Earlier Monograph Research Articles

Reflections on the Heuristic Teaching in Xue Ji

Xue Ji is the earliest monograph on educational theory in ancient education in ancient Chinese education. It is the crystallization of the wisdom of the sages of ancient education in ancient times. It is the treasure of our human culture. It contains many useful experience and unique insights. The inspirational teaching principles and methods of inspiration and induction, even more than 2,000 years later, still have a great reference and revelation effect. This article briefly describes the connotation of inspiring teaching in Xue Ji, and combines the same classic inspiration thoughts in my country's "The Analects of Confucius". Two representative inspiration teaching methods in the West, and finally think about how to use inspiration teaching to our current teaching activities.

Как Эммануэль Ле Руа Ладюри не стал микроисториком

The article analyzes the work of the outstanding French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929–2023), a pupil of Ernest Labrousse and Fernand Braudel, one of the oldest and most prominent representatives of the third generation of the «Annals»’ school. Paying tribute to the variety of scientific interests of the historian, the author of the article focused on one aspect of his work – on the definition of E. Le Roy Ladurie, which regularly appears in modern historiography, as a follower of microhistory in its French variation. According to the author of the article, several early monographs of the scientist allow researchers to draw a similar conclusion: «Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324» (1975), «Le Carnaval de Romans: de la Chandeleur au Mercredi des cendres (1579–1580)» (1979), «La Sorcière de Jasmin» (1980). Nevertheless, the analysis of the methodology proposed in these works forces us to see in E. Le Roy Ladurie a specialist primarily in «fixed history», which in turn refers to the works of Cl. Levi-Strauss and E. E. Evans-Pritchard and allows us to take a fresh look at the phenomenon of the «Long Middle Ages».

Saikosaponin a activates tet1/dll3/notch1 signalling and promotes hippocampal neurogenesis to improve depression-like behavior in mice

Ethnopharmacological relevanceRadix Bupleuri, also named “Chaihu” in Chinese, is a substance derived from the dry roots of Bupleurum chinense DC. [Apiaceae] and Bupleurum scorzonerifolium Willd. [Apiaceae]. Radix Bupleuri was initially recorded as a medicinal herb in Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing, the earliest monograph concerning traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Ever since, Radix Bupleuri has been broadly used to alleviate exterior syndrome, disperse heat, modulate the liver-qi, and elevate yang-qi in TCM. Radix Bupleuri has also been utilized as an important component in Xiaoyaosan, a classical formula for relieving depression, which was originated from the famous Chinese medical book called “Tai Ping Hui Min He Ji Ju Fang” in Song Dynasty. Currently, many valuable pharmacological effects of Radix Bupleuri have been explored, such as antidepressant, neuroprotective activities, antiinflammation, anticancer, immunoregulation, etc. Former studies have illustrated that Saikosaponin A (SSa), one of the primary active components of Radix Bupleuri, possesses potential antidepressant properties. However, the underlying mechanisms still remain unknown. Aim of the studyWe used a chronic social defeat stress (CSDS) mouse model to explore the ameliorative effects and potential mechanisms of SSa in depressive disorder in vivo. Materials and methodsThe CSDS mouse model was established and mice underwent behavioral studies using assays such as the social interaction test (SIT), sucrose preference test (SPT), forced-swim test (FST), tail suspension test (TST), and open field test (OFT). Western blotting, immunofluorescence, and Golgi staining were performed to investigate signaling pathway activity, and alterations in synaptic spines in the hippocampus. To model the anticipated interaction between SSa and Tet1, molecular docking and microscale thermophoresis (MST) techniques were employed. Finally, sh-RNA Tet1 was employed for validation via lentiviral transfection in CSDS mice to confirm the requirement of Tet1 for SSA efficacy. ResultsSSa dramatically reduced depressed symptoms, boosted the expression of Tet1, Notch, DLL3, and BDNF, encouraged hippocampus development, and enhanced the dendritic spine density of hippocampal neurons. In contrast, Tet1 knockdown in CSDS mice dampened the beneficial effects of SSa on depressive symptoms. ConclusionsTherefore, our results suggest that SSa significantly activates the Tet1/Notch/DLL3 signaling pathways and promotes hippocampal neurogenesis to exert antidepressant effects in the CSDS mouse model in vivo. The present results also provide new insight into the importance of the Tet1/DLL3/Notch pathways as potential targets for novel antidepressant development.

Darian R. Lockett. Letters for the Church: Reading James, 1–2 Peter, 1–3 John, and Jude as Canon

Darian R. Lockett. <i>Letters for the Church: Reading James, 1–2 Peter, 1–3 John, and Jude as Canon</i>

Gläubige Zeiten: Religiosität im Dritten Reich

Over the past two decades, nobody has done more to transform our understanding of German Protestantism during the Nazi era than the Berlin-based historian Manfred Gailus. Beginning with his 2001 study, Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus, and continuing through a number of monographs and edited volumes, Gailus has systematically revised traditional understandings of German Protestantism in the Nazi period as defined by religious resistance against the regime. Instead, Gailus has directed our attention to influential areas of consensus between church and state, such as common opposition to the political Left and Weimar liberalism, and mutual commitment to German nationalism. He is thus well placed to have written this short and thought-provoking survey summarizing the findings of recent scholarship on religious belief and identity in Nazi Germany. Unlike much of Gailus’s previous work, Gläubige Zeiten represents an effort to write history at the macro rather than the micro level. Eschewing the regional and biographical approaches taken in earlier monographs, Gailus examines the entire territory of the German Reich, analysing not only both major Christian confessions, but also the contested and ambiguous worlds of Nazi religiosity, in addition to minor ethnic-national (völkisch) religious groups such as German Faith Movement. Gläubige Zeiten covers the twelve years of the Nazi dictatorship, devoting the final of its four sections to discussion of the war years and the Holocaust. Its thematic focus specifically addresses the theme of religiosity, privileging belief and mentality over the institutional church-state relations traditionally central to much scholarship in this field.

Heredity under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome by Soraya de Chadarevian (review).

Reviewed by: Heredity under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome by Soraya de Chadarevian Miguel García-Sancho Soraya de Chadarevian. Heredity under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 272 pp. Ill. $37.50 (978-0-226-68511-3). In Heredity under the Microscope, Soraya de Chadarevian complements the picture of post-World War II biomedicine that she uncovered in her previous book, Designs for Life: Molecular Biology after World War II.1 Unlike in her earlier monograph, here she focuses on chromosomes as spaces of convergence of several lines of inquiry. This focus on research objects rather than disciplinary developments leads her to investigate a variety of practices that life scientists deployed to visualize and [End Page 466] interpret human chromosomes. The diversity of disciplinary backgrounds of these scientists and the multiplicity of uses to which their chromosome practices were put enable the author to expand the historiographical boundaries of both molecular biology and genetics research. Firstly, de Chadarevian disentangles “the study of postwar human heredity from the predominant concern about continuities with eugenic practices” (p. 5). The book does not limit itself to documenting the invention of karyotyping techniques to represent and detect anomalies in human chromosomes; it follows their standardization and spread, including their use as evidence of safe levels of radiation in the workplace (chapter 1) or sex assignment in the Olympic games (chapter 3). The emphasis on these uses, departed as they were from scientific theories about population improvement, displaces eugenics as the dominant interpretative framework of the history of human genetics. Secondly, the book presents chromosomes as showing “historical commonalities” (p. 177) between two approaches that have been traditionally considered as separate: molecular genetics and microscope-assisted chromosome observations. De Chadarevian stresses how these two approaches emerged as a consequence of the key role that nuclear research had played during World War II and the search of peacetime applications. Radioactive isotopes decisively fostered molecular biology, while the investigation of the effects of radiation was a crucial concern of human and medical geneticists using chromosome observations (chapter 1). Both molecular biologists and chromosome researchers also attempted to apply computers to their investigations, the former as an aid to the structural study of proteins and DNA, and the latter to automate the interpretation of karyotype images (chapter 4). However, whereas molecular biologists focused on simpler organisms, chromosome researchers engaged with both human populations and patients in the clinic. Radiation-induced leukemia was their first focus for then rapidly shifting to other conditions (especially those affecting mental abilities and sex identity) and larger-scale epidemiological studies (chapters 2 and 4). The 1960s, a decade that historians have dubbed the golden age of molecular biology,2 was also a time of expansion of chromosome observations. From the mid-1970s onward, molecular biologists turned to human subjects in order to realize the medical promise of the new recombinant DNA techniques. It is at this point when the intersection with chromosome research becomes more visible and de Chadarevian wonders “whose turn” this represents in history, a molecularization of human genetics or a humanization of molecular biology (pp. 171–76). Although subsequent success stories have put the emphasis on molecular biology, chapter 5 shows the importance of chromosome research as a key tool for gene mapping and the emergence of the human genome as an object of study. Even in the so-called post-genomic era, chromosome observations are [End Page 467] essential to clinically interpret the molecular sequence data derived from the Human Genome Project. Overall, the book offers a most welcomed framework to address the coexistence of chromosome observations and molecular biology, and their importance in genomics research. Understanding this is a pressing historiographical problem, given the dominance of molecular biologists in existing narratives and the apparent revival of chromosome research. There is yet still work to do in exploring specific overlaps between the visual and molecular approaches to the genome. A potential candidate is Victor McKusick, a main actor in de Chadarevian’s account and a co-author of the article in which Celera Genomics presented one of the draft sequences of the human...

Review: Balkrishna Doshi: Writings on Architecture and Identity and One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash

Review: <i>Balkrishna Doshi: Writings on Architecture and Identity</i> and <i>One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash</i>

Puritans and Pilgrims

Puritans and Pilgrims Christopher Grasso New Light on the Old Colony: Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration. Early American History. By Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs. Leiden: Brill, 2020. 582 pages. Cloth, ebook. One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puritans and the Beginnings of English New England. By Francis J. Bremer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 267 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. By David D. Hall. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019. 525 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. The World of Plymouth Plantation. By Carla Gardina Pestana. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. 244 pages. Cloth, ebook. They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty. By John G. Turner. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2020. 459 pages. Cloth, ebook. There was a time, a couple of scholarly generations ago, when a certain breed of graduate student in early American history seemed to embrace Giles Corey as their patron saint. Corey had been accused of witchcraft in Salem in 1692, but as the sheriff piled stone after stone upon him to force him to plea, Corey merely called for “more weight.”1 Three centuries later, [End Page 121] Corey’s New England Puritans appeared vital to understanding American religious and intellectual history. “Begin with Perry Miller’s two volumes on The New England Mind and work forward,” our mentors said. And as the next dense explication of Puritan theology or a six-hundred-page meditation on the cultural meanings of Plymouth Rock was added to our already long reading lists, like Corey we grinned or grimaced and called for more weight.2 But scholars have ceased to habitually plumb Puritanism for the deep sources of the “American mind” or the “American self.” We have long known how much Max Weber missed when he saw the Puritan strain of Protestantism as the font of “individualism.” We have long recognized that, despite the appropriations of politicians such as Ronald Reagan, John Winthrop’s 1630 invocation of a “city on a hill” was not a prophecy of American exceptionalism. In the pages of the William and Mary Quarterly at the end of the last century, Charles L. Cohen pronounced the end of the Puritan paradigm in early American religious history.3 New England Puritans, once dour giants bestriding American Studies, retreated to the hills and hollows of scholarly subspecialty, occasionally reemerging more fully as denizens of the seventeenth-century British Atlantic world. Perhaps most contemporary Americans only think of grim witch-hunting Puritans on Halloween and buckle-hatted Pilgrims on Thanks-giving, not giving much thought to the connections between the two. But most of the English settlers founding Plymouth were very much part of the larger movement that David D. Hall describes in his synthetic survey, The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. Hall himself is not much interested in the small Plymouth branch of the much larger Puritan tree. The other volumes under review here, however, each published with an eye toward the four hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower’s voyage, pay close attention to the significance of the Puritan version of “hot Protestantism” in that colony, even if they come to different conclusions.4 [End Page 122] Hall writes that when he began his doctoral work in 1959, historians of early New England tended to have “colonists unpack the luggage labeled Puritanism and magically turn into ‘founders’ of the America-to-be—founders of a literary tradition or something resembling democracy, and especially founders of a ready-made ‘identity’” (10). He names some of the leading American scholars who introduced the Atlantic turn to their studies of Puritan theology and practice: “Michael McGiffert, E. Brooks Holifield, Baird Tipson, W. G. B. Stoever, Theodore Dwight Bozeman, and Charles Hambrick-Stowe” (10–11) and also “Norman Fiering, Charles Lloyd Cohen, Francis J. Bremer, Richard Cogley, and Stephen Foster” (11). Most would add Hall to this list of luminaries. To an even longer list of British scholars, the name of Patrick Collinson stands out as a major influence. Hall’s early monograph, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the...

Regimes of Relevance

At the core of this essay is an exploration of the notion of regime of relevance introduced by Galin Tihanov in his monograph The Birth and Death of Literary Theory (2019). On the one hand, the author traces the ramifications of Tihanov’s coinage and demonstrates possible arenas for its further application; on the other, the essay researches the origins of the notion in Michel Foucault’s formulation of regime of truth. After a brief account of the Bulgarian reception of Foucault’s work, the text turns to Foucault’s early monograph The Order of Things (1966) to explore the paths that link Tihanov’s work to Foucault’s and then compares a reconstructed version of Foucault’s project for literary theory to Tihanov’s project.

Dynamics of lexicographic presentation and practical use of personal nouns with sufіx -ц(a).

This article explores changes in the lexicographic presentation of personal nouns with the suffix -ц(a). The study is based on materials from 20 dictionaries of the 20th and early 21st centuries, academic grammars and monographs. The dynamic processes of the entry of words of this type into the lexicon, their competitive interaction with identical masculine nouns with suffix -ец, -нік and adverbial nouns are analyzed. There are given examples of new formed words, which were included in lexicographic publications. The study notices differencies in presentating of the lexemes with -ц(a) in modern dictionaries: in quantity of these nouns as derivating synonyms of nouns of masculine gender with suffix -ец, -нік ets. and in gender marks (only masculine or masculine and common). Analysis of modern media texts shows a wider use of nouns with the suffix -ц(a) to mark a female person. In practice, variants of the gender and type of declension of nouns with the suffix -ц(a) causes difficulties in the use of case endings.

“Sermon among the ruins”: Laurens van der Post’s natural aesthetic

ABSTRACT Laurens van der Post is chiefly remembered by the general public for his voluminous and at times bewitchingly popular writings, and for his almost guru-like status as a conservationist. Yet only one early and incomplete monograph deals with Van der Post’s literary output. His several novels have received patchy critical attention, and none have been examined ecocritically, despite their pervasive ruminations upon the natural world. This article investigates four relatively neglected novels for their evocation of Van der Post’s “natural aesthetic”: Flamingo Feather (1955), The Hunter and the Whale (1967), A Story Like the Wind (1971), and its sequel A Far-Off Place (1974). I focus on passages which evince, through their stylistics, a distinctive aesthetic, suggesting that internal antitheses and ironies reflect wider dilemmas of nature conservation. I point to a potentially fruitful confluence between some recent developments in ecocriticism, literary animal studies, and environmental aesthetics – all the more necessary in our present global ecological climacteric.

Four Decades of Table Mountain Pine Demography on Looking Glass Rock (Transylvania Co., North Carolina, USA)

Table Mountain pine (Pinus pungens) is an Appalachian endemic that requires canopy-opening disturbance such as fire or logging for successful regeneration. The infrequency and typically moderate intensity of Appalachian lightning-ignited fires combined with Table Mountain pine's requirement for canopy disturbance for successful recruitment posed an ecological question: How did Table Mountain pine (TMP) persist in North America for almost 1.5 million years without anthropogenic fires? An early monograph on TMP suggested that the species might have persisted without fire on extremely xeric and sterile rock outcrops. Motivated by this suggestion, in 1976 the first author located a small TMP population on a xeric rock outcrop in western North Carolina where no fires had occurred since 1889. Three longitudinal censuses in 1976, 1986, and 1996 showed that the population had perpetuated itself without fire for more than 100 years. The current study extends this record of self-maintenance an additional 20 years and compares decadal variations in age structure with 120 years of drought records from western North Carolina. An unexpected observation of this 40-year study was a slow invasion of the TMP study site by ericaceous shrubs, a terminal transition that was predicted in a 2010 model of oak-pine-heath succession without fire.

Маркери театральної культури (Державний театр, 1917–1934, початок)

The principles of periodization of the history of Ukrainian theater, suggested by different researchers, were studied. Proceeding from the ideas of the representatives of the intellectual history, the analysis of the peculiarities of the theatrical culture of Ukraine from 1917 to 1934 was suggested on the basis of markers — the term system of a certain period, the significant renewal of which indicates the end of a particular period and the beginning of a new one. Elements of the term system cover different groups of features of the theatrical culture, including institutions; morphology of the theater; functions and tasks of the theater; theater goers; method; criticism; science, as well as the systematic interaction of these elements. The source basis of the research was the materials collected by the author for the dictionary on the history of the theatrical culture of Ukraine, which comprises two and a half thousand useful sources, including chronicles, dramatic works, school theater poetics, manifestos by the theater luminaries of the early 20th century, letters, monographs, dictionaries, reviews, creative portraits, and other documents that record the terminology of Ukrainian theater from its inception. In regard to quantity, these sources are divided into two parts – about one thousand sources are dated before 1917, the same number — prior to 1934, and about five hundred — from 1934 to the beginning of the 21st century. In the course of the analysis of the sources, nearly six thousand terms and set expressions, of which more than four thousand, that is, two thirds, relate to the theater theory and practice of the 20th century, were recorded. Among them, the period of the most active word-formation (more than two and a half thousand terms and set expressions) dates precisely to 1917–1934. Processing new text arrays can change this ratio, but it is unlikely to change dramatically, because by the law of large numbers, the error will not be critical. In the course of the analysis, the main blocks of terms and, accordingly, the phenomena that they define, which determine the peculiarities of the theatrical culture of Ukraine from 1917 to 1934, were identified. The main event in the history of the theatrical art of Ukraine of the specified period was determined as follows: nationalization of the theater evidenced by system changes in the theatrical culture, including the preparation and release process of performances, education system, as well as the emergence of new theatrical terms, each of which is based on a new phenomenon. It was the largest ever recorded system turn, which could be marked neither by the birth of one of the luminaries of the theater, nor by the production of a play that was considered to be highly artistic by theatrical journalism. The key concept of that time was the concept of proletarian culture, which was opposed to the bourgeois culture. However, the use of both concepts was manipulative: when the audience boycotted the theater, the audience was called narrow-minded people, and vice versa — when the theater didn’t meet the expectations of the authorities, the artists were accused of the narrow-minded psychology and bourgeois biases. The main criterion was not the truth anymore. It was the right to rename, give names and communicate names, which was delegated by the authorities either to the media, or to some collective structure — a public organization, a working collective, party meetings, etc. This explains the unprecedented development of theatrical and artistic journalism, in general. Regardless of the subjective intentions of the authors, the main feature of the method of structuring consciousness at that time was creating a world of changing, and sometimes chaotic meanings, and speculative, constantly changing criteria.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La resistencia del deseo by Francisco Ramírez Santacruz

Reviewed by: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La resistencia del deseo by Francisco Ramírez Santacruz George Antony Thomas Ramírez Santacruz, Francisco. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La resistencia del deseo. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2019. 317 pp. Octavio Paz’s monumental book Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe (1982) has been the standard reference work on the life and literature of the celebrated colonial Mexican writer since its publication in 1982. Francisco Ramírez Santacruz’s recent biography of Sor Juana offers a new interpretation, one that incorporates the many significant archival finds that have been made since Paz’s book first appeared. As Ramírez Santacruz explains in the prologue, his primary objective in this biography is to document the details of Sor Juana’s life and provide an objective analysis: “esta biografía propone una exégesis lo más objetiva posible de [End Page 873] todos los datos que se conocen de sor Juana hasta el día de hoy” (12). Paz attempted to paint a very broad picture, highlighting the colonial milieu in which Sor Juana worked and offering interpretations of many of her literary works, and he sometimes strayed from objectivity in trying to offer a psychological portrait of the nun in the mode of Ludwig Pfandl’s early monograph. Ramírez Santacruz’s biography is more traditional in that it covers the entire trajectory of Sor Juana’s life and it offers more details about her family and her interactions with a variety of important figures in the viceroyalty of New Spain. The first two chapters of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: La resistencia del deseo deal with Sor Juana’s life before she became a Hieronymite nun. Chapter one, “Los riesgos del mar (¿1648/1651?–1664),” provides a great deal of information about Sor Juana’s family, beginning with her maternal grandparents. Although this biography does not resolve the issue of Sor Juana’s exact birth date, it does affirm that her father was a native of the Canary Islands named Pedro de Asuaje (24). In addition, while many critics (and Sor Juana herself) seem to have believed that her father was of Basque origin, Ramírez Santacruz proposes that this was probably not the case and that this feigned lineage possibly had something to do with the high esteem of the Basque community in New Spain (27). There is a wealth of information about Sor Juana’s family and her early years in this chapter. The author goes beyond emphasizing the importance of Sor Juana’s grandfather (and his library) by establishing the key role played by the Mata family (Sor Juana’s uncle and aunt), who adopted her into their home in the capital of New Spain and played a central role in establishing her place at the court of a new viceroy. Chapter two, “El objeto venerado (1665–1667),” attempts to provide a glimpse into Sor Juana’s time at the viceregal court of the marquesses de Mancera and her brief attempt to join the Discalced Carmelite convent in Mexico City. This period is very difficult to document and so the author frequently strays from discussing what Sor Juana did during these three years and instead tries to speculate on the nature of her religious faith and why she decided to profess as a nun. Many of the primary sources cited in this chapter are Sor Juana’s own writings in addition to the somewhat hagiographic texts written by contemporaries (Diego Calleja and Juan Antonio de Oviedo). Although the author does try to maintain his objectivity, some Sor Juana scholars have advanced alternative interpretations on these issues. Despite the clear difficulties in establishing many factual details pertaining to this period, the author offers many interesting ideas about why Sor Juana first chose the Discalced Carmelites and, when discussing her abrupt departure from their community, highlights the intriguing fact that, between 1665 and 1670, there weren’t any professions in the convent that Sor Juana chose to abandon (57–59). In comparison to chapter two, the subsequent section on Sor Juana’s ultimate profession and entrance...

Novel: La genesi del romanzo moderno nell'Inghilterra del Settecento. [Novel: The Rise of the Modern Novel in Eighteenth-Century England.] by Riccardo Capoferro

Reviewed by: Novel: La genesi del romanzo moderno nell'Inghilterra del Settecento. [Novel: The Rise of the Modern Novel in Eighteenth-Century England.] by Riccardo Capoferro Flavio Gregori Riccardo Capoferro. Novel: La genesi del romanzo moderno nell'Inghilterra del Settecento. [Novel: The Rise of the Modern Novel in Eighteenth-Century England.] Rome: Carocci Editore. 2017. Pp. 271. €24. Capoferro's Novel is the ideal sequel to his earlier monographs on eighteenth-century prose: Frontiere del racconto. Letteratura di viaggio e romanzi in Inghilterra, 1680–1750 (2007; on travel narrative and the novel), and Empirical Wonder: Historicizing the Fantastic, 1660–1760 (2010); as well as to his introductory books on Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (2003) and Jonathan Swift (2013) for Italian undergraduates. Novel is an ambitious attempt to update the debate on the rise of that literary genre started by Ian Watt and carried on by several scholars, including Michael McKeon, whose tracks Capoferro perceptively follows. The core idea of his study is that new literary forms of representing life, based on the self's observation and interpretation of external and internal stimuli, emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and helped shape an approach to realism different from the mimetic representation of previous centuries insofar as it depended not so much on mirroring the outside world but on receiving and processing ideas within subjective and then intersubjective experience. In Capoferro's view, rather than being a direct result of the philosophical empiricism of Bacon and [End Page 218] Locke, this new literary approach to realism was a parallel phenomenon. Its main urge was to fashion the interpretive abilities of the readership by accommodating them to a new "social imaginary" that was emerging in the seventeenth century as an alternative to the ancien-régime ethos. Capoferro's interpretation of this "social imaginary" owes much to Charles Taylor's theory of the economic model of human society, and, of course, to Jürgen Habermas's history of the rise of the public sphere. To the already well-known interpretation of the novel as the result of the struggle between competing secular beliefs and moral-political ideas, Capoferro adds his own thesis, according to which this new realism materialized as an aesthetic mediation among, rather than a simple result of, competing worldviews. This realism of mediation and exchange was part of a new cognitive experience based not only on empirical knowledge but also, and above all, on an intersubjective life that was unknown to previous, ancien-régime literary form. Capoferro's history of the novel in part will look familiar to English scholars, especially in its structure which follows Watt's Rise of the Novel. The book in fact starts with a chapter on the cultural foundation of the novel from the culture of absolutism to the public sphere of opinion, followed by a chapter on the transition from ancien-régime verisimilitude to empirical realism; and by three chapters on Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, together with a coda on the development of fiction to the mid-eighteenth century. However, it also shows original ideas and close readings that flesh out the abovementioned new methodological approach and steer it away from the formal and dialectical models respectively offered by Watt and McKeon. In particular, Capoferro does not believe there are clear-cut boundaries separating the romance and the novel, nor between conservative and progressive ideologies. Unlike McKeon, he thinks that the novel emerges not so much as a simple abstraction at the end of a dialectical process opposing and intertwining conservative and progressive ideologies, but rather as a protean form that variously adjusts itself to epistemic shifts and tentatively incorporates them as interpretive models of an ever-changing reality. Therefore, instead of one single "realism" there are various novelistic "realisms" or, as Capoferro calls them, "empirical fictions." The rise of the novel thus becomes a lasting enterprise that never reaches a climax or stabilizes itself. The book's final chapter on "narrative immersion" (an important addendum to the most common histories of the eighteenth-century novel) opens up new views based on a cognitive interpretation of the novel's approach to the relationship between self and the world. In...

Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul’s Theology and Spirituality by Michael J. Gorman

Reviewed by: Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul’s Theology and Spirituality by Michael J. Gorman Thomas Schmeller michael j. gorman, Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul’s Theology and Spirituality (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019). Pp. xxiv + 294. Paper $30. “As in real estate, so also in soteriology: location is everything” (p. 194). In an exegetical work, this comparison is somewhat surprising, but it is a precise summary of Michael J. Gorman’s main thesis, which he explains in the following way: “Jesus the Messiah became, for us, God’s righteousness and thus was the ‘location’ of God’s righteousness, God’s saving act of restorative justice; he is now the location of believers, who are ‘in’ the Messiah. For that reason, those who are in Christ can ‘become,’ or embody . . . the sort of justice/righteousness that is characteristic of the God who has acted in Jesus Christ” (p. 194). The book is mainly about these theological concepts: about what God did “in Christ” and how the ones who are “in Christ” participate in this event. But “participation” does not come alone; its indispensable companion is “transformation,” that is, “theosis, deification, divinization, Christosis, and Christification” (p. xvi). Thus, G.’s thesis has consequences for ecclesiology, ethics, and other fields of theology. In this book, G. continues the “participationist perspective” (p. xxii) of his earlier monographs, but he gives a new direction to it by focusing on 2 Cor 5:14–21. If we look closer at what he is doing, the main issue is the relationship between participation and justification or righteousness, between participation and the imitation of Christ, and “between a cross-centered and a resurrection-centered spirituality and theology” (p. xxiii), a relationship he calls “resurrectional cruciformity” (p. xxiii). The book begins with a chapter in which G. clarifies what, in his eyes, Paul means by “in Christ,” “with Christ,” and related expressions, giving an overview of Pauline theology and spirituality and concentrating on “four closely related topics: the cross, cruciformity, dying and rising with Christ, and mission” (p. 27). The first two of these topics are dealt [End Page 506] with in the second (the cross) and the third (cruciformity) chapters, but then this clear sequence gives way to extensive and intensive interpretations of specific texts, the most important of which are Phil 2:5; Gal 1:16; 2:15–21; 4:4–6; 2 Cor 2:15–21; 4:7–12; Romans 4; 5:12–21; 6. All of these texts and topics are dealt with in part 1 of the book. In a much shorter part 2, G. writes about “Paul and Participation Today,” trying “to bring Paul more directly into conversation with the contemporary Christian church” (p. 237). He takes up Martin Luther King’s sermon “Paul’s Letter to American Christians” and develops it into a long message of Paul to North American Christians in the twenty-first century. Finally, the book offers reflections on spiritual and ethical implications of Paul’s witness to the resurrection for the life of the church today (pp. 255–62). It is not possible, of course, to do justice to G.s learned argumentation in this short review. I will limit myself to highlighting one idea that I find most interesting, although I do not agree with it. Starting with 1 Cor 2:2, where Paul limits his proclamation to the cross, G. asks about the relationship between cross and resurrection: How can believers participate in Christ’s cross and in his resurrection at the same time? G.’s answer is not only that this relationship is paradoxical (an interpretation that is shared by many). He insists that one has to go further: “[W]e must maintain Paul’s emphasis on the cross and therefore grant the word ‘cruciform’ a certain priority” (p. 55). Cross and resurrection do not function on the same level: participation in Christ has the form of the cross, but it has the quality of the resurrection (p. 58). Thus, “the cruciform life is suffused with the power of the resurrection; it is resurrectional, but not resurrectiform” (p. 61). In the context of 1 Cor 1:18–2:5, Paul’s statement...

Chemical and pharmacological research on the polyphenol acids isolated from Danshen: A review of salvianolic acids.

Danshen, the dried root of Salvia miltiorrhiza Bge, is a common medicinal herb in Traditional Chinese Medicine, which has been used for the treatment of a number of diseases for thousands of years. More than 2000 years ago, the Chinese early pharmacy monograph "Shennong Materia Medica" recorded that Danshen could be used for the treatment of gastrointestinal diseases, cardiovascular diseases, certain gynecological diseases, etc. Since then, Danshen has been widely used clinically in many different prescriptions for many different diseases, especially for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Nowadays, many pharmacological studies about the water-soluble components from Danshen have been reported, especially salvianolic acids. It turned out that salvianolic acids showed strong anti-lipid peroxidation and anti-thrombic activities, and among them, SalAA and SalAB were the most potent. This review focused on the achievements in research of salvianolic acids regarding their bioactivities and pharmacological effects. These studies not only shed light on the water-soluble active components of Danshen and their mechanisms at the molecular level, but also provided theoretical information for the development of new medicines from Danshen for the treatment of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, inflammatory diseases, metabolic diseases, etc.

Luguburu: Ritual, Pilgrimage and Quest for Identity Among the Santals

The present paper studies an event of annual pilgrimage and congregation of the Santal at Luguburu hill in Jharkhand along with associated performative practices of dance, song, speech events and rituals. Lakhs of Santals, the largest tribal community in eastern India, assemble at this place to offer worship to Lugubaba during the full moon day in the Santal month of Sohrae corresponding to October-November in English calendar. Pilgrimage is a new phenomenon in Santal culture. The earlier monographs on the Santal did not give any reference to this phenomenon. Martin Orans’ celebrated study on the Santals in search of a great tradition of their own has no mention of this event. The present study has discussed and analyzed the emergence of the phenomenon of pilgrimage. The study has argued that the search for tradition is actually linked to new cultural inventions in changed contexts as well as socio-political milieu. The new ‘cultural enactments’ draw elements from own as well as neighbouring cultures as the present case has exhibited. The rituals and associated activities built upon a ‘prior discourse’ leads to performative practice that is directed towards a celebration of identity of a community.

Pinter Three and Pinter Four

Pinter Three and Pinter Four

Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan ed. by Karen M. Gerhart

Reviewed by: Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan ed. by Karen M. Gerhart Yui Suzuki Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan. Edited by Karen M. Gerhart. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 412 pages. Hardcover, €132.00/ $159.00. It is the twenty-first century, and we are reminded time and again that women's voices continue to be silenced, erased, and ignored (as I write this in late 2018, Christine Blasey Ford and her allegations against Brett Kavanaugh prior to his confirmation as a US Supreme Court justice come immediately to mind). In the notably thoughtful preface of the volume under review, Barbara Ruch, citing Mary Beard, relates that in the ancient Western World rapists cut out the tongues of their victims to silence them, while in today's world "we have … 'more civilized' non-disclosure clauses and bank checks to achieve the muting effect" (p. x). Ruch sees here a parallel with the Japanese case, where today as much as in the premodern period covered by this book, women are not always taken seriously. Women, Rites, and Ritual Objects in Premodern Japan, edited by Karen M. Gerhart, is a welcome contribution of ten scholarly essays that fill a deep lacuna in Japanese studies by restoring some of the ignored, forgotten, or deliberately suppressed voices and lives of women in premodern Japan. The book's three themes—women, rites, and ritual objects—have always been of great interest to Gerhart. In editing the volume, she took care to ensure that it addressed larger cultural concerns "such as gender politics, the female body, class, and materiality" (p. 1). As a multidisciplinary examination of rituals and their objects—in this case featuring women and female deities—the current book follows a trajectory established with the publication of Gerhart's two earlier monographs, which interwove material culture studies, ritual studies, and art history.1 The book covers a historical span of roughly a millennium, from the eighth century to the end of the nineteenth century. Its ten essays, organized into four parts—"Rituals Related to Household and Childbirth" (with essays by Gerhart, Anna Andreeva, and Naoko Gunji); "Women and Buddhist Rituals and Icons" (Chari Pradel, Hank Glassman, and Sherry Fowler); "Buddhist Women and Death Memorials" (Patricia Fister and Monica Bethe); and "Female Patronage, Portraits, and Rituals" (Elizabeth Morrissey and Elizabeth Self)—all touch upon the issue of gender and female agency in Japanese art and ritual practice from one perspective or another. [End Page 85] One of the difficulties in uncovering what women were actually doing when it came to ritual activities is that most of the extant primary sources documenting rituals, such as court diaries, official histories, medical treatises, and Buddhist handbooks, were initiated and written by men. As explained in the book's introduction, even when women regularly documented their daily lives, the specifics were often left out. The essays demonstrate how the contributors overcame the challenge presented by a scarcity of written sources to illuminate the lives of women in premodern Japan, both as subjects and as objects of ritual activity. Two of the essays are notable for illuminating the role of elite women in the performance of ritual. First, in chapter 1, Gerhart examines the active participation of aristocratic Heian women in a complex set of yin-yang rituals known as shintaku ishi that were prescribed by yin-yang masters (onmyōji) when a household moved to a new residence. Meanwhile chapter 9, by Elizabeth Morrissey, analyzes two extant sources, the fourteenth-century illustrated handscroll Ishiyamadera engi e (Illustrated Legends of Ishiyamadera) and the eleventh-century text Eiga monogatari (A Tale of Flowering Fortunes), and proposes that Higashisanjō-in (962–1002), the tenth-century consort of Emperor En'yū (959–991; r. 969–984) and mother of Emperor Ichijō (980–1011; r. 986–1011), was one of the key female patrons of Ishiyamadera and an avid devotee of its main object of worship, a "secret icon" (hibutsu; a Buddhist image hidden from view) of Nyoirin Kannon (Sk. Cintamāṇicakra). By Higashisanjō-in's time, this important temple already had a well-established reputation among elite women as a miraculous site. Ishiyamadera's Nyoirin Kannon image was particularly...