of the human exercising of freedom both further underline the seemingly paradoxical nature of hispairing of suffering with fulfilment. As Constantinidès has it, for Maistre ‘one has to go through thedepths of the night to catch a glimpse of the dawn’. This statement sums up the purpose of thevolume: to show that Maistre’s works are more about redefining light than about uncompromis-ingly embracing darkness. This collection of insightful and revealing essays will appeal equally toMaistre scholars and to students or researchers who, interested in making out the contours of theEnlightenment, know that there is no better way to do this than by exploring its fringes.

Benjamin BâcleUniversity College London

Analogie et récit de voyage: voir, mesurer, interpréter le monde. By Alain Guyot. Paris:Classiques Garnier. 2012. 369 p. €29 (pb). ISBN 978-2-8124-0629-4.

Alain Guyot has produced a series of stimulating studies on travel-writing over a number of years.These have served as a basis for this monograph, which is underpinned by an impressive range ofrhetorical, classical, philosophical, even theological considerations. Analogy is a rhetorical termwhich is also a ‘phénomène de ressemblance’ (p.16). It is an effective instrument in explaining theunknown by reference to the known. Guyot traces the use of analogy back to antiquity and assessesits vicissitudes over the ages. Here particular attention is paid to a period in French literature whichhas received limited scholarly investigation, at least until recent times: the very late eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries. Priority is bestowed on the travel-writing of Bernardin de Saint-Pierreand Chateaubriand at a time when it can be claimed that the récit viatique gained entry intoliterature.

Travel-writing enjoyed a well-established function as a privileged mode of conveying new infor-mation. In so doing, it could often be related to contemporary thought and scientific ideas. Theancient world was well aware of the utility of analogical thought. Aristotle understood that thedecipherment of the cosmos involved the recognition of a network of analogies and similarities(p.51). For Galileo, however, the comprehension of the Book of the World necessitated the languageof mathematics (p.67). Buffon mistrusted the notion of resemblance as a means of cognition butallowed comparison a modest role. The eighteenth century in France witnessed a significant debateregarding the question of whether primacy should be accorded to reason or sentiment in the realmof cognition. Advocates of rationality could nonetheless acknowledge its limitations. Diderot cham-pioned the virtues of analogy, as indeed did Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. For Bernardin analogybecame a methodological tool (p.99) in his interpretation and presentation of the world. Despite hispretensions to scientific knowledge, Bernardin felt that ‘les poètes de l’Antiquité’ through theirallegories had a better understanding of the world than ‘la plupart des physiciens’ (p.100). Trainedas an engineer, Bernardin’s early travel accounts were really mémoires drafted to seek careeradvancement with the French authorities but were nevertheless ‘ponctuées de nombreusescomparaisons à caractère classificatoire’ (p.116). His Voyage à l’île de France (1773) is a hybrid textwhich straddles genres and epochs (p.121). The use of similarities in this work is not merely amethod of conveying features unknown to French readers but also a method of stressing the‘caractères sensibles’ (p.138) of Providence. The links established by analogy posit the essentialharmony of the world. The Voyage is thus geared, unlike many late eighteenth-century texts, whichaim predominantly at diffusing information, the fruits of exploration etc., to diffusing the vision ofits author.

Despite the personal vision of Bernardin in the Voyage, the personal element undergoes a sub-stantial mutation in Chateaubriand’s L’Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811). In the later text the moiof the writer becomes the centre of the text as part of an autobiographical project. Comparisonsmay be made for derogatory purposes. In Chateaubriand’s travel writings, ‘le moi de l’écrivainvoyageur entre en possession des figures de similarité pour les gérer à sa guise’ (p.197).

Guyot also analyses perceptively the vogue for descriptions of mountains in the second half of theeighteenth century (and indeed well into the following hundred years). Architectural analogies are

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to the fore in the depiction of the Alps, often inviting comparisons with Gothic buildings. Thespectacle of the mountain led some to suggest that this activity might facilitate ‘un savoir qui n’estpas dans les livres’ (p.257).

This monograph concludes with an instructive appendix listing terms of resemblance in variouscategories in the Voyage à l’île de France as well as supplying indexes of names and topics. All in all,this study is a valuable reassessment of travel-writing in a pivotal period, which should proverequired reading for those researching in this field.

Simon DaviesQueen’s University Belfast

Vagrancy in Law and Practice under the Old Poor Law. By Audrey Eccles. Farnham: Ashgate.2012. 262 p. £65 (hb). ISBN 978-1-4094-0487-3.

‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’: there are no more fitting words to describe the history ofvagrancy in England across the early modern period and right up until the Reform Acts of the 1830s(p.21-2). Audrey Eccles’s new book on the legal history of vagrancy provides the reader with a trulyimpressive array of archival evidence and offers a thoroughgoing assessment of the numerousvagrancy laws passed, before turning to the degree of their enforcement throughout the eighteenthcentury. The book is principally devoted to how vagrancy law could be ‘stretched’ (p.80) to cover awide range of undesirable and mobile populations and how the same laws could also be used orabused both by magistrates and by the poor themselves.

This book provides fantastic resources for specialists and historians of crime in England, includ-ing an excellent appendix of every vagrancy statute in England from 1563 to 1834, a thoroughindex and a chapter on legal developments related to vagrancy. However, non-specialists will findthe book difficult to get into. The ‘causes of vagrancy’ are not explained until the final chapter, legalterms such as capias (a writ of arrest) are not rendered in vernacular, and ‘notorious’ laws, such asthe ‘sus’ law of the nineteenth century, pass unexplained. Even so, the range of archival evidence ondisplay is very impressive. The short and unique encounters of literally hundreds of different peoplewith vagrancy law fill the pages of this book, and vagrancy’s ‘regionality’ emerges quite stronglyfrom its pages. We learn that Cambridge had a ‘criminal conversation’ problem in the eighteenthcentury: that is, a problem of casual prostitution and bastardy cases. We learn that the martialmarching corridors of Westmorland saw a high number of cases of ‘war widows’ and roadsidebirths, and that Dorset had a penchant for attracting vagrants with false ‘begging briefs’ detailingfake circumstances of distress (p.79). We also see regional evidence of poor people actively ‘makinguse’ of vagrancy law to travel cheaply and of parishes and magistrates enabling this practice; adevelopment that mirrors the agency of the poor that Tim Hitchcock has described in Down and Outin Eighteenth-Century London (2004).

This book does what it says on the tin, and readers cannot help but emerge from its pages with abetter working knowledge of eighteenth-century vagrancy ‘in law and practice’, but significantproblems persist. The book is written with specialist readers in mind and would have greatlybenefited from additional space devoted to explaining the disparate contexts of this intricate regimeof casual relief, summary justice and parochial exclusion. Readers curious about the cultural,political or economic contexts in which this regime operated will also need to seek answers else-where; the cultural context remains largely absent, an artificial separation of material, consideringthe references in this volume to Henry Fielding, William Hogarth and Daniel Defoe. Vagrancy in Lawand Practice under the Old Poor Law is filled with the artefacts and anecdotes of the poor on the move,of servants, sailors, widows and abandoned wives, and the legal echoes of their problematic mobil-ity. It is a book about the evidence of archives and the bewildering variety of circumstances to whichvagrancy law was applied. However, the book missed a chance to make this complex legal contextaccessible to a wider audience.

David HitchcockUniversity of Warwick

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© 2014 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies