Reviews and Short Notices

Books reviewed in this article: The Americas: Dictionary of Canadian Biography , Volume VI 1821 to 1835 . Edited by Francess G. Halpenny and Jean Hamelin. The Americas: Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 . By Stuart B. Schwartz. The Americas: Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 . Edited by Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden. The Americas: Society and Economy in Colonial Connecticut . By Jackson Turner Main. The Americas: The American Revolution . By Edward Countryman. The Americas: The American Revolution . By Michael Heale. The Americas: Franklin of Philadelphia . By Esmond Wright. The Americas: Saving the Revolution: the Federalist Papers and the American Founding . Edited by Charles R. Kesler. The Americas: A Machine That Would Go Of Itself: the Constitution in American culture . By Michael Kammen. The Americas: The American Constitution: the first two hundred years 1787–1987 . Edited by Joseph Smith. The Americas: The Whiskey Rebellion . By Thomas P. Slaughter. The Americas: The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 . By William E. Gienapp. The Americas: From Slave South to New South: public policy in nineteenth‐century Georgia . By Peter Wallenstein. The Americas: Judah P. Benjamin: the Jewish Confederate . By Eli N. Evans. The Americas: Embattled Courage: the experience of combat in the American Civil War . By Gerald F. Linderman. The Americas: Sheffield Steel and America: a century of commercial and technological interdependence, 1830–1930 . By Geoffrey Tweedale. The Americas: The Limits of Power: great fires and the process of city growth in America . By Christine Meisner Rosen. The Americas: Origins of the Federal Reserve System: money, class and corporate capitalism, 1890–1913 . By James Livingston. The Americas: The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and his legacy . By Stephen Fox. The Americas: Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era . By Kevin Starr. The Americas: From Progressivism to Prosperity: World War I and American Society . By Neil A. Wynn. The Americas: The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers , Volume III September 1920‐August 1921 , Volume IV 1 September 1921–2 September 1922 . Edited by Robert A. Hill. The Americas: Strength for the Fight: a history of black Americans in the military . By Bernard C. Nalty. The Americas: American Indian Policy and American Reform: case studies of the campaign to assimilate the American Indians . By Christine Bolt. The Americas: Harry Hopkins: ally of the poor and defender of democracy . By George McJimsey. The Americas: China Reporting: an oral history of American journalism in the 1930s and 1940s . By Stephen R. Mackinnon and Oris Friesen. The Americas: Hollywood Goes to War: how politics, profits, and propaganda shaped World War II movies . By Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black. The Americas: America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945–1948 . By John Lamberton Harper. The Americas: No Boundaries Upstairs: Canada, the United States and the origins of North American Air Defence, 1945–58 . By Joseph T. Jockel. The Americas: Ideology and US Foreign Policy . By Michael H. Hunt. The Americas: Selvages and Biases: the fabric of history in American culture . By Michael Kammen. The Americas: The Legacy of Conquest: the unbroken past of the American West . By Patricia Nelson Limerick. Ancient and Medieval: The Rise of the Greeks . By Michael Grant. Ancient and Medieval: Personal Enmity in Roman Politics, 218–43 BC . By David F. Epstein. Ancient and Medieval: The History of Cartography , Volume 1 Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean . Edited by J.B. Harley and David Woodward. Ancient and Medieval: The South‐West to AD 1000 . By Malcolm Todd. Ancient and Medieval: Medieval Thought: the western intellectual tradition from antiquity to the thirteenth century . By Michael Haren. Ancient and Medieval: Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe . By Janet L. Nelson. Ancient and Medieval: Religion in the Medieval West . By Bernard Hamilton. Ancient and Medieval: The Gospels in the Schools c1100‐c1280 . By Beryl Smalley. Ancient and Medieval: The Preaching of the Friars: sermons diffused from Paris before 1300 . By D.L. d'Avary. Ancient and Medieval: Anglo‐Norman Studies , IX Proceedings of the Battle Conference, 1986 . Edited by R. Allen Brown. Ancient and Medieval: The Governance of Norman and Angevin England 1086–1272 . By W.L. Warren. Ancient and Medieval: Castles in Wales and the Marches: essays in honour of D.J. Cathcart King . Edited by John R. Kenyon and Richard Avent. Ancient and Medieval: Saint Hugh of Lincoln . Edited by Henry Mayr‐Harting. Ancient and Medieval: Politics, Policy and Finance under Henry III 1216–1245 . By R.C. Stacey. Ancient and Medieval: Women in the Medieval English Countryside: gender and household in Brigstock before the Plague . By Judith M. Bennett. Ancient and Medieval: Merchants and Mariners in Medieval Ireland . By Timothy O'Neill. Ancient and Medieval: The Political Thought of Baldus de Ubaldis . By Joseph Canning. Ancient and Medieval: Pastor and Laity in the Theology of Jean Gerson . By D. Catherine Brown. Ancient and Medieval: Royal Intrigue: crisis at the court of Charles VI, 1392–1420 . By Richard C. Famiglietti. Ancient and Medieval: Lambert Simnel and the Battle of Stoke . By Michael Bennett. Early Modern: Pienza: the creation of a Renaissance city . By Charles R. Mack. Early Modern: The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: essays on perception and communication . By Peter Burke. Early Modern: The Renaissance . By Peter Burke. London: Macmillan, Studies in European History. Early Modern: The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation . By Alister E. McGrath. Early Modern: The French Reformation . By Mark Greengrass. Early Modern: The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe . By Brian P. Levack. Early Modern: Highroad to the Stake . By Michael Kunze. Early Modern: Godly Zeal and Furious Rage: the witch in early modern Europe . Early Modern: The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe . Edited by Anthony Pagden. Early Modern: Revolt and Revolution in Early Modern Europe . By Yves‐Marie Bercé, translated by Joseph Bergin. Early Modern: Renaissance and Revolt: the intellectual and social history of early modern France . By J.H.M. Salmon. Early Modern: The French Peasantry 1450–1660 . By Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie, translated by A. Sheridan. Early Modern: History of Wales , Volume III Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation: Wales c1415–1642 . By Glanrnor Williams. Early Modern: Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth‐Century England . Edited by Peter Lake and Maria Dowling. Early Modern: Elizabethan Parliaments, 1559–1601 . By Michael A.R. Graves. Early Modern: A Protestant Vision: William Harrison and the Reformation in Elizabethan England . By G.J.R. Parry. Early Modern: Court and Country: studies in Tudor social

REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

Books reviewed in this article: Africa, Asia and the Stirling: African Civilizations, precolonial cities and states in tropical Africa: an archaeological perspective . By Graham Connah. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: Three Faces of Imperialism: British and American approaches to Asia and Africa, 1870–1970 . By Philip Darby. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: Robert Thorne Coryndon: Proconsular Imperialiasm in Southern and Eastern Africa, 1897–1925 . By Christopher P. Youé. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia. 1890–1939 . By Dane Kennedy. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: The Jews in Palestine 1800–1882 . By Tudor Parfitt. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: The Anglo‐French Clash in Lebanon and Syria 1940–45 . By A.G. Gaunson. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: Banking and Empire in Iran: the history of the British Bank of the Middle East . Volume I. By Geoffrey Jones. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: A History of India . By Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: Agrarian Bengal: economy, social structure and politics, 1919–1947 . By S. Bose. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: India's Political Administrators 1919–1983 . By David C. Potter. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: Making the New Commonwealth . By R.J. Moore. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan . By Stephen Vlastos. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590–1884 . By Herbert P. Bix. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: the Kaitokud Merchant Academy of Osaka . By Tetsuo Najita. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: The Emperor's Adviser: Saionji Kimmochi and pre‐war Japanese politics . By Lesley Connors. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: Japan Prepares for Total War: the search for ecconomic security, 1919–1941 . By Michael A. Barnhart. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: The Second Indochina War: a short political and military history, 1954–1975 . By William S. Turley. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United Swes, and the modern historical experience . By Gabriel Kolko. Africa, Asia and the Stirling: Companion to Chinese History . By Hugh B. O'Neill. Ancient and Medieval: Hispania: Spain and the development of Roman Imperialism, 218–82 BC . J.S. Richardson. Ancient and Medieval: The Origins of England 410–600 . By Martyn J. Whittock. Ancient and Medieval: Medieval Europe, 400–1500 . By H.G. Koenigsberger. Ancient and Medieval: Poets and Emperors: Frankish politics and Carolingian poetry . By Peter Godman. Ancient and Medieval: Medieval European Coinage , Volume 1 The Early Middle Ages (fifth‐tenth centuries ). By Philip Grierson and Mark Blackburn. Ancient and Medieval: The Church and the Welsh Border in the Central Middle Ages . By C.N.L. Brooks. Ancient and Medieval: William of Malmesbury . By Rodney Thomson. Ancient and Medieval: The Tournament in England, 1100–1400 . By Juliet R.V. Barker. Ancient and Medieval: Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge . By Miri Rubin. Ancient and Medieval: Landlords, Peasants and Politics in Medieval England . Edited by T.H. Aston. Ancient and Medieval: Representatives of the Lower Clergy in Parliament 1295–1340 . By Jeffrey H. Denton and John P. Dooley. Boydell and Brewer. Ancient and Medieval: A New History of Ireland , II Medieval Ireland 1169–1534 . Edited by Art Cosgrove. Ancient and Medieval: Women in Medieval Life . By Margaret Wade Labarge. Ancient and Medieval: Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe . Edited by Barbara A. Hanawalt. Ancient and Medieval: The Medieval Crown of Aragon: a short history . By T.N. Bisson. Ancient and Medieval: Italy, Sicily and the Mediterranean, 1100–1400 . By David Abulafia. Ancient and Medieval: The Knights of the Crown: the monarchical orders of knighthood in later medieval Europe 1325–1520 . By D'A.J.D. Boulton. Ancient and Medieval: The Formation of Muscovy, 1304–1613 . By Robert O. Crummey. Ancient and Medieval: Aspects of Late Medieval Government and Society: essays presented to J.R. Lander . Edited by J.G. Rowe. Ancient and Medieval: Studi di stork economica ioscana nel medioevo e nel rinascimento in memoria di Fedengo Melis . Edited by Cinzio Violante. Ancient and Medieval: Tradesmen and Traders: the world of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c1250‐c1650 . By Richard Mackenney. Early Modern: Early Modern Europe 1500–1789 . By H.G. Koenigsberger. Early Modern: Politicians and Virtuosi: essays in Early Modern History . By H.G. Koenigsberger. Early Modern: Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: essays in honor of H.G. Koenigsberger . Edited by Phyllis Mack and Margaret C. Jacob. Early Modern: After the Black Death: a social history of early modern Europe . By George Huppert. Early Modern: The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe . Edited by Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi. Early Modern: Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe . Edited by Stephen Haliezer. Early Modern: Cardinal of Scotland . By Margaret Sanderson. Early Modern: The Early Modern Town in Scotland . Edited by Michael Lynch. Early Modern: Scotland and England, 1286–1815 . Edited by Roger A. Mason. Early Modern: The Jacobean Union: six tracts of 1604 . Edited by Bruce R. Galloway and Brian P. Levack. Early Modern: Industry before the Industrial Revolution: North‐East Lancashire c1500–1640 . By J.T. Swain. Early Modern: Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth‐Century London . By Andrew Pettegree. Early Modern: Gloriana: the portraits of Elizabeth I . By Roy Strong. Early Modern: Anti‐Calvinists: the rise of English Arminianism c1590–1640 . By Nicholas Tyacke. Early Modern: Politics without Parliaments 1629–1640 . By Esther S. Cope. Early Modern: Reform in the Provinces: the Government of Stuart England . By Anthony Fletcher. Early Modern: The English Village Constable 1580–1642: a social and administrative study . By Joan R. Kent. Early Modern: The Library of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1584–1637 . By Sargent Bush Jr and Carl J. Rasmussen. Early Modern: Henry Prince of Wales and England's Lost Renaissance . By Roy Strong. Early Modern: Society and History in English Renaissance Verse . By Lauro Martines. Early Modern:Ben Jonson: his life and work. By R. Miles. Early Modern: Renaissance Revivals: city comedy and revenge tragedy in the London theatre, 1576–1980 . By Wendy Griswold. Early Modern: Thomas Hobbes: radical in the service of reaction . By Arnold A. Rogow. Early Modern: Parliamentary Selection: social and political choice in early modern England . By M.A. Kishlansky. Early Modern: Fear, Myth and History: the Ranters and the Historians . By J.C. Davis. Early Modern: The Coming of French Absolutism: the struggle for tax reform in the province of Dauphiné, 1540–1640 . By Daniel Hickey. Early Modern: Louis XIII: the making of a king . By Elizabeth Wirth Marvick. Early Modern: The D'Aligres de la Rivière: servants of the Bourbon State in the seventeenth century . By D.J. Sturdy. Early Modern: The Contentious French: four centuries of popular struggle . By Charles Tilly. Early Mo

The Late Modern Origins of Early Modern Governance Antonis Hadjikyriacou (bio) Keywords Early Modern, Governance, Historiography, Ottoman Empire The conceptual tools associated with the historiography of early modernity have received scant attention.1 The lexicon for the study of this period currently includes concepts such as fluidity, ambiguity, adaptability, permeability, malleability, flexibility, accommodation, elasticity, pragmatism, exchange, or encounter. I will here discuss the context within which this trend emerged, and then shift attention to a recently popular term used to describe imperial rule: governance. The idea of early modernity as an explanatory, analytical or heuristic tool—different those purposes as they may be—gained traction in Ottomanist historiography sometime in the 1990s. The timing was not by chance. Firstly, as more than one contributor to this volume has pointed out, this was the result of the historiographical quest to offer a valid alternative to the orientalist decline paradigm. Early modernity implied that the Ottoman Empire was not inherently different from its European counterparts and experienced similar or identical historical processes. One of the pioneers of early modernity in the Ottoman context, Rifa‘at Abou-El-Haj, insisted on a social history agenda— interestingly, something that was gradually abandoned by later proponents of the approach. The early modern perspective opened new vistas for comparative studies, something that radically changed the field. However, the development of this perspective proved unable to account for historical questions at the explanatory level—unless one assumes that the Ottoman Empire failed to transition from early modernity to modernity proper, thereby adopting a developmentalist stage-theory approach of national state building. [End Page 37] This brings us to the second reason why the concept of early modernity appeared in the 1990s: That modernization theory had by then reached its explanatory capacity. The quest for a teleological path to the modern nation-state had restricted historians for too long. Scholars no longer accept long-standing binaries such as institutionalized/informal practices, centralization/decentralization, consolidated/fluid identities, or market/moral economy. Rather, the current consensus understands these processes as coexisting in non-mutually exclusive ways. This lack of consistency with modernization theory and its foundational assumptions did not preclude the development of modern structures. On a different level, the waning of area studies was another associated development, giving room for global, connected or entangled history.2 Equally important is the political/ideological context of this conjuncture. The end of the Cold War heralded the victory of liberal democracy and its values. The notion of multiculturalism rose in prominence both as ideology and policy in order to provide answers to questions of cultural and religious diversity or integration in the face of waves of migrants and refugees in the western world. Influenced by this intellectual climate, which concurrently included a temporary (if superficial) receding of nationalist ideology and historiography, historians turned to multiethnic and multireligious empires for answers and inspiration. The Ottoman Empire was a particularly fertile ground to elaborate on and document what an early modern multicultural polity looked like and how it administered and managed its populations. Despite the value and usefulness (if not necessity) of abandoning the rigid categories of modernization theory, there are various problems with the way early modernity has been conceptualized. I will limit my comments here to the lexicon of early modernity that I have referred to in my introductory paragraph. To name one implication that has escaped attention, the ease with which such concepts are employed renders early modernity a reflection of the current condition of late modernity. In other words, the language of the present globalized condition is projected back to a romanticized primordial pre-modern past. Such a linear periodization means that the flexibility and fluidity of early and late modernity were interrupted by a modern “digression,” which temporarily consolidated the human condition. Thus, it reifies modernity itself as the central and defining element of the preceding and subsequent era. The sense conveyed by most studies celebrating the multi-ethnic and multi-religious nature of Ottoman rule is that of a paradise lost, a cosmopolitan milieu that [End Page 38] twentieth-century nationalist modernity may have obliterated, but is coming back with a vengeance. Click for larger view View...

REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

The switch in terminology from Renaissance to was plainly a deliberate intervention in the moment of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, which dates from the mid-1980s, and was designed to undermine periodization as well as the hitherto exclusive focus on elite culture and high cultural texts. (Though see Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England 19-44 for evidence that early modern is of Victorian coinage, and 45-70 for evidence that the phrase had wide currency among economic historians in the first half of the twentieth century.) Furthermore, renaissance, like Restoration or BC/AD, is hardly a neutral term, but presumes some progressive, whiggish awakening from a stupor. You are already taking sides using such terminology, and it is fair to say that still scholars who prefer renaissance tend to be more conservative and those who prefer early modern tend to be more progressive.Institutionally, some of the readers of this journal will remember that when we began organizing the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, this meeting was designed to attract work beyond Europe and North America, and as such renaissance is hopelessly Eurocentric and has little meaning or no meaning for Asia or Africa, no reference outside of a European context. GEMCS was intended from the beginning to be more inclusive chronologically and a conceptual alternative to the American Society for Eighteenth- Century Studies.Conceptually, allows, enables, and encourages a continuity, rather than the absolute breaks that course catalogs, college curriculums, and the Modern Language Association job list categories still impose. These are categories that, despite endless critique, by simple inertia and institutional investment as yet determine training, hiring, and, through the curriculum, teaching. Nonetheless, the switch to clearly encourages a longer view, a greater arch (though not quite like Annales longue duree), whether one stresses continuity or rupture. Versions of the longer arch are nicely exemplified in Raymond Williams's work, Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961). Early also has the advantage of obviating such clumsy terms as the long eighteenth though it invites such equally clumsy substitutes as late modern (a description that, in fact, I prefer to eighteenth century). Wherever one's work is situated in the eighteenth century, as a cultural and historical formation, it has more in common with an agricultural old society (as Harold Perkins has it), a face-to-face society (as Peter Laslett has it), than it does to an urbanized, industrialized, and capitalized nineteenth century. Michael McKeon's Secret History of Domesticity offers a particular rich recent example of such fruits, as a prehistory of domesticity and the novel, reaching further back than any study has before. As such, it is unlike all the histories of the novel spawned by Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel that are predicated on novelty and an absolute break between seventeenth-century romance and eighteenth-century novel. For those of us (here read leftist) still given to the larger view, for whom Williams's dialectic of residual, dominant, and emergent still offers the most flexible, capacious, and efficacious model for understanding cultural change, the larger arch is a precondition of any adequate narrative of change. …

The chapters of this volume demonstrate the protracted coexistence in the early modern era of a wide variety of medical knowledge regimes and practices for interpreting health and combating illness. In contrast, the modern medical paradigm, which consolidated its hegemonic authority in the first half of the twentieth century, understood health as primarily a concern of medical science and of the public sphere. However, the latter decades of the twentieth century saw a reemergence of alternative epistemologies and the growth of a multifaceted health market. The epilogue discusses comparisons, analogies, and contrasts between this era of ‘late modernity’ and the early modern era. Three main topics are discussed: the return of holistic new spirituality; the ideology of ‘healthism’ and the marketisation of health; and the emergence of fitness culture.

New Books across the Disciplines

Reviewed by: The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life by Thomas S. Davis Allan Hepburn The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life. Thomas S. Davis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv + 307. $60.00 (cloth). A brilliant and timely book, The Extinct Scene joins the growing list of scholarly works that deal with Anglo-British modernism in the middle of the twentieth century, such as Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism (1999), Marina MacKay’s Modernism and World War II (2007), Leo Mellor’s Reading the Ruins (2011), Peter Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters (2013), and Gill Plain’s Literature of the 1940s (2013). These works establish continuities from the interwar years through the Second World War and into the era of British decolonization. In The Extinct Scene, Davis defines an “outward turn” as characteristic of late modernism (3). Consciousness, feeling, and inwardness—traits important to high modernism—did not suit mid-century writers. From the 1930s through the 1960s, writers and artists turned to the political and economic turbulence in the world as resources for artworks; in particular, they represented the alignments and misalignments between citizens and states. At the same time, late modernist texts correlated everyday phenomena with political crises, such as the Spanish Civil War, the Sino-Japanese War, the [End Page 469] Second World War, and the Notting Hill Riots. In The Extinct Scene, Davis focuses on British culture, though he keenly notes the international stance of British writers and filmmakers; they look outward to Spain, China, and the Caribbean to understand changes in world-systems. Throughout The Extinct Scene, Davis keeps a steady focus on everydayness. In an explication of John Grierson’s documentary aesthetics in the 1930s, Davis claims that “art must capture and reveal something about everyday life. It should neither assume a mimetic function nor drift into a self-contained world of endless experimentation” (39). The everyday throws up any number of opportunities for seizing capitalism, politics, and history in action. For Humphrey Jennings, Charles Madge, and other researchers associated with Mass-Observation, the everyday manifests itself in singular events and anecdotes. Mass-Observation aimed to “uncover the particularities of everyday experience and show how that experience permeates the collective” (57). In this regard, late modernist film, fiction, and art renounce the avant-garde experiments of high modernism—interruptions, lyrical monologues, defamiliarization—unless they address the radical disruptions inflicted on everyday life by geopolitical forces. Davis puts the matter more succinctly: “Late modernism designates the moment when modernism no longer recognizes itself” (11). Neither realism nor the resources of high modernism adequately captured changes in the world-system that happened at mid-century. If anything distinguishes the difference between high modernism and late modernism, it is the determined politicization of art forms that occurs in works by George Orwell, Humphrey Jennings, Elizabeth Bowen, and numerous others. Davis’s superb analysis refreshes what scholars know about late modernist works, not least because he draws upon an original and compelling corpus of materials: Henry Green’s novel Party Going, the sociological interventions of Mass-Observation, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s Journey to a War, Henry Moore’s paintings of women and children in tube shelters, Cecil Beaton and James Pope-Hennessy’s History under Fire, Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories about blitzed London, a clutch of novels by Vic Reid, Sam Selvon, and Colin MacInnes, and, in an epilogue about the afterlife of modernist everydayness, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. Davis’s close readings are virtuosic. His analysis of power relations between white landowners and black Jamaicans in Vic Reid’s New Day, for example, dwells on the transformative power of seeing, especially the ways that white and black citizens understand uprisings and bloodshed as actions that impinge on everyday life and incrementally register changes in geopolitics. By giving meticulous accounts of specific works, Davis vivifies late modernism. In one vector of inquiry in The Extinct Scene, Davis offers commentary on the duties and entitlements of citizenship. As expressions of a political unconscious, artworks model citizenship as a form of necessary engagement. Vernacular fictions such as Absolute Beginners (1959) and The Lonely Londoners (1956...

Reviewed by: Temporality and Mediality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture ed. by Christian Kiening, and Martina Stercken Frank Swannack Kiening, Christian, and Martina Stercken, eds, Temporality and Mediality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Cursor Mundi, 32), Turnhout, Brepols, 2018; hardback; pp. x, 257; 50 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €75.00; ISBN 9782503551302 Editors Christian Kiening and Martina Stercken focus their volume 'on the period around 1500' (p. 3). They argue that the 1500 period engages in a crucial temporal intersection of medieval and early modern mediality. The essays collected also reflect a recent trend in academic studies of the medieval period's important influence on early modern texts. Temporality and Mediality in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture begins with Barbara Schellewald's analysis of the Cappella della Madonna dei Mascoli mosaic in St Mark's, Venice. The mosaic's depiction of celestial light represented by gold ground captures shifting light within the medieval church, to imply a viewer's engagement with 'sacred time' (p. 33). Schellewald makes an interesting observation that during the fifteenth century scientific advancements in optics led to gold ground being abandoned in images. The mosaic's traditional use of medieval gold ground, conversely, transcends early modern scientific developments. Marius Rimmele examines the symbolic folding and unfolding structures of religious triptychs in late medieval Antwerp and Cologne. Space and time are collapsed and extended so that the viewer either becomes part of the painting's spiritual world, or the 3D triptych infiltrates the viewer's temporal reality. The mediation of heavenly and earthly space and time is also the backbone of Britta Dümpelmann's study of St Mary's altarpiece by Veit Stoss in Kraców. By studying sculpture rather than paintings, Dümpelmann argues that touch is more important than sight. By 1500, the medieval sinful sexual connotations of touch are displaced by notions of embodiment and disembodiment. Heavenly and earthly time merge in the tangible visible spectacle of St Mary's sculpture. Kiening's contribution identifies how medieval salvation history mediates past, present, and future temporalities through the mortal and divine notions of the Passion. Examining texts of Christian pilgrimages to Palestine, Kiening infers that spiritual experiences contained by time and space are dwarfed by an eternal perspective. [End Page 221] Stercken explores Gerhard Mercator's world map of 1569. The common critical assumption is that Mercator's famous map showcases technical advancement over medieval cartography. Stercken argues that the medieval influence on Mercator of mediating time in pictorial and textual map-making has been ignored by academics. Mercator follows the encyclopaedic mappae mundi by inserting images of exotic beasts and written histories of newly discovered regions. He also uses early modern scientific technologies to augment his new map. As Stercken notes, Mercator borrows liberally from medieval traditions and early modern advancements to create a world map demonstrating universal knowledge that transcends time and space. Anja Rathmann-Lutz examines the Rudimentum Novitiorum (1475) through its innovative use of discontinuous text, pictorial family trees, charts, and illustrations. As Rathmann-Lutz argues, critics of the compendium have previously failed to acknowledge the Rudimentum Novitiorum's similarity to earlier illustrative histories. Readers are encouraged to flip back and forth through the compendium's different timelines to experience history as a form of medieval time travel. Marcus Sandl tackles the relationship between prophecies and prophets. He utilizes the medieval theological concept of the figura to argue that the prophet negotiates transition. Time is mediated through a prophetic exchange charting 'salvation history' (p. 221). The prophet's historical and theological knowledge is reinterpreted in an age of reformation obsessed with accumulating wealth, goods, commodities and information. To close the volume, Aleksandra Prica examines the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, printed in 1499. The close relationship between life and literature informs the essay, and Prica's main interest in the text lies with a particular form of allegorical interpretation. Meaning in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is created by a resonance of 'lingering', a literary conceit signified by narrative stasis or an accumulation of historical knowledge (p. 230), especially, as Prica argues, when the text encounters architectural ruins. The twin narrative functions of historical stagnation and tragedy become...

Reviews and Short Notices

Ricardo Padrón. <i>The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West</i>

Gender and Economics Through a Trifocal Lens:Production, Distribution, and Consumption Derek J. Penslar (bio) I am honored that Riv-Ellen Prell has included my 2001 book Shylock's Children in a body of scholarship that, over the past two decades, has integrated economics into modern Jewish history and Jews into the economic history of modern Europe and the United States. If one includes work on early modern Europe, the "economic turn" in Jewish history goes back quite a bit further, to Jonathan Israel's pioneering European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750 (1985), and produced seminal works such as Jonathan Karp's The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848 (2008) and Francesca Trivellato's The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (2012). One important difference between the literature on Jews in the economic systems of early and late modernity is a shifting of emphasis from distribution (Jews in commerce) to production and, more recently, consumption. Prell's overarching critique—that much of the scholarship on Jews in the modern economy neglects women by overlooking the family as an economic unit—might be even more relevant to early than late modernity, and is applicable to all three branches of economic activity. My own book, like Karp's, was about political economic discourses and practices that were overwhelmingly the work of men. If they thought about women at all, they conceived of them as objects to be assigned specific tasks in order to render Jews more productive, moral, and socially acceptable. My book, as Prell points out, did not seek to make an original contribution to the history of what Jews did for a living—on this subject my analysis was heavily synthetic—so much as what Jews thought about their economic position. Women were indeed actively involved in the embourgeoisement of Jewish life in the home and in philanthropic associations. But they did not contribute (at least not until the fin de siècle, and then only sparingly) to the public discourse by Jews in the press and in communal and inter-communal organizational reports. If we move from sensibility to activity, however, the story is different. In any time and place, and for any population, whether defined by nationality, ethnicity, or religious community, both men and women have been economic actors. Women and men often encountered modern capitalism differently, because women were more likely than men to [End Page 513] work within the confines of the family home, which, whether nuclear or extended, functioned as an economic unit (hence the word "economics," from the Greek for "household management"). I would, however, blur somewhat the distinction that Prell draws between men and women, because women (including Jewish women) could encounter capitalism in many ways, some of which more closely approximated the experience of men than others. Women's economic functions differed most from men when men produced commodities or objects for barter or sale and women engaged in unremunerated domestic labor. This labor was no less an economic activity than that of men, and even if it was not measured in monetary terms, it had an implicit monetary value. If women did not provide uncompensated labor, someone else would have needed to, and that person would have been a servant or slave: the former of whom received a wage, in money or in kind, and the latter of whom had been purchased at a rate commensurate with predicted productivity. Women's economic activity was not always explicitly market activity, yet women in early capitalist societies encountered the market in various ways, such as cottage production, or through assisting, co-managing, or solely-managing a family business. This latter practice was common among Jews in Eastern Europe well into the nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish women increasingly worked outside the home as wage laborers or white-collar, salaried employees. Some became teachers and social workers, and a few became physicians. Their encounter with the modern economy still differed from that of men because of perceptions of women that justified lower wages, gender-segregated work, and patriarchal authority...

This contribution aims to demonstrate how forms of governance are inextricably intertwined with the forms of life that give rise to them and how such forms of life/governance tend to emerge, historically, in the sensory sphere – on canvas in particular – before they do so symbolically, or conceptually, in the spoken or written word. In other words, emerging forms of life/governance leave traces first in ‘prophetic’ painting before they do so in tracts, books, texts, film scripts, installation art, and so on. This is demonstrated with regard to three historical periods that, each, saw the birth of a particular form of life/governance, that is, early modernity (roughly from 1470 to 1520), high modernity (1750–1800), and late modernity (1940–1990). This contribution includes discussions of ‘prophetic paintings’ by early modern painters such as Jean Fouquet, Gerard David, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Antonello da Messina, and Quentin Metsys; high modern painters such as William Hogarth, Joseph Wright of Derby, and Henry Fuseli; and, finally, late modern painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

I write this book amid the fat panic that is all too pervasive in the twenty-first century West, especially the United States. I explain this panic by looking to its discursive roots in early modernity, but I do so to offer a counterpoint to our late modern constructions that fuel this panic. A fat history is needed at this particular historical moment to make us consider the bodily categories that have come to seem so natural to many of us. For this reason, we particularly need a history such as the type that has been offered by scholars of queer studies. Such a history needs to interrogate bodily categories, such as "obesity," "overweight," and "obesity epidemic," that are oppressive insofar as they are taken as natural and transhistorical. A fat history would also interrogate the types of emotional, aesthetic, and political attachments we take for granted and, in so doing, help us foster very different types of commitments, attachments, and identifications. Rather than simply feeling, for example, revulsion for the fat body, we can learn to see it in some of its vivified forms as offering a powerful model of defiance of our late modern normative constructions. Such has been my primary aesthetic and political motivation in writing The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity: Body Image in Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton.KeywordsNational GeographicThin BodyEarly Modern PeriodCultural ImperativeBodily CategoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.