Reviews of Books

Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York. By DAVID L. BARQUIST, with essays by JON BUTLER and JONATHAN D. SARNA . (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Art Gallery in association with Yale University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi, 304 . $ 60.00. )

Reviewed by Mark A. Peterson, University of Iowa

The simultaneous appearance of two volumes on colonial American silver offers an opportunity to assess the current state of material culture research in early America with respect to this most refined category of artifacts. Both volumes are sponsored, at least in part, by major American art museums possessing rich collections of colonial silver. Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York is the catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Yale University Art Gallery in 2001. New England Silver and Silversmithing, 1620–1815 consists of essays originally presented at a conference held at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston in April 1996, co-sponsored by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.1 The author and editors of these volumes are curators at the Yale University Art Gallery and the MFA, and the writings of decorative arts curators at these and other museums are featured prominently in the texts.

1

Both volumes reach out to include historians of early America, combining the expertise of artifact specialists with that of traditional historians. Myer Myers begins with two contextualizing essays written by distinguished historians of American religion, Jon Butler of Yale University and Jonathan D. Sarna of Brandeis University. New England Silver and Silversmithing begins with an introductory essay by Richard L. Bushman of Columbia University, another prominent historian of American religion and society. The latter volume was published under the auspices of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, the seventieth in a series of historical publications that have contributed immeasurably to scholarship on early New England. The obvious question, then, is how well did they do? What sort of results emerge from these collaborative efforts to rethink the meaning of silver in early America?

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