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 Islam. Though he downplays the difference between monotheists and polytheists (exemplified by Greeks and Chinese), noting that the Egyptians practiced a monotheism “buried in polytheistic beliefs,” Goody says that the monotheistic religions were “in practice the most hegemonic.” The effects were two-edged: hegemony stifled both “independent enquiry” and representational art, and created “a coherence of the ‘irrational’” (pp. 12–13). Yet these same religions were pre-set to return to the foundational texts, in “periods of looking back,” conceived as reformations or recuperations, which sometimes produced “bursts forward” of knowledge and creativity, even if, in between, came periods of conservatism and stasis. In the rest of the book Goody is, rightly, far less concerned with the inevitable oscillations, the blips and freezes, than with the returns and bursts forward, and what conditions and contingencies promote them.

This is where comparisons and perspectives broaden. Goody is interested in contacts and influences between text-based cultures, notably between the Islamic world and Christian Europe—chapter 2 deals with medicine as a medieval example—but he is even more interested in the endogenous traits and clusters within each culture, and how historical patterns of change are manifested over long spans of time. Arnold Toynbee and Fernand Braudel are progenitors of this intellectual project, and the Renaissance is “at the center” because it provides a paradigm alongside which multiple “renascences” in European and other cultures can be identified, analyzed, and compared. The distinction between terms creates an expectation which hovers over the remaining chapters and which the book fulfils in the end.

In the conceptually complicated chapter 3, “Religion and the Secular,” Goody traces a tension between philosophy and theology in Islam and Judaism, as in Christianity, at very different periods in each case, and extends this point to Hinduism and Buddhism, and even to China (though he recognizes that religious specialists there did not occupy the hegemonic position they had elsewhere [85]). Here Goody starts many hares that, unlike sheep, are not to be rounded up and penned. Aperçues abound. Not only in medieval Christendom but also in the Islamic world and in Judaism, literacy led beyond the Book. Love poetry thrived in all these cultures. Scientific ideas were discussed in schools; they grew in botanists' gardens, in medical consulting rooms and in naval yards; they were applied by the builders of cathedrals and mosques, fortifications and palaces. It was not only in Christendom that the intolerance of monotheistic hegemonic creeds was modified in practice by humanistic and “secular” values. Especially through trade, contacts between cultural zones proliferated in “vaguely equivalent societies” (90–91).

In more detailed and lengthy considerations of renascences in Islam, India, and China (chapters 4, 6, and 7) cyclical patterns emerge. Here a collaborator, Stephen Fennell, has helped with the spadework. The results, never less than interesting, do sometimes read like the summary narratives often encountered in large-scale cross-cultural syntheses. In the 120 footnote references to the chapter on China, for instance, some half-dozen secondary synoptic works predominate, most of a certain vintage. Yet the chapter's concluding assertion that “looking back [in China] has not prevented a total ‘modernization’” (240) is in part belied by the persistence and ubiquity of those backward looks. In chapter 5, by contrast, Goody's sole-authored reflections on Judaism's renascences include a quotation from his book's dedicatee, Eric Hobsbawm, in which the impact of later-nineteenth-century urbanization on Jewish emancipation is likened to “the lid [being] removed from a pressure-cooker” (154). This chapter begins and ends in modern times with “efflorescence” that involved “not so much a looking back as a looking around” (145, 159) to Islam and to the Asiatic world as well as to Christian Europe. Just as “the Italian Renaissance” had not abandoned but circumscribed Christianity's cultural sway, so secularization confined the sway of religious Judaism, letting immigrant Ashkenazi Jews dominate American cinema and much of art and science in the West, thence globally.

In the final chapter, “Were Renascences only European?” Goody seems to be heading toward a negative answer: he points out that all the major cultures considered have had Dark Ages, followed by “renascences” typically centered on rulers and their courts, which stimulated the increased flow of written communication, consumer demand, and commercial supply. Is “renascence” after all a synonym for “Renaissance” (as implied fleetingly at page 241)? Given premises and concerns voiced at the outset of Renaissances, the reader is surprised by the conclusion that only in Europe did the return to Antiquity cause a “looking back” so determined, a break with the medieval past so drastic, and a degree of secularization so large, as to allow “a burst forward in science and in knowledge generally,” which opened the door to modernity (261–62, 265; cf. 62). The Renaissance's “uniqueness” (272) turns out to depend, in other words, on a uniquely strong version of the break in continuity (“nobody else had lost their past in quite the same way” [260]) caused by the Western European Dark Ages and the subsequent domination of the Latin Church. The Renaissance, then, historically specific and with irreversible ripple effects, is indeed “only European” (my stress). There is no truck here with Eurocentrism or teleology, nor any lack of good faith, but simply a recognition that, some similarities notwithstanding, the Renaissance in Europe came about in conditions that were not replicated elsewhere—hence, was different from any renascence.

Goody's historical diagnosis is correct, but a reviewer who moonlights as a medieval Europeanist raises an eyebrow over how he reached it. Medieval Europeans had not “lost their past,” nor was the Renaissance possible without multiple medieval renascences, or even renaissances, Carolingian, Ottonian, and twelfth-century (Goody is familiar with these but discounts them), that effected new versions of Antiquity, and new fusions of these with other cultural inheritances, biblical, variously Roman, and variously barbarian, in which law and practical know-how (scientia) loomed large. Do many European renascences a Renaissance make? If so, however labeled, they are not mere links in a chronological chain but documented phenomena whose relationships cumulatively suggest, even explain, a comparatively studied social and historical one—and Goody has done it again!