REVIEWS 97

number of rolls of film available, the first and last years to which any of that material relates and the occurrence of “other material” that exists intermixed with the registers. If vital records are not available their absence is noted, though exactly how much had to be missing before such a code was used is not explained.

Notwithstanding the intentions of the Survey, its usefulness is severely curtailed by the fact that details of individual roll numbers of films are not given. If a researcher is working, or wishes to work, on a specific parish, then all that he can learn is the approxi- mate number of films that he would have to consult. Since gaps occur in the film and in the original documentary runs, he would not know from this survey in which type of record they occurred. More importantly, none of the specific films can be retrieved, either in Salt Lake City or remotely at one of the branch libraries, without the unique film roll number. The searcher’s frustration may reach the level so well known to those who have peered into rooms full of documents in Mexican archives only to be told that there are “perhaps some other documents, but they will not be ready for many years”.

Several errors may also be noted. A cursory check in the card catalogue demonstrates that the twenty-five rolls for Cuautitlan (Jalisco) are excluded, and for several other parishes in Jalisco records are said to be absent when the index indicates that they are present. In the rather mysterious list headed ‘Census’ (p. 161), it is unlikely that Colotlan has 127 rolls of film : the card catalogue itself only cites one census, for the year 1855. The translation of some of the key information from the map appearing as a frontispiece also leaves much to be desired, as does the accenting and spelling of place-names in the main text.

In spite of such defects the Survey is a very useful listing of Mexican municipios and their vital records, and a preliminary introduction to the incredible range and quantity of documentation the Mexicanists have in store for them at Salt Lake City. With these new Finding Aids and, equally important, with the establishment of the Center for Historical Population Studies in the University of Utah, whose Newsletter will periodi- cally update the catalogued Mexican material, there now exists the potential for a renewed and extended research effort into the socio-economic history, as well as the demographic and historical geography of Mexico. All Mexicanists and Latin American centres will need to add this book to their collections. It is the beginning of a vast enterprise which geographers would do well to become involved in.

Syracuse University DAVID J. ROBINSON

SERGE GAGNON, Le Qutfbec et ses historiens de 1840 ci 1920 (Quebec: Les Presses de 1’Universitt Laval, 1978. Pp. 474)

The systematic study of Quebec’s nineteenth-century economy and society is a recent enterprise. It is not much more than a decade since Fernand Ouellet’s pioneering study of the period between 1760 and 1850 was being enthusiastically reviewed, and only eight years since publication by Jean Hamelin and Yves Roby of an economic history of the province in the second half of the century. Now that economic structures have been analysed and the classes composing Quebec’s nineteenth-century society have been identified, historians have naturally enough wanted to see if they could trace connections between the nature of society and the ideas, opinions, doctrines or attitudes expressed by its members. Analyses of ideologies and their identification with class interests or at least class outlooks have been a major part of French-Canadian historical work in recent years. It is to this category that we are to assign Serge Gagnon’s study of French- Canadian historical writing during the “traditional” period, in which French-Quebec society was dominated by the Catholic clergy and the liberal professions. Professor Gagnon’s aim is to demonstrate “les correlations, les rapports d’influence entre la societe canadienne-francaise du XIX” siecle et la connaissance que ses historiens ont Ctablie de la Nouvelle-France”.

98 REVIEWS

The 1840s and 50s saw an important compromise in Quebec between two classes which had previously competed for social influence or leadership: the clergy and the liberal professions. The latter acquired a certain hold on political and administrative life and a particular prestige in the rural or small town society. But they were obliged to concede major responsibilities for education and social services to the clergy. For the rest of the century the social and intellectual life of Quebec was increasingly dominated by clerical attitudes and values. This is what Professor Gagnon shows through the medium of historical writing.

The book’s accumulation of evidence is massive, the demonstration overwhelming. The prevalence of hagiography, the choice of religious heroes as biographical subjects, the interpretations of actions and events, attribution of motives, value judgements, acceptance of divine intervention in history-all these are shown again and again to have expressed a religious outlook and, further, to have served as justification of the clergy’s pretensions to influence or even power in the nineteenth century. The past constructed by historians was one that taught the value of clerical influence and of social structures dominated by the professional class.

Professor Gagnon’s method is a classic analysis of texts, and he has surely obtained from it all that it can possibly yield. He has produced a solid block for the edifice of our knowledge of the intellectual world of nineteenth-century Quebec.

University of Toronto ARTHUR SILVER

PETER D. HARRISON and B. L. TURNER (Eds), Pre-Hispanic Muya Agriculture (Albur- querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978. Pp. x + 414. $20.00)

This important book is about the eastern lowlands of Mesoamerica, from the Peten to to northern Yucatan. The persistent idea of the Maya region as an ecologically uniform and resource-deficient environment is effectively demolished. The range of exploitable habitats was probably not significantly different from that of most parts of the adjacent highlands. The level of ecological (climatic) stability at the time of agricultural coloniza- tion may also have been overestimated (A. P. Covich, in chapter 7). The savannas of the region present unsolved problems of origin and use. The possible cultural importance of the bajos of the Pet&r is widely acknowledged, but we are still poorly informed about their physical history. A millennium or so ago, the majority probably contained more open water than they do today. D. S. Rice (chapter 4) refers to evidence of “massive” sedimentation in Lakes Yaxha and Sacnab from the Late Preclassic. In this necessarily interdisciplinary field, a large slice of future work will fall to the natural scientists.

Information about pre-Hispanic Maya agriculture has been gleaned chiefly from the study of relict earthworks and from research in palaeoecology. Iconographic and lin- guistic evidence and the earliest Spanish accounts of the region do not figure prominently at present. The idea that the Maya practised only swidden (shifting) cuhivation, in which maize was by far the most important crop, was based on ethnographic analogy. This assumption, first seriously undermined by B. Bronson’s paper on root crops (1966), is here shown to be entirely misleading. Variation and diversity, and changing emphasis through time, are now the key concepts-so much so that new evidence is likely to be accommodated with comparative ease.

F. M. Wiseman (chapter 5) makes the useful distinction between biointensive and geointensive systems of farming: arboriculture, multi-cropping and inter-cropping and permanent kitchen gardens on the one hand and raised fields, terraces, and canal irrigation on the other. D. E. Puleston (chapter 12) re-states his case for the importance of “breadnut” or ramon (Brosimum alicastrum) over maize in the Tikal heartland. Interest in this highly productive tree crop could, he suggests, have freed labour for building operations. His intriguing theory is, however, largely based on the present association between ramon and ancient sites, and on the arguable proposition that