Fragmentary Sources Research Articles

Enterprise, activism and charity: Mary Pickford and the urban elite of Derby, 1780-1812

ABSTRACTAssessing the role of the enterprising middle-ranking widow amongst the urban elite in Derby, England, this article focuses on Mary Pickford, the contribution she made to the early textile industry, her political engagement, and her charitable concerns. The interrelated aspects of Pickford’s life simultaneously contributed to her social standing and to Derby’s economic development. The East Midlands was synonymous with the large-scale textile concerns of the Strutts and the Arkwrights about whom much has been written. Pickford’s moderately-sized business, however, is more representative of the majority about which far less is known. As such, an analysis of her activities, drawn from fragmentary sources, recognises the significance of the individual and the enmeshed nature of female involvement in urban life, thereby adding to a greater understanding of industrial and urban growth in the region.

The 'Mantle of Stone' Re-Worked: Comments on the Relationship of Lycoph. Alex. 333 to Hom. IL. 3.57 and the Style of Lycophron's Alexandra

The 'Mantle of Stone' Re-Worked:Comments on the Relationship of Lycoph. Alex. 333 to Hom. IL. 3.57 and the Style of Lycophron's Alexandra* Fabian Horn In the enigmatic poem Alexandra commonly ascribed to the Hellenistic poet Lycophron of Chalcis (3rd century bce), the fate of queen Hecuba is described in the following lines (330–34): σὲ δ' ἀμφὶ κοίλην αἰχμάλωτον ᾐόναπρέσβυν Δολόγκων δημόλευστον ὠλένῃἐπεσβόλοις ἀραῖσιν ἠρεθισμένῃκρύψει κύπασσις χερμάδων ἐπομβρίᾳΜαίρας ὅταν φαιουρὸν ἀλλάξῃς δομήν. But you, aged captive by the hollow shore,stoned by the arm of the people of the Doloncians,which was enraged by your railing curses,a stony mantle will hide in a torrent of rocks,when you have put on the reddish-brown body of Maira.1 [End Page 205] The version of the myth presumed and presented in highly compressed form by Lycophron is known in more detail from other sources: after the sack of the city, Hecuba, the aged queen of Troy, was taken captive and brought to the land of the Doloncians on the Thracian Chersonese where she avenged the death of her son Polydorus, and after she had blinded his killer, the Thracian king Polymestor, she was transformed into a dog and was subsequently stoned to death (see also Lycoph. Alex. 1174–88 on Hecuba's transformation and cenotaph).2 At first reading, the metaphor κύπασσις χερμάδων 'mantle of stones' in line 333 is cryptic, as befits the style of the poem as a large-scale riddle,3 but the phrasing is distinctive enough to be recognizable to the erudite reader as an intertextual reworking of a famous metaphor from the Iliad:4 in Book 3, Hector chastises his brother Paris and threatens that, if the Trojans were less indulgent towards his philandering, 'you would be wearing a shirt of stone for all the misery you have caused' (Il. 3.57: λάινον ἕσσο χιτῶνα κακῶν ἕνεχ' ὅσσα ἔοργας), probably a novel and imaginative variation of the similar expression 'putting on (a garment of) earth', a [End Page 206] metaphorical euphemism for burial in later Greek.5 There are no direct verbal echoes between the two passages, but the metaphor is unique and accordingly most commentators merely mention the model of Iliad 3.57 for Lycoph. Alex. 333, even though the precise relationship between the two passages is not made explicit.6 Indeed, Lycophron's adaptation is certainly meant to evoke the original Homeric metaphor, but the imagery of the passage and the effects it produces are more complicated and will be examined in the following discussion. Initially, it seems as if Lycophron has simply rephrased the Homeric metaphor in the language of his tragic messenger speech and substituted different words for the original phrasing. The lexeme κύπασσις, which has come to replace the Homeric χιτών and similarly denotes a short shirt or frock for both men and women reaching to mid-thigh,7 is not a particularly common word and is mainly attested in fragmentary sources.8 In its rarity, it is typical of Lycophron's penchant for peculiar and uncommon words.9 The Homeric adjective λάινος 'made of stone' (derived from λᾶας 'stone', 'boulder'; cf. Il. 2.319; 3.12; 7.268; 12.445, 453; Od. 9.537; 11.594, 596, 598; 14.163) is taken up by the genitive χερμάδων. Χερμάς is a conventional poetic word well adapted to this context, since it denotes a large stone, especially one used for throwing or slinging.10 Therefore any ancient [End Page 207] reader with sufficient erudition to read and understand Lycophron's Alexandra could not fail to notice that the collocation κύπασσις χερμάδων is a paraphrase of the unique image of the Homeric λάινος χιτών, both phrases meaning 'a garment of stones' as a creative metaphor for death by stoning. However, in the Alexandra the following word ἐπομβρίᾳ partially deconstructs the original image: κύπασσις 'coat' and ἐπομβρία 'rain',11 even though they at first seem to share a common conceptual domain, are both used figuratively, while only χερμάδες 'stones' is to be taken literally. As it is, neither of the two nouns can be understood literally and on its own: neither Hecuba, in the shape of a dog, being hidden by an actual mantle in a metaphorical torrent of stones, nor a figurative mantle of stones covering her in a literal shower of rain makes good sense from a logical point of view.12 Thus κύπασσις metaphorically denotes 'something covering the...

THE PORT OF MISSING MEN: BILLY GOHL, LABOR, AND BRUTAL TIMES IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST by Aaron Goings

462 OHQ vol. 121, no. 4 provides an overview of the women’s community and family of origin, background on their Euro-American husbands, the historical circumstances that brought the couples together, and the trajectory of their lives and those of their spouses and children into the early twentieth century. These biographies make for interesting reading because the author has woven together multifold strands of a fragmentary source base that allows her to reconsider the history of Whatcom County from the perspective of Indian women who, within a swirl of larger historical events, were actively engaged in creating families and communities across cultural lines. These biographies are interesting and enlightening; however, they do always not make for easy reading. The eight women confronted a range of hardships and challenges during their lifetime, including separations from their families of origin and children, intimate partner and organized settler violence, economic distress and abandonment, the progressive dispossession and administrative assault on Coast Salish communities initiated with the Point Elliot Treaty (1855), and the incredible ripple effects of the Fraser River Gold Rush (1858). Despite such countervailing winds, these Native women demonstrated fortitude and perseverance as well as economic foresight and entrepreneurialism. The women from Coast Salish communities in the region harnessed the political acumen and strategic thinking of their elders to advance the interests of their bicultural families and Native communities in Whatcom County, all in the face of settler efforts to marginalize both groups. Although Peace Weavers and Interwoven Lives are narrative histories less engaged with historiographical currents in gender history, Indigenous history, and settler colonial studies, they add fascinating and valuable insights to the historical record. For example, the story of Mrs. George Pickett provides a fuller picture of the complex, sometimes troubled life of George E. Pickett prior to his service in the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg (1863). It also reveals the Haida woman’s legacy in the career of her son, James Tilton Pickett, who became a respected commercial artist in Portland, Oregon , prior to his death in 1889 at age thirty-one. These two volumes will be useful resources for general readers and local residents, college students, and researchers and scholars seeking fine-grained details on a crucial period in Pacific Northwest history. Noteworthy, too, is Wellman’s re-examination of Phoebe Goodell Judson’s A Pioneer’s Search for an Ideal Home (1925), and Judson’s sleight of hand in representing the experience of Indigenous women in Puget Sound. For comparative views, Wellman’s book can be paired with Sue Armitage’s Shaping the Public Good: Women Making History in the Pacific Northwest (2015) and Katrina Jagodinsky ’s Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854–1946 (2016). In sum, Wellman has ably demonstrated the critical importance of biographical studies. She has placed Native women at the center of Whatcom County history as well as that of Washington State and the Pacific Northwest. These women’s biographies were actively distorted and suppressed by the structures of settler colonialism. Wellman has countered this “silencing the past” (in the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot) and helped reweave their stories and their contributions into the larger public memory. Melinda Marie Jetté Franklin Pierce University THE PORT OF MISSING MEN: BILLY GOHL, LABOR, AND BRUTAL TIMES IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST by Aaron Goings University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2020. Illustrations, photographs. 296 pages. $29.95 cloth. In 2019, crime writer C.J. March published a popular history with the eye-catching title, The Ghoul of Grays Harbor. Who was the ghoul of 463 Reviews Grays Harbor? The answer was well known to visitors and residents of this coastal port on the Olympia peninsula. Aaron Goings, who grew up in the Grays Harbor city of Aberdeen, had imbibed the story of this notorious serial killer as part of the ambiance of his hometown. Now, Goings has written an engaging and deeply researched book that conclusively lays the blame on a very different killer. In looking for the real killer, The Port of Missing Men takes readers into Grays Harbor’s saloons and boarding houses, its fraternal lodges, union halls, city...

“The Prison, By God, Where I Have Found Myself”: Graffiti at Ellis Island Immigration Station, New York, c. 1900–1923

Abstract This article analyses messages and pictures drawn on the walls by detainees at Ellis Island immigration station in New York c. 1900–1923. This fragmentary source material provides a valuable insight into the perceptions and emotions of people held in the limbo of immigration detention. Largely neglected in the historiography, the graffiti are significant as a counterpoint to official mark-making and bureaucracy. Ellis Island was an environment where the performance of writing was suffused with power, infamously in the marking out of passengers for further inspection with chalk symbols on their clothing. In the official documents, detainees ‘voices were translated, transcribed, and circumscribed. In contrast, the walls of dormitories and detention rooms formed a backstage space for personal musings, creativity, and low-level dissent.

ВІЧЕ У ПОМОРСЬКИХ СЛОВ’ЯН XI–XII ст. (до історіографії проблеми)

Background: The research on early medieval Pomerania (eleventh–twelfth centuries) and its assemblies discusses a variety of interpretations. Scholars explain veche and its place in the governance of the region based on their understanding of Slavic societies. Historians trace the development of Pomerania during the Early Middle Ages, analyze gradual transformation of its institutions. Recent studies use such concepts as segmentary structures and chiefdom as well as the newest archaeological material. Purpose: The goal of the article is to study the research on veche, particularly the most recent publications. Among them, the works of such historians and archaeologists as Piotr Boroс, Karol Modzelewski, Roman Zaroff, Michaі Tymowski, Michaі Kara, Przemysіaw Urbaсczyk, and others. The paper investigates their understanding of the place of assemblies in the governance of early medieval Pomerania as well as the appliance of such concepts as segmentary structures and chiefdom. Results: Pomeranian veche could be understood both as an element of the early medieval societies and as a way of collective decision-making. The article highlights various approaches to the study of veche, specifically the appliance of such concepts as segmentary structures and chiefdom. The paper investigates their usefulness for the research on early medieval Pomerania and its assemblies. The concepts of segmentary structures and chiefdom describe local communities and regional political formations, respectively. They help to distinguish a few levels of governance, to analyze relations between various parts of early medieval societies, and to trace integration as well as state formation processes. The future studies could continue the discussion about the appliance of different methodological approaches in research on well-known and fragmentary source material. Key words: veche, Pomerania, historiography, segmentary structures, chiefdom.

Owens, Samantha The Well-Travelled Musician: John Sigismond Cousser and Musical Exchange in Baroque Europe (review)

SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 774 part V. I. Lenin”’ (p. 17). In his second novel, Absurdistan (2006), Shteyngart ‘present[s] a burlesque of Russian character, along with Russian and American ways of conceiving that character, giving us a series of comic identities that nevertheless lay claim to some essential plausibility’ (p. 41). Thus, by creating hybrid versions of identifiable contemporary worlds, Shteyngart is able, from his perspective of wry detachment, to create the environments in which the weak and the abject emerge as the most unlikely heroes, much in the vein of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, or Goncharov’s Oblomov. Building on Adrian Wanner’s Out of Russia (Evanston, IL, 2011), Geoff Hamilton gives us the first serious full-length study of the foremost émigré, or rather, transnational, writer of his generation. Interestingly, as if in response to a fourth wave of Russian-American writers emerging from the post-Soviet era, still very much preoccupied with the experience of emigration, Shteyngart continues to set himself apart by taking a bold step away from previous concerns in his most recent novel. What Hamilton’s study attests to is that no single perspective can or will dominate this new émigré fiction, and that figures like Shteyngart should be studied and understood not only for the ways in which their work is determined by its past and present contexts, but also in all its future divergencies. UCL SSEES Barbara Wyllie Owens, Samantha. The Well-Travelled Musician: John Sigismond Cousser and Musical Exchange in Baroque Europe. Music in Britain, 1600–2000. Boydell Press, Woodbridge and Burlington, VT, 2017. xvi + 385 pp. Tables. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. Born in Bratislava (then part of Hungary) in 1660 and died in Dublin in 1727, Johann Sigismund Kusser (rendered as ‘Cousser’ in Britain and Ireland) traversed and engaged in nearly all aspects of public musical life in between. Both as an historical figure and as a composer-performer Cousser had, before now, largely fallen between the cracks. Samantha Owens has taken larger strides than any other scholar to rectify that lacuna in this beautifully presented and neatly-organized book. In addition to the nine central chapters are five useful appendices (the chapters and the appendices each constitute about half of the book). The latter are a particularly welcome inclusion as they often invite further scholarly engagement and are certain to further research into Cousser, his music and his eventful life. The most usual way for Cousser to appear in modern scholarly discourse is via his so-called ‘Commonplace Book’. This was a notebook kept by Cousser REVIEWS 775 during the last thirty years of life — and the introduction of this fascinating document forms the opening pages of this monograph. The notebook contains all manner of details about the life a working musician: a diary of sorts without parallel of scale or detail for its time. At the heart of Owens’s book is the exploration of contacts and exchange: social, cultural and musical. In addressing the notebook, Owens tips her hat at the modern social media phenomenon to capture something of the importance of social and business contacts for a musician working, as it were, across cultures. Here Owens is keen to make clear that she does not merely mean national cultures, but that in terms of professions that either allowed or even demanded international travel and networks, musicians were amongst the earliest of the labouring classes note just to move around Europe, but also to move across boundaries of class that were otherwise unnavigable. Chapter one (‘Hungarian Beginnings and Adoption of the French Musical Style’) deals as best as can be done with such fragmentary source materials and how Cousser fell under the sway of central European devotees of Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87) at a time when Italian musical style dominated most central European courts. Like so many other composers of his time, Cousser’s fluency in different musical styles shifted both with the spirt of the age and with the demands of employers. This is dealt with especially well in chapter four (‘“The incomparable director” in Hamburg, Nuremberg and Augsburg’); at Hamburg’s Gänsemarkt opera house in particular, Cousser made a...

Greek History

Political and military history used to be the main staple of ancient Greek history. This review includes a number of volumes devoted to the subject. Matteo Zaccarini's book focuses on Cimon and the period between 478 and 450 bce. Sandwiched between Herodotus’ Persian Wars and Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, the Pentekontaetia (478–431) is the most problematic period of classical Greek history, primarily because of the lack of a continuous narrative and our reliance on much later and fragmentary sources. Zaccarini has divided his work into two sections: the first studies the development of narrative traditions concerning Cimon and his age, from the fifth century to the Second Sophistic, and presents a context for interpreting the shaping of the information provided in these traditions. This is undoubtedly the most profitable part of the work, and a good model that others could imitate. The second part attempts to present a historical reconstruction of the period 478–450 on the basis of the conclusions of the first part. Many of Zaccarini's arguments are, in my view, correct: he shows the need to emancipate our narratives from models based on competition between aristocratic/popular or pro- and anti-Spartan leaders and programmes; he argues that the late 460s–450s is the crucial period of change in the balance of internal and external forces; and he minimizes the actual significance of Cimon's role. These sensible conclusions could have been strengthened by engaging with the rethinking of the nature of early Athenian imperialism by scholars such as Lisa Kallet and John Davies. But the volume is still a worthy contribution towards reassessing this crucial period.

Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition by Benjamin D. Sommer

Reviewed by: Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition by Benjamin D. Sommer Danny Mathews benjamin d. sommer, Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition (AYBRL; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). Pp. xviii + 419. $50. Sommer’s study can be viewed as an extensive fleshing out of the implications of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s claim: “As a report about revelation, the Bible itself is a midrash” (Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959] 77). In short, the Jewish Bible itself is a record of various human voices engaged in dialogue and debate and hence is to be aligned with rabbinic literature under the larger category of Oral Torah. The argument is based on a close analysis of the distinct interpretations of revelation advocated by J, E, and P in the Sinai account in Exodus 19–24 and its counterpart in Deuteronomy. S. adopts the source-critical conclusions of the so-called Neo-Documentary Hypothesis school (Menahem Haran, Baruch J. Schwartz, and especially Joel S. Baden). E is the earliest layer and preserves the most ambiguity about what exactly happened at Sinai in terms of the speaker (Moses? God?), what was spoken (actual words? non-verbal sounds such as thunder?), and the extent of the Decalogue that is actually revealed to the people. E’s main goal is to ensure that one cannot know for certain what exactly happened at Sinai. In contrast, according to P, the revelation at Sinai consists solely of a blueprint of the sanctuary, which in turn will be the true location of the ongoing revelation [End Page 127] of law. While E leans toward a “stenographic” theory of revelation, P advocates a “participatory” theory, according to which all revelation is the result of human mediation and interpretation of a divine communication. J, the most fragmentary source, is characterized by fascinans, that is, a desire for a close encounter with God, as well as providing narrative context for law. Deuteronomy represents the first commentary on the Sinai account and eliminates the ambiguities by portraying the Decalogue as the sole revelation that is distinctly and clearly heard by the entire people without mediation, a view that is later rejected by the scribal addition of Deut 5:5—this feature of including both commentary and revision leads S. to describe Deuteronomy as a rabbinic text (pp. 70–71). While the view of revelation advocated by P and J is “minimal” because it is given only to human mediators, D presents a “maximal” view in which everyone hears the unmediated, clear, and distinct words of God. These sources also differ with regard to the issue of whether the revelation of Sinai was a one-time event or an ongoing process. For E, the revelation occurred once. For P, it is an ongoing process involving a number of human mediators that took place before Sinai, for example, in the Passover instructions in Exodus 12, and during and after Sinai at the tent of meeting. D, however, presents a very sophisticated view of Sinai as a one-time event that is transcendentally accessible to each new generation. Moreover, D inscribes an apparent contradiction between the rhetorical claim of the fixity of law that is revealed only once (Deut 4:2; 13:1) and the actual practice of presenting earlier laws that have been systematically revised and updated. Both claims are implied in Deuteronomy’s frequent use of the term “today.” Although the sources vary with respect to the specific details, all agree on the actual event of the revelation itself and especially the inseparable linking of that revelation to a call for obedience to God’s will for living out the commands. S. adopts Franz Rozenzweig’s distinction between the transcendent command (Gebot) and a specific law (Gesetz) formulated by human interpretation and links this with his understanding of D’s view of law to make a theologically profound and elegant claim that the actual event at Sinai “produces . . . a sense of commandedness, and by observing mitzvoth the Jew reconstructs the experience of revelation and moves from the human to the divine point of view. . . . God communicated for a moment at...

Diecezja kamieniecka około 1830 roku – parafie i dekanaty, kościoły i kaplice

Kluczowym i podstawowym problemem w badaniach nad dziejami Kościoła katolickiego obrządku łacińskiego na wschodnich ziemiach Rzeczpospolitej Obojga Narodów, po rozbiorach wcielonych do Imperium Rosyjskiego, jest weryfikacja informacji dotyczących zmian w podziale administracyjnym, ilości parafii, kościołów, kaplic oraz liczby duchowieństwa i wiernych od 1772 do 1939 roku. Istniejące w obiegu naukowym, często wykorzystywane i komentowane dane zostały ustalone na podstawie szczątkowych źródeł, znajdujących się w polskich i zachodnioeuropejskich archiwach, wydawnictw prasowych oraz dawniejszych publikacji historyków. Niniejsza praca ma za zadanie zweryfikowanie podstawowych informacji o diecezji kamienieckiej przed rozpoczęciem represji rosyjskich, po upadku powstania listopadowego.

Pigeon racing clubs in Pas-de-Calais, France, 1870–1914

The history and geography of sports in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France have been studied intensively during the last thirty years but one sport – that of pigeon racing – has received virtually no attention. This paper ventures into a largely unexplored field. After describing briefly the general history of homing pigeons and the specific geography of pigeon racing clubs in France in 1890, it focuses on the département of Pas-de-Calais in northern France. Pas-de-Calais and the adjacent département of Nord together accounted for more than half of the just over 400 pigeon racing clubs identified in France in 1890. Within the context of the rapid development between 1870 and 1914 of its population, society and economy (and especially its coalmining industry), Pas-de-Calais saw the creation of more than one thousand recreational societies, especially sports clubs, among them numerous pigeon racing clubs. Three hundred pigeon racing clubs in one of the département's six arrondissements – that of Béthune – are examined closely from surviving but fragmentary sources. The aims, names, membership and racing activities of these societies are studied from their unpublished records. They are shown to have developed in close association with the growth of coalmining communities and in particular with the role of Belgian immigrants in those communities.

DIE PROBLEMATIEK IN DIE NAVORSING VAN KONTEMPORÊRE KRYGSGESKIEDENIS IN SUID-AFRIKA

As is the case after most wars, there has been a flood of material of varying quality on the so-called “BushWar”. Much of this material is written by lay historians. The method of the historian is explained in an attempt to clarify why it is more difficult and more time-consuming for the historian to produce history, than it is for the journalist to produce popular-historical literature. The task of the historian can be facilitated by improving the accessibility of documents. However, the unauthorized destruction of documents, official papers in private possession, document security, inadequate or fragmentary primary sources, and the existance of relatively few memoirs and autobiographies can prove problematic. The writer suggests that a general amnesty for soldiers, increased flexibility with regard to security and the closer involvement on the part of the soldier on the ground, will go a long way to improving the conditions under which military historical research takes place.

Zhangzhung and Qiangic Languages

Zhang-zhung, a dead Sino-Tibetan language only known by fragmentary sources, has no living descendant. The area of the former Tibetan empire is home to many non-Tibetan languages, some of which could be related to Zhang-zhung, and therefore be of tremendous importance for interpreting Zhang-zhung data. However, the huge diversity of ST languages, and the poor accessibility of data on many non-literary languages, makes it difficult for specialists of Old Tibetan philology to evaluate etymological claims regarding the ZZ vocabulary. The aim of the present paper is to evaluate the degree of relationship between ZZ and Qiangic languages. Several scholars, such as Hummel (1986), have proposed to locate the origin of ZZ in Eastern Tibet rather than in Western Tibet, using some linguistic comparative data. This hypothesis, if true, would be of far-reaching consequences for the study of Tibetan History. However, this paper will show that the evidence is rather limited.

The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693 - 1796 (review)

Reviewed by: The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693 - 1796 Katherine M.J. Mckenna (bio) Colleen Gray . The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693 - 1796. McGill-Queen's University Press. 2007. xvi, 250. $32.95 Colleen Gray has assumed a challenging task of reconstructing the history of a cloistered community that was by design less focused on this world than the next. Gray takes up the story of the nuns of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame in 1693, forty years after the community had been founded by the famous Marguerite Bourgeoys, when Bourgeoys handed over leadership of the convent to her successor Marie Barbier. Bishop Saint-Vallier [End Page 563] took advantage of this transfer of power to enforce his authority by way of a written constitution. Since 1676, when the Catholic Church had given official approval, the bishop had the right to draw up formal rules for the conduct of the community, but it was not until Saint-Vallier that any had exercised this right. At first the sisters protested the new restrictions placed on them. They had considered themselves 'women of the parish' who dedicated themselves to God's work in the community. Saint-Vallier mandated that they would henceforth be cloistered, not even permitted to speak to outsiders without permission, that they take formal vows of chastity and obedience to a new hierarchy of authority, and that dowries would be required for entry into the convent. At first, the sisters were outraged and protested these changes, but they had no choice but to submit to the bishop's authority. Gray contends that this did not necessarily mean that the Congrégation de Notre-Dame was oppressed by this change, but she makes this claim by focusing on the spiritual aspect of their life. It would have been interesting if Gray had compared the functioning of the community before and after the leadership of Bourgeoys, but she does not. Gray argues that, despite the new restrictions, the sisters did retain close ties and were integrated with the larger community in many ways. She has meticulously mined the fragmentary sources available to her, rendered all the more difficult by losses over time and the numerous fires that ravaged the convent over the centuries. She finds that family ties bound the nuns to the secular life, and as teachers of girls they were also connected to the outside world. Furthermore, they had missions in remote communities where the sisters could not be properly cloistered. Indeed, those returning from the less-restricted life at such postings often posed discipline problems for their superior. Also, in more practical ways, worldly connections were unavoidable. The congregation needed to buy supplies and services, often received in-kind property for dowry payments, and sought loans during troubled times. In particular, they were property owners, involved in real estate transactions, renting out their land and hiring men to maintain it. Gray also examines the power of the convent's superiors, examining three for whom there are historical records - Marie Barbier, Marie-Josèph Maugue-Garreau, and Marie Raizenne. She finds that they did exercise power and may not have always submitted without complaint to the bishop, even though they expressed their outward obedience in a conventional manner. Marie Barbier, in particular, had an extraordinary relationship with her confessor Charles de Glandelet, who supported her in her extreme methods of self-chastisement, which can only be described as cruelly masochistic. I was struck by the emotional intensity of their acknowledgement of each other's insight into their souls, which to this secular reader seemed to go rather beyond mutual religious concern. [End Page 564] Gray does not want to argue, as she contends that historians such as Marta Danylewycz have done, that life in a convent could be a source of liberation for women. Yet she does see it as an option that could often be more attractive than marriage and motherhood, and that it did have spiritual meaning and purpose. She sees power manifested in the lives of the sisters of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, but ultimately concludes that it was...

:The Other Friars: The Carmelite, Augustinian, Sack and Pied Friars in the Middle Ages

In 1274 the Council of Lyons decreed the end of various 'new orders' of Mendicants which had emerged during the great push for evangelism and poverty in the thirteenth-century Latin Church. The Franciscans and Dominicans were explicitly excluded, while the Carmelites and Austin friars were allowed a stay of execution. These last two were eventually able to acquire approval, but other smaller groups, in particular the Friars of the Sack and Pied Friars, were forced to disband. This book outlines the history of those who were threatened by 1274: tracing the development of the two larger orders down to the Council of Trent, and following the fragmentary sources for the brief histories of the discontinued friaries. The impact of the Lyons decree is thus exposed, revealing both the reasons for failure, and what it took to succeed in the late medieval Church. For the first time these orders are treated comparatively and a total history is attempted, from their origins, spirituality and pastoral impact, to their music, buildings and runaways.

Les conseils juifs en Pologne orientale et en Union soviétique sous l’occupation Allemande

Despite certain weaknesses in terms of sources, Isaiah Trunk’s analysis of the Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe remains the most effective treatment of the subject. However, since it was written, the opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s has expanded the regional scope of our knowledge to include Jewish Councils in some of the numerous ghettos that existed mostly only for a short period beyond the pre-1939 Polish borders.The aim of this article will be to take Trunk’s analytical framework and apply it to some of the smaller and less well-known ghettos of (pre-1939) eastern Poland and also the former Soviet Union, including the occupied parts of Russia. Despite the availability of only fragmentary sources for these areas, a comparison can be made of certain aspects of these Councils with the pattern described by Trunk mainly for the central and western Polish territories.Among the issues discussed in the article are the establishment, composition and functions of the Jewish Councils, the role of women, the issue of Jewish social welfare and the attitudes of Jews toward the Councils. While the evidence confirms that many Jewish Councils acted as a break on the development of resistance, other documentation shows that they energetically intervened to ameliorate living conditions in the ghettos. It was personal corruption rather more than obedience to impossible German demands (made with the threat of death) that alienated some Jews from their leaders.

CAROL G. THOMAS. Finding People in Early Greece. (The Fordyce W. Mitchel Memorial Lecture Series.) Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 154. $34.95

This book consists of Carol G. Thomas's 2002 Fordyce Mitchel Memorial Lectures (University of Missouri) on the history of preclassical Greece. The first part is a general, rather repetitive review of twentieth-century approaches to the study of history. This takes the form of a passionate plea for a return to “real history” focused on people and individuals in the past, influenced by the work of scholars like Eugene Genovese and Victor Hanson. Thomas criticizes what she sees as two unfruitful directions in historical scholarship that have created a crisis in the “human sciences” more widely: the postwar fashion for scientific and social scientific methodologies, and more recent postmodern scholarship. The second and third parts of the book consist of two case studies that seek, and claim to find, evidence for the lives of specific individuals from the preclassical Greek past: the hero Jason and the poet Hesiod. In this short book Thomas, perhaps necessarily, does not engage in the depth of argument or scholarship essential to pursue the complex issues she has raised. However, she opens up significant questions well worth further exploration. “First, the primary goal of history,” states Thomas, “is the recovery and recounting of the human story” (p. 128). History as the act of narrating the past and history as the “reality” of what happened in the past are two different things. The relationship between them is not straightforward. Our only direct connection to the past is the primary sources by which historians attempt to link their narratives of the past to “reality” through critical evaluation and interpretation. For a remote period like preclassical Greece, with difficult and fragmentary source material, this task is profoundly difficult.

Cattle, community and corrals

Jean and John Comaroff's paper provides an elegant narrative describing the processes at work behind the adoption of coinage amongst the Tswana of southern Africa under the influence of European missionaries and colonists. My own particular interests are set back two thousand years earlier with the adoption of coin in France and Britain. At this time Rome was the up-and-coming imperial power engaged in trade, and then conquest, stretching its area of influence and dominions from the Mediterranean littoral into temperate Europe. As such I envy the Comaroff's ability to use a rich array of source material that is unavailable to me with my much poorer archaeological remains and fragmentary literary sources. None the less, many of the themes have echoes of processes that must have taken place many years before in this other time and place.

Instrumental, directive, and affective communication in hospital leaflets

This study focuses on the typical semantic systems extracted from hospital staff communicative resources which attempt to validate information as an "object" to be transferred to patients. We describe the models of textual communication in 58 patient information leaflets from five hospital units in Brazil, gathered from 1996 to 2002. Three categories were identified, based on the theory of speech acts (Austin, Searle, and Habermas): 1) cognitive-instrumental utterances: descriptions by means of technical terms validated by self-referred, incomplete, or inaccessible argumentation, with an implicit educational function; 2) technical-directive utterances: self-referred (to the context of the source domains), with a shifting of everyday acts to a technical terrain with a disciplinary function and impersonal features; and 3) expressive modulations: need for inter-subjective connections to strengthen bonds of trust and a tendency to use childish arguments. We conclude that the three categories displayed: fragmentary sources; assumption of univocal messages and invariable use of information (idealized motivations and interests, apart from individualized perspectives); and assumption of universal interests as generators of knowledge.

AN ‘EPISODE IN THE SOUTH’? ARS SUBTILIOR AND THE PATRONAGE OF FRENCH PRINCES

Scholars have long been aware of the intriguing fact that the late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century French song repertory survives almost exclusively in non-French sources. Most of the principal collections of chansons copied between c.1380 and 1420 – that is, in the period corresponding roughly to the reign of Charles VI, sources like PR, Pit, ModA and FP – derive from Italy; further witness to the circulation of this repertory south of the Alps is found in additional, fragmentary sources, such as Lu, SL and GR. In comparison, the number of French songs preserved in manuscripts of northern provenance is remarkably slight. Moreover, those works that do survive in such sources (and these are mostly Flemish fragments) are generally simple works in classic Ars nova style; hardly any songs from the repertory we associate with Ars subtilior feature in these collections at all.

Antonio Foscarini in the City of Crossed Destinies

This article concerns ambassadors and spies in seventeenth-century Venice and London. It was the result of attempts to find a form appropriate to a story plagued with riddles, contradictions and uncertainties, in which the author's attempts to interpret the evidence shadowed earlier attempts by seventeenth-century commentators. This is a story in which the conventions of 'empirical' history proved inadequate to answer the questions raised by fragmentary sources. The form is an allegory of the content; in other words, the way the story is told is a commentary on what the story is about. By presenting the relationship between past and present (or form and content) as allegorical or metaphorical, both our distance from the past and our ability to speak meaningfully about it are simultaneously asserted.