My review of An Infinite History (Princeton University Press, 2021) by Emma Rothschild.
This review first appeared in Who Do You Think You Are ? Magazine.
Review by Ruth A Symes
Behind the silent records of family history, the past is
noisy. Our ancestors were not individuals living in isolation, but members of
ever-changing social networks who shared news and information with the many people
who lived around them and (through the networks of those people) with the world
beyond. Rothschild’s study of the
networks around an unknown and illiterate French woman, Marie Aymard, in the
obscure provincial town of Angouleme in the years leading up to the French Revolution,
examines this proposition in fascinating detail.
Making prolific use of archival sources, the
investigation spins first around 83 townsfolk who came together one December
afternoon in 1764 to witness a prenuptial agreement. The largely familial and neighbourly network,
broadens to include the next ring of social contacts in other parts of the town
and country, and then moves out further still to include contacts who operated in
other parts of the world, but had links back to Angouleme. Academics would
describe the time dimension of this kind of history as ‘flat’ or ‘horizontal,’ but
Rothschild also introduces a ‘vertical’ component by tracing some families on
into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Even amateur family historians will speculate on what
they might learn by similarly scrutinising the networks around their own
ancestors; the possibilities are truly ‘infinite’.
Angouleme, French Revolution, France, French, women's history, family history, genealogy, networks
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