Sull'Autore
David Cressy is George III Professor of British History and Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at The Ohio State University.
Fonte dell'immagine: From David Cressy's page at Ohio State University.
Opere di David Cressy
Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (1997) 141 copie
Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (1987) 48 copie
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome legale
- Cressy, David Arthur
- Data di nascita
- 1946-04-04
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- UK (birth)
USA (naturalized) - Luogo di nascita
- Isleworth, England, UK
- Istruzione
- University of Cambridge
- Attività lavorative
- professor
historian - Organizzazioni
- North American Conference on British Studies
American Historical Association - Premi e riconoscimenti
- Guggenheim Fellowship
Fellow, Royal Historical Society
Utenti
Recensioni
Liste
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 20
- Utenti
- 568
- Popolarità
- #44,051
- Voto
- 3.8
- Recensioni
- 5
- ISBN
- 60
- Preferito da
- 2
This is an elusive, difficult and frustrating topic – a puzzle with many missing pieces. Alas, this book can tell us little about faith, gives only a fleeting glance at demography and tells us much less than we would like about Gypsy culture. Instead, the focus is on Gypsy relations with the wider community: relations founded in the prejudice and fear of that wider world. ‘Perceived as people without roots and without honesty’, Cressy reminds us that the Gypsies were seen as ‘a danger to society, an affront to the state, and offensive to God’. Indeed, between 1563 and 1783 the very fact of being a Gypsy was a hanging offence. The statute was, said a 19th-century commentator, ‘the most barbarous … that ever disgraced our criminal code’. They had a point: although the last hangings were as far back as 1628, this will have been of little comfort to the victims. Indeed, prejudice survived well beyond the anti-Gypsy laws. One correspondent to a local newspaper in the 20th century spoke for many when they dubbed Gypsies ‘shiftless, worthless people … Their morals are not bounded by ordinary rules, and nearly all of them are thieves’.
Cressy is especially good on the early modern period and at puncturing some of the bad history that has attached itself to the subject. He shows an early modernist’s scepticism for the letter of the law: the statutory prohibitions were brutal, but they were hardly ever used. The fanciful ideas – held by some scholars – that Gypsies were some kind of literary construct, or emerged as a response to the alleged transition from feudalism to capitalism, are rejected. Cressy accepts, surely correctly, the evidence that sees the Roma as a group with a history that goes back to ancient India. That said, through the centuries, they came to be bolstered by recruits from the settled population: the poor, the restless, the unsettled, perhaps even those simply wishing to escape the prying Leviathan.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Jonathan Healey is Associate Professor in Social History at Kellogg College at the University of Oxford.… (altro)