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Jack Goody, in all his many prolific years, has never written a dull work. Though the word "comparative" does not seem to have featured in any of his titles, comparisons--with their constructively unsettling effects--and a perspective spanning Eurasia and Africa, have characterized his writings from the 1960s on. In his latest book, he starts from the European concept of Renaissance, and the thing it was coined for, which he calls a European "burst forward" (the adverb offers a hostage), first in Italy, then more widely, between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. He inspects critically renaissance's core meaning of rebirth, in order to compare its alleged anticipations, repetitions, and analogues. The metaphor signals the inspiration of the past. Oral myths and traditions can transmit such inspiration, but Goody is interested here in pasts known through texts, not just in Europe but in non-European cultures too. Long before the words "global" and "transnational" history appeared on university curricula, Goody concerned himself with the things. He is more frank now than before about what drives him: a determination to challenge Eurocentrism and the teleology that makes Europe's lead in modernity a foregone conclusion.
The genesis of Renaissances lies in some of Goody's earliest work. He himself identified a particular co-authored article, "The Consequences of Literacy," which appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History in 1963: in 1986, in the preface to The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society, Goody described this article as "brashly entitled." The adverb was tongue-in-cheekily unrepentant. Renaissances reprises the argument that a literate culture exhibits specific traits, whose interactions produce not a simple binary--literate: oral--but highly varied consequences and options, social, economic, and above all communicative. Texts formulate, preserve, and transmit knowledge, but how these processes affect culture at large depends on who commissions, studies, interprets, teaches, and applies the texts. In the first chapter, Goody introduces and explores the role of religious texts, especially those of the "Abrahamistic" trio of Judaism, Christianity, and...