thrust into various ancillary (albeit interesting) topicsthat are tangential to dress. Germans are pictured asfundamentally honest, non-judgmental citizens of anewly enlarged world. The author seems eager to por-tray them as virtuous participants in an expanded Eu-ropean consciousness that did not judge the “others”found in exotic cultures but rather portrayed them asdignified human beings worthy of respect. Here, Ru-black neatly packages an emergent German-ness,proud of its past but scrambling mightily to find a morecosmopolitan future within the larger, more urbane Eu-ropean milieu that it hoped to join.

Chapter six focuses on the Behaim family of Nurem-berg, specifically on two of three brothers (Friedrichand Paul) studying away from home in Altdorf andLeipzig whose letters home begged for cash, not onlyfor beer but also to purchase new clothes. Rublack em-ploys Steven Ozment’s Three Behaim Boys: Growing Upin Early Modern Germany (1990), correspondence rem-iniscent of Florentine Alessandra Strozzi’s letters to herexiled sons. But why devote an entire chapter to it, es-pecially as chapter seven, on “Bourgeois Taste andEmotional Styles,” also draws on Behaim correspon-dence to describe long-suffering mother Magdalena’surban shopping tastes? These two shortish chapters onconsumption could have been combined to good effect.

The book concludes with a long and unwieldy epi-logue that touches on at least a dozen new topics relatedto clothing, consumption, and the marketplace. Againthe reader swims in too much information. Amongother things, Rublack claims that sumptuary legislationhas been woefully understudied (p. 265), a conclusionnot borne out by current scholarship. Contemporaryscholars have been writing about this and other aspectsof the history of dress for over thirty years now, be-ginning in 1981 with Jacqueline Herald’s RenaissanceDress in Italy 1400–1500 and continuing with StellaMary Newton’s The Dress of the Venetians, 1495–1525(1988), Daniel Roche’s La culture des apparences: Unehistoire du vetement, XVIIe–XVIIIe siecles (1989), andmy own Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, For-tunes, and Fine Clothing (2002). In 2012 there is nodoubt that clothing practice is a valuable area of his-torical study.

Rublack’s intended audience is not exclusively thestudent or focused historian of dress, costume, and ma-terial culture. She is apparently aiming at a larger read-ership that includes the interested layperson, who willbe entertained and engaged by the frequent digressionsshe allows herself on topics ancillary to dress, and daz-zled by the richness of her visual presentation.

CAROLE COLLIER FRICK

Southern Illinois University,Edwardsville

URS APP. The Birth of Orientalism. (Encounters withAsia.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.2010. Pp. xviii, 550. $79.95.

Urs App’s book offers an account of eighteenth-centuryEuropean (mostly French) thinkers who wrote on thereligions and philosophies of Asia east of the IndusRiver, particularly the attempt to fit Hinduism and Bud-dhism into an overarching history of culture. The sev-enteenth century had seen a certain amount of Euro-pean engagement with Arabic and Persian texts, and by1700 there was a Jesuit-fueled explosion of interest inChina (especially Confucius). It was during the eigh-teenth century, however, that the degree of Europeanengagement with Indian textual traditions saw thegreatest growth, from almost nothing at the century’sbeginning to, by its end, the work of William Jones andothers on the connection between Sanskrit and Greek.App’s argument mirrors that of the Enlightenment tra-dition in European Indology that he reconstructs. En-lightened thinkers from Voltaire onward used Indianancient texts to “relativize” Christianity as part of anemergent comparative history of religion; App sees In-dology as playing a key role in the creation of a non-Biblical universal history. This, App argues, is whatcleared the ground for the nineteenth century’s “mod-ern” Orientalism, a set of specialist fields distinct fromChristian theology.

The chapters are organized as a series of case studiesof a range of authors, many of them armchair travelersreliant for their Orientalist learning on the publicationsof more specialized scholars (mostly missionaries).Such writers sought to fit the newly available Asian phil-osophical texts into speculative genealogies of culture,arguing, for example, that what we now term Hinduismwas really an “exoteric” form of what we now term Bud-dhism, that some Chinese Buddhist texts were reallytranslations from the Vedas, and so on. These “key-to-all-mythologies” arguments built upon and trans-formed a much older comparative tradition. The Chris-tian tradition had, since the Church Fathers, looked forthe “figures” of a primitive revelation (or prisca theo-logia) in pagan religions, as evidence of the truth ofChristianity. Eighteenth-century freethinkers used thesame comparative structure to draw the opposite con-clusion that Christianity was a local variant on olderEurasian mythologies. This broad narrative, familiarenough in Enlightened historiography, is fleshed out atlength through App’s chapters on Voltaire, Bartholo-maeus Ziegenbalg and Mathurin Veyssiere de LaCroze, Denis Diderot, Joseph de Guignes, AlexanderRamsay, John Zephaniah Holwell, Abraham-Hya-cinthe Anquetil-Duperron, and Constantin FrancoisVolney. App returns to, and casts new light on, a set ofquestions that will be familiar to readers of RaymondSchwab’s La Renaissance orientale (1950), and of morerecent studies by (among others) Roger-Pol Droit, Syl-via Murr, Will Sweetman, Ines G. Zupanov, RafGelders, Brijraj Singh, and Guy G. Stroumsa.

App’s history of Orientalism is very much a history ofideas, in which there is little space given to the practicesthat make intellectual production possible. Indeed,App occasionally implies (e.g., p. xi) that reestablishingthe intellectual framework for eighteenth-century In-

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dology is intended as a counterweight to the recent ef-forts to place European Orientalist discourse into so-cial, political, and geographic contexts (efforts thatmight be traced back to Edward Said’s work). By re-mapping the intellectual context for some discussionsof India’s ancient past by some prominent Europeanwriters, App’s book may well redress one imbalance inthe field, but in so doing, this approach neglects muchof the colonial travel and textual exchanges—or whatMiles Ogborn has called “the geography of writing”—that made the work of Voltaire and the like possible.Moreover, to imply, as App appears to do at variouspoints (e.g., p. 186), that such an intellectual historyrefutes, rather than complements, the sociological ap-proach, is something that some readers may feel re-quires further methodological discussion to establish.

App’s book immerses its readers in the world of En-lightenment comparative religion and casts importantnew light on eighteenth-century European speculationsabout ancient Asian culture.

NICHOLAS DEW

McGill University

ALEXANDER C. T. GEPPERT. Fleeting Cities: Imperial Ex-positions in Fin-de-Siecle Europe. New York: PalgraveMacmillan. 2010. Pp. xvii, 398. $95.00.

World’s fairs continue to attract considerable scholarlyattention. Books about exhibitions tend to fall into oneof three categories: deep analysis of a single exhibition;broad comparison of several exhibitions; or theoreticalframeworks for analyzing the exhibition phenomenon.Alexander C. T. Geppert’s book is a study of five im-perial expositions in late nineteenth- and early twen-tieth-century Europe that blends all three approacheswith mixed results.

Fleeting Cities begins and ends with broad theoreticalsuggestions. Drawing on cultural critics such as GeorgSimmel, Werner Sombart, Henri Lefebvre, and MikhailBakhtin, Geppert conceptualizes exhibitions as “meta-media”: that is, “means of communication that encom-pass and incorporate other communicative technolo-gies” including “medicalization, visualization andvirtualization.” He also characterizes them as “knots in. . . a worldwide web,” “spaces of modernity,” or, in thewords of late nineteenth-century German art historianJulius Lessing, “nodes in the course of history” (p. 3).

Exhibitions, Geppert observes, undermined bothtime and space by juxtaposing past and present, met-ropolitan and colonial. They were transitory—that is,they generally lasted only a year or so—but exhibited“frozen times” (p. 245) in that they offered snapshotsof the societies being displayed, whether historical orcontemporary. And yet, even though the majority of ex-hibition structures were planned for demolition afterthe event’s closure, “this temporality did not hinderthem . . . from acquiring meaning, founding traditions. . . [or] creating legacies” (p. 5). Another novel line ofanalysis is Geppert’s claim that these exhibitions “re-sembled their surrounding metropolitan areas” and

were often considered “cities within the city” (p. 221).Moving beyond the theories of Lefebvre, Geppertshows that “expositions had a catalytic effect on the cityin which they were held” (p. 222), especially on trans-portation infrastructure, architectural construction,and global image.

Compared to space and time, however, people getshort shrift. Although Geppert usefully distinguishesbetween five different groups of actors—initiators, or-ganizers, participants, reviewers and observers, and vis-itors—their roles and responses emerge as a melange,and at times a cacophony, of voices and visions. In typ-ical postmodernist fashion, no one person’s views areprivileged over those of any other.

But this fits Geppert’s broader view of exhibitions.He writes about the last of the five exhibitions he cov-ers, the 1931 Exposition Coloniale et Internationaleheld in Paris: “It is a general feature of the expositionmedium that . . . every attempt to find any kind of uni-fied meaning is fatally flawed” (pp. 194–195). Thistheme recurs throughout the study, which also discussesthe Berliner Gewerbeausstellung of 1896, the FrenchExposition Universelle of 1900, the Franco-British Ex-hibition of 1908, and Britain’s Wembley Empire Exhi-bition of 1924–1925. Geppert does not explain, how-ever, why he chose these particular five exhibitions.And because some were international while othersmore limited, the comparison is at times uneven.

The most valuable case study concerns the Berlintrade exhibition of 1896, the only significant exhibitionheld in Germany during the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. Not that businessmen and industrialists didnot try to organize a grander and more internationalevent, but the first attempt in 1882 fell victim to Ottovon Bismarck’s “personal objections as well as a generallack of support on [the] part of the government,” anda second attempt, a decade later, was abandoned dueto Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “brusque intervention” (p. 19)and his concern that Berlin could not yet rival Paris. Yetthis is a very unsatisfying explanation. Failure of visionseems to have played a role, as did “provincial fear” (p.33) and Germany’s “comparatively marginal position asan imperial power” (p. 36), but much more likely wasGermany’s lack of a cohesive national identity, even af-ter 1871. Geppert does not explore this possibility, how-ever, perhaps because he is so dismissive of the “stan-dard argument” that “expositions . . . were centralinstruments in the making of ‘national identities.’ ” Infact, Geppert finds “identity” to be a “conceptuallyvague, highly charged and worn buzzword . . . unsuit-able for stringent historiographical analysis” (p. 14).

Yet in a subsequent chapter on the 1900 Paris Ex-position, he does not contradict one contemporary ob-server, who claimed that “the principle of nationality. . . underlies the whole conception” (p. 85). In fact, theissue of nationalism and national identity haunts thisbook in complicated ways. As Geppert astutely pointsout, the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908 was charac-terized by opposition between the two nations, yet itoccurred in the immediate aftermath of the signing of

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