Search results for ""university of pennsylvania press""

"In the 1990s when I was watching reruns of The Fugitive on the Arts and Entertainment Network twice a day, I couldn't take my eyes off it. . . . No one in The Fugitive ever relaxes as you watch and you can't relax either, even though for long stretches absolutely nothing happens. It was the combination of nonstop tension with the (relative) absence of slam-bang action that attracted me, and as I now reflect on it, the same combination characterizes the literary works I have been reading and writing about for more than forty-five years."—Stanley Fish, from the Introduction In the stark television drama The Fugitive, Dr. Richard Kimble, an innocent man convicted of murder, is on the run from the police and in pursuit of the real killer. The award-winning show, which aired on ABC from 1963 to 1967 and inspired a 1993 blockbuster movie, still has many devoted fans, none more passionate than literary and legal theorist and intellectual provocateur Stanley Fish. In The Fugitive in Flight, Fish examines the moral structure of the long-running series and explains why he thinks this may well be the greatest show ever aired on American network television. Analyzing key episodes, The Fugitive in Flight goes beyond plot summaries and behind-the-scenes stories. For Fish, the real action of The Fugitive takes place in confined spaces where the men and women Richard Kimble encounters are forced to choose what kind of person they will be for the rest of their lives. Kimble is the catalyst of such choices and changes, but he himself never changes. Breaking free from the political and social problems of his time, he is always the bearer and exemplar of the very middle-class values informing the system that has misjudged him. Kimble is the perfect representative of a mid-twentieth-century liberalism that values above all independence, personal integrity, and the refusal to surrender oneself to obsessions or causes. He is so consistently faithful to his liberal vision of life that he displays both its virtues and its dark side, the side that flees attachments, entanglements, responsibilities, and human connections. Stanley Fish's Richard Kimble is the ultimate man in a gray flannel suit, even when he is wearing a windbreaker and walking down a dark, lonely road.

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Imperial Entanglements chronicles the history of the Haudenosaunee Iroquois in the eighteenth century, a dramatic period during which they became further entangled in a burgeoning market economy, participated in imperial warfare, and encountered a waxing British Empire. Rescuing the Seven Years' War era from the shadows of the American Revolution and moving away from the political focus that dominates Iroquois studies, historian Gail D. MacLeitch offers a fresh examination of Iroquois experience in economic and cultural terms. As land sellers, fur hunters, paid laborers, consumers, and commercial farmers, the Iroquois helped to create a new economic culture that connected the New York hinterland to a transatlantic world of commerce. By doing so they exposed themselves to both opportunities and risks. As their economic practices changed, so too did Iroquois ways of making sense of gender and ethnic differences. MacLeitch examines the formation of new cultural identities as men and women negotiated challenges to long-established gendered practices and confronted and cocreated a new racialized discourses of difference. On the frontiers of empire, Indians, as much as European settlers, colonial officials, and imperial soldiers, directed the course of events. However, as MacLeitch also demonstrates, imperial entanglements with a rising British power intent on securing native land, labor, and resources ultimately worked to diminish Iroquois economic and political sovereignty.

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From the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries in Spain, health-related information in the vernacular began to circulate widely in treatises, compendiums, manuals, plague tracts, summaries, encyclopedias, and recipe collections. These were often the work of concerned physicians who attempted to refashion medical information to appeal to nonprofessionals. In Fictions of Well-Being Michael Solomon explores the shaping of this audience of sickly readers, highly motivated individuals who, when confronted with the painful, disruptive, and often alienating conditions of physical disorder, looked for relief in books. Vernacular medical writing from late medieval and early modern Spain emerged from the interrelated imperatives to address the immediate or future hygienic and pathological needs of the patient while promoting the reputation and learned credentials of the physician. For sickly readers, a medical treatise was more than just a collection of technical information; such a work implied that they could do with a medical text what the physician normally did at the bedside. In their imagination, the treatise became a type of palpable instrument that encouraged the reader to take advantage of its possible use and benefits. In these fictions of well-being, we may see the antecedents of the self-help and popular medical books so prominent on today's best-seller lists.

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Globalization challenges fundamental principles governing international law, especially with respect to state sovereignty and international relations. This transformation has had a significant impact on the practice of trade law, financial regulation, and environmental law but relatively little effect on one area of law and regulation: human rights. Universal Human Rights and Extraterritorial Obligations examines both the international and domestic foundations of human rights law. What other contemporary human rights debates have almost totally ignored is that in an increasingly interdependent world—where public and private international actors have great influence on the lives of individuals everywhere—it is insufficient to assess only the record of domestic governments in human rights. It is equally important to assess the effect of actions taken by intergovernmental organizations, international private entities, and foreign states. From this standpoint, contributors to this book address how states' actions or omissions may affect the prospects of individuals in foreign states and asks important questions: To what extent do agricultural policies of rich countries influence the right to food in poorer countries? How do decisions to screen asylum seekers outside state borders affect refugee rights? How does cooperation among different states in the "war on terror" influence individuals' rights to be free from torture? This volume presents a brief for a more complex and updated approach to the protection of human rights worldwide.

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Affective meditation on the Passion was one of the most popular literary genres of the high and later Middle Ages. Proliferating in a rich variety of forms, these lyrical, impassioned, script-like texts in Latin and the vernacular had a deceptively simple goal: to teach their readers how to feel. They were thus instrumental in shaping and sustaining the wide-scale shift in medieval Christian sensibility from fear of God to compassion for the suffering Christ. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion advances a new narrative for this broad cultural change and the meditative writings that both generated and reflected it. Sarah McNamer locates women as agents in the creation of the earliest and most influential texts in the genre, from John of Fécamp's Libellus to the Meditationes Vitae Christi, thus challenging current paradigms that cast the compassionate affective mode as Anselmian or Franciscan in origin. The early development of the genre in women's practices had a powerful and lasting legacy. With special attention to Middle English texts, including Nicholas Love's Mirror and a wide range of Passion lyrics and laments, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion illuminates how these scripts for the performance of prayer served to construct compassion itself as an intimate and feminine emotion. To feel compassion for Christ, in the private drama of the heart that these texts stage, was to feel like a woman. This was an assumption about emotion that proved historically consequential, McNamer demonstrates, as she traces some of its legal, ethical, and social functions in late medieval England.

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Early Christians spoke about themselves as resident aliens, strangers, and sojourners, asserting that otherness is a fundamental part of being Christian. But why did they do so and to what ends? How did Christians' claims to foreign status situate them with respect to each other and to the larger Roman world as the new movement grew and struggled to make sense of its own boundaries? Aliens and Sojourners argues that the claim to alien status is not a transparent one. Instead, Benjamin Dunning contends, it shaped a rich, pervasive, variegated discourse of identity in early Christianity. Resident aliens and foreigners had long occupied a conflicted space of both repulsion and desire in ancient thinking. Dunning demonstrates how Christians and others in antiquity capitalized on this tension, refiguring the resident alien as being of a compelling doubleness, simultaneously marginal and potent. Early Christians, he argues, used this refiguration to render Christian identity legible, distinct, and even desirable among the vast range of social and religious identities and practices that proliferated in the ancient Mediterranean. Through close readings of ancient Christian texts such as Hebrews, 1 Peter, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Epistle to Diognetus, Dunning examines the markedly different ways that Christians used the language of their own marginality, articulating a range of options for what it means to be Christian in relation to the Roman social order. His conclusions have implications not only for the study of late antiquity but also for understanding the rhetorics of religious alienation more broadly, both in the ancient world and today.

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Spanning forty years, this collection of essays represents the work of a renowned teacher and scholar of the ancient Greek world. Martin Ostwald's contribution is both philological and historical: the thread that runs through all of the essays is his precise explanation, for a modern audience, of some crucial terms by which the ancient Greeks saw and lived their lives—and influenced ours. Chosen and sequenced by Ostwald, the essays demonstrate his methodology and elucidate essential aspects of ancient Greek society. The first section plumbs the social and political terms in which the Greeks understood their lives. It examines their notion of the relation of the citizen to his community; how they conceived different kinds of political structure; what role ideology played in public life; and how differently their most powerful thinkers viewed issues of war and peace. The second section is devoted to the problem, first articulated by the Greeks, of the extent to which human life is dominated by nature (physis) and human convention (nomos), a question that remains a central concern in modern societies, even if in different guises. The third section focuses on democracy in Athens. It confronts questions of the nature of democratic rule, of financing public enterprises, of the accountability of public officials, of the conflict raised by imperial control and democratic rule, of the coexistence of "conservative" and "liberal" trends in a democratic regime, and of the relation between rhetoric and power in a democracy. The final section is a sketch of the principles on which the two greatest Greek historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, constructed their outlooks on human affairs. Ultimately, the collection intends to make selected key concepts in ancient Greek social and political culture accessible to a lay audience. It also shows how the differences—rather than the similarities—between the ancient Greeks and us can contribute to a deeper understanding of our own time.

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When King Philip VI expelled the Jews in 1306, some 100,000 men, women, and children were driven from royal France into the neighboring lands of Spain, Provence, Italy, and North Africa. The great expulsion of 1306 was arguably one of the most traumatic moments of medieval Jewish history and would prove to be the harbinger of a series of recalls and expulsions, local and general, culminating in King Charles VI's expulsion decree of 1394. Despite the upheavals of the fourteenth century, the literary productivity of Jews was astonishing. Yet there are few direct references to the catastrophic events of 1306, even in Jewish liturgical and historiographic texts, where one would expect to find them. In No Place of Rest, Susan Einbinder coaxes out the literary traces of this traumatic expulsion. Why did the memory of this proud and vibrant Jewish community fade from historical memory? Where do its remnants reside among later communities and readers? From the lyrics of the supposed "Jewish troubadour" Isaac HaGorni to medical texts and astronomical charts, Einbinder studies a range of writings she reveals to be commemorative. Her careful readings uncover the ways in which medieval Jews asserted their identity in exile and, perhaps more important, helped to preserve or efface their history.

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The narrative of the Garden of Eden infused seventeenth-century political thought no less than it reflected attitudes toward the relationship between the sexes. Within the contemporary debate over political legitimacy, theorists who supported or questioned the monarchy turned explicitly to the narrative of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve to articulate their theories of governmental authority. Engaging this foundational relationship between gendered interpersonal and governmental organization, Shannon Miller turns to a body of texts produced in England that replot the story of the Garden. She sets a series of writings by women into conversation with the period's most important poetic rendering of the Fall, Milton's Paradise Lost, to illustrate how significant gender was to accounts of social and political organization, and to demonstrate how the Garden narrative plots the role of gender. Her multidirectional and multilayered conversation between numerous seventeenth-century women—such as Aemilia Lanyer, Rachel Speght, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, and Mary Chudleigh—and Milton's Genesis epic crystallizes the interplay between the narrative of the Fall, the organization of political structures, and the extent to which both were shaped by cultural debates over the role of women.

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There was immense social and economic upheaval between the Black Death and the English Reformation, and contemporary writers often blamed this upheaval on immorality, singling out women's behavior for particular censure. Late medieval moral treatises and sermons increasingly connected good behavior for women with Christianity, and their failure to conform to sin. Katherine L. French argues, however, that medieval laywomen both coped with the chaotic changes following the plague and justified their own changing behavior by participating in local religion. Through active engagement in the parish church, the basic unit of public worship, women promoted and validated their own interests and responsibilities. Scholarship on medieval women's religious experiences has focused primarily on elite women, nuns, and mystics who either were literate enough to leave written records of their religious ideas and behavior or had access to literate men who did this for them. Most women, however, were not literate, were not members of religious orders, and did not have private confessors. As The Good Women of the Parish shows, the great majority of women practiced their religion in a parish church. By looking at women's contributions to parish maintenance, the ways they shaped the liturgy and church seating arrangements, and their increasing opportunities for collective action in all-women's groups, the book argues that gendered behavior was central to parish life and that women's parish activities gave them increasing visibility and even, on occasion, authority. In the face of demands for silence, modesty, and passivity, women of every social status used religious practices as an important source of self-expression, creativity, and agency.

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In the last quarter of the twentieth century, urban colleges and universities found themselves enveloped by the poverty, crime, and physical decline that afflicted American cities. Some institutions turned inward, trying to insulate themselves rather than address the problems in their own backyards. Others attempted to develop better community relations, though changes were hard to sustain. Spurred by an unprecedented crime wave in 1996, University of Pennsylvania President Judith Rodin knew that the time for urgent action had arrived, and she set a new course of proactive community engagement for her university. Her dedication to the revitalization of West Philadelphia was guided by her role not only as president but also as a woman and a mother with a deep affection for her hometown. The goal was to build capacity back into a severely distressed inner-city neighborhood—educational capacity, retail capacity, quality-of-life capacity, and especially economic capacity—guided by the belief that "town and gown" could unite as one richly diverse community. Cities rely on their academic institutions as stable places of employment, cultural centers, civic partners, and concentrated populations of consumers for local business and services. And a competitive university demands a vibrant neighborhood to meet the needs of its faculty, staff, and students. In keeping with their mission, urban universities are uniquely positioned to lead their communities in revitalization efforts, yet this effort requires resolute persistence. During Rodin's administration (1994-2004), the Chronicle of Higher Education referred to Penn's progress as a "national model of constructive town-gown interaction and partnership." This book narrates the challenges, frustrations, and successes of Penn's campaign, and its prospects for long-term change.

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In the early 1980s the Guatemalan army unleashed a scorched-earth campaign against civilians suspected of supporting antigovernment guerrilla forces. Faced with violent repression, indigenous people found various ways to survive. Some joined the guerrilla ranks, some fell in with so-called self-defense patrols controlled by the army, while others crossed the Mexican border to seek safety. In the mid-1990s, after more than a decade in refugee camps, the displaced migrants returned to Guatemala as retornados and started to rebuild their lives. Guatemalans in the Aftermath of Violence highlights the complex survival strategies of the returnees and their neighbors who had stayed behind. Anthropologist Kristi Anne Stølen lived among the Guatemalan peasants, gathering firsthand testimonies of their struggles. Their varied voices and differing points of view shed light on many facets of violence: the dynamics of its escalation, its destructive force, and its power to engender community and identity. By showing that for many refugees, exile did not always mean deprivation and victimization, but often recognition and even empowerment, Stølen dispels the simplistic notion that those exposed to violence are merely its helpless casualties. With lessons learned through interaction with the international aid and solidarity community during the years of exile, the returnees managed to reconstruct community and identity in a changed environment. This study of their efforts illustrates how poor and exploited people are able to endure, utilizing whatever opportunities they find to improve their lot.

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In 1492 the Spanish humanist Antonio de Nebrija proclaimed that "language has always been the companion of empire." Taking as his touchstone a wonderfully suggestive sonnet that Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in 1535 from the neighborhood of ruined Carthage in North Africa, Richard Helgerson examines how the companionship of language and empire played itself out more generally in the "new poetry" of sixteenth-century Europe. Along with his friend Juan Boscán, Garcilaso was one of the great pioneers of that poetry, radically reforming Spanish verse in imitation of modern Italian and ancient Roman models. As the century progressed, similar projects were undertaken in France by Ronsard and du Bellay, in Portugal by Camões, and in England by Sidney and Spenser. And wherever the new poetry emerged, it was prompted by a sense that imperial ambition—the quest to be in the present what Rome had been in the past—required a vernacular poetry comparable to the poetry of Rome. But, as Helgerson shows, the new poetry had other commitments than to empire. Though imperial ambition looms large in Garcilaso's sonnet and others, by the end of the poem Garcilaso identifies not with Rome but with the Carthaginian queen Dido, one of empire's legendary victims. And with this startling shift, which has its counterpart in poems from all over Europe, comes one of the most important departures the poem makes from its apparent imperial agenda. Addressing these rival concerns as they arise in a single sonnet, Richard Helgerson provides a masterful and multifaceted image of one of the most vital episodes in European literary history.

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Turkey's mixed human rights record has been highly politicized in the debate surrounding the country's probable ascendance to membership in the European Union. Beginning with the foundation of a secular republic in 1923, and continuing with founding membership in the United Nations and participation in the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, Turkey made significant commitments to the advancement of human rights. However, its authoritarian tradition, periods of military rule, increasing social inequality, and economic crises have led to policies that undermine human rights. While legislative reforms and civil social activism since the 1980s have contributed greatly to the advancement of human rights, recent progress is threatened by the rise of nationalism, persistent gender inequality, and economic hardship. In Human Rights in Turkey, twenty-one Turkish and international scholars from various disciplines examine human rights policies and conditions since the 1920s, at the intersection of domestic and international politics, as they relate to all spheres of life in Turkey. A wide range of rights, such as freedom of the press and religion, minority, women's, and workers' rights, and the right to education, are examined in the context of the history and current conditions of the Republic of Turkey. In light of the events of September 11, 2001, and subsequent developments in the Middle East, recent proposals about modeling other Muslim countries after Turkey add urgency to an in-depth study of Turkish politics and the causal links with human rights. The scholarship presented in Human Rights in Turkey holds significant implications for the study of human rights in the Middle East and around the globe.

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For a work to be considered African American literature, does it need to focus on black characters or political themes? Must it represent these within a specific stylistic range? Or is it enough for the author to be identified as African American? In Deans and Truants, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the shifting definitions of African American literature and the authors who wrote beyond those boundaries at the cost of critical dismissal and, at times, obscurity. From the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, de facto deans—critics and authors as different as William Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka—prescribed the shifting parameters of realism and racial subject matter appropriate to authentic African American literature, while truant authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, George S. Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison—perhaps the most celebrated African American author of the twentieth century—wrote literature anomalous to those standards. Jarrett explores the issues at stake when Howells, the "Dean of American Letters," argues in 1896 that only Dunbar's "entirely black verse," written in dialect, "would succeed." Three decades later, Locke, the cultural arbiter of the Harlem Renaissance, stands in contrast to Schuyler, a journalist and novelist who questions the existence of a peculiarly black or "New Negro" art. Next, Wright's 1937 blueprint for African American writing sets the terms of the Chicago Renaissance, but Yerby's version of historical romance approaches race and realism in alternative literary ways. Finally, Deans and Truants measures the gravitational pull of the late 1960s Black Aesthetic in Baraka's editorial silence on Toni Morrison's first and only short story, "Recitatif." Drawing from a wealth of biographical, historical, and literary sources, Deans and Truants describes the changing notions of race, politics, and gender that framed and were framed by the authors and critics of African American culture for more than a century.

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When Eldridge Cleaver wrote in 1965 that black men "shall have our manhood or the earth will be leveled by our attempt to gain it," he voiced a central strain of Black Power movement rhetoric. In print, as well as on stage and screen, Black Power advocates equated masculinity with their political radicalism and potency. While many observers have criticized the misogyny in this preoccupation, few have noted the challenges to it within the period in the works of authors such as James Baldwin, John Edgar Wideman, Clarence Major, and John Oliver Killens. These and other writers tested the link between masculinity and radical politics. By recovering their voices, Rolland Murray demonstrates that the movement's gender ideals were questioned more fully than scholars have acknowledged. He also examines how the Black Power era's contentious gender politics continue to play a role in contemporary African American culture and scholarship. Murray analyzes the ways in which notions of masculinity were interwoven with essential movement philosophies regarding revolutionary violence, charismatic leadership, radical rhetoric, and black sexuality. Striving to forge a more nuanced account of how masculinist discourse contributed to the movement's overall agenda, he frames masculinity both as a linchpin of the seductive politics of Black Power and as a focal point of dissent by black male authors.

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For people living in U.S. cities, social services come not only from the government but increasingly also from local religious communities. Ever since the Clinton administration's welfare reform, faith-based institutions, and especially congregations, have been allowed to bid for federal funds for their programs. In The Other Philadelphia Story, drawing on the first-ever census of congregations in any American city, Ram Cnaan and his colleagues provide an authoritative account of the functioning of congregations, their involvement in social services, and their support of other charitable organizations. An in-depth study of 1,392 congregations in Philadelphia, the book illuminates how these groups function as community hubs where members and neighbors alike gather throughout the week. Cnaan's findings show that almost every assembly of parishioners emphasizes caring for others, even if the help is modest. Thus American congregations uphold an implicit but strong norm of social responsibility and work to improve the quality of life for members and nonmembers alike. Many of the problems associated with urban life persist in the face of governmental inaction, and the burden of responsibility cannot be shouldered entirely by congregations. However, in a city such as Philadelphia, where half the residents are regular attenders of religious congregations, hopes for urban improvement are largely to be found in these local groups. Special focus is given in the book to kinds of care that often go unnoticed: volunteerism, provision of refuge, and informal assistance to community members in need. All told, Cnaan asserts, congregations are an essential component of Philadelphia's civil society. Without them, the quality of life would deteriorate immeasurably.

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The Miami estate of Vizcaya, like its palatial contemporaries Biltmore and San Simeon, represents an achievement of the Gilded Age, when country houses and their gardens were a conspicuous measure of personal wealth and power. In Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers, a celebrated architecture critic and writer and an award-winning landscape architect explore the little-known story of Vizcaya, an extraordinary national treasure. Witold Rybczynski and Laurie Olin use a rich collection of illustrations, historic photographs, and narrative to document the creation of this stunning house and landscape. Vizcaya was completed in 1916 as the winter retreat of Chicago industrialist James Deering. The cosmopolitan bachelor, who chose Miami for its warm climate, enlisted the guidance of artist Paul Chalfin, with whom he traveled throughout Italy to survey houses and gardens. With the assistance of architect F. Burrall Hoffman, Jr., and garden designer Diego Suarez, the 180-acre site on Biscayne Bay was transformed into a grand estate, complete with lagoons, canals, citrus groves, a farm village, a yacht harbor, and a 40-room Baroque mansion. The lure of this architectural and landscape masterpiece, named for a Spanish Basque province, is undeniable. John Singer Sargent planned a short visit in 1917 but stayed for several months, producing an inspired series of watercolors, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. The book is further enriched by archival material and by the color images of noted photographer Steven Brooke, paying homage to Vizcaya as a lens through which readers learn about architecture, landscape and garden design, interior decoration, and art.

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In the fourteenth century, garish ornaments, bright colors, gilt, and military effects helped usher in the age of fashion in Italy. Over a short span of years important matters began to turn on the cut of a sleeve. Fashion influenced consumption and provided a stimulus that drove demand for goods and turned wealthy townspeople into enthusiastic consumers. Making wise decisions about the alarmingly expensive goods that composed a fashionable wardrobe became a matter of pressing concern, especially when the market caught on and became awash in cheaper editions of luxury wares. Focusing on the luxury trade in fashionable wear and accessories in Venice, Florence, and other towns in Italy, Gilding the Market investigates a major shift in patterns of consumption at the height of medieval prosperity, which, more remarkably, continued through the subsequent era of plague, return of plague, and increased warfare. A fine sensitivity to the demands of "le pompe," that is, the public display of private wealth, infected town life. The quest for luxuries affected markets by enlarging exchange activity and encouraging retail trades. As both consumers and tradesmen, local goldsmiths, long-distance traders, bankers, and money changers played important roles in creating this new age of fashion. In response to a greater public display of luxury goods, civic sumptuary laws were written to curb spending and extreme fashion, but these were aimed at women, youth, and children, leaving townsmen largely unrestricted in their consumption. With erudition, grace, and an evocative selection of illustrations, some reproduced in full color, Susan Mosher Stuard explores the arrival of fashion in European history.

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Medical systems function in specific cultural contexts. It is common to speak of the medicine of China, Japan, India, and other nation-states. Yet almost all formalized medical systems claim universal applicability and, thus, are ready to cross the cultural boundaries that contain them. There is a critical tension, in theory and practice, in the ways regional medical systems are conceptualized as "nationalistic" or inherently transnational. This volume is concerned with questions and problems created by the friction between nationalism and transnationalism at a time when globalization has greatly complicated the notion of cultural, political, and economic boundedness. Offering a range of perspectives, the contributors address questions such as: How do states concern themselves with the modernization of "traditional" medicine? How does the global hegemony of science enable the nationalist articulation of alternative medicine? How do global discourses of science and "new age" spirituality facilitate the transnationalization of "Asian" medicine? As more and more Asian medical practices cross boundaries into Western culture through the popularity of yoga and herbalism, and as Western medicine finds its way east, these systems of meaning become inextricably interrelated. These essays consider the larger implications of transmissions between cultures.

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Following the Jewish Enlightenment, many eighteenth-century Jews chose not to observe the religious laws and customs that had earlier marked them as culturally different from their Christian peers. As the Jewish population became increasingly assimilated, an ultraorthodox movement also emerged, creating a discrete identity for a group within the Jewish community that opted not to move toward the mainstream but instead to embrace the traditional laws. By tracing the evolution of the approach of the Orthodox to their nonpracticing brethren, Adam S. Ferziger sheds new light on the emergence of Orthodoxy as a specific movement within modern Jewish society. In the course of this process, German Orthodoxy in particular articulated a new hierarchical vision of Jewish identity and the structure of modern Jewish society. Viewing Orthodox Judaism as no less a nineteenth-century phenomenon than Reform Judaism or Zionism, Ferziger looks at the ways it defined itself by its relationship to the nonobservant Jewish population. Ferziger argues that as the Orthodox movement emerged, it rejected the stance that the assimilated and nonobservers were deviant outcasts. Instead, they were accepted as legitimate members of a Jewish community, in which Orthodox Jews occupied the pinnacle, as the guardians of its tradition. This book's contribution, however, moves beyond a historical study of Orthodox Judaism. The sociological methodology that Ferziger employs enables the reader to appreciate how other religious groups have sought to carve out their places within the mosaic of modern society.

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Copyright and intellectual property issues are intricately woven into any written work, but the precise nature of this relationship has plagued authors, printers, and booksellers for centuries. What does it mean to own the products of our intellectual labors in our own time? And what was the meaning three centuries ago, when copyright laws were first put into place? Jody Greene argues that while "owning" one's book is critical to the development of modern notions of authorship, studies of authorial property rights have in fact lost sight of the most critical valence of owning in early modern England: that is, owning up to or taking responsibility for one's work. Greene puts forth what she calls a "paranoid theory of copyright," under which literary property rights are a means of state regulation to assign responsibility for printed works, to identify one person who will step forward and claim the work in exchange for the right to reap the benefits of the literary marketplace. Blending research from legal, historical, and literary archives and drawing on the troubled authorial careers of figures such as Roger L'Estrange, Elizabeth Cellier, Daniel Defoe, John Gay, and Alexander Pope, The Trouble with Ownership looks to the literary culture of early modern England to reveal the intimate relationship between proprietary authorship and authorial liability.

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In this book Alexia Bloch examines the experiences of a community of Evenki, an indigenous group in central Siberia, to consider the place of residential schooling inidentity politics in contemporary Russia. Residential schools established in the 1920s brought Siberians under the purview of the Soviet state, and Bloch demonstrates how in the post-Soviet era, a time of jarring social change, these schools continue to embody the salience of Soviet cultural practices and the spirit of belonging to a collective. She explores how Evenk intellectuals are endowing residential schools with new symbolic power and turning them into a locus for political mobilization. In contrast to the binary model of oppressed/oppressor underlying many accounts of state/indigenous relations, Bloch's work provides a complex picture of the experiences of Siberians in Soviet and post-Soviet society. Bloch's research, conducted in a central Siberian town during the 1990s, is ethnographically grounded in life stories recorded with Evenk women; surveys of households navigating histories of collectivization and recent, rampant privatization; and in residential schools and in museums, both central to Evenk identity politics. While considering how residential schools once targeted marginalized reindeer herders, especially young girls, for socialization and assimilation, Bloch reveals how class, region, and gendered experience currently influence perspectives on residential schooling. The analysis centers on the ways vehicles of the Soviet state have been reworked and still sometimes embraced by members of an indigenous community as they forge new identities and allegiances in the post-Soviet era.

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Changes in human rights environments in Africa over the past decade have been facilitated by astounding political transformations: the rise of mass movements and revolts driven by democratic and developmentalist ideals, as well as mass murder and poverty perpetuated by desperate regimes and discredited global agencies. Human Rights, the Rule of Law, and Development in Africa seeks to make sense of human rights in Africa through the lens of its triumphs and tragedies, its uneven developments and complex demands. The volume makes a significant contribution to the debate about the connections between the protection of human rights and the pursuit of economic development by interrogating the paradigms, politics, and practices of human rights in Africa. Throughout, the essays emphasize that democratic and human rights regimes are products of concrete social struggles, not simply textual or legal discourses. Including some of Africa's leading scholars, jurists, and human rights activists, contributors to the volume diverge from Western theories of African democratization by rejecting the continental view of an Africa blighted by failure, disease, and economic malaise. It argues instead that Africa has strengthened and shaped international law, such as the right to self-determination, inspired by the process of decolonization, and the definition of the refugee. Insisting on the holistic view that human rights are as much about economic and social rights as they are about civil and political rights, the contributors offer novel analyses of African conceptions, experiences, and aspirations of human rights which manifest themselves in complex global, regional, and local idioms. Further, they explore the varied constructions of human rights in African and Western discourses and the roles played by states and NGOs in promoting or subverting human rights. Combining academic analysis with social concern, intellectual discourse with civic engagement, and scholarly research with institution building, this is a compelling and original approach to the question whether externally inspired solutions to African human rights issues have validity in a postcolonial world.

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Texts by, for, and about preachers from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries reveal an intense interest in the preacher's human nature and its intersection with his "angelic" role. Far from simply denigrating embodiment or excluding it from consideration, these works recognize its centrality to the office of preacher and the ways in which preachers, like Christ, needed humanness to make their performance of doctrine effective for their audiences. At the same time, the texts warned of the preacher's susceptibility to the fleshly failings of lust, vainglory, deception, and greed. Preaching's problematic juxtaposition of the earthly and the spiritual made images of women preachers, real and fictional, key to understanding and exploiting the power, as well as the dangers, of the feminized flesh. Addressing the underexamined bodies of the clergy in light of both medieval and modern discussions of female authority and the body of Christ in medieval culture, Angels and Earthly Creatures reinserts women into the history of preaching and brings together discourses that would have been intertwined in the Middle Ages but are often treated separately by scholars. The examination of handbooks for preachers as literary texts also demonstrates their extensive interaction with secular literary traditions, explored here with particular reference to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Through a close and insightful reading of a wide variety of texts and figures, including Hildegard of Bingen, Birgitta of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena, Waters offers an original examination of the preacher's unique role as an intermediary—standing between heaven and earth, between God and people, participating in and responsible to both sides of that divide.

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Scholars who investigate race—a label based upon real or perceived physical differences—realize that they face a formidable task. The concept has been contested and condoned, debated and denied throughout modern history. Presented with the full understanding of the complexity of the issue, Race and Practice in Archaeological Interpretation concentrates on the archaeological analysis of race and how race is determined in the archaeological record. Most archaeologists, even those dealing with recent history, have usually avoided the subject of race, yet Charles E. Orser, Jr., contends that its study and its implications are extremely important for the science of archaeology. Drawing upon his considerable experience as an archaeologist, and using a combination of practice theory as interpreted by Pierre Bourdieu and spatial theory as presented by Henri Lefebvre, Orser argues for an explicit archaeology of race and its interpretation. The author reviews past archaeological usages of race, including a case study from early nineteenth-century Ireland, and explores the way race was used to form ideas about the Mound Builders, the Celts, and Atlantis. He concludes with a proposal that historical archaeology—cast as modern-world archaeology—should take the lead in the archaeological analysis of race because its purview is the recent past, that period during which our conceptions of race developed.

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Throughout the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was home to a rich cultural mix of Christians, Jews, and Muslims. At the end of the fifteenth century, however, the last Islamic stronghold fell, and Jews were forced either to convert to Christianity or to face expulsion. Thousands left for other parts of Europe and Asia, eventually establishing Sephardic communities in Amsterdam, Venice, Istanbul, southwestern France, and elsewhere. More than a hundred years after the expulsion, some Judeoconversos—descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had converted to Christianity—were forced to flee the Iberian Peninsula once again to avoid ethnic and religious persecution. Many of them joined the Sephardic Diaspora and embraced rabbinic Judaism. Later some of these same people or their descendants returned to Iberian lands temporarily or permanently and, in a twist that Jewish authorities considered scandalous, reverted to Catholicism. Among them were some who betrayed their fellow conversos to the Holy Office. In Souls in Dispute, David L. Graizbord unravels this intriguing history of the renegade conversos and constructs a detailed and psychologically acute portrait of their motivations. Through a probing analysis of relevant inquisitorial documents and a wide-ranging investigation into the history of the Sephardic Diaspora and Habsburg Spain, Graizbord shows that, far from being simply reckless and vindictive, the renegades used their double acts of border crossing to negotiate a dangerous and unsteady economic environment: so long as their religious and social ambiguity remained undetected, they were rewarded with the means for material survival. In addition, Graizbord sheds new light on the conflict-ridden transformation of makeshift Jewish colonies of Iberian expatriates—especially in the borderlands of southwestern France—showing that the renegades failed to accommodate fully to a climate of conformity that transformed these Sephardic groups into disciplined communities of Jews. Ultimately, Souls in Dispute explains how and why Judeoconversos built and rebuilt their religious and social identities, and what it meant to them to be both Jewish and Christian given the constraints they faced in their time and place in history.

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Published in 1774, Essay on Gardens is one of the earliest texts showing the progressive shift in French taste from the classical model of the gardens at Versailles to the picturesque or natural style of garden design in the late eighteenth century. In this formulation of his ideas concerning landscape, Claude-Henri Watelet describes an ideal farm and also his own very real garden, Moulin Joli, near Paris. He advances the theory that the useful and the pleasurable must be combined in the planning, preservation, and decoration of the land by offering a relatively novel design that uses experimental methods to create a comfortable estate. The result is a horticultural and ecological laboratory that includes a residence, a farm, stables, a dairy, an apiary, a mill, walks, vistas, flower beds, an area reserved for medicinal plants, decorative statues, a medical laboratory, and even a small infirmary for ailing members of the community. Given the wide scholarly interest in the field of garden design and its history, this first English edition of Watelet's small but influential book will interest historians of landscape design as well as students of the history of architecture. Joseph Disponzio's informative introduction to Samuel Danon's masterful translation situates the Essay on Gardens within the framework of other landscape and garden treatises of the late eighteenth century. Although the original text was not illustrated, this edition includes a selection of charming drawings and etchings of Moulin Joli by Watelet himself, Hubert Robert, and others.

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In The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero, Peggy McCracken explores the role of blood symbolism in establishing and maintaining the sex-gender systems of medieval culture. Reading a variety of literary texts in relation to historical, medical, and religious discourses about blood, and in the context of anthropological and religious studies, McCracken offers a provocative examination of the ways gendered cultural values were mapped onto blood in the Middle Ages. As McCracken demonstrates, blood is gendered when that of men is prized in stories about battle and that of women is excluded from the public arena in which social and political hierarchies are contested and defined through chivalric contest. In her examination of the conceptualization of familial relationships, she uncovers the privileges that are grounded in gendered definitions of blood relationships. She shows that in narratives about sacrifice a father's relationship to his son is described as a shared blood, whereas texts about women accused of giving birth to monstrous children define the mother's contribution to conception in terms of corrupted, often menstrual blood. Turning to fictional representations of bloody martyrdom and of eucharistic ritual, McCracken juxtaposes the blood of the wounded guardian of the grail with that of Christ and suggests that the blood from the grail king's wound is characterized in opposition to that of women and Jewish men. Drawing on a range of French and other literary texts, McCracken shows how the dominant ideas about blood in medieval culture point to ways of seeing modern values associated with blood in a new light, and how modern representations in turn suggest new perspectives on medieval perceptions.

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In classical terms the georgic celebrates the working landscape, cultivated to become fruitful and prosperous, in contrast to the idealized or fanciful landscapes of the pastoral. Arguing that economic considerations must become central to any understanding of the human community's engagement with the natural environment, Timothy Sweet identifies a distinct literary mode he calls the American georgic. Offering a fresh approach to ecocritical and environmentally-oriented literary studies, Sweet traces the history of the American georgic from its origins in late sixteenth-century English literature promoting the colonization of the Americas through the mid-nineteenth century, ending with George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature (1864), the foundational text in the conservationist movement.

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Few issues in the relations between China and the West invoke as much passion as human rights. At stake, however, are much more than moral concerns and hurt national feelings. To Washington, the undemocratic nature of the Chinese government makes it ultimately suspect on all issues. To Beijing, the human rights pressure exerted by the West on China seems designed to compromise its legitimacy. As China's economic power grows and its influence on the politics of developing countries continues, an understanding of the place of human rights in China's foreign relations is crucial to the implementation of an effective international human rights agenda. In Human Rights in Chinese Foreign Relations, Ming Wan examines China's relations with the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and the United Nations human rights institutions. Wan shows that, after a decade of persistent external pressure to reform its practices, China still plays human rights diplomacy as traditional power politics and deflects pressure by mobilizing its propaganda machine to neutralize Western criticism, by making compromises that do not threaten core interests, and by offering commercial incentives to important nations to help prevent a unified Western front. Furthermore, at the UN, China has largely succeeded in rallying developing nation members to defeat Western efforts at censure. In turn, it is apparent to Wan that, while the idea of human rights matters in Western policy, it has seldom prevailed over economic considerations or concerns about national security. Western governments have not committed as many policy resources to pressuring Beijing on human rights as to other issues, and the differing degrees of commitment to human rights-related foreign policy explain why Japan, Western Europe, and the United States, in that order, have gradually retreated from confronting China on human rights issues.

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Queen Victoria was famously not amused, and the age to which she gave her name is not generally known for its playfulness or sense of fun. But play was pervasive in Victorian society and in the realist novels that were central to that culture. In Serious Play, J. Jeffrey Franklin examines the role of play in three areas—gambling, theatricality, and aesthetic theory—demonstrating in the process how the realist novel served as a vehicle for play while play in turn entered and helped define the form of realism. Franklin's analysis focuses on close readings of eight novels by Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, as well as works by Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold. The readings are grounded in histories and cultural studies of gambling, recreation, the stock market, theater and antitheatrical prejudice, the performance of gender roles, working-class protest, aesthetic theory, and especially the novel genre itself. While the treatments of gambling, theatricality, and aesthetics are specific, the book shows how play links each of them to broader, culturally defining issues that Victorian writings frequently express: values versus value, the artificial versus the authentic, and the real versus the illusory. Serious Play demonstrates, as no previous study has, how play functioned as a linchpin concept within the discursive infrastructure of Victorian society, challenging critical commonplaces about the unplayfulness of the Victorians and the ideological conservatism of realism. "Serious Play provides a completely new insight into the Victorian realist novel. . . . All the major theories of play are subjected to penetrating analysis through which their respective shortcomings and their historical conditioning are highlighted, so that the book can also be read as one of the most comprehensive assessments of modern play theories to date." —Wolfgang Iser

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Sometime before the middle of the twelfth century, an anonymous English writer composed the Leges Edwardi, a treatise purporting to contain the laws that had been in force under the Anglo-Saxon King Edward the Confessor (1042-1066), cousin of William the Conqueror. The laws were said to have been spoken to William shortly after the Conquest by "English nobles who were wise men and learned in their law," recounting "the rules of their laws and customs" for the invading Norman king. When they had finished, the king wondered whether it might not be better for all of them to live under the law of his Viking ancestors; the English, however, protested that they preferred to live by their own preconquest laws. The king acquiesced, and thus, goes the story, were the laws of King Edward the Confessor authorized. Looking through the lens of this important—if spurious—treatise, God's Peace and King's Peace offers the first ground-level view of English law during the century in which the common law was born. Bruce R. O'Brien compares the Leges Edwardi to other memorials of legal policy and practice from before and after 1066, in both Normandy and England, and advances conclusions about the treatises' reliability on specific points of law. He also shows how the Laws of Edward the Confessor, taken as a record of English law at the conquest, came to be used as authoritative evidence behind the Magna Carta that the king was under the law, and how it was eventually declared a notorious forgery by seventeenth-century antiquaries and Enlightenment historians.

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An intriguing scholarly investigation, not so much of the ways the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries articulated pain, but of the ways in which pain itself articulated the late eighteenth-century experience. Through analysis of novels, plays, and poems, the author explores the transition from sensibility as a sense of "selflessness" to Romanticism, which puts the self in the foreground as the mediating consciousness. His tightly focused discussion sets a starting point for further critical investigation of the subject.

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The third volume in the series Lectura Dantis Americana is Maria Picchio Simonelli's study of Inferno III. Primarily philological in its focus, the book examines in detail a number of the cruces found in this canto, which initiates the voyage to the underworld in Dante's poem.

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Herman Beavers offers a richly nuanced study of Ernes J. Gaines, James Alan McPherson, and Ralph Ellison as writers who have found ways to invest circumstances that might otherwise be seen as sites of squalor or despair with a sense of cultural vitality. He examines the Ellisonian themes and motifs the two later writers take up in their fiction, and looks at Ellison's influence on the strategies they enact to construct themselves as American writers. For Beavers, the fictions of Ellison, Gaines, and McPherson are peopled by characters who value acts of storytelling and whose stories frame a fuller, more complex, and more inclusive version of American identity than those the dominant white culture has allowed.

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Albertanus of Brescia is an important figure in the cultural history of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. He is best known among literary scholars for the influence of his writings on Brunetto Latini, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer. In addition, his sermons have received attention as part of the history of lay confraternities and lay preaching in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. James M. Powell shows that Albertanus's contributions considerably surpass even these notable attainments. Powell contends that Albertanus was an original social theorist who drew on his experience with religious confraternities and with the law to develop a theory of consent. Albertanus developed the idea that society rested on voluntary acceptance of a rule, much as did religious life. This acceptance laid the foundation for social cohesion and legal enforcement. Albertanus's ideas were to find great prominence in the later Middle Ages. Powell's purpose in writing Albertanus of Brescia goes beyond the study of his eponymous subject. Through Albertanus, Powell examines how major developments of the twelfth century began to find expression in the mind of an early thirteenth-century secular thinker. In Albertanus, Powell perceives an individual bringing received, bookish authority into confrontation with lived experience. To Powell, the example of Albertanus suggests a much more complex picture of medieval approaches to social theory than that previously evident in the literature. This is the first book-length study of Albertanus and his works. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of medieval, Italian, intellectual, and literary history, and political theory.

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When Ecuador's cut-flower industry took off in the mid-1980s, it rode a wave of international credit peddling and currency speculation that would lead countries of the Global South into successive debt crises and northern financial firms to fortune and dominion. By the start of the twenty-first century, as the Ecuadorian economy collapsed and its ties with international finance became strained, flower exporters rebuilt their businesses around the profitability of their indigenous labor force, drawing local communities deeply into new plantation systems taking over the highlands. In A Feast of Flowers, Christopher Krupa goes inside Ecuador's booming cut-flower industry to chronicle the ways its capitalist pioneers built a booming export industry around a racial ideology, turning indigenous people's purported differences into resources for industrial expansion. At the core of this racial system is a belief, central to postcolonial science and politics in Ecuador, in capitalism's unique capacity to change people's racial identity and to liberate oppressed populations from racial subordination. Krupa shows how such views not only guide how indigenous people are today incorporated into demanding labor systems in Ecuador's new export plantations, but also how indigenous minds and bodies became sites of study and intervention by scientists, politicians, and economic planners throughout the last century, all looking to change indigenous people in some way. Combining nearly two decades of ethnographic and historical research, A Feast of Flowers shows how aggressive capitalist expansion in postcolonial contexts may revive longstanding intersections between race and economy to facilitate new modes of dispossession under the guise of humanitarian intervention.

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The usefulness of time and place as defining categories would seem to be baked into the very notion of nineteenth-century American literary studies, yet they have challenged scholars practically since the field's inception. In Neither the Time nor the Place seventeen critics consider how the space-time dyad has both troubled and invigorated Americanist scholarship in recent decades and make explicit how time and place are best considered in tandem, interrogating each other. Taken together, the essays challenge depictions of place and time as bounded and linear, fixed and teleological, or mere ideological constructions. They address both familiar and unexpected objects, practices, and texts, including a born-digital Melville, documents from the construction of the Panama Canal, the hollow earth, the desiring body, textual editing, marble statuary, the sound of frogs, spirit photography, and twentieth-century Civil War fiction. The essays draw on an equally wide variety of critical methodologies, integrating affect studies, queer theory, book history, information studies, sound studies, environmental humanities, new media studies, and genre theory to explore the unexpected dimensions that emerge when time and place are taken as a unit. The pieces are organized around considerations of citizenship, environment, historiography, media, and bodies—five political, cultural, and/or methodological foci for some of the most provocative new work being done in American literary studies. Neither the Time nor the Place is a book not only for scholars and students already well grounded in the study of nineteenth-century American literature and culture, but for anyone, scholar or student, looking for a roadmap to some of the most vibrant work in the field. Contributors: Wai Chee Dimock, Stephanie Foote, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Coleman Hutchison, Rodrigo Lazo, Caroline Levander, Robert S. Levine, Christopher Looby, Dana Luciano, Timothy Marr, Dana D. Nelson, Ifeoma C. Kiddoe Nwankwo, Mark Storey, Matthew E. Suazo, and Edward Sugden.

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Whether man-made or naturally occurring, large-scale disasters can cause fatalities and injuries, devastate property and communities, savage the environment, impose significant financial burdens on individuals and firms, and test political leadership. Moreover, global challenges such as climate change and terrorism reveal the interdependent and interconnected nature of our current moment: what occurs in one nation or geographical region is likely to have effects across the globe. Our information age creates new and more integrated forms of communication that incur risks that are difficult to evaluate, let alone anticipate. All of this makes clear that innovative approaches to assessing and managing risk are urgently required. When catastrophic risk management was in its inception thirty years ago, scientists and engineers would provide estimates of the probability of specific types of accidents and their potential consequences. Economists would then propose risk management policies based on those experts' estimates with little thought as to how this data would be used by interested parties. Today, however, the disciplines of finance, geography, history, insurance, marketing, political science, sociology, and the decision sciences combine scientific knowledge on risk assessment with a better appreciation for the importance of improving individual and collective decision-making processes. The essays in this volume highlight past research, recent discoveries, and open questions written by leading thinkers in risk management and behavioral sciences. The Future of Risk Management provides scholars, businesses, civil servants, and the concerned public tools for making more informed decisions and developing long-term strategies for reducing future losses from potentially catastrophic events. Contributors: Mona Ahmadiani, Joshua D. Baker, W. J. Wouter Botzen, Cary Coglianese, Gregory Colson, Jeffrey Czajkowski, Nate Dieckmann, Robin Dillon, Baruch Fischhoff, Jeffrey A. Friedman, Robin Gregory, Robert W. Klein, Carolyn Kousky, Howard Kunreuther, Craig E. Landry, Barbara Mellers, Robert J. Meyer, Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Robert Muir-Wood, Mark Pauly, Lisa Robinson, Adam Rose, Paul J. H. Schoemaker, Paul Slovic, Phil Tetlock, Daniel Västfjäll, W. Kip Viscusi, Elke U. Weber, Richard Zeckhauser.

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In a work based on a meticulous analysis of sources, many of them previously unexplored, Catherine M. Mooney upends the received account of Clare of Assisi's founding of the Order of San Damiano, or Poor Clares. Mooney offers instead a stark counternarrative: Clare, her sisters of San Damiano, and their allies struggled against a papal program bent on regimenting, enriching, and enclosing religious women in the thirteenth century, a program that proved largely successful. Mooney demonstrates that Clare (1194-1253) established a single community that was soon cajoled, perhaps even coerced, into joining an order previously founded by the papacy. Artfully renaming it after Clare's San Damiano with Clare as its putative mother, Pope Gregory IX enhanced his order's cachet by associating it also with Clare's famous friend, Francis of Assisi. Mooney traces how Clare and her allies in other houses attempted to follow Francis's directives rather than the pope's, divested themselves of property against the pope's orders, and organized in an attempt to change papal rule; and she shows how, after Francis's death, the women's relationships with the Franciscans themselves grew similarly fraught. Clare's pursuit of her vision proved relentless: at the time of her death, she newly identified her community as the Order of Poor Sisters and allied it unambiguously with Francis and his friars. Overturning another myth, Mooney reveals how only in the late nineteenth century did Clare come to be known as the sole author of a rule she had written collaboratively with others. Throughout, the story of Clare and her sisters emerges as a chapter in the long history of women who tried to define their religious identities within a Church more committed to unity and conformity than to diversity and difference.

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Usme, one of the peripheral districts surrounding Bogotá, Colombia, is one of the poorest, most populous, and most marginalized outer districts of the city, with a high concentration of indigenous occupants. Over eighty percent of Usme’s women have experienced partner violence or some kind of partner-controlling behavior. How does one go about understanding the perpetration of partner violence? Based on ethnographic work with survivors, responders, and most of all the perpetrators of this kind of abuse, scholar John I.B. Bhadra-Heintz explores this issue in A Tyranny Against Itself. Throughout this study, Bhadra-Heintz examines how this violence is made possible, how it is positioned to be permissible socially, and what is at stake for those who are involved. This violence is examined as a question of sovereignty on the intimate scale. Not the product of a particular cultural pathology, a phenomenon that can otherwise be otherized, this book seeks instead to find the lines of connection, and contradiction, that tie these intimate acts of violence into broader regimes of power. In a community so profoundly shaped by centuries of political conflict, only through this kind of approach can new apertures for engagement be found. Through them, this book outlines new vulnerabilities in this form of abuse, and along the way imagines new ways of escaping from these everyday acts of intimate terror and the broader systems of violence in which they are involved.

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Since the early decades of the eighteenth century, European, and especially British, thinkers were preoccupied with questions of taste. Whether Americans believed that taste was innate—and therefore a marker of breeding and station—or acquired—and thus the product of application and study—all could appreciate that taste was grounded in, demonstrated through, and confirmed by reading, writing, and looking. It was widely believed that shared aesthetic sensibilities connected like-minded individuals and that shared affinities advanced the public good and held great promise for the American republic. Exploring the intersection of the early republic's material, visual, literary, and political cultures, Catherine E. Kelly demonstrates how American thinkers acknowledged the similarities between aesthetics and politics in order to wrestle with questions about power and authority. Judgments about art, architecture, literature, poetry, and the theater became an arena for considering political issues ranging from government structures and legislative representation to qualifications for citizenship and the meaning of liberty itself. Additionally, if taste prompted political debate, it also encouraged affinity grounded in a shared national identity. In the years following independence, ordinary women and men reassured themselves that taste revealed larger truths about an individual's character and potential for republican citizenship. Did an early national vocabulary of taste, then, with its privileged visuality, register beyond the debates over the ratification of the Constitution? Did it truly extend beyond political and politicized discourse to inform the imaginative structures and material forms of everyday life? Republic of Taste affirms that it did, although not in ways that anyone could have predicted at the conclusion of the American Revolution.

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From 1975 to 1990, Lebanon experienced a long war involving various national and international actors. The peace agreement that followed and officially propelled the country into a "postwar" era did not address many of the root causes of war, nor did it hold main actors accountable. Instead, a politics of "no victor, no vanquished" was promoted, in which the political elite agreed simply to consign the war to the past. However, since then, Lebanon has found itself still entangled in various forms of political violence, from car bombings and assassinations to additional outbreaks of armed combat. In War Is Coming, Sami Hermez argues that the country's political leaders have enabled the continuation of violence and examines how people live between these periods of conflict. What do everyday conversations, practices, and experiences look like during these moments? How do people attempt to find a measure of certainty or stability in such times? Hermez's ethnographic study of everyday life in Lebanon between the volatile years of 2006 and 2009 tackles these questions and reveals how people engage in practices of recollecting past war while anticipating future turmoil. Hermez demonstrates just how social interactions and political relationships with the state unfold and critically engages our understanding of memory and violence, seeing in people's recollections living and spontaneous memories that refuse to forget the past. With an attention to the details of everyday life, War Is Coming shows how even a conversation over lunch, or among friends, may turn into a discussion about both past and future unrest. Shedding light on the impact of protracted conflict on people's everyday experiences and the way people anticipate political violence, Hermez highlights an urgency for alternative paths to sustaining political and social life in Lebanon.

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Since the nineteenth century, a succession of states has classified the inhabitants of what are now the borderlands of Northeast India and Bangladesh as Muslim "frontier peasants," "savage mountaineers," and Christian "ethnic minorities," suspecting them to be disloyal subjects, spies, and traitors. In Jungle Passports Malini Sur follows the struggles of these people to secure shifting land, gain access to rice harvests, and smuggle the cattle and garments upon which their livelihoods depend against a background of violence, scarcity, and India's construction of one of the world's longest and most highly militarized border fences. Jungle Passports recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along violent borders. Sur shows how the division of sovereignties and distinct regimes of mobility and citizenship push undocumented people to undertake perilous journeys across previously unrecognized borders every day. Paying close attention to the forces that shape the life-worlds of deportees, refugees, farmers, smugglers, migrants, bureaucrats, lawyers, clergy, and border troops, she reveals how reciprocity and kinship and the enforcement of state violence, illegality, and border infrastructures shape the margins of life and death. Combining years of ethnographic and archival fieldwork, her thoughtful and evocative book is a poignant testament to the force of life in our era of closed borders, insularity, and "illegal migration."

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Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal. Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.

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A political, legal, intellectual, and social history of employment in America In the present age of temp work, telecommuting, and outsourcing, millions of workers in the United States find themselves excluded from the category of "employee"—a crucial distinction that would otherwise permit unionization and collective bargaining. Tracing the history of the term since its entry into the public lexicon in the nineteenth century, Jean-Christian Vinel demonstrates that the legal definition of "employee" has always been politically contested and deeply affected by competing claims on the part of business and labor. Unique in the Western world, American labor law is premised on the notion that "no man can serve two masters"—workers owe loyalty to their employer, which in many cases is incompatible with union membership. The Employee: A Political History historicizes this American exception to international standards of rights and liberties at work, revealing a little known part of the business struggle against the New Deal. Early on, progressives and liberals developed a labor regime that, intending to restore amicable relations between employer and employee, sought to include as many workers as possible in the latter category. But in the 1940s this language of social harmony met with increasing resistance from businessmen, who pressed their interests in Congress and the federal courts, pushing for an ever-narrower definition of "employee" that excluded groups such as foremen, supervisors, and knowledge workers. A cultural and political history of American business and law, The Employee sheds historical light on contemporary struggles for economic democracy and political power in the workplace.

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An impressively learned and beautifully illustrated review of medieval ideas about Paradise Did Adam and Eve need to eat in Eden in order to live? If so, did human beings urinate and defecate in paradise? And since people had no need for clothing, transportation, or food, what purpose did animals serve? Would carnivorous animals have preyed on other creatures? These were but a few of the questions that plagued medieval scholars for whom the idea of Eden proved an endless source of contemplation. As theologians attempted to reconcile their own experiences with the realities of the prelapsarian paradise, they crafted complex answers that included explanations of God's interaction with creation, the existence of death, and man's dominion over nature. In From Eden to Eternity, Alastair Minnis examines accounts of the origins of the human body and soul to illustrate the ways in which the schoolmen thought their way back to Eden to discover fundamental truths about humanity. He demonstrates how theologians sought certainty in matters of orthodox Christian thought and also engaged in speculation about matters that, they freely admitted, were not susceptible to firm proof. Moreover, From Eden to Eternity argues that the preoccupation with paradise belonged not only to the schools but to society as a whole, and it traces how lay writers and artists also attempted to interpret the origins of human society. Eden transcended human understanding, yet it afforded an extraordinary amount of creative space to late medieval theologians, painters, and poets as they tried to understand the place that God had deemed worthy of the creature made in His image.

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