0. Food supply, demand and trade. Aspects of the economic relationship between town and countryside (Middle Ages - nineteenth Century). Book introduction

In Chateaubriand's Voyage en Amérique et en Italie, we read: “In Gothic languages, Scandinavia was called Mannaheim, which means ‘country of men,’” and what the Latin of the sixth century has translated with vigor by these words: “the factory of the human race.”2 This extract, as an echo of Jordanes's vagina nationum, demonstrates the growing interest for Scandinavia in French intellectual life during the nineteenth century, and especially for Iceland, described by Chateaubriand as “the Norse historical archive.” Just as MacPherson's Ossian had at the end of the preceding century, the discovery of Ari Thorgilsson or Snorri Sturluson (“the Herodote of the North” for Chateaubriand) further opened a new field of research for French scholars.In fact, this field had been opened up from at least the middle of the eighteenth century, when Montesquieu fantasized about a mythicized North as a homeland of freedom (in opposition to the South) and saw it not only as factory of mankind but as the “factory of instruments that break the iron forged in the South” (Montesquieu 1973, EL, XVIII:5; Mohnike 2016, 18; Davy 2010, 96–7). Reviving Montesquieu's historical approach, the French scholars of the nineteenth century saw the North as a well that drew its waters from many streams.Legal historians did not hesitate to tap into it (Sturmel 2002, 90–121; Audren and Halpérin 2013), testifying to their own curiosity, but more generally to the scientific interest of French lawyers and historians for Scandinavia. This was demonstrated when the academician Louis-Jean Koenigswarter wrote in 1853: “The ancient customs and laws of Scandinavia have real advantages for those who study the antiquities of European laws over the first written customs of the barbarians.”3 This interest of French historical, legal, or geographical sciences for Iceland is reflected also in the superlatives used to qualify the Nordic island. For Jean-Marie Pardessus, Professor at the Faculty of Law of Paris, Iceland is, of all the parts of Northern Europe, “the most remarkable by its civilisation, its literature and its laws” (Pardessus 1834, 45). For Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, geographer and politician, the Icelandic nation “is one of most intelligent from all over the world,” and “no one is more faithful to its own traditions’ (Bory de St-Vincent and Lacroix 1840, 251–8). For Henri Prentout, Professor at the University of Caen, Iceland is “the most interesting country to have a picture of the Scandinavian society in [the] 9th century” (Prentout 1911, 206). Pardessus's judgment about Icelandic singularities reads as follows: I could say that Iceland is almost more Scandinavian than Norway, because alliances and invasions [that] came from Europe have quickly altered the pure Scandinavian race in Norway. . . . That is so true that historians who wanted to study mores, customs, laws, and Scandinavian literature have always focused on Iceland.4Such an affirmation by a French scholar in the middle of the nineteenth century is not surprising because the North had become the home of a myth a few centuries earlier, dating back perhaps to the reception in France of Olaus Magnus's Historia om de nordiska folken in the middle of the sixteenth century (Davy 2019, 12), or to Rudbeck's Atlantica sive Manheim, a work that so influenced Montesquieu and Chateaubriand (Wolfram 1990, 2) in its confusion of Plato's Atlantis story and Virgil's Ultima Thule, and which managed to trace the homeland of all civilizations back to Scandinavia (Anttila 2014, 245). Thus, what Xavier Marmier writes in the middle of the nineteenth century is significant: Beyond the Baltic Sea, we leave our science. A wall of fog hides the surroundings and Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Lapland, Spitzberg, Finland, and also Russia appear behind this wall with their imprecise forms and confuse themselves with our imagination. It is here our Thule; here is this country half fabulous and half historical of Ancients, this foggy kingdom whose customs we cannot identify and position with precision, and on which we are told so many strange things. (Marmier 1840, 95)In fact, since the beginning of the early modern period, Thule seemed to embody a sort of original sanctuary where the origins of peoples and of their laws could be found, the birthplace of the world. Why should it not, therefore, also be the fons et origo of the homo juridicus? Certainly, French scholars were not unanimous in assimilating Thule to Iceland. But such an assimilation was often made by many of them, and it contributed to this mythical approach and the quest for the origins of Europe's nations there.At the beginning of the nineteenth century, John Pinkerton reminded everyone that famous and talented scholars had based their research on the “imaginary hypothesis” of a Scythian migration from Scandinavia outwards. In their minds, he says, the language, mythology, and morals of the Scythes had been preserved in the “Icelandic desert” intact, such that the Scythian advance through Scandinavia has become “a very curious object of study” (Pinkerton 1804, 247). A few years later, in 1822, Fabre d'Olivet believed that he had located the source for the first Mexican legislators in the Atlantis, and in the Borean race, “whose peregrinations have led it from Iceland to America” (Fabre d'Olivet 1822, 188). The belief was repeated by the jurist Ernest Glasson at the end of the same century (1889, 12). Here, we find ourselves on the threshold of a larger Indo-European perspective, amply exploited since the beginning of the nineteenth century by Malte-Brun, for example, who envisaged “one great family from the banks of the Ganges River to the shores of Iceland” (Malte-Brun 1828, 400), but also by Frédéric Eichhoff (1853, 11–2) and Adolphe Pictet (1859, 3).Furthermore, since the days of Montesquieu, there was no doubting that the North had been, long ago, a country of freedom. This was an idea that became widespread through to the end of the nineteenth century. Ernest Nys (the famous Belgian promoter of the study of international law), for example, envisaged the Far North as “the liberty's servant and defensor which fought for the independence of men versus despotism” (Nys 1896, 125). Iceland embodies this topos through the memory of the Norse migrations, Norsemen being forced to flee the tyranny of Harald Fairhair (Haraldr inn hárfagri) at the end of the ninth century. Land of freedom, founded on an anti-monarchical legacy, Iceland is also described as the land of equality, that being, as Henri Prentout pointed out, a dominant trait in old Scandinavian society (1911, 206).Following in the footsteps of Paul-Henri Mallet, who called Iceland “the Athens of the Ice,” several French historians in the nineteenth century presented Scandinavia as the “paragon of democracy.” “Common misfortune had brought them together,” wrote Georges Depping, “all equal, and no one could impose their own domination on others.” And, after enumerating the powers of the assemblies and the “lavmand” (i.e., lawman, lögmaðr/lögsögumaðr, who presided over the Althing), he added: Here was the simple and democratic government of this small Free State, separated from Europe by the boreal seas, and seated between the rocks, volcanoes, and ices of Iceland.5Various scholars made the small step that transformed Iceland into the antecedent of the Parliamentary system. Charles Hertz saw medieval Iceland as a Parliamentary republic (1879, 336); Gabriel Gravier located Iceland as the origin of Parliaments (1887, 171); Joseph-Louis Ortolan attributed a Norse origin to the word “Republic” (1831, 373); and Ernest Nys depicted Iceland as the “mother of England and grand-mother of United-States” (1896, 100).All these historical and legal reflections attest to the evidence of a relationship woven in fantasy between Iceland and the French scholarly world from the end of the eighteenth century until the end of the following century. There are therefore questions to be asked about the stance of French legal historians in that period toward Iceland, and about what it meant. On the one hand, it allowed them to renew their approach to their indigenous legal culture by locating in unknown (or hitherto ignored) sources the origins of their own national law elsewhere than in Roman law or in those law-codes that they termed “barbarian.” On the other hand, this allowed them to retain the notion of a civil law-code whilst avoiding the risk of an ever more perilous “Germanism.” When it comes to meaning, the use of Icelandic sources gave to many of these scholars of a liberal disposition (almost all of them from 1830s to 1840s) a sort of historical base from which their own political opinions could flourish.It even gave birth to a “Norse school” in French universities, a “school of legal history with a Scandinavian wing.” This school focused, on the one hand, on discovering (or rediscovering) Icelandic sources of law (see section I below) and, on other hand, on modeling those sources as a way to discover the distant origins of French law (see section II below).At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Noël de la Morinière, interested in Scandinavian antiquities in Normandy, admitted to the widespread contemporary ignorance of Norse texts: “They are not familiar to French people,” he said. “These documents seem to us like as Boreal forests which we only know from the sea littoral but in whose milieu we dare not penetrate” (Morinière 1799, 28). And when Domenico Alberto Azuni, a Sardinian jurist summoned to Paris by Napoleon Bonaparte, published his treaty on maritime law in 1810, he managed to ignore Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and, of course, Icelandic laws. When Jean-Marie Pardessus presented his monumental Collection des lois maritimes in the Themis review of 1823, he disregarded Scandinavian laws on the subject before the fifteenth century. In 1839, Édouard Laboulaye, member of Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres and Professor at the Collège de France, wondered out loud: ‘Who knows the name of Gragàs [sic], that curious law-code of the Icelanders?’ (Laboulaye 1839, 49). So we need to step back and review how the interest of French scholars in Icelandic sources took shape.The corpus of old Icelandic texts in France became known less through the writings of the early French pioneers of Icelandic studies in the seventeenth century (Isaac de La Peyrère or La Martinière) than through the authors of the eighteenth century, such as Jean-Baptiste Des Roches de Parthenay and Paul-Henri Mallet. The former, with a presentation of the Edda and a few sagas, such as the Eiríkr saga rauða (Saga of Erik the Red), in his Histoire du Dannemarc (1730), showed how French intellectuals begin to become acquainted with the wealth of this hitherto unknown culture (Des Roches de Parthenay 1730, lii–lviii). Mallet rooted the Icelandic medieval corpus within the domain of European learning. Mallet analyzed the Edda, used the sagas and the Grágás, and joined together the three elements of the poetic, narrative, and legal triptych in Icelandic patrimony (1755). For this Swiss scholar, these sources are the tabernacle of an immemorial culture (Davy 2022). A century later, Frédéric Eichhoff, a linguist and philologist, after translating Völuspá (sometimes called a “mythological code of the old Scandinavians” [Cordier de Launay de Valéri 1806, 168]), wrote as follows: How not to recognize in [this patrimony] the vigorous and true picture of the ancient Scandinavia's beliefs, the same as that in the Germania, the same as that across barbarian Europe before the Middle Ages; these latter fade into obscurity before the Gospel light, cast like a late spine-chilling gleam on the frozen rocks of Iceland?6Mallet and Eichhoff both follow in the path of Giambattista Vico and his hope that poetry and myths will help to unravel the mystery of ancient cultures (Gianturco 1977, 93–4). The philological development of fables and legends becomes a “literal mime of history,” and the mythological corpus becomes “its articulated discourse” (Schefer 1977, 172). In French universities, the reading of Vico offered a challenge to the exegetic school that gradually influenced the small band of legal historians such as Lerminier, Klimrath, or Laferrière (Audren and Halpérin 2001, 4). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the influence of Vico's New Science opened up two lines of thought.On the one hand, we know how, via Vico and through Mallet, the members of the Coppet group draw inspiration from Icelandic poetry for their own approach to liberalism. For Germaine de Staël, to take an example of someone whose influence on the destiny of legal history in France remained important during the first half of the nineteenth century (Gaudemet 1998, 109), the North seemed “naturally metaphysic” and a national “soul,” a “genius,” and a “spirit.” These are the lessons that she derived from the Icelandic sources that she discovered through her reading of Mallet (Berthier 1977, 206). With Mallet, as Sismondi repeated in 1807, the study of Scandinavian customs, laws, religion, and liberty became paramount, “not only for Scandinavian peoples, but for all Europeans too” (Sismondi 1807, 17). This would have notable consequences on the works of some French jurists such as Henri Klimrath (Audren 2006, 123). And, at the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Ginoulhiac, Professor at the Faculty of Law in Toulouse, affirmed nothing less when he wrote that “because German and Frankish peoples, as Gauls before them, kept, in their own poetry or their songs, the memory of the important events of their founders, it is hardly surprising that they should preserve by that same route the legislation that they adopted” (Ginoulhiac 1884, 151). In other words, for many lawmen or historians of the French nineteenth century, Icelandic poetry was the to discovering the of old the other hand, the texts were also a source for ancient famous and that Icelandic legal were to the democratic de la These to Klimrath, as a of the legal Frédéric de at the sagas in the same In his they are the of the Scandinavian first For some jurists in the nineteenth century who the origins of French laws, the sagas which Iceland has a were fables and that a that allowed one to For them, this was no an and their about the legal an behind which was to human destiny through to discover the origins of through the of and also and In at the Faculty of Law in Paris and the of in the ancient that he would take the most ancient texts of barbarian by to the Edda and the saga on which Jean-Marie Pardessus that the wrote “a that the civil and political of his A few later, would a of this famous saga on two Danish and as “the true picture of ancient Scandinavian de la 1896, to in his about the in French law from sagas were written they us with on the law of Scandinavian peoples because they ancient customs (1879, These French scholars did not the about the of the texts on which they those of Mallet, who on the of between and in sagas because of their for the and fabulous or those of who that no one should ignore the that the sagas are of On the many French jurists of the period wanted to the between sagas and and to name but a Grágás, the of which was by in of to have remained unknown during a of the to be used in French historical in the of the nineteenth century. Pardessus, who in with the Danish of the that of the sagas would we had the our very A of for de la a sort of of to the French for (1879, the could not, be as laws or to Pardessus, because the had not been (Pardessus such many French jurists of the nineteenth century this as a of “the most ancient Scandinavian as Koenigswarter it 188). For the in his at the Faculty of Law of Paris in of all the old laws, the Icelandic customs most For the is the Scandinavian most ancient For at the Collège de the only to the century, but it a law So it becomes to the as the of ancient customs, which is how the legal and Henri would it in the first of the century the late of the was not as because jurists and historians had in the by sources that to the laws before the century Pardessus and or because one had to the of an by the of the that it into Scandinavian laws could not the whilst “the most laws in of their of are the in of their other words, the philological of discovering a corpus of texts that had been hitherto had a of when it came to Iceland, a that European nations were to at is what Ernest Nys Icelandic our and life is based on that most the of This them with remarkable which a to the modern world. It is to them, that we on the subject of the most interesting of the Scandinavian the Norsemen the some of the first It is to them that we to know so many about customs, and was and it was with those Icelandic sources in that a of the French legal was the half of the nineteenth century, In Scandinavia we find the ancient Germania, the morals and that had no by the of and they have been altered or through this the simple did French jurists and historians discover through their interest in old Icelandic the first many legal historians of the period a of history that the as the barbarian invasions of the century. The origins them, perhaps more Gothic than of all these peoples from a of the North as a of as Koenigswarter it It was from ancient Ortolan that “the old us the of Gothic who to other their own (1831, 45). This approach both of that of late and that of the reflected that in the middle of the century. here the approach of a of history that several French such as to “In the and sixth Scandinavian was the same as that of the who not to the great wrote Ernest the national of the the when they focused on ancient laws, many French legal historians on through what medieval Scandinavian sources to For the law of Scandinavian the with law as by In de was to the notion that Scandinavian law and what and us about and barbarian laws in the century” between what the legal historians about old barbarian laws and what they about ancient Scandinavian laws is Louis-Jean Koenigswarter pointed out, what had been on the of ignorance was by some research on ancient Scandinavian laws, which have been to have with the and customs of German peoples, hitherto described by the modern world as when they on the historical on the of this legal many authors Icelandic sagas as a way to ancient barbarian laws The of Frédéric de on this is “The law-code was not a of barbarian laws but the of customs, as not only in Icelandic and the and the but also in the and the Scandinavian sources could be a to old Europeans laws. This was one of the lessons in the works of the academician on medieval The study of the history of Scandinavian law and customs one of the sources from which modern Icelandic and the Grágás, us the example in modern that had not been transformed by and the Edda, that great whose is a the the and its us back to the customs, the and the through which we in the and of our Middle the until the end of the nineteenth century, French scholars barbarian laws in the of Icelandic texts For the French the to that of ancient Scandinavian it is they take with the So that in the have a Nordic origin in the word in Icelandic law one that in the of Montesquieu, the origins of many French scholars in the nineteenth century, Iceland as the sanctuary of the culture of that an ancient brought together “the from a The discovery of legal Icelandic sources through that Koenigswarter into his history of French law as a of its origins a in the of our ancient and allowed modern legal to the Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish us of some new to they will help us to the study of the of laws in their and to approach to Icelandic one which “the of the old was not, its at the University of it as he that the study of Icelandic law in the century the interest of an ancient and based on the of but not influenced by the and very to the other Norse laws of the years earlier, Louis-Jean Koenigswarter had also written that the Scandinavian race is nothing than the race in its ancient is But he that the myths and of ancient Scandinavia could on antiquities than the barbarian laws written in Latin and influenced by the 4). he “one on which all European scholars is that they the customs, religion, and law from Scandinavian and cast on the between religion, customs, and law in both French ancient Icelandic law was because of its to and Roman in to the laws, which all from the of the on them the pointed out, the laws written during the century cannot an idea of laws because and had the life and of the Roman Thus, Icelandic it became to study old laws in their original forms Norse culture was therefore in to a medieval Europe after had been to the political and legal of And it was a of by their very the most of scholars many to for the origins of European laws in Icelandic That is what a of law at the University of in his study of French law The old Scandinavian documents are the most important source of the legal That is not only because they are and more than other but also because they are written in the through which to us added: The first them, that is to say those of Iceland, law to us in its and from for the of Icelandic law-codes was historical and geographical which many scholars pointed to the and de it is to their boreal that the the of their national de Ganges presented in the Grágás, the and academician to us a hitherto the world In his in at the Faculty of Law in Paris, seemed in his affirmation that on the were the of the influence of the on ancient On the many French jurists in Iceland an original and legal In that they an that a to and history in the of ancient law 2001, 17). pointed out, the was an original code that had not been by It is a law from all repeated a national law-code to Laferrière This was the of French legal historians in the and For Louis-Jean law remained to Norse and only Scandinavia many centuries after other European peoples had been to Iceland into a Scandinavian Iceland That is where there are the most of Norse and Norse Icelandic laws, as we them, are not than those of Sweden, or Norway, but they are more by the of the ancient de la culture had been altered in or Sweden, their own customs and their intact, writes Eichhoff (1853, used by French scholars in the nineteenth century to attest the original of Icelandic law-codes was to on the in which they had been preserved over many barbarian laws transformed by out Icelandic law has an (1853, 4). In the same Laferrière writes that “Icelandic law . . . had been in the of the a long before it was written at the beginning of this law was by the of called the of This sort of the interest of French jurists and historians in on the as evidence of legal In Icelandic law is of a widespread are in Iceland, And this of gradually came to on the (Davy the remained example, the in a study published in in the they the interest in the the for the was the for written laws are the of his he was of civil French jurists saw the as the of the “Icelandic legal The interest of French legal scholars in Iceland should not be In many the Icelandic legal to historians and jurists a to find an but political and on which to their about the origins of European laws and and the origins of their own But such an approach was on a of only some of which out to be was a in a that has to be was this “Norse school” in French a Certainly, it was a hope that a of liberal jurists Klimrath, influenced by legal It had a on the following which had to in the of and the of the in The to Icelandic sources to through a sort of political which Laferrière until or the to through Norse history the origins of French laws from those of laws of of were of to a into French The political and of its also have to its before the the of Edda, of the sagas and of the Grágás, was as new and Scandinavian works became into French The sciences also a real in France at the of the nineteenth and between the quest for the New and its of new scientific and the influence of other on how to the national law of ancient It was the end of an we should on the of by when to further back than the century in of the origins of the law of de la en Paris, could on not in some

Affective Realism

Food wedges: Framing the global food demand and supply challenge towards 2050

Reviewed by: Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages by Lynn T. Ramey Jorge Carlos Arias Lynn T. Ramey, Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2014) xii + 176 pp. Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages is a valiant effort of scholarship in the current academic environment. The criticisms of the so-called linguistic turn, the complex history of the modern concept of race, and the weight of the idea of a clean break between the medieval and renaissance periods have made the study of “race” in a pre-modern setting a dangerous endeavor. Ramey’s goal is to point out that many important elements that would become much more explicit in “scientific racism” and nineteenth-century European colonialist discourses were already present in the Middle Ages. She supports this point armed with post-colonial and literary analyses of a wide variety of sources: medieval prose and verse, Classical ethnographies, medieval commentaries on the Bible, fifteenth-century colonial debates and, most surprisingly, modern films and nineteenth-century depictions of the Middle Ages. [End Page 289] Given that few scholars today would consent to the un-qualified use of the term race before the modern period, Ramey’s first task is to explain how she plans to use it and what she really intends to study. She settles on treating racism as “a form of xenophobia,” often utilizing the concept of “the Other” (1). She describes medieval culture not as “color blind” as many older studies of this topic have asserted but as “proto-racial” and containing a “cacophony of discourses” regarding race, before modern conceptions of phenotypic difference cemented a hegemonic idea of race (2). Ramey focuses on “prejudice against darker-skinned persons from non-Western cultures precisely because of their skin color and their usually imagined, always unfamiliar, cultural practices” (1). Lest there be some confusion, Ramey explicitly states that she is not arguing that racial consciousness was born in the Middle Ages, but that the medieval period did play an important role in its subsequent development (3). There are two central critiques in the book: first, of the scholarly tradition that asserted that a categorical rupture existed between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; second, of the role of the nineteenth century in shaping not only our modern conceptions of race but also of the medieval period itself. The first tradition helped to isolate the study of race solely to the modern era and consequently resulted in the interpretation of the medieval period as a “golden age of cohabitation,” and erased “the history of prejudice that was present from what many consider to be the foundation of European civilization” (3). Writers of the nineteenth century displayed a particularly Romanticized view of the Middle Ages, for example evident in the development of professional history and its relationship to the creation of the modern nation-state based on supposed and Romanticized ties to medieval predecessors. This view became intertwined with a search for essentialist origins and a scientific racism that reflected certain nineteenth-century concerns on race back into the medieval period. Chapter 1 looks at various examples of this Romanticized view of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century. Washington Irving’s tales of medieval Spain in The Alhambra (1832) are imbued with a fear of “racially linked degeneration more appropriate to his own American culture” (9). For example, his praise of the Arab elite of Muslim Spain, which he portrays as white and worthy of intermarriage with the “Gothic” Christian elite, is contrasted with depictions of the decay of the monarchy of Granada through its intermarriage with Berber groups, characterized as dark and governed by emotion. Eugène-Emmanual Viollet-le-Duc, as the architect in charge of restoring many of France’s most famous medieval structures (Vézelay Abbey, Mont Saint-Michel, Notre Dame Cathedral) between 1838 and 1879, not only had an immense influence in the representation and re-interpretation of medieval architecture, but he also helped to strengthen the notion that “elementary characteristics of… race” and environment were linked to ethnically essentialist aesthetic and architectural choices (23). Chapter 2 is an overview of how race has...

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJon Agar is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University College, London. He is the author of Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Polity/John Wiley, 2012) and The Government Machine (MIT Press, 2003).Jennifer Karns Alexander is a historian of technology in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Program in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Mantra of Efficiency (Johns Hopkins, 2008), winner of the Society for the History of Technology's Edelstein Prize.Rachel A. Ankeny is a professor in the School of History and Politics at the University of Adelaide. She holds a master's in bioethics and a Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science; she specializes in history and philosophy of contemporary biology, particularly genetics, and worked in genetic counseling clinics in the 1980s.Theodore Arabatzis is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Athens. He is the author of Representing Electrons: A Biographical Approach to Theoretical Entities (University of Chicago Press, 2006), coeditor of Kuhn's “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” Revisited (Routledge, 2012), and coeditor of the journal Metascience.Massimiliano Badino is Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and MIT. He has worked on the history and philosophy of modern physics, particularly on Planck's theory of black-body radiation and on Boltzmann's statistical mechanics. His current research project deals with the evolution of the concepts of order and chaos in mathematical physics from the three-body problem to the ergodic theorem.Charlotte Bigg is a historian of science at the CNRS/Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris. She has coedited (with Jochen Hennig) Atombilder: Ikonografie des Atoms in Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit des 20. Jahrhunderts (Wallstein, 2009) and (with David Aubin and Otto Sibum) The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture (Duke, 2010).Christian Bracco is an associate professor at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis and a member of the team for history of astronomy at the Syrte Laboratory at the Paris Observatory. He specializes in the history of physics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and also contributes to pedagogical publications that address historical problematics.Massimo Bucciantini teaches history of science at the University of Siena. His publications include Galileo e Keplero (Einaudi, 2003; trans., Les Belles Lettres, 2008), Esperimento Auschwitz / Auschwitz Experiment (Primo Levi Lecture) (Einaudi, 2011), and Il telescopio di Galileo: Una storia europea (with M. Camerota and F. Giudice) (Einaudi, 2012; trans., Harvard University Press, 2015).Adelene Buckland is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at King's College, London. She is the author of Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago, 2013) and coeditor, with Beth Palmer, of A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900 (Ashgate, 2011).Conor Burns teaches history of science and technology courses at Ryerson University in Toronto. His current research examines American field sciences in the period 1780–1850, with a particular focus on archaeology and geology.Christián C. Carman is a professor and researcher at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, and a research member of the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET). He works on topics related to philosophy of science as well as the history of ancient astronomy.Imogen Clarke is an independent scholar. She is interested in early twentieth-century physics and culture, science publishing, and the ether.Harold J. (Hal) Cook is the John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University. He works mainly on early modern science and medicine and has published award-winning books, most recently Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale University Press, 2007).Ruth Schwartz Cowan is Janice and Julian Bers Professor Emerita of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening (Harvard, 2008). She is working on the sesquicentennial history of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council.Brendan Dooley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College, Cork. He has previously taught history of knowledge and history of science at Harvard, Notre Dame, and Jacobs University in Bremen. His current publications include Brill's Companion to Renaissance Astrology (2014), Renaissance Now! (Peter Lang, 2014), and A Mattress Maker's Daughter: The Renaissance Romance of Don Giovanni de' Medici and Livia Vernazza (Harvard, 2014).Sven Dupré is Professor of History of Knowledge at the Freie Universität Berlin and Research Group Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He is the editor of Laboratories of Art: Alchemy and Art Technology from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Springer, 2014).Richard England is Dean of the Sandra and Jack Pine Honors College and Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Illinois University. He is the coeditor (with Jude Nixon) of Victorian Science, Religion, and Natural Theology (2011) and one of three editors preparing an edition of the papers of the Metaphysical Society (1869–1880).James Evans is Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Puget Sound. His research interests include the history of physics from the eighteenth century to the recent past, as well as ancient astronomy.Paul Lawrence Farber is an Oregon State University Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He has written primarily on the history of natural history and is now working on the tangled questions on race mixing in the first half of the twentieth century. His most recent book is Mixing Races: From Scientific Racism to Modern Evolutionary Ideas (Johns Hopkins, 2011).Amy E. Foster is an associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida, where she teaches the history of science, technology, and medicine. Her research includes the history of women and technology, particularly women in the U.S. space program.Craig Fraser is Chair of the International Commission for the History of Mathematics and Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. His primary field of interest is the history of analysis and mathematical mechanics.Jean-François Gauvin is the Director of Administration for the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University. Since 2000 he has cowritten and coedited two prize-winning volumes as well as several articles and book reviews dealing with science museums, instruments, and instrument making. He teaches one course per semester at Harvard on the material culture of science.Alexa Geisthövel is a research associate at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine, Charité Universitätsmedizin, Berlin. Her work is part of the ERC-funded research project “Ways of Writing: How Physicians Know, 1550–1950.”Francesco Gerali is a postdoctoral researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. A native Italian who works on the history of the early oil industry, he moved to Mexico in 2011 to study the development of Mexican oil between 1860 and 1920.Yves Gingras ([email protected]) is Professor in the Department of History and Canada Research Chair in History and Sociology of Science at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He was President of the Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association (CSTHA) from 1988 to 1993 and Editor of Scientia Canadensis from 1995 to 2000. His most recent books are Sociologie des sciences (Presses Universitaires de France, 2012) and Les derives de l'évaluation de la recherché: Du bon usage de la bibliométrie (Raisons d'Agir, 2013). He is also the editor of Controverses: Accords et désaccords en sciences humaines et sociales (CNRS Éditions, 2014).Leila Gómez is Associate Professor of Latin American and Comparative Literatures at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She specializes in travel writing in Latin America; her publications include La piedra del escándalo: Darwin en Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2008), Iluminados y tránsfugas: Relatos de viajeros y ficciones nacionales en Argentina, Paraguay y Perú (Madrid, 2009), and Darwinism in Argentina: Major Texts (Lewisburg, 2011).Christopher D. Green is Professor of Psychology at York University, with cross-appointments to Science and Technology Studies and to Philosophy. His research is focused on turn-of-the-twentieth-century American psychology and on the use of digital methods in the history of science more broadly.Crystal Hall is Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Bowdoin College, where she is building a digital project on Galileo's personal library. She is the author of Galileo's Reading (Cambridge, 2013) and several articles on Galileo and literary studies in journals including Renaissance Quarterly and Quaderni d'Italianistica.Christopher Hamlin is Professor in the Department of History and the graduate program in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame and Honorary Professor in the Department of Public Health and Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His interests include natural theology, the history of public health, and the history of expertise. His most recent book is More Than Hot: A Short History of Fever (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).John Henry recently retired from the University of Edinburgh, where he had been Professor of the History of Science and Director of the Science Studies Unit. He has published widely in the history of science, including an introductory textbook, A Short History of Scientific Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).Jonathan B. Imber is Jean Glasscock Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. He has been Editor-in-Chief of Society since 1998. He is the author of Trusting Doctors: The Decline of Moral Authority in American Medicine (Princeton University Press, 2008).Catherine Jackson is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She has published on Liebig, Hofmann, and nineteenth-century chemical laboratories and is the coeditor, with Hasok Chang, of An Element of Controversy: The Life of Chlorine in Science, Medicine, Technology, and War (2007).Danielle Jacquart is a professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris), where she holds the chair for “History of Sciences in the Middle Ages.” She is the author of numerous publications on medieval medicine. Among the most recent are “Anatomy, Physiology, and Medical Theory,” in The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 2: Medieval Science (2013); and Recherches médiévales sur la nature humaine: Essais sur la réflexion médicale (SISMEL, 2014).Frank A. J. L. James is Professor of History of Science at the Royal Institution and at University College, London. He recently completed the six-volume edition of the Correspondence of Michael Faraday and is now working on a study of Humphry Davy's practical work.Mark Jenner is Reader in Early Modern History and Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York. His publications include Londinopolis (Manchester, 2000) and Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850 (Palgrave, 2007). He completing a book on ideas of cleanliness and dirt in early modern England.Masanori Kaji is Associate Professor of the History of Science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. His research interests include history of chemistry in Russia and in Japan and environmental history. He is the author of Mendeleev's Discovery of the Periodic Law of Chemical Elements (1997).Vera Keller is an assistant professor at the Robert D. Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon. She is the author of over a dozen articles. Her first book, Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), explores the role of interest theory in the reshaping of research in early modern Europe.Sally Gregory Kohlstedt is a professor in the Program in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota. Her recent book, Hands-On Nature Study (2011), won the Margaret Rossiter Prize. She will spend her sabbatical year, 2014–2015, doing research on museum history at various sites, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.Brandon Konoval is on the faculty at the University of British Columbia, where he is cross-appointed in the Arts One Program and the School of Music. He has written most recently on Nietzsche and the Scopes trial for Perspectives on Science (2014) and on the relationship between Nietzsche and Foucault for Nietzsche-Studien (2013).Stefan Krebs, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Technology and Society Studies at Maastricht University, is the author of Technikwissenschaft als soziale Praxis (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008) and, with Karin Bijsterveld, Eefje Cleophas, and Gijs Mom, of Sound and Safe: A History of Listening Behind the Wheel (Oxford University Press, 2014).Kenton Kroker has published on the history of sleep research, experimental psychology, and clinical immunology. His current research project, Epidemic Futures, is a historical reconstruction of the encephalitis lethargica pandemics of the early twentieth century. He is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at York University in Toronto.Deepak Kumar teaches history of science and education at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. During the last four decades he has researched and published a great deal on the history of science, technology, and medicine in the context of British India. He is also known for his book Science and the Raj (Oxford, 2nd ed., 2006).Thomas C. Lassman is curator of the post–World War II rocket and missile collection at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution. His research interests focus on the history of U.S. industrial and military research and development and the history of weapon systems acquisition in the Department of Defense.Christoph Lehner works on history and philosophy of modern physics, especially quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He is a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and the coordinator of the project “History and Foundations of Quantum Physics.”David Leith is an Advanced Research Fellow in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. His main research interests lie in Greco-Roman medicine, in particular its relations to ancient philosophy.Thomas Lessl is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Rhetorical Darwinism: Evolution, Religion, and the Scientific Identity (Baylor University Press, 2012).Mark Madison is Adjunct Professor at Shepherd University and the Chief Historian for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the National Conservation Training Center Museum/Archives.Anna Maerker is Senior Lecturer in History of Medicine at King's College, London. She works on the relationship between expertise and material culture in medicine and science and is the author of Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815 (2013).Jaume Navarro is Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country. He is the author, among other works, of A History of the Electron: J. J. and G. P. Thomson (Cambridge, 2012) and coeditor of Research and Pedagogy: A History of Quantum Physics through Its Textbooks (Berlin, 2013).Vivian Nutton is Emeritus Professor of the History of Medicine at University College, London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His recent publications include a revision of his Ancient Medicine (2013), the first English translation and commentary on Galen's Avoiding Distress (2013), and the historical introduction to the 2013 Karger translation of Vesalius's The Fabric of the Human Body.Mary Jo Nye is Professor of History Emerita at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Her most recent book is Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Her current research focuses on patterns of collaboration in twentieth-century chemical sciences.Giuliano Pancaldi is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Bologna. He is the author of Darwin in Italy (Indiana, 1991) and Volta (Princeton, 2003). He is now working on a study of the connections between the life sciences and the demographic transition circa 1900.Leigh Penman is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Unanticipated Millenniums: Chiliastic Thought in Post-Reformation Lutheranism (Springer, forthcoming) and numerous articles in the areas of early modern religious and intellectual history.Michael Pettit is Associate Professor of Psychology and Science and Technology Studies at York University. His first book is The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America (University of Chicago Press, 2013). He studies the history of psychology's research methods and ethics, the relationship between scientists and subject populations, the interface between psychology and public policy, and the circulation of psychology in the public sphere.Patricia Princehouse is a member of the Department of History and Director of the Program in Evolutionary Biology, Institute for the Science of Origins, Case Western Reserve University.Monica Saavedra is a research fellow at the Centre for Global Health Histories, University of York. She has worked in the fields of medical anthropology and the history of medicine and has published about vaccination and malaria in former Portuguese India and Portugal.C. F. Salazar, previously the Editor-in-Chief of Brill's New Pauly, is a research associate at both the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, working on translations of works by Galen and Aetius of Amida, respectively.George Saliba is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science at Columbia University and studies the development of scientific ideas from late antiquity to early modern times. His most recent book is Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (MIT Press, 2007; paperback, 2011).Darya Serykh is a Ph.D. student in Social and Political Thought at York University. Her current research focuses on the production of queer discourses in the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.Megan K. Sethi is an adjunct professor at Southern New Hampshire University. Her work examines the educational activities of scientists who promoted nuclear arms control during the early Cold War era. She participated in the Wilson Center's SHAFR Summer Institute on the International History of Nuclear Weapons in 2013.Michael H. Shank is Professor of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the coeditor, with David Lindberg, of the Cambridge History of Science, Volume 2: Medieval Science (2013).Elise Juzda Smith has written on the history of craniology, anthropometry, and scientific racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently a Teaching and Research Fellow in the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford.Richard Staley lectures in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Einstein's Generation and the Relativity Revolution (Chicago, 2008), and his current research explores physics and anthropology.Heiko Stoff is Guest Professor for the History of Science and Technology at the Technical University of Braunschweig. He has published on the history of rejuvenation (Ewige Jugend: Konzepte der Verjüngung vom späten 19. Jahrhundert bis ins Dritte Reich [Böhlau, 2004]) and the history of biologically active substances (Wirkstoffe: Eine Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Hormone, Vitamine und Enzyme, 1920–1970 [Stuttgart, 2012]). He is the editor, with Alexander von Schwerin and Bettina Wahrig, of Biologics: A History of Agents Made from Living Organisms in the Twentieth Century (Pickering & Chatto, 2013).Liba Taub is Director and Curator of the Whipple Museum of the History of Science and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include Aetna and the Moon: Explaining Nature in Ancient Greece and Rome, Ancient Meteorology, and Ptolemy's Universe: The Natural Philosophical and Ethical Foundations of Ptolemy's Astronomy.Jetze Touber is a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University. His Ph.D. dissertation, on the cult of the saints and law, medicine, and in Rome, has recently been published by His research interests include in the Dutch and and in the of is Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of and the author of The Science and Technology is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of New and the author of in The of American and the of the and Conservation in America (University of Chicago is Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His research focuses on the history of ancient and early modern mechanics and on the between practical and knowledge in the history of a historian of ancient and medieval Islamic and is coordinator of at University and of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of He is author of The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth: The Early History of (Princeton, 2009) and The Art of (Princeton, is Senior Lecturer in the History of Science in the Department of History at University. His research focuses on the early modern between and He has published on the history of and astronomy and is now preparing work on early modern and on the of A. is an assistant professor of history at University and teaches in the industrial archaeology graduate program His work is between early modern and and the history of nineteenth-century American military technology and the that J. is an assistant professor of history at The University of the and the author of The as Scientific and in the Early Enlightenment (Chicago, An early who specializes in the history of science, she has published widely on and and education in the first half of the eighteenth century. She is working on a project about the history of the in early modern is Assistant Professor of History of Art at State University. He is a in medieval and the history of His first book, de and the Medieval in from the Institute in is Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of and Research Associate at King's College, Cambridge. Her current research project focuses on the of culture, medicine, and the role of in science, Previous article by Volume of the History of Science Society on by The History of Science articles

Notes on Contributors

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewPhilology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. James Turner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Pp. xxiv+550.Julie OrlemanskiJulie OrlemanskiUniversity of Chicago Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis book asks to be evaluated as an ambitious undertaking. The heft of its nearly six hundred pages and the mild extravagance of its production (such as the decorative endpaper maps, in pale blue and dusty brown, crawling with Latin place-names) argue that it is a volume to be pored over. Ambition is heralded, too, in the grandiosity of its subtitle, which claims philology as the “forgotten origins of the modern humanities,” and in notes and bibliography together running to 120 pages. And from some angles, James Turner’s study makes good on these portents of ambition. It stands as one of the first overarching histories of the humanities, joining Rens Bod’s A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2013) to pioneer a subfield that may one day stand alongside the history of science. It contributes to a lively ongoing conversation concerning the history of philology, braiding together many of that history’s disparate strands. These include biblical scholarship, classics, comparative historical philology, and the study of European vernaculars. With them, Turner weaves an account of broadly historical inquiry in England and the United States up until the end of the nineteenth century. The latter two-thirds of the book are archivally rich, drawing on unpublished or rarely considered sources (albeit anecdotally). Using these sources, Turner evokes the intellectual milieu and workaday concerns of practicing scholars during the period of the humanities’ gradually emergent academic disciplinarity.Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities is not, however, a conceptually ambitious book. It never sufficiently interrogates its central notions of “philology,” “the humanities,” or “origins.” Philology, for instance, is defined from the outset in terms of a “likeness in method” shared by several discrete modes of nineteenth-century philological research: all share an “insistence on comparison and genealogy” (x). But should this common ground characterizing nineteenth-century scholarship be hypostatized as “philology” and traced from the ancient world to modern universities? Early in the book’s first chapter, Turner acknowledges the “unstable connotations and sometimes awkward fit” of the term in the ancient world, but he insists that it “provides the only adequate portmanteau word” (4). Another interpretation of this awkwardness would be that it signals the disparateness and heterogeneity of what Turner wishes to identify as philology. Because the book’s criteria for philology are so general—because any and all comparative historical research counts—philology ends up discoverable almost everywhere. And because the criteria are drawn from nineteenth-century research informed by historicism, philology’s story unsurprisingly reaches its apotheosis with nineteenth-century historicism. A similar degree of presumption shapes Turner’s idea of the humanities. Despite the apparent centrality of philosophy to the humanities, he deems it inessential: “Must not a history of the humanities include the oldest component, philosophy? Absolutely not. … Philosophy’s classification as one of the humanities in modern American higher education resulted only from administrative convenience and accident of timing” (381). With little more argumentation than this, Turner dismisses the relevance of the philosophic tradition. He similarly minimizes the roles of theology and natural science in the humanities’ evolution. Nomothetic pursuits are treated as prima facie irrelevant. While such decisions may be defensible, their grounds are not adequately argued here, nor are counterarguments robustly entertained.Meanwhile, an ideology of origins undergirds the book’s narrative and argument: according to Turner, the specialized disciplinarity of the modern humanities “masks a primal oneness,” a oneness that can be identified at a distant beginning and tracked through subsequent changes (386). In other words, Turner’s story of the humanities follows a plot line more or less minted by nineteenth-century historicism, a developmental plot that has since been shown (to say the least) to be a contingent device of history writing rather than the necessary shape of events. The resulting account feels correspondingly frictionless, as the self-same impulse to comparative historical research undergoes sundry adventures from ancient Alexandria to nineteenth-century Altertumswissenschaft and its subsequent rending into diverse academic specialties. The book’s central claim—that “the birth of the humanities in the English-speaking world” issues “from the womb of philology” (xiii)—gradually comes to seem like a foregone conclusion, which is to say, simultaneously obvious and tendentious, because already contained in the book’s premises. One is left with little sense of the stakes of the claim, or what use it could be to the modern humanities.The book is divided into three parts, charting the fate of philology, respectively, from antiquity to around 1800, from 1800 to 1850, and from 1850 to the end of the nineteenth century. The latter two sections are stronger than the first, bolstered as they are by Turner’s experience as a historian of the nineteenth century and his ambitious trawling of documentary archives for minor but illuminating figures, for the telling phrase or letter exchanged between seemingly distant figures, for the telling details of contents lists or marginalia. While nineteenth-century scholarship emerges in dense and teeming detail, the further Turner goes back in time, the more rote his account becomes. As a medievalist, I am inclined to notice how the Middle Ages are treated in broad-gauge histories. Here almost every Dark Ages cliché is indulged: the early Middle Ages were “chaotic centuries poisonous to any form of learning” (2); the “erudition born in Alexandria went into near hibernation in most of Europe after 1200” (29); and the classical heritage “lay on countless library shelves, in monasteries across Europe, waiting to be discovered anew” (32). Turner’s engagement with the Middle Ages makes up only a small fraction of his study, but it nonetheless illustrates his readiness to rely on potted grands récits. He would have done well to place these commonplaces of secular modernity within a more self-aware framework. Generally, the history writing in Philology minimizes disagreements between scholars, rarely discussing divergent interpretations of the evidence. The result is a well-oiled historical narrative that flattens historiographic controversy in its commitment to a story of pure origins.The prologue and epilogue locate the book’s utility within the ongoing crisis in the humanities. “Higher education needs reconstruction,” Turner writes, “but rebuilding can only proceed intelligently if we understand how knowledge has evolved over time” (xv). While I do not disagree with the sentiment in principle, Turner’s study concludes around 1900 and consequently has little to say about the forces determining the shape of academia later in the twentieth century and in the twenty-first. For instance, Turner seems unaware that his claiming that disciplines are “peculiarly cramping” and have “fractured learning” meshes neatly with current administrative efforts to eliminate departments, reduce time to degree, and promote largely vocational training. Since foreign language departments are those most frequently closed in the pursuit of institutional efficiency, it seems unlikely that dismantling the humanities’ disciplines will result in “more extensive knowledge” and facility with “multiple languages” (386), as Turner forecasts.Nonetheless Turner’s study is timely. Philology is at present a lively and contested topic in the humanities. Since the 1980s, prominent thinkers have been revisiting the term, interrogating it, and polemically redefining it. Paul de Man called for a “return to philology” (“The Return to Philology,” in The Resistance to Theory [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], 21–26); a 1989 multidisciplinary conference at Harvard wondered about its definition (see Jan Ziolkowski, “‘What Is Philology?’: Introduction,” in On Philology [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990], 1–12); and an issue of the journal of the Medieval Academy of America advocated a “new philology” (Speculum 65 [1990]). The conversation has continued to grow more diverse and more vibrant since then. A recent example is the publication of World Philology, edited by Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, Ku-ming Kevin Chang (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), which draws together different philological traditions from around the world. Philology is a name to conjure with.My sense is that part of the word’s allure has depended on its bifurcation into two very different definitions. One is the broad, idealist sense corresponding to the word’s etymological roots philia and logos, the love of language—or in the final sentence of Turner’s study, “Philology: the love of words” (387). The other definition might be summarized as “mere” philology and is the historicist subdiscipline centered on etymology and textual editing. The many invocations of philology in recent years have generally entailed pitting the first definition against the second, which is to say, advocating for some unsullied wellspring of philological ardor against fallen disciplinary practice. Indeed, the explicit polemic of Turner’s book follows these outlines by lamenting the artificial divisions of the modern humanities and lauding the comprehensive whole of a now-vanished erudition. Yet the true contribution of Turner’s Philology is more valuable than this familiar maneuver would suggest. The encompassing breadth of Turner’s research means that Philology has much to teach us beyond its summary formulations in prologue and epilogue. The book brings together the widest range of philological figures and practices yet surveyed, and the philology that emerges immanently from its many case studies is self-divided and dynamic, driven by counterpoised and heterogeneous tendencies. A weakness of Turner’s study is that it assumes philology to be one stable thing (comparative historical research), but its strength is that despite itself it illustrates the diversity of historical inquiry, together with the material and social connections by which this diversity leads to change. In effect, Turner’s book unfolds in the middle space between philology’s two dictionary definitions, the love of words and this love’s practical, institutional realization. The philological middle ground was a zone of scholarly experimentation that fomented new norms, means, and desires for understanding human culture. Despite its overly schematic central concepts, Philology actually shows the contestatory multiplicity of this middle ground and opens new archives to the ongoing reclamation and reinvention of philology.Over the course of his study Turner rarely reflects on the dispositions of gender, class, race, and global economy that shaped past erudition. Indeed, this book has little to say about philology’s systematic entanglement with antisemitism, nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, or globalized modernity. For instance, Turner mentions the anti-Judaism of this or that biblical scholar but declines to comment on the constitutively anti-Judaic premises of “Old Testament” scholarship. That William Jones was a judge in colonial Bengal is certainly acknowledged, and ample context testifies to the imbrication of American linguistics and ethnology with the US government’s administration of native peoples—but again no comment is ventured on the pervasiveness of philology’s relation to colonial domination. The chapter on the emergence of anthropology is particularly uncomfortable, where Turner elects to use the terms “savage” and “barbaric” without scare quotes, “if only to avoid littering pages with inverted commas” (328). As a result, at points his prose naturalizes nineteenth-century ideologies of racism. As I see it, a full-throated defense of philology or the humanities demands reckoning self-consciously with their violent legacies. Indeed, lacking some sense of how textual and historical knowledge can be turned back on itself critically, philology’s history elicits the question of why, morally and politically, it should be pursued at all. In light of this, the absence of Edward Said from the book’s massive bibliography is all the more egregious. Not only is Said’s Orientalism directly relevant to the history Turner here recounts, but late in life Said staged his own return to philology (“The Return to Philology,” in Humanism and Democratic Criticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 2004], 57–84). Said’s practice of genealogy—by way of the philologist-cum-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s heir Michel Foucault—could have provided a counterpoint to Turner’s historicism, even if only as a starting point for disagreement.The histories of philology and the humanities are also histories of modernity. Writing them demands argumentation about central concepts and historiographic forms, which Turner’s book neglects. Nevertheless, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities does provide a resource for undertaking such argumentation, namely, a fantastically encompassing account of philological practice from antiquity through the nineteenth century. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 115, Number 1August 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/691428HistoryPublished online March 02, 2017 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Sweden, Inc.: Temporal Sovereignty of the Realm and People from the Middle Ages to Modernity

Reviews and Short Notices

When Ruskin coined the term 'Mediaevalism', he did so as a way of contrasting what he saw as a distinctive visual style with two other historical styles, 'Classicalism' and 'Modernism'. Ruskin's terms have since been broadened to include much more than visual style, but his aesthetic preoccupation still clings to 'medievalism'.1 As a consequence, comparatively little has been said about the political implications of turning to the Middle Ages as a model of style or behaviour. On the face of it, those implications would seem to be conservative and authoritarian. Divine right monarchy, theocracy, social and cosmic hierarchy, theological descriptions of authority, all are political ideas that originated in the Middle Ages or achieved dominance then, and all belong to the decidedly conservative end of the political spectrum. One immediately thinks, for example, of how medievalism flourished in the reactionary political atmosphere of nineteenth-century England, when a theological definition of authoritarian order from the past appealed to those with power and privilege as they confronted the threat of political revolution and rapid social change. But while a nostalgic perception of the medieval authority undoubtedly characterizes the nineteenth century, that understanding did not arise then for the first time. Every river has a source, and what might well be thought of as the river of nineteenth-century medievalism is no exception. Just as the conception of the 'middle ages' itself had to arise some time after what we think of as the Middle Ages, so medievalism as a nostalgically conceived repository of political conservatism had to arise at some point after the thing itself had passed, or at least was perceived to have passed. What I want to suggest here is that the key ingredients of what would eventually emerge as nineteenth-century medievalism can be found in the seventeenth century and specifically in the rise of Stuart absolutism under James I. To be sure, in laying down the foundations of centralized power, the Tudors had consciously preserved and in some cases revived certain symbols and rituals of power that had arisen much earlier and were essentially neo-medieval, for they had been rendered obsolete in practice by Tudor policy itself. Court rituals such as the tournament or the disguising, for

Cookbooks for Making History: As Sources for Historians and as Records of the Past

Cutting edge technologies to end food waste

Notes on Contributors

China, as a developing nation with a population in excess of 1.3 billion, supports more than 20 % of the world’s population on less than 10 % of the world’s cultivated land, and if a problem arises for China’s food security it will become a profound issue for the global food market which cannot be ignored. In recent years China’s total production volume for food and production volume per unit area have been on an upward trend, but food supply and demand is still going through a somewhat tight situation. As the supply volume shortfall is large for some food crops, the possibility is high of it having a great impact on China’s food supply. From such a background, in this paper we analyzed the changes in China’s food production, consumption and trade and the causes impacting thereon, and also undertook examination of the forecasts for the food supply and demand situation. Building on that, we indicated the following three points as issues for China’s future food security, based on the analytical results. First, regarding the food self-sufficiency ratio, it is important to set the food self-sufficiency ratio at a realistic 80–95 % as a concrete policy objective, making appropriate adjustments after assessing the situation for the international food supply and demand balance. Second, via measures including the development and dissemination of agricultural technology, the putting in place of agricultural infrastructure, and the prevention of disease and insect damage, it is necessary to raise the total utilization efficiency rate of water and land resources and constantly improve the production volume per unit area. Third, at the same time as developing the food futures market in focused fashion, it is necessary to establish price changes via market mechanisms. Moreover, in addition to taking a series of countermeasures domestically, the implementing of a multifactorial import strategy for agricultural produce is also important.

Economic development and growth of population in Asia have caused an increase in the demand for food. On the other hand, disappearing the cultivation area and global warming have caused a decrease in the supply for food. In 1995, China imported cereals from U. S. A for the first time.To understand the future of Asia, it is required to make a model which concerns about reciprocal action among demand for food, supply for food, environment, economic development. This study proposes a model based on ecology and economics.For example, this study includes a model based on income producing processes. Income is obtained from a calculation involving capital and labor using the Cobb-Douglas function. These data for income is then used to calculate the demand for food.