Clio is a demanding muse. Those who pay scant heed to her discipline of context, who pay little attention to the contingency of that context, or who seek to Solomonically separate her s tep-chi ldren--structure and process--f ind themselves in the dark when she spreads her wings. Social historians step warily in this contested terrain, and the most successful have kept a clear eye on the rigours of chronological organization. Indeed, it is probably not tmtrue to say that the historian is inherently conservative and wary of generalization precisely because her /h is training and experience have repeatedly shown overarching formulae and principles to be of little concrete value in explaining the specificity of those innumerable events and episodes that are joined together in the crucible of time and space. Yet, and it is an enormously large qualification, much of the most interesting and stimulating social history borr o w s s o m e t i m e s indiscriminately--from the social sciences. It used to be that sociology mad economics were the fields to be plundered, but now it appears to me that borrowing from social anthropology is in vogue. What historians have gained from these intellectual forays has not been the discipline of other disciplines but rather the new ways of seeing that a theoretical, as opposed to a resolutely empirical, method provides. Nowhere has this trend been more pronounced than the study of early modern European h is tory-I think here of Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Love, M o n e y and Death in the Pays d'Oc as particularly exemplary texts. However, it seems to me that, for all the genius and insight that these two authors, and many others, have displayed in their illumination of sub-literate discourse, this histoire des mental i tes is something of a dead-end. It spotlights extraordinary but hitherto neglected plebeians and raises them to the stature of their more illustrious contemporaries; but, just as biography is an inadequate guide to the history of a time, so, too, and for much the same reasons, is this new vogue of plebeian intellectual biography. We are left, then, propped on what the English would call a cleft stick: how do we begin to accord comparative weights to the centrifugal and centripetal forces and still retain some sense of the representativeness of that experience? I am not sure that there is an answer to this question other than the hackneyed ones that the proof is in the pudding/let 's see what comes out in the wash. It is thus extremely dif-