| Summary: | In a recent article in this journal, Anne Eriksen and Torunn Selberg (2015) directed readers’ attention to Rachel Busk’s exceptional collection of urban folktales, The Folk-Lore of Rome (1874). This note is, partially, a response to their request for more biographical information. Busk was a traveller and writer on European culture, one of several such women connected to the Folklore Society in its first decades who deserve to be better known. As Vincenzo Ambrogi and Basilio Tinti highlighted in another recent article (2016), in their case on Herbert Morris Bower, British folklorists were important contributors to the development of folklore studies in Italy, as they were in several European countries. This European perspective on the early history of the Folklore Society can be overlooked, squeezed between the domestic and imperial dimensions. If, as Jonathan Roper has argued (2008), William Thoms’ intention in proposing the formation of the Folklore Society was to uncover the material for a specifically English mythology, in practice the Society was very international in its early years, with members scattered throughout the British Empire, to the extent that other scholars have argued that it was essentially an ‘imperialist’ enterprise (Gosden and Wingfield, 2012). Colonial findings made sense of domestic discoveries and vice-versa, as these two perspectives combined to inform the ‘British anthropological school’ of Sidney Hartland, Edward Clodd, Andrew Lang and the other members of the ‘Great Team’ of pre-war folklorists (Dorson, 1968). However, the comparative method was never limited to the British Empire; continental European data was provided by the likes of Lucy Garnett (1849-1934) on Greece and Turkey, Edith Durham (1863-1944) on Albania, Violet Alford (1881-1972) on the Pyrenees and Estella Canziani (1887-1964) on the Alps (among other places).
|
|---|