Publisher's Synopsis
In the Mammoth Room of Charles Wilson Peale's Philadelphia museum, the reconstructed skeleton of a mammoth stands beside that of a mouse. This juxtaposition, write Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, is symbolic of the two approaches to history which they seek to reconcile.;In "The Mammoth and the Mouse: Microhistory and Morphology" Egmond and Mason aim to rescue morphology from abstraction and microhistory from the taint of triviality. They explore the theoretical relationship between the microhistorical method of paying careful attention to revealing details and the morphological method of looking for homologies among cultural artifacts or texts from different places and times. Drawing on both textual and visual material, the authors offer a series of microhistorical examinations of a surprising variety of phenomena - including a legal dispute between spouses in 16th-century Holland, a curious ritual punishment for capital offences, and the reassembling of the above-mentioned mammoth skeleton for public display in 1800.
