The past may be another country, but when we try to study it the problem seems to be not so much that they do things differently as that they give such a different account of what they do. To understand past intellectual activities, in particular, we often have to divide up what for us is a single concern, or bring together issues which we treat as distinct. Coleman's is an ambitious unifying project of the latter kind; its problems come from the nature of the two issues she yokes together.

LRB 14 May 1992 | PDF Download