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Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside. By Alain Corbin. Translated by Martin Thom. [European Perspectives.] (New York: Columbia University Press. 1998. Pp.xx, 416. $35.00.)
The villages of nineteenth-century France were unfamiliar with the pervasive sounds of our contemporary world, the bum of the computer, the engines of the cars in the street and planes overhead, music and news amplified by the ubiquitous radios, tape decks, and compact-disk players. The silence of rural France was broken instead by the pealing bells of the parish church, which carried both an enormous amount of information, and an affective charge based on their ability to evoke feelings of belonging, danger, sadness, and joy. For Alain Corbin, the Village Bells which are the subject of his new book"bear witness to a different relation to the world and to the sacred as well as to a different way of being inscribed in time and space, and of experiencing time and space" (p. xix).
Corbin opens...