Collective Title Research Articles

'Such a general itching after book-learning': Popular Readers of 'the most eminent Wits'

ABSTRACT This article considers a paradox that lies at the heart of mid-seventeenth-century printed miscellanies: that these very popular, cheap printed collections offered points of conduct advice for elite social contexts; that books like The Academy of Complements (1640) and Wits Interpreter (1655) purported to present social etiquettes and words of eloquence fit for application in the rarefied environment of court, but were directed to, and read by, a popular, decidedly non-elite audience. This article considers how we might make sense of this consumption of notionally elite texts by popular readers. Learning is a thing that hath been much cried up and coveted in all ages, especially in this last century of years, by people of all sorts though never so mean and mechanical. [...] The extravagant humour of our country is not to be altogether commended, that all men should aspire to book-learning. There is not a simpler animal and a more superfluous member of state than a mere scholar. (James Howell to Edward Sackville, Earl of Dorset, c. 1651) (1) So plain and easie [...] that the meanest capacity may in a short time attain to a perfection. (The Mysteries of Love E 'If you write in forme of a petition to the King', the prose must begin 'May it please your Majesty to understand, or to grant ...' (pp. 245-46). In later editions of this same book the theme is explored further, as the reader is initiated into the intricacies of offering 'A tender of service to ones Soveraigne', or 'An humble addresse to a great Lord', where the reader is encouraged to employ epistolary prose such as: 'I must entreate you to pardon my boldnesse, in that I, who am a stranger, have presumed to come to visit you, being invited thereunto by the fame and report of your noble vertues.' (3) The Academy of Complements is perhaps the best-known example of the mid-seventeenth-century printed miscellany. Printed miscellanies were small, octavo or duodecimo publications, the products of a bundling together of writing from diverse sources--manuscript commonplace books, plays, song books, other printed miscellanies. These texts are bursting with material: most commonly short poetry from numerous unascribed authors, but often also potted histories, court dialogues, model letters, notes of mythology, riddles and jokes. These books are verse miscellanies; models for etiquette; prompt-books for wits; exemplars of elite life. The most common subject for discussion is love, particularly the torturous sufferings of the snubbed male wooer, but poems praising or criticizing women, lauding Royalism, friendship, and drink, are also common. If these books could be said to have any unified voice, that voice must be pitched somewhere among the bawdy, the misogynous, the Royalist, the voyeuristic, and the educative. (4) The Academy of Complements was a hugely popular text, running through at least twelve editions between 1640 and 1685, each new edition larger than the last. Frequent references in contemporary plays suggest this collection's title was well established and resonant with connotations. (5) This very popularity presents us with the paradox I would like to consider in this article. …

Espacios y movilidad de la gente negra en el Pacífico Sur colombiano: ¿hacia la construcción de una "sociedad regional"?

En Colombia, la Constitución de 1991 y la Ley 70 de 1993 reconocen derechos territoriales a las poblaciones negras ribereñas del Pacífico, al atribuirles títulos colectivos sobre territorios ancestralmente ocupados y explotados, previa organización de los campesinos en "Consejos comunitarios" encargados de manejar los territorios en el futuro. El artículo explora las transformaciones que esto implica en la organización regional, basándose en un análisis espacial que recalca tres modelos de estructura socio-espacial. Se puede así combinar tiempos y espacios, y analizar el papel que los distintos actores sociales, económicos y políticos juegan en estas transformaciones.

Jewish Identity and Poetic Form in "By the Waters of Babylon"

The first prose-poems ever published in the English language appeared in the March 1887 issue of Century Illustrated, a popular American magazine. Their collective title, "By the Waters of Babylon," announced their common theme: the sorrows of Jewish exile. The subtitle, "Little Poems in Prose," drew attention to this unusual form by reminding readers of the precedent of Charles Baudelaire's groundbreaking 1869 collection, Petits poèmes en prose. A few months after the publication of "By the Waters of Babylon," its author died of cancer at the age of 38. Her name was Emma Lazarus. 1

The Territorial Turn: Making Black Territories in Pacific Colombia

Over the last decade, a wide range of global forces have combined to promote the territorial titling of collective lands to indigenous and black communities in the lowland tropics of Latin America. This marks an unprecedented turn in land titling and reform in the hemisphere. In this paper, I describe the territorial turn in collective land titling in the Pacific region of Colombia. In particular, I describe the World Bank-funded Natural Resource Management Program's effort to demarcate and title some 5 million hectares of national lands to black community councils in Pacific Colombia since 1996. In so doing, I examine how environmental, human rights, and multilateral lending interests have come together over the last few decades to strengthen ethnic rights to collective lands throughout the Latin American lowlands. Although it is too early to make definitive assessments, I argue that the machinations of the World Bank-funded project interacted in very complex and significant ways with how black social movements instituted a novel ethnic-territorial relationship. The project has widespread implications for black and indigenous territorial aspirations throughout the lowland tropics and for better understanding how identity and territory constitute one another.

Alfonso X el sabio y las crónicas de España (review)

Reviews183 Fernández-Ordónez, Inés, Ed. Alfonso X el sabio y las crónicas de España. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid-Centro para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles, 2000. 283 pp. ISBN 84-8448-096-8 It is salutary to remember that it is only a few years short of a century since Ramón Menéndez Pidal effectively inaugurated the modern era of the study of Alfonsine historiography with his edition of what he then called the Primera crónica general (Menéndez Pidal 1906), and exactly forty since his grandson Diego Catalán revolutionized the field with the publication of four essays under the collective title De Alfonso X al conde de Barcelos (Catalán 1962). In the ensuing years work has continued in ever-widening circles, much of it under the auspices of the Instituto Universitario "Seminario Menéndez Pidal", directed by Catalán in the 1980s. Not only the editor of this volume, but also three of her collaborators - Maria del Mar de Bustos, Mariano de la Campa, and Juan Bautista Crespo - are products of this fruitful exercise in teamwork; and to them are joined five other scholars Samuel G. Armistead, Giuseppe di Stefano, Fernando Gómez Redondo, Peter Linehan and Georges Martin, all of them with solid credentials in the field. It is interesting and encouraging that four countries are represented as well as Spain itself, ample testimony to the way in which work in this field is both being done outside Spain, and appreciated within it. The volume is a partial edition of the Proceedings of a Seminar held in 1997 under the joint auspices of the Centro para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles and the Fundación Duques de Soria. Fernández-Ordóñez's introductory essay or "Presentación" (9-18) sets the scene by giving a general overview of the problems in the field of Alfonsine historiography, together with an attempt to define the nature of each contributor's work within the overall context of seeking to "presentar un estado de la cuestión sobre los progresos alcanzados en la investigación de la Esloria de España alfonsi" (10). Let me begin with the "outsiders", the non-members of the Seminario. Each has contributed a piece in the part of the field he has made his own. Linehan writes on the debt of the Alfonsine chronicles to the previous work of el Tudense and el Toledano, and as the author of the most ambitious work to date on the historiography of medieval Spain (Linehan 1993) he is well placed to do so. Comparing the essentially Leonese perspective of Lucas of fuy with the more local interests of Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada ("siguió un plan propio, basado ... en la promoción y en la prosperidad de la iglesia de La corónica 31.1 (Fall, 2002): 183-87 184ReviewsLa corónica 31.1, 2002 Toledo", 31), Linehan concentrates on a number of cases in which the preoccupations of Alfonso's reign - and especially its troubled final years - may have had a strong influence on the preference shown by his chroniclers between their two principal sources. Georges Martin's contribution, entitled "El modelo historiográfico alfonsi y sus antecedentes" is probably the most sophisticated theoretically of the essays in this book, as might be expected from the author of a book whose subtitle contains the words "mentalités et discours historique" (Martin 1992). Here his starting point is the distinction between intentio, inventio and dispositio (or 'purpose', 'subject matter' and 'organization'). Each is considered in turn, and the conclusions deserve to be quoted. Intentio, the first great characteristic of the Alfonsine model is for Martin, "la participación del saber histórico en una amplia concepción científica de lo político por parte de la corona y en el proyecto de subordinar a las élites del reino al ideario de la realeza" (42-43). Inventio, after listing the obvious points of the breadth of the sources employed, the care with which they are presented and subjected to commentary, is "el vaivén entre hechos pasados y acontecimientos presentes, el...

Introduction: The Colombian Pacific in Perspective

In many Latin American nations, black history, identity, and culture have become public and political issues in unprecedented ways as multiculturalism becomes an official ideology of nationhood in such countries (Assies, Haar, and Hoekema 2000; Van Cott 2000). In some contexts, black people have become the subjects of legislation directed specifically at them, giving them particular rights. Nowhere is this so evident as in Colombia, a nation unique in Latin America in having very detailed legislation directed at so-called black communities. Beginning in 1991 with a transitory article in the reformed Constitution and culminating in Law 70 of 1993, along with a series of associated decrees, legislation has opened the way for rural black communities in Colombia's Pacific coastal region to gain collective title to land. In addition, two special seats were, between 1993 and 1997, reserved for black delegates in the House of Representatives, while black representatives now participate in important state bodies such as INCORA (Colombian Institute of Land Reform), Ministry of Mines, Ministry of the Environment, and Ministry of Education, as well as in organisms created especially to oversee the development of black communities, such as the Division of Black Community Affairs. Recent legislation has promoted the creation of Afro-Colombian studies in the national curriculum and given black students special access to grants for university studies. A great deal of all this activity is directed at the country's Pacific coastal region, a mainly rural area inhabited predominantly by black people, alongside indigenous and white/mestizo minorities. This region is not unique to Colombia, since the northern part of Ecuador's Pacific coast is very similar historically and culturally (Whitten 1986), but the combination of this very particular regional complex with the recent changes in the legislative panorama make the Colombian case of great interest.

Lucy Is “Enceinte”: The Power of an Action in Defining a Work

SUMMARY Although performed works are defined based on their collaborative nature and rules for mixed responsibility in AACR2R, descriptive practices are vague when applied to the cataloging of a television series—a type of performed work. Is the umbrella title identical as the title expressed in a bibliographic series? Or is it the collective title of the work and each episode a part? A key factor in this decision is in understanding how performed works are distinct from textual works. By highlighting the seminal television situation comedy I Love Lucy as an example, it is argued that a textual approach provides an incomplete methodology for the retrieval of the component parts of a television series. Descriptive areas in AACR2R are explored, particularly issues related to seriality, whole-part relationships, and the use of work identifiers in the collocation of episodes.

This England: The Histories (review)

Once again the Royal Shakespeare Company mounted the eight history plays concerned with the Wars of the Roses. This time the collective title is This England: The Histories. The plays opened in historical order in the RSC's three different theatres in Stratford-upon-Avon: Richard II, directed by Steven Pimlott, opened in The Other Place in March 2000; both parts of Henry IV, directed by Michael Attenborough, opened in the Swan in April and June; Henry V, directed by Edward Hall, opened in the main house, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, in August. The three parts of Henry VI, subtitled "The War," "The Fall," and "The Chaos," which opened in November and December 2000 in the Swan and Richard III, which opened in February 2001, also in the Swan, were cast as a unit, with thirty actors and twenty-three technical staff, all under the direction of Michael Boyd, with design by Tom Piper. This tetralogy came to the Power Center of the University of Michigan for a short residency in mid-March 2001 for three cycles of the four plays--twelve sold-out performances in all.

Ethnic Rights Under Threat: The Black Peasant Movement Against Armed Groups’ Pressure in the Chocó, Colombia

During the past decade Colombia has been experiencing the paradox of, on the one hand, enjoying one of the most advanced constitutional frameworks for the empowerment of citizenship rights in general and ethnic rights in particular, and on the other, suffering from the drawn‐out effects of endemic violence and armed conflict. In this paper, the manifestation of this paradox in a specific context, that of the black peasants’ land rights movement in the Chocó region, is explored. Under the aegis of the 1991 Constitution, organisations of black peasants have been making headway in filing for and receiving substantial collective land titles on the basis of a discourse of black ethnic rights. At the same time, and not coincidentally, various armed actors such as the FARC guerrillas and paramilitary forces have made violent inroads into this region. The violence has led to internal displacement, social uprooting, and the disruption of the organisational efforts of the black peasantry. This has put the process of ethnic construction and mobilisation under severe strain. However, black peasants’ organisation have been trying to use the land entitlements as a tool to mount a counterstrategy against the violence inflicted by the armed groups.

Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality (review)

Edited by Calvin Thomas, Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality promises to use the term "queer" to interrogate "heterosexuality" in theory, literature, and culture, but in practice the interrogation rehearses what has become a highly familiar constitutive tie. Thus, the volume's contributors trace homoerotic disruptions of straight narratives so as to render queerness and straightness each the pliable corollary of one another, much like the "twist" featured in the collection's title. While neither explicitly foregrounded nor evenly critiqued until the conclusion, sexism emerges throughout the volume as the twist's ironically unifying torque. If this insight is deferred, the figure of the twist nonetheless reveals a promising, related figure to which the contributors allude sotto voce, until at the collection's apex Catherine A. F. MacGillivray loudly proclaims the value of the "hole." Her animated dialogue with Calvin Thomas demonstrates what more cogent feminist critique might have provided and how little, at times, straight-but-twisting-scholarship ventures, especially when critics remain reticent about the permutations of queerness within their own and their subjects' praxis. If for MacGillivray, there's a hole in this work, then it's that the "hole" has been minimized. Nonetheless, her trenchant analysis realizes the collection's burgeoning web of references to the gendered politics and politically shattering pleasures of the hole, too often lost in what Thomas calls the tendency to "cover [our] asses." For instance, MacGillivray's emphasis on the significance of reception for re-imagining gender and jouissance resonates with the work of Roland Barthes, whose influence is prominent throughout the volume. In his well-wrought essay, "Updike's Erect Faith in A Month of Sundays," John Duvall features Barthes in an [End Page 537] argument about the anxiety that receptivity inspires in the novel's protagonist, a hyper-heterosexual minister whose faith, like his masculinity, must be embodied compulsively in "risen" flesh; this flesh in turn ejaculates into an abject "feminine" receptacle Updike also figures as the reader/congregation. In assessing the sexism that precipitates the protagonist's intense homophobia, though, Duvall might have offered disapprobation as explicit as what Katherine Gantz provides in her excellent discussion of the homosocial framing of Elaine in "Reading the Queer in Seinfeld."

Cisneros's "Terrible" Women: Recuperating the Erotic as a Feminist Source in "Never Marry a Mexican" and "Eyes of Zapata"

In the preface to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherrie Moraga discusses the and psychic struggle the collection represents for the writers who participated in it. For these women of color, the process of moving from the personal terror of racism, classism, and (hetero)sexism to a creative agency capable of denouncing and fighting against such systems is necessarily a personal visceral act. As the collection's title suggests, gaining subjectivity for women of color is often tied to the ability to transform their bodies into bridges of communication.' Because their bodies have historically served as sites of multiple oppressions, women of color find it almost impossible to exclude their physical selves from their struggles for consciousness, opposition, and change. Perceived through distorted images and representations of race and sexuality, many women are in effect socially dispossessed of their own bodies; to overcome these numerous levels of domination, women of color thus must first seek out a material and personal form of resistance. As Chicana historian and lesbian feminist Emma Perez asserts, We have been spoken about, written about, spoken at but never spoken with or listened to. Language comes from above to inflict us with western-white-colonizer ideology. To emerge as a survivor, Perez contends, a woman of color must (re)claim her own sitio y lengua; she must find a space in which she can create her own discourse.2 Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros has struggled to give voice to the female body within her feminist writing. The sole daughter of a Mexican father and

William of Ockham and the Michaelists On Robert Grosseteste and Denis the Areopagite

The investigation at Avignon of Ockham‘s suspected errors in the mid 1320s, the canonization by John XXII of Aquinas in July 1323, Ockham’s defiance of Pope John XXII for asserting in November 1323, heretically in Ockham’s view, that Christ and the apostles had held property and property rights, his association with Michael of Cesena and his followers at Avignon, and then at Pisa and Munich, are some of the well-known circumstances which brought Ockham, from 1327 onwards, to write polemics which have acquired the collective title of opera politica. The facility for searching by electronic means the new edition being made of the largest of these works, the Dialogus, has revealed a passage that I had not noticed in the edition made in 1614 by Melchior Goldast, nor have I seen any reference to it in modern scholarship. The passage, which is found in Part 1, Book 1, chapter 9, and which is reproduced below in Appendix 1, reads in English as follows:

The French Revolutionary Roots of Political Modernity in Hegel's Philosophy, or the Enlightenment at Dusk

Readers of Auguste Comte's Cours de Philosophie positive which began to appear just before Hegel's death might well have imagined, from the work's title, that they were about to confront an interpretation of Hegel's philosophical system. If Hegel himself had assembled his writings as systematically as his doctrines, that collective title would probably have embraced their meaning with greater accuracy than any other. The positivity of Comte's philosophy was of course strikingly different from Hegel's and was in a crucial sense meant to supplant it, replacing it with a genuinely scientific understanding of society, just as metaphysics had earlier overturned theology. Over the past hundred and fifty years or so, Comte's positive philosophy – which he also termed sociology – has in its various formulations by his disciples come to encapsulate the proper agenda of the human sciences for a post-metaphysical, post-Hegelian, age.

An Autumnal Blast, a Killing Frost: Coleridge's Poetic Conversation with John Thelwall

IDELY REGARDED AS AMONG HIS MOST SUCCESSFUL WORKS, COLE ridge's conversation poems have long been taken as typical of that broad transition in voice and vision that defines romanticism: from public genres to private, lyric modes, from the world of radical political activism to the solitary, transcendent realm of imagination. In this respect their collective title is perhaps somewhat misleading, for what poems like Lime Tree Bower and The Nightingale seem to record is not true dialogic utterance, but an intimate exchange among a coterie which often approaches the nature of soliloquy. This tendency is perhaps most evident in Frost at Midnight, a poem in which the words themselves at times seem to be merely accessories, external markers of a silent, spiritual com munion between Coleridge and his sleeping child (or his imagination, nature, God) which issues in a psychic and poetic transformation as invis ible, as effortless, as organic as the secret ministry of the frost. Such a poem appears as distant from the public debates and political divisions of its historical period as its quiet, sincere meditations are from the zealous exhortations and rhetorical excesses of Coleridge's lectures and more topi poems. Yet as Paul Magnuson has recently suggested, this least politi cal of Coleridge's poems1 has more in common with Coleridge's more partisan productions and activities than it appears, for it was published in a volume together with two explicitly political poems (Fears in Solitude and France: An Ode), which ensured that, whatever the circumstances of its composition, it would be received not as a personal lyric reflecting w

The Time of Theory

longer comes from its harmony with a cosmic order, but from a different harmony: an abstract identity between all individuals. A serious problem must be faced by this society: how to recognize when an event has happened. In order to testify that an event has occurred, you need someone who must be at the same place at the time it occurred, in order to perceive it and then to bear witness to it. But this is not enough. The witness must be socially recognized as a good witness in order for everyone to recognize that the event he has witnessed occurred. In a society no longer founded on the order of the cosmos (and thus on the authority of a priest-king whose testimony is backed by competence and social position), events must be democratically validated. But how to avoid the confusion of voices, since no one has the authority to decide the value of a perception, of an aisthesis-to employ the Greek term, for the story actually concerns the Greek cities between the eighth and sixth centuries before Christ. It does not really matter if the individual perception remains in a private domain, but what happens if someone arrives in the agora, yelling that a foreign army is coming? On this kind of occasion, it is important to stop any useless discourses on the validity or non-validity of the perception, and make a decision quickly. Thus it was decided that certain citizens should be chosen, based on good social standing and a reputation for probity, and sent to see what had happened, if indeed something had happened. And until they returned, no one had the right to say anything about the eventuality of what may have happened. As soon as they came back and testified what they had seen, public discussion could legitimately take place. These citizens bore the collective title of theoria-those who have seen or

Interpretation in History: Collingwood and Historical Understanding

When considering a suitable topic for inclusion in this collection, it occurred to me that it might be worth discussing a writer whose interests were largely centred on themes directly related to those cited in the collection's title, and who throughout most of his philosophical career remained particularly insistent upon the need to define the boundaries separating humanistic modes of understanding from ones associated with the physical sciences. The writer in question was R. G. Collingwood. Although Collingwood has justly been credited with perceptive insights into the metaphysical origins and presuppositions of natural science, as well as with raising pointed questions concerning the nature of conceptual change in scientific thought, he had in fact little first-hand knowledge of the subject and it is not in this sphere that his chief claims to importance and originality lie. Rather, they are to be found in an area with which he was certainly intimately acquainted and in which as a practitioner he helped to make significant discoveries on the ground. That was history, a discipline requiring in his view a type of thinking that had either been ignored by his philosophical contemporaries or else misconceived and distorted by those who had troubled to consider it. Thus, as a result of making a serious effort on his own account to come to terms with what it involved, he became—in his own words at the time—‘more and more conscious of being an outlaw’.

La Pologne dans l'Eglise médiévale by Jerzy Kloczowski

522 BOOK REVIEWS The final study comprises a selection of notes under the collective title, "Liturgical Books from Late Anglo-Saxon England: A Review of Some Historical Problems."There is hardly room here for a thumbnail sketch of each of the nine problems with which he deals, for each short essay delineates a fresh approach to a topic central to the history of the English liturgy. The topics include: the continuity of liturgical tradition (and lack of it) as evidenced by the liturgical manuscripts from the eighth century to the tenth; the transference of eighthand ninth-century books from northern to southern centers exclusively until about the time of King ^Ethelstan, after which southern books are often seen to be conveyed northwards; the liturgical or quasi-liturgical use of the hagiographical libellus containing a uita and sometimes benedictions and homilies; the contribution of the Celtic (especially Breton) Church to the English Benedictine renewal, as evidenced by a variety of works of canon law, computistics, and hagiography and poetry; the function of documentary materials added to liturgical manuscripts to which a list of Gospel books so augmented is appended ; the presence of Old English in liturgical books as evidence of a trend which accelerated in the eleventh century before the Conquest to provide vernacular equivalencies for Latin texts; the categorization and function of a variety of liturgical books; the production of liturgical manuscripts in both its material and political dimensions; the implications for scribal practice and scriptorial identity of a "liturgical script." This is a most important compendium of English liturgical materials, one that will undoubtedly take its place beside Edmund Bishop's Litúrgica Histórica. Like that work, it will provoke further scholarship on the considerable body of Anglo-Saxon liturgical materials, materials which Dumville shows not merely to illuminate the development of church ritual, but also to corroborate and authenticate the processes of English intellectual and cultural history. Patrick W. Conner West Virginia University La Pologne dans l'Eglise médiévale. By Jerzy Kloczowski. [Collected Studies Series, CS 417.] (Brookfield, Vermont: Variorum, Ashgate Publishing Co. 1993. Pp. x, 321. $94.95.) The author of these collected studies is well known to readers of this journal and to students of ecclesiastical history in general. Jerzy Kloczowski is, among his other appointments, Professor of History of Polish Culture at the Catholic University of Lublin and a long-time Corresponding Fellow of the American Catholic Historical Association. His substantive scholarship, his editorial creativity and industriousness, his methodological innovations, and—especially for many outside Poland—his support ofyounger scholars have marked him as one of the major figures of our profession. BOOK REVIEWS 523 This volume brings together eighteen studies—in French, English, and Italian— published between 1962 and 1988 on the subject of medieval Poland in the context of the larger history of east central Europe. All originally appeared in west European or North American journals and series, in publications in the western languages in Poland, or—in many cases—in conference volumes. To list the individual items included here would do little more than reveal the enormous scope of Professor Kloczowski's interests; instead it is more appropriate to identify some of the themes reflected in these essays and articles. One important topic is the cultural and spiritual integration ofPoland into the Christian civilization of medieval Europe. This is addressed particularly effectively in the first essay, which focuses upon the crucial period of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Another theme is the institutional history of the Church in medieval Poland: the structure of ecclesiastical provinces and the growth of parishes.Yet a third theme, which indeed has been central to Kloczowski's major scholarly contributions in Polish, is the monastic and mendicant movements in Poland. This is addressed in both general studies and in essays focused more specifically on such varied groups as the Canons Regular, the Cistercians, the Carthusians, the Dominicans and Franciscans, and others. Given the important contributions which Professor Kloczowski has made over the years to the cultural and religious geography ofPoland and the region,it is good to have a number ofarticles which provide a summary of his approach, in particular item XI,his geographic...

Burrowing into The Borrowers

Burrowing into The Borrowers Donna R. White Jon Stott. Mary Norton. Twayne’s English Authors Series 508. New York: Twayne, 1994. Mary Norton is remembered mainly for her books about the Borrowers, a race of tiny people who survive by “borrowing” things from humans. Little people have had a strong appeal for children for centuries: in Elizabethan times we shrank the fairies to a diminutive stature, in the eighteenth century children appropriated the Lilliputian chapters of Gulliver’s Travels, and more recently Lynne Reid Banks has entertained young readers with a series of books about an Indian in the cupboard. Along with T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose (1947) and Pauline Clarke’s The Return of the Twelves (1964), Norton’s books about the Borrowers fit cozily into this peculiar English subgenre of children’s literature. Jon Stott is a great admirer of the Borrower stories. Half of his Twayne volume on Mary Norton is devoted to a discussion of the series—an appropriate concentration, since more than half of Norton’s literary output revolved around the Borrowers. Stott clearly believes that the Borrower books represent the apex of Norton’s literary achievement. Her earlier works, The Magic Bed-Knob and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1957) (better known by their collective title, Bed-Knob and Broomstick (1957) receive more cursory treatment, and Stott seems hard pressed to find literary value in the unusual late work Are All the Giants Dead? (1975). When he discourses on the Borrowers, however, Stott burrows deeply into the books and emerges with armloads of literary treasures. Much of the discussion centers on the changing narrative structure of [End Page 269] the five books, which evolves from ambiguous frame story to direct narrative in a manner that parallels the Borrowers’ increasing independence from the “human beans.” In The Borrowers (1952), the first book in the series, Mrs. May tells the story of a Borrower family from long ago—Pod, Homily, and Arrietty Clock—to her willful niece Kate, leaving the little people’s fate unknown. The Borrowers Afield (1955) and The Borrowers Afloat (1959) also contain frame stories set in the present, but in The Borrowers Aloft (1961) Norton switches to a more direct narration set in the time period of the Clocks—the early decades of the twentieth century. Stott examines the effects of the changing narrative framework and argues that the changes show an increasing sophistication in Norton’s style. Stott also surveys previous criticism of the series, focusing on aspects of the novels such as their sociopolitical commentary, the female bildungsroman, and ways of seeing. The Clocks are presented as external observers of a human way of life that was quickly disappearing: the English class system and rural gentility. As a bildungsroman, The Borrowers and its sequels center on Arrietty, who matures from a slightly rebellious adolescent to a wiser, self-controlled and self-reliant young woman, learning along the way what it means to be a Borrower and coming to appreciate the dangers of talking to humans. Seeing and being seen are vital elements of the books, as most of the dangers encountered by the Clocks spring from Arrietty’s friendships with individual “human beans.” Surprisingly, Stott does not address one of the most appealing aspects of the books—the Borrowers’ ingenuity. When Pod and Arrietty construct a balloon anchor by tying two opened safety pins together (The Borrowers Aloft), the reader is charmed and amused. (This incident caused me serious trouble in childhood; reading the book surreptitiously in my sixth-grade science class, I inadvertently laughed out loud at the description of the anchor.) The inventiveness with which the Clocks appropriate small human items and adapt them to Borrower needs is what remains with readers long after they have forgotten the plot and the names of the characters. Stott discusses Norton’s first two children’s books, The Magic Bed-Knob and Bonfires and Broomsticks, in terms of their relationship to The Borrowers, referring to them as “harbingers of greatness.” These books are about an apprentice witch and the displaced children who come to stay with her during the London blitz. Although the story was made into a Disney film...

Classical singers of the opera and recital stages: a bibliography of biographical materials

Introduction Bibliographical Abbreviations Collective Titles: Books on Singers Collective Titles: Related Books Individual Singers, A-Z Appendix I: Additional Artists Appendix II: Grove-Opera Index Index of Authors, Compilers, and Editors

Being and Goodness: The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology ed. by Scott MacDonald

150 BOOK REVIEWS Being and Goodness: The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology. Edited by SCOTT MACDONALD. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp. 328. $43.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. The quality of these (mostly) new essays and the modest price make Being and Goodness recommendable, almost as two anthologies in one. This ambitious collection has a split personality: careful interpretations of medieval texts (in part I) are yoked to intriguing contributions to contemporary discussions in metaethics and philosophical theology (in part II). Four essays by Eleonore Stump, Norman Kretzman, or both, appear to he the heart and inspiration of this anthology. Their contributions are about 40% of the length of the volume; and their collaborative essay, "Being and Goodness" (the only reprinted essay included), pro· vides both the collection's title and its theme, which is to enrich con· temporary debate in philosophical theology and virtue ethics by :mining the resources of the ancient and medieval tradition that " the terms ' being ' and 'goodness ' are the same in reference, differing only in sense" 99). Other contributors (Scott MacDonald, Jan A. Aertsen, Ralph Mc· Inerny, Mark D. Jordan, and Jorge J. E. Gracia analyze medieval texts in the tradition from Augustine to Suarez; William E. Mann and Thomas V. Morris contribute essays in philosophical theology) do not integrate historical analysis and original speculation. The editor frames this collection with a fine introductory survey of the being/goodness tradition from Plato through the Middle Ages, a considerable (13 page) bibliography, and a new translation of Boethi.us's De hebdomadibus, which was an influential text in the tradition. There are two distinct ways of conceiving the necessary connection between being and goodness. The " participation approach," which sees being as metaphysically and causally dependent upon goodness, tends to a theological and relational account of goodness: creatures are good only because they are created by God, who is goodness in itself. The "nature approach," on the other hand, derives from Aristotle and tends to neither a theological nor a relational account of goodness. It identifies the good with the end, or telos of a being: an existing thing is good when it fully actualizes its intrinsic nature. The tension he0 tween these approaches can lead to confusion or to fruitful synthesis. For example, Albert the Great took up contradictory accounts of goodness in part hecause he failed to distinguish the two senses of " end " {as intention and as nature) characteristic of the pm:ticipation and BOOK REVIEWS 151 nature approaches, according to MacDonald's "The Metaphysics of Goodness and the Doctrine of the Transcendentals." On the other hand, Aquinas successfully combined approaches in his exploration of the tension between the views that ' good ' is a common name applicable to all beings (Aristotelian) and that only God is 'good' (Platonic), argues Jan A. Aer·tsen in "Good as Transcendental and the Transcendence of the Good." Stump and Kretzmann begin " Being and Goodness " with a lucid summary and defense of Aquinas's metaethics as a worthy contender for " the metaethical foundation that recent virtue-centered morality has been criticized for lacking" (p. 98). Aquinas's view that goodness is a property which supervenes upon a natural property, the actualiza· tion of the individual's " substantial form," follows the nature approach. Their derivation of Aquinas's normative ethical rules from this metae· thics responds to critics who claim virtue-theoretical approaches do not illumine the role of deontological rules in morality. They explore implications for theories of religious ethics (the divine-command theory is avoided) and certain solutions to the problem of evil; these explorations are relatively undeveloped, but intriguing. Stump builds on this collaborative essay in her "Aquinas on Faith and Goodness" when she argues that Aquinas's being/goodness meta· ethics explains why God would want humans to accept propositions about God on faith rather than knowledge, why having faith is meri· torious, and why epistemological weighing of evidence plays only a minor part in adult religious conversions. Stump's conclusions are based on her thesis that when one assents to the proposition " God exists" on faith, one is "metaphysically justified" in this belief because one hungers for perfect goodness, perfect...