R.B. Bernstein emailed the news this morning that the distinguished historian of early America Rhys Isaac has passed away following a long battle with cancer. Isaac is best known for his 1982 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, which presents an anthropological interpretation of the changes in Virginia culture over that time. I remember well the first time I read it — as an undergraduate in the Van Pelt Library at Penn. I thought it very odd as a work of history — because it focuses on things like architecture and rituals — but it was also engaging for precisely those reasons. The Transformation of Virginia was the first book to open me up to the possibility that history could connect physical surrounding to ideas (there are some great pictures of the interior of Baptist and Episcopal churches in Virgina, which really drive home the point of the correlation between Baptist beliefs and architecture and Episcopal beliefs and their architecture) and that we might reconstruct human interactions and from such data draw conclusions about the American Revolution. (In fact, I was looking for one of the churches that Isaac pictured when I stopped in New Kent County on the way home from Williamsburg last spring.) I read it shortly before I first read Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution — and while those are two very different books, I found that they complemented each other well in method and in conclusions.
Perhaps most inspiring for me, though, was the introduction to the book — which is written in very sparse prose and which has lots of pictures and maps of early Virginia. It's a beautiful and elegant way to introduce a very complex subject. And I've experimented with trying to recreate that feel with University, Court, and Slave — without much success, I fear.
Isaac's anthropological approach has been of particular importance for legal historians; A.G. Roeber's Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers: Creators of Virginia Legal Culture, 1680-1810 — which appeared the year before Transformation of Virginia — employs a similar method to reconstruct the nature of legal practice and legal culture in late colonial and early national Virginia. And I — again rather imperfectly — modeled both of those works in my brief quantitative study of litigation in Sussex County, Delaware in the late seventeenth century. I tried to use their descriptions of the courthouse, of spatial organization in the county, interactions of litigants, jurors, and judges in and out of court, the book culture of the Quaker settlement, the limited extra-judicial writings of judges, and data on the economy of Sussex, to get a sense of how the legal system stitched together the community.
I suppose I should conclude this remembrance with one observation — that this is one of the books I like to give friends because it's such a beautiful introduction to history. So if you're looking for a holiday present, I highly recommend it.
(In honor of Isaac's interest in church architecture, I've used an image of the Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg.)