Entire Epoch Research Articles

Reform by Franco of Cologne as the basis of rhythmic notation

The article describes the stages of development of rhythmic notation, characterizes the essence of the reform of Franco of Cologne. Its significance for the formation of the Ars Nova notation has been revealed. The research methodology is based on a combination of general-historical and theoretical methods. The Franco’s notation reform can be summed up by next basic points. Firstly, in the framework of the already existing and rather long tradition of mensural music, which began condition ally from Johannes de Garlandia (in theory, in practice – even before), the Franco’s treatise had a unifying and systematic meaning. Also, the author brilliantly summarized the groundwork of an entire epoch in the history of western rhythmic notation. If we consider the pre-Franco’s notation to be potentially mensural, then Franco puts it in a classical form that will be relevant for the next two centuries. Secondly, Franco in his reform fixes the transition from a modal notation (which is still not quite stable in terms of unambiguous reading) to the actual mensural (quite stable in this attitude). And finally, in a broader sense, the Franco’s mensural system can be considered a completely emancipated system of musical rhythm. It is not related to the rhythm of the poem, either with the rhythm of prose, or with a priori rhythmic formulas that largely comprise the content of modal rhythm. From this point of view, the mensural system represents a further step in separating music from the word, from the verse, from the grammar. The collapse and interpenetration of modes led to the idea of a triple metric unit, abstraction from modes, to the idea of perfection. The connection with modes remained, since the perfection was a triple one, but it was already a theoretical abstraction, practically equivalent to the modern concept of a bar. Further steps in this direction were made by Vitry and Muris.

The Invention of Rome: Biondo Flavio's Roma Triumphans and Its Worlds ed. by Frances Muecke, and Maurizio Campanelli

Reviewed by: The Invention of Rome: Biondo Flavio's Roma Triumphans and Its Worlds ed. by Frances Muecke, and Maurizio Campanelli David Daintree Muecke, Frances, and Maurizio Campanelli, eds, The Invention of Rome: Biondo Flavio's Roma Triumphans and Its Worlds (Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 576), Paris, Librairie Droz, 2017; paperback; pp. 296; 5 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €39.00; ISBN 9782600047890. Nothing better illustrates the Birth of the Modern (to use Paul Johnson's memorable title) than the almost total eclipse that has been the fate of books and compilations that once enjoyed nearly universal respect among scholars of an earlier age. This volume undertakes the task of reinstating the reputation of Biondo's Roma triumphans (1459), an encyclopedic treatise in ten books on the institutions of ancient Rome, and achieves its purpose comprehensively. The work itself, in the words of the editors, 'is one of the greatest literary monuments of Italian humanism and its greatest legacy to European culture in the early modern period. As an encyclopedic work of all-encompassing scope it might be called a cultural space, a site in which the culture of an entire epoch is collected, synthesized, and passed on' (pp. 11–12). This is high praise verging on hyperbole, reflecting the editors' obvious passion for their subject. Phrases like 'greatest legacy' and 'cultural space' come on a bit strong but to be fair they are skilfully backed up and persuasively defended by an array of learned essays by first-rate scholars who share the editors' enthusiasm. The taut if effusive introduction is followed by thirteen papers classified into three parts: 1. Context, Genre and Purpose; 2. Mores et instituta; and 3. Reception. Five items conclude the volume: lists of contributors, editions cited, and illustrations; and two indexes of manuscripts and of names. We are faced with a worldview that is not easily recovered by any reader who is not very familiar with the ancient as well as medieval intellectual furniture associated with the closely-related notions of humanitas and Romanitas. Biondo's major preoccupation was with the notion of 'Roma aeterna', the continuity of Rome, from the empire of the Caesars to the City of God, from paganism to Christianity. To thinkers like Biondo, and Dante too, there is a mystical quality about Rome that transcends ordinary patriotism: Roma is the world's mother, [End Page 213] the common inheritance not only of Europe but of men everywhere 'from the Caucasus to the Don and the Ganges' (Angelo Mazzocco, p. 58). The naïve cast of mind behind this mode of thinking could not be better illustrated than by Dante's simple statement in the second book of his De Monarchia: 'Romanus Populus fuit nobilissimus; ergo convenit ei aliis omnibus praeferri' ('the Roman nation is the noblest; it is therefore appropriate that it be given a place before all'). Biondo, Mazzocco continues, held that in the Respublica Christiana 'the numerous Christian officials discharge duties identical to those of the Respublica Romana. Thus the pope is Rome's consul, the cardinals her senators, the kings, the princes, the dukes, the marquises, the counts, and other nobles of the Christian world are respectively her legates, her quaestors, her tribunes' (p. 59). Biondo completed his book when it became clear that the new crusade, so longed for by Pius II, was not to have the support of the Christian princes of Europe. It was a time of bitter disappointment for those who felt that the 'New Rome' was unworthy of its predecessors, 'our pagans' (gentiles nostri, Frances Muecke, p. 87). This interesting phrase points again to that attitude of mind, grounded on an almost mystical belief in Roma aeterna, that sees Romanitas as being close on the heels of Christianitas in the blessings it confers on humanity: those old Romans, he seems to be saying, may have been pagans, but at least they were our pagans! Biondo criticizes old Rome for its superstitions, and clearly views Christianity as the ultimate revelation to humankind, but also insists that old Rome 'still has much to teach his own time' (James Hankins, p. 109). In this he is firmly on the side of those who...

Dynamic Equilibrium Sets of the Atomic Content of Galaxies across Cosmic Time

Abstract We analyze 88 independent, high-resolution, cosmological zoomed-in simulations of disk galaxies in the NIHAO simulations suite to explore the connection between the atomic gas fraction and angular momentum (AM) of baryons throughout cosmic time. The study is motivated by the analytical model of Obreschkow et al., which predicts a relation between the atomic gas fraction f atm and the integrated atomic stability parameter , where M and j are the mass and specific AM of the galaxy (stars+cold gas) and σ is the velocity dispersion of the atomic gas. We show that the simulated galaxies follow this relation from their formation (z ≃ 4) to the present within ∼0.5 dex. To explain this behavior, we explore the evolution of the local Toomre stability and find that 90%–100% of the atomic gas in all simulated galaxies is stable at any time. In other words, throughout the entire epoch of peak star formation until today, the timescale for accretion is longer than the timescale to reach equilibrium, thus resulting in a quasi-static equilibrium of atomic gas at any time. Hence, the evolution of f atm depends on the complex hierarchical growth history primarily via the evolution of q. An exception is galaxies subject to strong environmental effects.

Simulating the Cosmic Dawn With Enzo

We review two decades of progress using the Enzo hydrodynamic cosmology code to simulate the Cosmic Dawn, a period of roughly 1 billion years beginning with the formation of the first stars in the universe, and ending with cosmic reionization. Using simulations of increasing size and complexity, working up in length and mass scale and to lower redshifts, a connected narrative is built up covering the entire epoch. In the first part of the paper, we draw on results we and our collaborators have achieved using the Enzo cosmological adaptive mesh refinement code. Topics include the formation of Population III stars, the transition to Population II star formation, chemical enrichment, the assembly of the first galaxies, their high redshift galaxy statistics, and their role in reionization. In the second part of the paper we highlight physical difficulties that will require new, more physically complex simulations to address, drawing from a broader literature survey. We discuss the healthy interplay between self-consistent numerical simulations and analytic and semi-analytic approaches. Finally, we discuss technical advances in hardware and software that will enable a new class of more realistic simulations to be carried out on exascale supercomputers in the future.

Contribution of diverse monsoon precipitation over Central and Northern India during mid to Late Holocene

Abstracts The Indian summer monsoon (ISM) precipitation pattern over Indian subcontinent is looked through various high resolution speleothem oxygen (δ18O) isotope records from Mid to Late Holocene. The six cave locations distributed from central to northern India describing regional climatic conditions due to stalagmite deposition are considered. The stalagmite deposition reflects precipitation patterns by temporal variations of δ18O values. Oxygen isotope values reflect cumulative precipitation that is basically interpreted by averaged latitudinal site of inter tropical convergence zone (ITCZ). Under the Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project Phase III (PMIP3) simulation, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Mk3L version 1.0 – Part 2 (CSIRO-Mk3L-1-2) model output shows ITCZ movement from Bay of Bengal (BoB) to Arabian Sea (AS) during Mid to Late Holocene which resulted due to solar insolation changes. It reflects precipitation shift from BoB to AS as well as to core monsoon zone (CMZ) to the western Himalayas. The past millennium epoch, which consists little ice age (LIA) and middle warm period (MWP), shows large variations in 850 hPa geopotential height leading to high anomalous precipitation variability all over India during ISM. The high fluctuation in δ18O values during Mid Holocene over northern India led to drought conditions due to which Indus valley civilization vanished. The present study shows that the Himalayas received higher precipitation during late Holocene. That is basically governed by western disturbances (WD) as well as ISM. Present study summarizes that the mean annual precipitation cycle for entire epoch was roughly similar, but spatial distribution of precipitation during various epoch was quite divergent from Mid to Late Holocene. The onset of ISM was also similar but, withdrawal was comparatively unalike. Wherever, peaks of seasonal precipitation were alike over Indian subcontinent region, spatial distribution of precipitation were unlike.

Conflicting Authorities. The Byzantine Symphony and the Idea of Christian Empire in Russian Orthodox Thought at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract The ideal of Byzantine symphony is still present in contemporary debate on church-state relations. A worldly notion of power interferes with a theological assessment of authority in the Church: hence the identification of the Christian empire with the kingdom of God, in a kind of a realized eschatology. This paper undertakes the deconstruction of the notion of “byzantine symphony” through its interpretations by some Russian religious thinkers at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the whole of Russian society faced dramatic changes. The idea of Christian empire, represented by Constantine the Great, emerges as the foundation of the new orthodox Russian Empire (Tjutčev), contrasted to European civilization (Danilevskij, Leont’ev); but Constantine is also an apocalyptic figure (Bukharev), a political leader (Bolotov), a tyrant (Solov’ev) and the symbol of an entire epoch in Christian history that definitely came to an end (Bulgakov, Berdyaev).

The Year 1917: Sacrifices of History

For Russia, the beginning of the twentieth century was a step into Modernity, into that pan-European new time that in the seventeenth century heralded a permanent social change, which has defined our entire epoch up to the present day—it was a time of transformation, war, and revolution.1 A concept of “revolution” that emerged within theology marked a global shift toward modernization, which defines Modernity even in those moments when there is a fallback to the preceding tradition, the meaning of which is lost. Thus, the current break with the objectives of the 1917 revolution does not correspond with the illusion of a return to old values. The idea of the redesign of traditions and their introduction into the past is a truly new thing, for no other time dared to change the past in the name of state interests.

PRECISE MEASUREMENT OF THE REIONIZATION OPTICAL DEPTH FROM THE GLOBAL 21 cm SIGNAL ACCOUNTING FOR COSMIC HEATING

ABSTRACT As a result of our limited data on reionization, the total optical depth for electron scattering, τ, limits precision measurements of cosmological parameters from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). It was recently shown that the predicted 21 cm signal of neutral hydrogen contains enough information to reconstruct τ with sub-percent accuracy, assuming that the neutral gas was much hotter than the CMB throughout the entire epoch of reionization (EoR). Here we relax this assumption and use the global 21 cm signal alone to extract τ for realistic X-ray heating scenarios. We test our model-independent approach using mock data for a wide range of ionization and heating histories and show that an accurate measurement of the reionization optical depth at a sub-percent level is possible in most of the considered scenarios even when heating is not saturated during the EoR, assuming that the foregrounds are mitigated. However, we find that in cases where heating sources had hard X-ray spectra and their luminosity was close to or lower than what is predicted based on low-redshift observations, the global 21 cm signal alone is not a good tracer of the reionization history.

Promises and Predicaments: Trade and Entrepreneurship in Colonial and Independent Indonesia in the 19th and 20th Centuries ed. by Alicia Schrikker and Jeroen Touwen

Reviewed by: Promises and Predicaments: Trade and Entrepreneurship in Colonial and Independent Indonesia in the 19th and 20th Centuries ed. by Alicia Schrikker and Jeroen Touwen Howard M. Federspiel (bio) Alicia Schrikker and Jeroen Touwen, eds. Promises and Predicaments: Trade and Entrepreneurship in Colonial and Independent Indonesia in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Singapore: University of Singapore Press, 2015. 334 pp. The well-drawn Introduction by Alicia Schrikker and Jeroen Touwen gives two reasons for bringing together the seventeen essays that make up this anthology. The first gives recognition to the economic historian J. Thomas Lindblad, to whom the collection is dedicated. His work on Indonesian economic history is widely accepted as an important contribution to Indonesian studies. Second, the volume was intended to present material on Indonesian economic development by contemporary scholars who would follow the path already described by Howard Dick et al.1 Their critical study on national Indonesian economic history defined the important periods of that history and detailed the main characteristics of each period. Nearly every article in the anthology mentions or pays tribute to Lindblad. The Introduction, of course, succinctly outlines his work on the emergence of an Indonesian national economy, starting with globalization in early history, but failing until the early twentieth century to coalesce into an overall economy because of parochial demands within the archipelago. Beyond this introduction, however, the only other author going beyond simple laudatory remarks is Freek Columbijn. In a fine piece of research using legal cases in Medan, Columbijn shows participation in the Medan workplaces by race and ethnicity. The research reveals that there was a brief period in the 1940s and 1950s when the Dutch, the Chinese, and Indonesians shared many workplaces in a complementary manner—termed complementarisasi by Columbijn—but that this stage passed away relatively quickly for full Indonesianization, which was Lindblad’s contention. All the chapters fit with the second goal, that is, contributing to a fuller understanding of Indonesian economic history a la Dick et al. Specifically, some articles outline the major issues and challenges of the past two hundred years. The Introduction certainly does, and the opening article by Anne Booth does so as well, as she describes the entire epoch in a lean, straightforward essay. Particular periods are covered equally well by several authors. Dick provides considerable detail on the development of statistics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the Dutch colonial administration, which later served as a baseline for Indonesian efforts in the field. Robert Cribb contributes a nicely crafted essay on the role of rice in the early days of the Indonesian republic in the late 1940s, when ideology was often set aside for practical results in feeding urban populations. Thee Kian Wie revisits failed [End Page 131] US policies toward Indonesian development in the 1950s and early 1960s, concluding that those policies had no chance against the economic nationalism of President Sukarno. Ewout Frankeema explores the astounding “green revolution” in Indonesian agriculture during the New Order years in the last quarter of the twentieth century and assesses the remarkable convergence of factors that made it possible. While all of the essays in this volume have academic worth, several of them fail to fit the editors’ premise to provide the historic overview they sought. For example, one article, by Leonard Blusse, related a neat case study of a single—and minor—historic event about employment of Chinese sailors aboard a Dutch ship in the late-colonial era. The study had almost no relevance to long-term economic developments and might have been a footnote, at best. Another article, by Alexander Claver, marked by solid description and insight, outlined money usage in the precolonial and colonial periods, noting bifurcated use by the internationalized economy and by the local economy. But the postcolonial era, where the same phenomenon of different money usage, albeit with different currencies than earlier, but with profoundly different outcomes, was not covered by Claver or by any complementary article. A significant failing. Roger Knight’s chapter tracks the early twentieth century competition initiated by Japan to pit Formosan and Javanese growers against one another to supply the Japanese home islands’ need for rice and...

Does habituation differ in chronic low back pain subjects compared to pain-free controls? A cross-sectional pain rating ERP study reanalyzed with the ERFIA multilevel method.

The objective of the present study was to investigate cortical differences between chronic low back pain (CLBP) subjects and pain-free controls with respect to habituation and processing of stimulus intensity. The use of a novel event-related fixed-interval areas (ERFIA) multilevel technique enables the analysis of event-related electroencephalogram (EEG) of the whole post stimulus range at a single trial level. This technique makes it possible to disentangle the cortical processes of habituation and stimulus intensity.In a cross-sectional study, 78 individuals with CLBP and 85 pain-free controls underwent a rating paradigm of 150 nonpainful and painful somatosensory electrical stimuli. For each trial, the entire epoch was partitioned into 20-ms ERFIAs, which acted as dependent variables in a multilevel analysis. The variability of each consecutive ERFIA period was modeled with a set of predictor variables, including 3 forms of habituation and stimulus intensity.Seventy-six pain-free controls and 65 CLBP subjects were eligible for analysis. CLBP subjects showed a significantly decreased linear habituation at 340 to 460 ms in the midline electrodes and C3 (Ps < .05) and had a significantly more pronounced dishabituation for the regions of 400 to 460 ms and 800 to 820 ms for all electrodes, except for T3 and T4 (Ps < .05). No significant group differences for stimulus intensity processing were observed.In this study, group differences with respect to linear habituation and dishabituation were demonstrated. By means of the ERFIA multilevel technique, habituation effects were found in a broad post stimulus range and were not solely limited to peaks. This study suggests that habituation may be a key mechanism involved in the transition process to chronic pain. Future studies with a longitudinal design are required to solve this issue.

Dianina, Katia. When Art Makes News: Writing Culture and Identity in Imperial Russia (review)

REVIEWS 359 and Czechoslovakia caused the Soviet leadership no end of trouble in the years after Pomerantsev published his article. As Kozlov sums it up: ‘“Sincerity” as an emblematic term for a new relationship between experience and language became a code word for the entire epoch of the Thaw’ (p. 87). There is, alas, no space left here to discuss Kozlov’s approach to readers’ or editors’ understanding or misunderstanding of works by Dudintsev, Pasternak, Ehrenburg, Solzhenitsyn, Paustovskii, Simonov, Chukovskaia, Siniavskii and the unjustly forgotten Nikolai Voronov. Those interested in the work of any of these writers should definitely read this splendid book. Department of Slavonic Studies Martin Dewhirst University of Glasgow Dianina, Katia. When Art Makes News: Writing Culture and Identity in Imperial Russia. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2013. xii + 399 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $45.00. After visiting the Paris Exposition in 1867, the director of the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art, Thomas Archer, declared in his report for The Art Journal (1868) that ‘it was seen unmistakably that Russia has a true school of Art, essentially national’. Responses to Russian displays at international exhibitions were an important measure of the development of the ‘national school’; moreover, they shaped Russia’s mid- to late-nineteenth-century campaigntoestablishagreatersenseofnationalidentityinculturalproduction, the subject of Dianina’s monograph. Although there is already a considerable amount of scholarship on this period — when the campaign for Russianness in art and architecture reached its height — the author’s primary aim is to bring new elements of the picture to the fore. Specifically, she seeks to show how the national idea was propagated through the arenas of public discourse: not only exhibitions, but print culture, monuments, newly-founded art museums and other public events (p. 69). Dianina deftly explores untapped sources and re-examines more familiar material to build a strong line of argument through her seven chapters, introduction and epilogue. Conceptually, she divides the book into two parts: ‘The Predicament of Russian Culture’ (defining the roots of the nationalist debate and explaining the importance of such developments as the rise of journalism in the 1860s) and ‘Discursive Practices’ (tackling, among other things, the role of institutions, critical debates over realist art and nationality, the Russian style and the neo-national revival). It is the central chapters which are the most innovative and thought-provoking. For example, extensive sections in chapter three examine the impact of the feuilleton and the writings SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 360 of the critical community in artistic discourse surrounding national identity; similarly, chapter four uses contemporary media responses to state-sponsored projects (the Millennium Monument of 1862, the Imperial Hermitage and the Imperial Academy of Arts) to shed new light on these. By the next chapter we are on familiar territory, with an historical overview of the Association of Travelling Art Exhibitions (‘Itinerants’), though Dianina’s emphasis is upon the role played by the critical intelligentsia in its (their) success. Her subsequent discussion of galleries and museums foregrounds lesser-known aspects of the history. Thus, in a brief account of the emergence of the ‘Russian style’, Moscow’s centrality to the debate is stressed by attention to such events as the relocation of the Rumiantsev museum from St Petersburg (1862), the Ethnographic Exhibition (1867) and the Russian National Polytechnical Exhibition of Industry and the Arts (1872). The final chapter, on the neo-national revival centred around Abramtsevo and Talashkino, is an important strand of the history which Dianina seeks to weave; however, drawing heavily from previous accounts, it is the least effective. The danger of attempting an interdisciplinary study is that inevitably there are errors. A quotation by the leading protagonist of the neo-national revival, Elena Polenova (p. 228), is wrongly attributed to her sister-in-law, Natal´ia. Moreover, there are generalizations, such as the binary assertion that ‘the Itinerants aimed to imitate life as closely as possible, in all its ugly and vulgar details’, unlike the neo-nationalists, for whom ‘the aesthetics of revived Russian antiquity was defined by the opposite scenario, life copying art’ (p. 227); this analysis is simply not borne out by the facts, as recent scholarship on the Itinerants...

Tragische Dispositionen der Moderne. Stimmung und Aura im Wandel des Landschaftsbegriffs

The present text deals with the relation between the consolidation and the development of landscape-painting and the concept of landscape during the 19th century and the catabasis of a certain economy of disposition until our days. The process of the transformation and overcoming of landscape-painting reflects the decadence of an entire epoch, influencing the introduction of the dispositions into philosophy, as well the initiation of a new philosophical discipline, the Philosophy of Landscape.

King, Averil. Isaak Levitan: Lyrical Landscape (review)

REVIEWS 755 King,Averil.IsaakLevitan:LyricalLandscape.Thirdedition.AntiqueCollectors’ Club, Woodbridge, 2011. 159 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Chronology. Select bibliography. Index. £35.00. Averil King’s beautifully illustrated monograph on Russian landscape painter Isaak Levitan (1860–1900) is the first Western study on this important artist. The book was first published to coincide with the ‘Russian Landscape Painting’ exhibition that opened in Groningen in 2004 and travelled on to the National Gallery in London. For this third edition, the text and illustrations have been expanded and the layout reoriented to a horizontal format more conducive to the landscapes that are its primary subject. That the book has now sold out of its third printing shows how successfully the author has engaged a broad, nonspecialist audience in Levitan’s life and work. As David Jackson writes in his Foreword, Levitan was Russia’s ‘national painter par excellence’ his haunting landscapes evoking a host of associations — historical, literary, political, social — unique to the Russian experience. Yet he was also very much a man of his time, whose works convey poetic introspection and often a fin-de-siècle melancholy. It is this duality that King captures in her book. Coming from a background in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European painting (her previous book was on the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker), she presents Levitan as simultaneously part of Russian and European art history. King paints in broad strokes, assembling the most diverse range of references and vignettes to bring Levitan’s world to life. The result is both panoramic in scopeandkaleidoscopic,evendizzying,indetail.Thebarefactsofhischildhood, in an impoverished Jewish family in Kibarty (misspelled in the text), are set against a lengthy description of Russian serfdom and a history of Lithuania. In following his early years as an aspiring artist at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, we meet both the Russian artists who influenced him (Perov, Savrasov, Polenov) and the Barbizon painters who inspired them all, followed up with a short history of landscape painting in Russia. The text is shot through with details of local colour (the fashions worn at court balls, Dostoevskii’s near escape from execution, a short history of Russian music, the urban growth of Vienna) that make for lively, occasionally distracting reading. The goal is not scholarly depth (the author relies almost entirely on Englishlanguage sources), but an immersive experience that transports the reader into an entire epoch. Her use of Russian literary and musical parallels will resonate with a broad lay audience, binding Levitan into an already family world of evocative associations; the treatment of his life-long friendship with Anton Chekhov is especially well handled. The writing is lyrical and evocative, with deeply felt descriptions of Levitan’s paintings. SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 756 What makes the book more than a skilful synthesis of the English-language sources is its ability to situate Levitan within a larger, inclusive history of latenineteenth -century European painting. Readers familiar with the canonical history of this period will readily appreciate King’s efforts to link Levitan with a host of artists whose works may already be familiar: Odilon Redon’s pastels, GustavKlimt’ssquare-formatlandscapes,thelandscapesoftheWorpswedeand Dachau communities, and especially Claude Monet, whose views of the Seine are interestingly paired with Levitan’s Volga paintings. These comparisons often involve a certain amount of imaginative hypothesizing (‘It is tempting to think that Klimt and Levitan made each other’s acquaintance’ p. 114), and sometimes they seem forced, as when comparing the capacity of Monet and Levitan for braving winter weather (p. 89) or the former’s love of poplars, the latter’s of birches (p. 92). But the larger point that Levitan’s paintings express the Zeitgeist of his time while remaining quintessentially Russian is persuasively made. It is this quality that endeared him to Sergei Diaghilev and the World of Art group, to which an excellent chapter is devoted. Chapters on the Vienna and Munich Secessions (Levitan exhibited with the latter beginning in 1896) reinforce these aesthetic and emotional affinities. Those already familiar with Russian art will probably not find new insights on that subject here. And there are points on which one can quibble: Ivan Kramskoi was...

The Holocene marine diatom flora of Eastern Newfoundland bays

In total, 39 diatom species belonging to 22 genera were identified and photographed from Holocene marine sediment cores of Eastern Newfoundland bays. The cores were retrieved from Placentia Bay in the southeast and Bonavista Bay in the northeast of Newfoundland. The study area lies at the meeting point of the cold Labrador Current and the warmer Gulf Stream and is sensitive to changes in ocean circulation. It is thus an ideal location for paleoceanographic reconstructions based on the analysis of (sub)fossil diatoms, for which a good taxonomic framework is essential. The studied sediment cores encompass different age ranges and together represent the entire Holocene epoch. The most abundant species belonged to the genera Thalassiosira, represented by 10 different species, Fragilariopsis (four species), Detonula, Thalassionema and Odontella (one species each). This study provides an annotated list of the most commonly identified diatom species and references to further literature. All taxa are documented by high quality photomicrographs.

Blaming it on the “Barbarians”: Alleged Uses of Nose-Cutting Among the Franks

Patricia Skinner’s compassionate reaction to the searing image of Aisha bibi, and her effort to contextualize the violence the young Afghani woman suffered at the hands of family members who amputated her nose and ears, make a compelling case as to why understanding the Middle Ages may be beneficial today. Even during the centuries of the so-called Dark Ages, stereotyped as a period in which barbarians streamed out of the dark forests of northern Europe to defeat the civilized Romans, contemporaries understood nose-cutting to be a severe punishment. 1 Knowledge of the mores of a society in which the removal of noses was sanctioned, according to Skinner’s reasoning, may thus provide insight into the unjust punishment of Afghani women. But are the alleged similarities in attitudes toward facial mutilation sufficient to justify our study of the early Middle Ages for this purpose? 2 As noted by Skinner, the historian Valentin Groebner has observed that a person without a nose was perceived as a non-person in the late Middle Ages. 3 But given the nature of medieval written sources, which exist in limited number and usually foreground elite (and clerical) priorities, can we confidently make such general observations about the values of the period? At least in the case of the early Middle Ages, it seems safe to say that we have too little evidence to reach a definitive conclusion about the gendered implications of a noseless visage. Archaeological evidence, for instance, suggests that deformity, at least the kind caused by illness, might be perceived otherwise. The sixth- and seventh-century cemetery of Edix Hill (Barrington A, Cambridgeshire) proves instructive in demonstrating the potential flaws of assumptions built upon the views of clerical historians. Rather than one response characterizing the mores of an entire epoch, we must imagine that a multiplicity of attitudes existed. In Grave 18B at Edix Hill, for example, a woman who died prematurely in her teens was laid to rest with great forethought and care. As movingly reconstructed by the historian Robin Fleming, the woman had been severely disfigured by leprosy, a disease that had eaten away much of the bone support beneath her nose and upper teeth. Her family (and perhaps also the larger community of which she was a part), nevertheless, outfitted her grave with a bed and a generous assortment of objects. 4 Not only did her ailment not preclude survivors from according her funerary rites typically reserved for elites, but she evidently retained a place of honor among them with the most

Introducing the Event Related Fixed Interval Area (ERFIA) Multilevel Technique: a Method to Analyze the Complete Epoch of Event-Related Potentials at Single Trial Level

In analyzing time-locked event-related potentials (ERPs), many studies have focused on specific peaks and their differences between experimental conditions. In theory, each latency point after a stimulus contains potentially meaningful information, regardless of whether it is peak-related. Based on this assumption, we introduce a new concept which allows for flexible investigation of the whole epoch and does not primarily focus on peaks and their corresponding latencies. For each trial, the entire epoch is partitioned into event-related fixed-interval areas under the curve (ERFIAs). These ERFIAs, obtained at single trial level, act as dependent variables in a multilevel random regression analysis. The ERFIA multilevel method was tested in an existing ERP dataset of 85 healthy subjects, who underwent a rating paradigm of 150 painful and non-painful somatosensory electrical stimuli. We modeled the variability of each consecutive ERFIA with a set of predictor variables among which were stimulus intensity and stimulus number. Furthermore, we corrected for latency variations of the P2 (260 ms). With respect to known relationships between stimulus intensity, habituation, and pain-related somatosensory ERP, the ERFIA method generated highly comparable results to those of commonly used methods. Notably, effects on stimulus intensity and habituation were also observed in non-peak-related latency ranges. Further, cortical processing of actual stimulus intensity depended on the intensity of the previous stimulus, which may reflect pain-memory processing. In conclusion, the ERFIA multilevel method is a promising tool that can be used to study event-related cortical processing.

John Milton and the Epochs of International Law

For the historian of law William Grewe in his controversial opus, The Epochs of International Law, it was the English writer John Milton who offered the death blow to an entire epoch, one founded on the principle that discovery brought legal title in Yet John Milton's Paradise Lost is rarely considered alongside the history of In this article, I contend that a robust history of law in the 17th century would profit from engaging head on with literary texts like Paradise Lost. Milton's understanding of the law of nations provides legal scholars with a richer intellectual history of 17th-century law than that typically on offer � one more sensitive to humanist methods, literary texts, and embodied questions of vulnerability. Approaching the intellectual history of the law of nations dialectically, I suggest that a full reckoning of Milton's law of nations in Paradise Lost requires a careful balance of presentism and openness to alterity � presentism in the sense that we might appreciate how strongly Milton's law of nations resonates with debates about law in our own time, and alterity in the sense that Milton's law of nations encompassed much that many of today's readers would hardly recognize as law. A full intellectual history of Milton's law of nations, then, may require us partly to estrange that term - to set aside a priori definitions of the international and resist easy transhistorical transpositions from Milton's late Renaissance world to our own - but it also requires a paradoxical domestication of the law of nations, a making familiar, a bringing into one's home.

Legs in Lukács

Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall (eds), Georg Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence: Aesthetics, Politics, Literature, London, Continuum, 2011, 239 pp; 60 [pounds sterling] hardback As one thinker put it, the significance of past movements in thought is established only when the present requires them for understanding its own, defining upheavals. (1) With the work of Fredric Jameson, Martin Jay, and Lukacs's Budapest School inheritors, Georg Lukacs never entirely disappeared from notice. But now from within the crisis not of waning capitalism, but of capitalism's relentless ascendance, theorists are re-establishing our need for Lukacs, and his claim on us. This past year (2011), Continuum released two self-contained edited volumes on Lukacs: Michael J. Thompson's Georg Lukacs Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics, and the collection under review here, Timothy Bewes' and Timothy Hall's Georg Lukacs: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence. Although three contributors have chapters in both volumes, each book is comprised of new and differently oriented essays. In addition to an introduction and twelve chapters, this volume also contains translations of two pithy and--especially in light of their application in several of these essays--extremely valuable works by Lukacs: 'Art for Art's Sake and Proletarian Writing' (1926) and 'An Entire Epoch of Inhumanity' (1964). In their Introduction, the editors appropriate an Adornian design to ask what the present might mean 'in the face of Lukacs'. They sketch compellingly the character of a contemporary situation in need of Lukacsian analysis, but which demands, too, that Lukacs be rendered operational: rethought, critically revised, and perhaps most helpfully, read against himself. The Lukacsian principle of totality is presented as crucial to our judgment of current challenges, precisely insofar as Lukacsian totality interacts with the disunity or dissonance upon which it is established. At the level of interpretation, Bewes and Hall also show that the notion of totality develops out of Lukacs's earliest consideration of aesthetic form, for which contingency is constitutive. I find these to be fine points; I expand upon them in the Afterword to the 2010 edition of Lukacs's Soul and Form. (2) A short review cannot dojustice to any single essay, let alone a multifaceted collection of them, so here I will only mention several connected, axial points from which much of the collection drives forward. There are productive interpretative divergences, for example, between Neil Larson's magnificent analysis of labour and class struggle as fetish categories, David Cunningham's argument that capital, rather than the proletariat, is the subject of history given expressive form by the novel, and Patrick Eiden-Offe's fresh portrayal of the way that class functions as a matrix of imputed, revolutionary consciousness. Yet these essays and others share an essentially Lukacsian insight about the task of the critic, and thus about the critical authority that roots the whole book: for given the long reach of reifying and ideological practices, the responsibility to define existing contradictions and to help engender alternative ways of life is a necessary intellectual condition of any non-reactionary rejection of the status-quo. Andrew Feenberg's rethinking of reification, the cornerstone of Lukacs's legacy, embodies a related theme embedded throughout the collection. Feenberg confronts the economic, administrative, and technological faces of reification, cogently responding to Axel Honneth's recent appropriation. Feenberg deploys reification together with the equally Lukacsian notion of mediation to outline a philosophy of technology sensitive to the underdetermination of technological systems, and thus to their potential for organizing collective action. Feenberg's discussion of the way technical networks construct social collectives and may yet advance their shared interests is invigorating. …

Refashioning Print Literature:

In addressing the issue of modern China and world literature in the age of globalization, we should not neglect this fact: in contemporary Chinese society as well as elsewhere, the elite literary market has been increasingly shrinking, with more and more readers reading online rather than in the libraries, for there have appeared numerous netizens who write and publish online. I think it's hard to say whether or not the Internet will ruin or contrib- ute to the popularization of serious literature: a lot of print literature, chiefly serious literature, is likely to be published on the Internet, but although that means fewer books will be printed on paper, it also means that it will pos- sible for more and more readers to get access to serious literature, including translated world literature online. Since translated literature comprises a large part of the literary market, Internet writing might well contribute a bit to the popularization of world literature in China as well. But my concern in this article is the extent to which the Internet will help to popularize literature. Obviously, the emergence of the Internet in our daily lives provides us with a new way to communicate and express our feelings and opinions. As a global system of interconnected computer networks, the Internet con- nects billions of users (or their computers) worldwide by using the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). Thus, for most users, it is the first time that they have not been limited by space and time in communicating with others, and they now have the opportunity to know other people's (public or private) stories and share their experiences in just a matter of seconds. Speed changes everything and makes things go more smoothly in our lives. Not only do the younger generations like to communicate online, but even the older scholars are gradually taking interest in communicating through the Internet.

Reasoning with Exceptions: An Event-related Brain Potentials Study

Defeasible inferences are inferences that can be revised in the light of new information. Although defeasible inferences are pervasive in everyday communication, little is known about how and when they are processed by the brain. This study examined the electrophysiological signature of defeasible reasoning using a modified version of the suppression task. Participants were presented with conditional inferences (of the type "if p, then q; p, therefore q") that were preceded by a congruent or a disabling context. The disabling context contained a possible exception or precondition that prevented people from drawing the conclusion. Acceptability of the conclusion was indeed lower in the disabling condition compared to the congruent condition. Further, we found a large sustained negativity at the conclusion of the disabling condition relative to the congruent condition, which started around 250 msec and was persistent throughout the entire epoch. Possible accounts for the observed effect are discussed.