of the Society for Medieval Archaeology” (p. 290).

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 291.

¹⁵ Beresford, Maurice W. and Hurst, John G., Deserted Medieval Village Studies (London, 1971), p. 78Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Such a fallacy of transparency has also troubled efforts to formulate an archaeology of gender. By analogy, if we assume that the archaeological record is transparent, then we will believe that archaeological evidence will somehow render visible women, who have remained invisible in written documents. For a recent critical reworking of some of the premises of an archaeology of gender, see Gero, J. and Conkey, M., Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory (New York, 1991)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Wolf's, Eric study, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, 1982)Google Scholar, has profoundly influenced the historical vision of Richard Hodges. For a recent critique of Wolf's book, see Taussig, Michael, “History as Commodity in Some Recent American (Anthropological) Literature,” Critique of Anthropology 9, no. 1 (1989): 7–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also the reply by Mintz, Sidney W. and Wolf, Eric R., “Reply to Michael Taussig,” in the same issue, pp. 25–31Google Scholar.

¹⁸ My reading of Hodges's concept of the archaeological record is deeply influenced by a brilliant article by Patrik, Linda E., “Is There an Archaeological Record?” Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 8 (1985): 34Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Hodges, , “Parachutists and Truffle-Hunters,” p. 304Google Scholar.

²⁰ Hodges, , The Anglo-Saxon Achievement (n. 2 above), p. 1Google Scholar.

²¹ Public discourse about history does still make this claim, however: Lynn Cheney, head of the National Endowment of the Humanities, claims that there are timeless truths “transcending accidents of class, race and gender, [that] speak to us all,” as quoted in Scott, Joan, “History in Crisis? The Others' Side of the Story,” American Historical Review 94, no. 3 (1989): 683CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hodges is not alone in an uneasiness about the empty throne of the humanities and the desire to fill that throne with something, archaeology or science. See a recent dialogue between Watson, Patty Jo and Fotiadis, Michael, “The Razor's Edge: Symbolic-Structuralist Archaeology and the Expansion of Archaeological Inference,” American Anthropologist 92, no. 3 (1990): 613–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an example of concerns among historians over the empty throne, see Cousins, Mark, “The Practice of Historical Investigation,” in Post-structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Attridge, Derek, Bennington, Geoff, and Young, Robert (London, 1987), pp. 126–36Google Scholar; De Bolla, Peter, “Disfiguring History,” Diacritics 16 (Winter 1986): 49–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Biddick, Kathleen, “People and Things: Power in Early English Development,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 1 (1990): 3–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Baudrillard, Jean, The Mirror of Production (St. Louis, 1975)Google Scholar.

²⁴ See the following article for a reflection on uses of quantitative methods in history: Fitch, Nancy, “Statistical Fantasies and Historical Facts: History in Crisis,” Historical Methods 17, no. 4 (1984): 239–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ I remain indebted to Otto Gründler and Thomas Seiler, Western Michigan University, for their unflagging support of the archaeological conference and publication of the conference volume Archaeological Approaches to Medieval Europe, ed. Biddick, Kathleen, in Studies in Medieval Culture, vol. 18 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1984)Google Scholar.

²⁶ For a critical meditation on capitalism and the writing of history, see Prakash, , “Can the ‘Subaltern’ Ride?” (n. 9 above), pp. 175–79Google Scholar.

²⁷ Biddick, Kathleen, “Medieval English Peasants and Market Involvement: A Case Study,” Journal of Economic History 45, no. 4 (1985): 823–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Missing Links: Taxable Wealth, Markets and Accumulation among Medieval English Peasants,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 2 (1987): 277–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ See n. 10 above, for the references to Richard Hodges publications. The following work of Alan Macfarlane has deeply influenced Hodges, : The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar.

²⁹ In order to have individualism, there must be individuals. It is very difficult for Western epistemological and ontological systems to imagine persons as other than individuals. There is an urgent need for grappling with this problem, in order to think about personhood in the past and the future, but we must also take care not to construct alternative epistemologies as “golden ages,” that is not the point of my discussion here. I wish to mark differences but not to judge them. For compelling reflections on this subject, see the following articles to which this section is indebted: Strathern, Marilyn, “Localism Displaced: A ‘Vanishing Village’ in Rural England,” Ethnos 49. nos. 1/2 (1984): 43–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strathern, Marilyn, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ This note rehearses debates more relevant to the “People and Things” essay, but it is important to note here that I do not expect these practices to converge at all times and all places in medieval Europe. I argue that they do in a specific moment in twelfth-century England. Such practices of survey, textuality, and inscription on the landscape do not converge for Carolingian polyptyques, for instance. They might be better regarded along with barbarian law codes as symbolic instruments which have not yet aligned orality, textuality, and literacy: for the argument about early medieval law codes and their disjuncture with juridical processes, see Wormald, Patrick, “Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis: Legislation and Germanic Kingship, from Euric to Cnut,” in Early Medieval Kingship, ed. Sawyer, P. H. and Wood, I. N. (Leeds, 1977), pp. 105–38Google Scholar.

³¹ The problem of specularity embedded in the metaphor “mirror of material culture” is profoundly vexing in many registers. For a provocative deconstruction, see Gallop, Jane, “Where to Begin,” in her essays Reading Lacan (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), pp. 74–92Google Scholar.

³² There exists a wonderful image for this—the famous scene in the film The Circus (1928), in which Charlie Chaplin gets lost in the funhouse of mirrors.

³³ I am struggling here with Gayatri Spivak's critique of totalizing concepts of power and desire in the work of Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari and their potential for reintroducing the sovereign subject under the category of agent: see Spivak, Gayatri, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Laurence (Champaign-Urbana, Ill., 1988), pp. 271–313CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Elaine Scarry has brilliantly explored the deprivation of making in her book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar. My thoughts here are also indebted to other sources: de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (n. 3 above); de Lauretis, Teresa, “The Technology of Gender,” in her essays Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), pp. 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haraway (n. 4 above); Miller, Daniel, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar.

³⁵ See Haraway, esp. p. 595; and also Scott (n. 1 above). Haraway's ideas about situated knowledges converge on a very different kind of critique of representation in Mitchell (n. 9 above).

³⁶ de Certeau, , The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 117Google Scholar.

³⁷ For an introduction to a growing body of literature that will enable the rereading of “place” for “space,” see Bennett, Judith M., Women in the Medieval English Countryside (New York, 1987)Google Scholar.

³⁸ de Lauretis, , “The Technology of Gender,” p. 25Google Scholar.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ de Certeau, , The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 117Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Wilson, D. R., “Alterations to Ridge and Furrow: Some Examples Illustrated,” in Aston, , Austen, , and Dyer, , eds. (n. 10 above), pp. 287–306Google Scholar.

⁴² Stuart Wrathmell, “Peasant Houses, Farmsteads and Villages in Northeast England,” in Ibid., pp. 247–68.

⁴³ I refer to this historiographic literature in a review essay: Biddick, Kathleen, “Malthus in a Straitjacket? Analyzing Agrarian Change in Medieval England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 20, no. 4 (1990): 623–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ Theorists such as Peter Stallybrass and Aron Gurevich warn us against simple dichotomies of those with history and those without: Gurevich, Aron, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar; Stallybrass, Peter and White, Alon, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London, 1986)Google Scholar. For an example of this kind of literary excavation, see the essays collected in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Patterson, Lee (Berkeley, 1990)Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Camille, Michael, “The Très Riches Heures: An Illuminated Manuscript in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (1990): 72–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Labouring for the Lord: The Ploughman and the Social Order in the Luttrell Psalter,” Art History 10, no. 4 (1987): 423–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ The intersections of rural time with urban time require more study—see Biddick, “Medieval English Peasants and Market Involvement,” “Missing Links: Taxable Wealth, Markets, and Accumulation among Medieval English Peasants” (both n. 27 above); Campbell, Bruce and Power, John P., “Mapping the Agricultural Geography of Medieval England,” Journal of Historical Geography 15 (1989): 24–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Campbell, Bruce, The Agricultural Geography of Medieval England (Cambridge, in press)Google Scholar; interim reports of the project, Feeding the City: London's Impact on the Agrarian Economy of Southern England, c. 1250–1350, available from the Centre for Metropolitan History, University of London, Institute for Historical Research.

⁴⁷ de Certeau, , The Practice of Everyday Life (n. 3 above), pp. 48–49Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Cited from Duby, Georges, The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974), p. 5Google Scholar. The pollen diagram of Rotes Moor appears on p. 9. See also Duby, Georges, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, trans. Postan, Cynthia (1st English trans., Columbia, S.C., 1962Google Scholar; 1st paperbacked., 1976; 2d ed., 1981; 3d ed., 1990)—the pollen diagram of Roten Moor (the different spellings of the moor are Duby's) appears on p. 392.

⁴⁹ Abel, Wilhelm, Die Wuestungen des ausgehenden Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 1976; the 3d ed., 1976CrossRefGoogle Scholar, contains the foreword to the 1943 and 1955 eds.). The pollen diagram appears on p. 56 of the 1976 edition.

⁵⁰ Genicot uses a pollen diagram in a similar way in his narrative; see Rural Communities in the Medieval West (n. 2 above), p. 8; Recent work in environmental archaeology has asserted the relational, interactive process of so-called natural and cultural processes. In so doing, they locate their studies not in nature or in culture and thus deterritorialize both as categories. As M. L. Parry has argued, “Space time coincides between climatic change and economic change do not necessarily indicate a causal connection.” See Parry, M. L., Climate Change, Agriculture and Settlement (Folkestone, 1978)Google Scholar; Bell, Martin, “Environmental Archaeology as an Index of Continuity and Change in the Medieval Landscape,” in Aston, , Austen, , and Dyer, , eds., pp. 268–86Google Scholar; Waateringe, W. Groenman-van and van Wijngaarden-Bakker, L. H., “Medieval Archaeology and Environmental Research in the Netherlands,” in Medieval Archaeology in the Netherlands, ed. Besteman, J. C., Bos, J. M., and Heidinga, H. A. (Maastricht, 1990), pp. 283–98Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Hoskins, W. G., The Making of the English Landscape (Harmondsworth, 1955), p. 76Google Scholar. For a different history of the English woodland, see Rackham, Oliver, Ancient Woodland (London, 1980)Google Scholar.