Personal Importance Research Articles

Archibald Marshall’s “Motley Mixture of Crying Contradictions”: Upsidonia as Utopian Farce

ABSTRACT Karl Marx’s acerbic observation in the opening lines of The Eighteenth Brumaire that “all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” may be profitably applied to a reconsideration of literary farce sui generis, a genre represented in this article by a long-neglected work of utopian fiction, Archibald Marshall’s Upsidonia (1915). Although Upsidonia’s current disregard is arguably undeserved, the article’s chief interest is not to reclaim the novel on aesthetic grounds but to illuminate the mechanics of what Marx would call its “serious buffoonery.” In its persistent reversal of capitalist principles and relations, Upsidonia naturally invites readers to revisit Marx, whose mordant gambit may serve as a key to Marshall’s own farcical plot and praxis, rooted in return and repetition, the essential maneuvers of farce itself.

Evaluation of II. Abdulhamid and his Period in Terms of Political Geography

Political Geography is a branch of science that has started to make a name for itself, especially in the last years of the 19th century all over the world. Ottoman Sultan II. Abdulhamid Khan was the leading actor of the world political scene in those years. He was an important personage influencing world politics in the years when such a science emerged. Examining the II. Abdulhamid period will certainly attract attention. Socio-cultural power, which has an important place in political geography, the characteristics of the human who make up a nation are the power formed by educated people equipped with technical knowledge. In a sense, it means that the citizens of the state are well educated from the lowest level to the person who governs the state. From this point of view, Sultan II. Abdulhamid Han was a very perfect carpenter. He also used this carpentry profession in state administration. Because the job of the carpenter is to create perfect furniture sets from raw wood. While governing his state, he showed the whole world that the Ottoman Empire was not destroyed by correcting the unsound parts of the state. After he was dethroned, the collapse of the state accelerated, and those who dethroned him desired for him to come back to power.

Dziennik [Diary] by Władysław Konopczyński on Writing a Biography of Stanisław Konarski

Stanisław Konarski (1700–1773) – a Piarist, playwright, poet, translator, publisher, publicist, reformer of education, and founder of the Collegium Nobilium; one of the most important personages of eighteenth-century Polish history. His earliest scientific biography was written by the Krakow historian Władysław Konopczyński in 1926. Based on Konopczyński’s Diary¸ this study presents a reconstruction of work on this important book and challenges surrounding its publication.

Freedom Libraries: The Untold Story of Libraries for African Americans in the South

Freedom Libraries: The Untold Story of Libraries for African Americans in the South

TÂCÜDDÎN AHMED B. İBRÂHÎM ED-DEHHÂN EL-HANEFÎ NİN "RİSÂLETÜN Fİ l-KUNÛTİ Fİ L-FECR VE GAYRİH MİN BÂKİ L-EVKÂT'İNDE HÜDÛSİ N-NÂZİLÂT" ADLI RİSÂLESİNİN TAHKÎK VE TAHLİLİ

Tâcuddin Ahmed b. Ibrâhim b. Osman b. ‘Abdinnebi ed-Dehhân was one of the important personages in the twentieth century. Dehhân who received his knowledge education from Mecca’s famous scholars is known as a person being interested in all of the Islamic knowledges and it is stated that he mostly specialized in Hanafi’s fiqh. Dehhan that there was not much information about his life in the relevant sources had a few epistles. One of these epistles is Risâletun fi kunuti fi’l-fecr ve gayrih min bâki’l-evkât ‘inde hudusi’n-nâzilât. On this epistle which is not known well in the knowledge world, the view of Hanafi sect related to the statement of kunut pray in the calamity times was respectably reviewed. On this study which consists of the edition critic, it was aimed to provide ed-Dehhan’s concise epistle to the use of relevant persons and so to contribute to the knowledge world. In this context, the kunut pray was considered with the outline on the introduction section of this study. Next, Dehhan’s life and works were mentioned and the epistle’s investigation was made with its analysis in terms of content.

CATHERIN E HOREL, ADMIRAL HORTHY - THE REGENT OF HUNGARY, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2019, 417 pages

The author is a historian and research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, a specialist in the history of Central Europe, a professor. The volume of the French Catherine Horel represents a valuable contribution, not only on the biography of an important personage of Hungarian history, but also on the history of interwar Hungary.

Exploring the World of J. S. Bach: A Traveler's Guide by Robert L. Marshall and Traute M. Marshall

Reviewed by: Exploring the World of J. S. Bach: A Traveler's Guide by Robert L. Marshall and Traute M. Marshall Jaime Carini Exploring the World of J. S. Bach: A Traveler's Guide. By Robert L. Marshall and Traute M. Marshall. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. [xxx, 245 p. ISBN 9780252040313 (cloth), $95; ISBN 9780252081767 (paperback), $29.95; ISBN 9780252098574 (e-book), $26.96.] Maps, photographs, color illustrations, appendix, bibliography, index. The American Bach Society (ABS) and the University of Illinois Press (UIP) once again collaborate to create a special publication, Exploring the World of J. S. Bach: A Traveler's Guide by Robert L. Marshall and Traute M. [End Page 75] Marshall. The need for such a guide arose in 1989 after the collapse of the Socialist government and subsequent reunification of Germany, which prompted a surge in tourism to Bach's homeland and facilitated new discoveries in Bach scholarship and architectural renovations of Bach sites. The new guide simultaneously incorporates these developments and complements the first collaborative special publication of the ABS and UIP (Christoph Wolff and Markus Zepf, The Organs of J. S. Bach: A Handbook, trans. Lynn Edwards Butler [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012]), by blending academic research with tourism information. The result is this academically based travelogue of Bach sites, written in English, that serves both scholars and tourists. Rarely does one encounter a book whose authors address both the academic community and tourism populace with equal integrity. The Marshalls balance these seemingly disparate groups by focusing on the interest that unites them: the places that circumscribed the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. Working within these physical borders, they break out of literary confines—the book works as a "biography, a reference work, and a tour guide"—in order to create an appropriate intellectual space for their diverse audience (p. x). Readers will appreciate the clear organization of the book's core material, which is divided into two roughly equal parts. Part 1, "J. S. Bach's Principal Residences," contains eight chapters, each devoted to a town where Bach resided: Eisenach (1685–95), Ohrdruf (1695–1700), Lüneburg (1700–1702), Arnstadt (1703–7), Mühlhausen (1707–8), Weimar (1703, 1708–17), Köthen (1717–23), and Leipzig (1723–50). These chapters are organized chronologically and include accounts of Bach's personal and professional activities in each place. Part 2, "Towns Certainly or Presumably Visited by J. S. Bach," portrays forty-three additional towns that Bach may have had reasons to visit. Here, each entry, ordered alphabetically rather than chronologically, retains two familiar elements from part 1: a description of Bach's professional activities, and landmarks in the town. Part 2, then, increases what we know about Bach and his interactions with places outside of the towns where he resided. Perusing the pages of part 1, the reader learns about Bach's early "German school" education, his activities as a chorister in Ohrdruf and Lüneburg, his extended family in Arnstadt, and his various positions as court and church musician, in which he composed for both secular and sacred occasions. Descriptions of the various musical influences on his developing style permeate the chapter devoted to his Lüneburg period (1700–1702). The German, Italian, and French musical attributes that Bach absorbed here while a chorister at the St. Michaeliskloster school, and through his interactions with organist Georg Böhm, would continue to define his compositional style throughout his career as he moved to other locations. Information about other members of Bach's family and important personages enrich the biographical contents in part 1. In chapter 1, "Eisenach (1685–95)," for example, readers encounter a brief description of Georg Philipp Telemann's activities in Eisenach that alerts them to a stele (erected in 2012) with the inscription, "Here he created the new form of the Protestant church cantata" (p. 5). Travelers to Eisenach to visit the Bach sites might also be on the lookout for this Telemann monument. Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen, figures prominently in chapter 7, "Köthen (1717–23)," as the "gracious Prince" who employed Bach as Kapellmeister of his court (p. 63). [End Page 76] Geographical location becomes a...

Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603– 1912 by Atsuko Hirai

Reviewed by: Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603– 1912 by Atsuko Hirai Michael Laver (bio) Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1603– 1912. By Atsuko Hirai. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge MA, 2014. xx, 433 pages. $49.95. Government by Mourning is an ambitious book that seeks to bring many different strands of Tokugawa historiography together through a detailed and far-reaching study of Tokugawa mourning edicts. Hirai’s book is primarily about Tokugawa edicts of sound abstention during times of mourning. These prohibitions mandated that the populace refrain from making sounds that accompany a variety of forms of entertainment, including musical instruments, theatrical performances, and dramatic recitations. However, on a deeper level the book seeks to make much more sweeping claims about the Tokugawa polity itself, including the nature of Tokugawa authority throughout premodern Japan as well as the role that both the shogun and the emperor played in the consciousness of commoners along the length and breadth of the archipelago. Hirai notes the contributions that sundry other scholars, both Japanese and Western, have made in the field of Tokugawa mourning rituals, including Kuroda Hideo, Nakagawa Manabu, Imano Makoto, and, most recently, Nam-lin Hur. What is missing from other scholars’ works, Hirai claims, is the recognition that Tokugawa mourning rituals, combined with sound prohibitions, created a Tokugawa neo-orthodoxy that was not necessarily based on neo-Confucian thought but on the mourning edicts that emanated [End Page 195] from Edo across the country. Other scholars have paid various degrees of attention to mourning edicts or sound prohibitions, but rarely have they woven these edicts together to form a coherent Tokugawa policy that served to entrench Tokugawa authority even in daimyō domains that were historically hostile to the shogunal family. While Hirai traces pre-Tokugawa mourning rituals in the opening chapters, it is with the shogunate of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi that she sees the ultimate codification of Tokugawa mourning policy. Hirai praises Beatrice Bodart-Bailey’s attempt to rehabilitate Tsunayoshi’s reputation but marvels that she ignores Tsunayoshi’s mourning edicts, which Hirai calls the most significant and enduring achievement of his shogunate. In 1684 Tsunayoshi, noting that the various mourning edicts were not systematized in any way, established a coherent Tokugawa edict on mourning and abstention that stood as a lasting achievement, even though the edicts were amended significantly under the shogunate of Tokugawa Yoshimune in 1736. In essence, Tsunayoshi’s code laid out in detail how long one was to mourn relatives of various degrees of proximity to the mourner: from one’s parents to one’s great-grandparents. The codes also spelled out mourning periods for the wild complexity of the families of Japanese political elites, including mourning for biological parents in the case where a child was an adopted heir of another family. Hirai notes that the Tokugawa mourning and abstention edicts served, as other scholars have noted, to reinforce the legitimacy of successors, especially given that the succession to shogun became so complex with multiple children born to wives and concubines, and, on several occasions, no children born to a shogun’s primary wife. Such abstention edicts included a variety of activities forbidden on the occasion of the death of an important personage; in particular, Hirai is concerned with “sound abstentions”: abstaining from playing musical instruments to be sure, but also staging theatrical productions, reciting dramatic performances, and the like. Hirai observes that Tsunayoshi himself was never “supposed” to become shogun, but that because of a series of unlikely events, he ascended to the shogunate with at least a modicum of doubt as to whether he was the legitimate heir. As Hirai states, “strict implementation of the mourning edict helped to ensure orderly succession, especially when the heirs were young at the time of their fathers’ deaths” (p. 122). Hirai turns from examining the Tokugawa mourning and abstention edicts themselves, as well as their political functions, toward the reach of the Tokugawa edicts. Here she uses the mourning and abstention edicts as a way to demonstrate that Tokugawa power was much more widely spread than has been recognized and that the beginnings of Japanese state formation lay not...

The Adulterous Muse: Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W. B. Yeats by Adrian Frazier

Reviewed by: The Adulterous Muse: Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W. B. Yeats by Adrian Frazier Anthony Bradley The Adulterous Muse: Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W. B. Yeats, by Adrian Frazier , pp. 312. Dublin: Lilliput Press. 2016. €20 (paper). Anyone who has read the poems of W. B. Yeats, or knows anything about his life, knows that he fell in love with Maud Gonne, the beautiful Irish nationalist, when he was a young man; proposed marriage to her several times over the course of almost thirty years; that she did not requite his passion; and that Yeats wrote some of the finest love poems in the language, ranging from the adulatory and mythologizing to the accusing and embittered: "Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery. …" The conjunction of sexual desire and political nationalism in her person was typically transmuted in Yeats's poetry into a powerful erotic nationalism, so that even when a poem (such as "Easter, 1916,") appears self-evidently to be about something else, in Frazier's compelling and persuasive reading, it is really all about Gonne. The Adulterous Muse is a highly readable and even sensational book, replete with political imbroglios and sexual intrigue, well paced and expert in its narration, and impressive in its lightly worn scholarship. Frazier has tapped into French archives that feature fascinating newspaper and magazine articles about Gonne and her adulterous lover, Lucien Millevoye, in 1890s Paris. Of the three main players, we presumably know most about Yeats, thanks especially to R. F. Foster's biography, but by focusing on his relationship with Gonne (offering illuminating and original readings of Yeats's poems about her), Frazier manages to shed new light on his artistic and emotional life. Maud Gonne has remained a more opaque figure, despite her autobiography A Servant of the Queen (1938), and several biographies. Whether she is admirable or not depends on your leanings in Irish politics—yet even one sympathetic to her activism might wonder about her emotional life beyond the near-fanaticism of her dedication to Irish nationalism. Frazier shines a light into Gonne's private life that illuminates her relations with both Yeats and Millevoye, who is not well known (unless you have reason [End Page 150] to be familiar with late nineteenth-century French politics, and the Boulangist movement of which he was a ranking member). Frazier recovers Millevoye as an important personage in Gonne's life—after all, he was her first lover and the father of two of her children—whose political convictions reinforced her own. Frazier summons up the ambience of the time in France, its nationalism, its anti-Semitism, its politicians and their mistresses, its duels, its antiparliamentary threats ending with a whimper in the grim farce of General Boulanger's suicide. As well as running a salon on behalf of Millevoye, Gonne simultaneously performed as a muse figure for the young Irish nationalist Yeats, who saw in her the incarnation of romantic Ireland. That role, Frazier says, she "worked … for all it was worth." As with Millevoye, there was in her relationship with Yeats the combination of an intense personal alliance with a political allegiance to a revolutionary national ideal. She was an actress on occasion—notably in the first performance of Yeats's and Gregory's Cathleen Ni Houlihan—and in real life histrionically played the role of Yeats's muse. "[T]hey all write about some woman in their poetry," says that unchaste Penelope, Molly Bloom, in her early morning soliloquy as she briefly fantasizes about becoming the muse for Stephen Dedalus, who has just departed the kitchen of 7 Eccles Street after having a cup of cocoa with her husband. (Earlier in the day she had had an adulterous encounter with Blazes Boylan.) It still comes as something of a shock to recall, as Frazier's wicked title prompts us to do, that when Yeats first met her, both of them in their early twenties, she was already the mistress of the married Millevoye, and that she kept Yeats in the dark about this for a long time, and combined leading him on, as it were, with dark hints about tragic...

The Early Midwest in the Atlantic World

The Early Midwest in the Atlantic World Robert Michael Morrissey Catherine Cangany, Frontier Seaport: Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 272pp. $45.00. Christian Ayne Crouch, Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians, and the End of New France. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 2014. 250pp. $35.00. David MacDonald, Lives of Fort de Chartres: Commandants, Soldiers, and Civilians in French Illinois, 1720–1770. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 262pp. $28.50. Histories of early America used to presume that the most important aspects of the process of early American development were the things that happened in the New World and that separated the American experience [End Page 142] from the Old World. Over the past two generations, an “Atlantic world turn” in early American studies has challenged this basic understanding in two ways. First, by contextualizing local early American histories in a wider frame, historians have called into question how unique New World experiences actually were, challenging the previously exceptionalist narratives of colonial American history. Secondly, by exploring the important connections and entanglements between early American places and events and their counterparts in the Atlantic basin, historians have demonstrated that certain aspects of early American history simply cannot be understood as local stories but demand to be understood as part of larger processes. As these insights have gained acceptance, historians have revised the basic narrative of early America, tying it to a larger transnational story organized around themes of economy, culture, migration and exchange. Three new books add to our understanding of the Atlantic dimensions of the early American Midwest. In Frontier Seaport, Catherine Cangany explores the tension between early Detroit’s status as a frontier colony and Atlantic outpost, elucidating the fascinating contours of this distinctive city along the way. In Nobility Lost, Christian Ayne Crouch vividly reconsiders the Seven Years War not simply as a colonial fight, but as a moment when French colonial and metropolitan military cultures came into contact and disagreement, with important results for the future of the French empire. Finally, in Lives of Fort de Chartres, David MacDonald expands the local history of Fort de Chartres in colonial Illinois Country by considering the transnational and cosmopolitan experiences of many of its important personages during the French regime, especially through the institution of the French Navy. Together, these studies shed valuable new light on the early Midwest, even as they remind us that, like early America generally, the Midwest was never just an isolated frontier divorced from the larger story of empires and global processes. In Frontier Seaport, Catherine Cangany defines an explicitly Atlantic research problem: how was the frontier city of Detroit simultaneously a frontier zone as well as an Atlantic entrepot? Founded in the early 1700s, Detroit began as a fur trade center, a place that was utterly remote from the colonial metropole, but also critically attached to it by its economic purpose. Picking up her history at the end of the fur trade phase and at the beginning of Detroit’s colonization by British and later American entrepreneurs, Cangany investigates how Detroit’s history continued to be defined by its remote situation as well as by its relentless cultural, political, and economic connections [End Page 143] to the wider Atlantic world. Detroit was, Cangany writes, “poised at the intersection of East and West, empire and frontier, core and periphery,” and this defined its history (3). For Cangany, Detroit was defined by important local idiosyncracies—“localisms”—that made it distinctive economically, politically, and culturally. This makes sense, given Detroit’s roots as a refuge for often defiant and self-interested traders, Indians, and later settlers. The dictates and preferences of central authority and empire often meant little to pragmatists on the ground in a place like Detroit, where Europeans with diverse agendas came together with Native people to fashion a hybrid world. At the same time, however, the frontier colony was not independent and its inhabitants wanted many of the economic, political, and cultural benefits that connection to the Atlantic offered. Thus was Detroit’s history centrally shaped by the tension between localisms and the standardizing tendencies of Atlantic world connections. Cangany...

Medeia escrava: sobre amada de Toni Morrison

The essay proposes a lecture of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, keeping the focus on the evident resemblance that exists between the story written by the contemporary author and the classical myth of Medea, and highlighting the distinctions of each one. The comparison between the two protagonists has already been drawn, more than once, and it is not the first time that a novel, whose protagonist is a woman who has killed her own offspring is compared to the mythical Greek personage. Women’s appeal to the horrible infanticide as a reaction to a tragic situation has been recurrent throughout history and throughout stories. And it is in the dialectic between reality and fiction that it is possible to notice the first big different among the two narratives. While Medea is a mythical character, Sethe – the character created by Toni Morrison – is a fiction based on a real person, on Margaret Garner, who has really killed her daughter, and because of this gesture became an important and almost mythical personage in the struggle of North American abolitionists. The second difference to be highlighted lies in the motivation of the act around which the story revolves: Self-love, in one case; maternal love in another. The third and last major outstanding distinction is directly linked to the first, that is, to the dialectic between fiction and reality. For coming from a story that really happened, the character of Toni Morrison has to face the reaction to her murderous act in the so-called real world, serve sentence in jail and suffer for it in her life. The deus ex-machina solution is reserved for mythical heroines. If there is a god able to save Sethe, it is a quite phenomenal one and goes by the name of Eros.

Stuttered Speech and Moral Intent


 
 
 When examining the history of early imperial China one is struck by the number of important personages, from Han Feizi 韓非子 (ca. 280–ca. 233 B.C.E.) and Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 B.C.E.–18 C.E.) to Guo Pu 郭璞 (276–324) and Wang Wei 王微 (415–453), who are described in biographical records as kouji 口吃 (disfluent). This paper contextualizes these descriptions by examining both the hermeneutical tradition regarding the language used to describe this condition and its evolving understanding in the traditional Chinese medical records. These two broad bodies of social understanding provide a compelling tool for interpreting and contextualizing the many descriptions of individuals in the early imperial biographical tradition. It becomes clear when taken in this larger context and as a collective that this condition is not just a random oddity to be included in a biography as merely an outlying feature of an individual, but that disfluency was understood in the much more highly charged realm of language production and moral practice. It spoke to the long-standing tension over rhetorical skill versus moral intent, form versus content. Finally, what also emerges from the collective is a clearer understanding of the range of strategies that individuals with this disability found to navigate the specific social context of early imperial elite culture. It is out of these dual views, collective-moral and individual-functional, that this study provides insights into the lives of these highly influential individuals and adds layers to our understanding of the social and medical context for individuals with disabilities in early imperial China.
 
 

Being Marcus

As a re-writing of the past, Being Marcus is an alternative ‘his-story’ of an important personage in History. In the conspiracy against and assassination of Caesar, Brutus has been seen, through the ages, to have been ‘the leading spirit of the coup’ (Lewis 1983, 58). Beware the Ides of March is a soothsayer's warning in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Caesar, attended by a train of friends and supporters, ignores the warning and leaves for games and races that mark the celebration of the feast of Lupercal (Perry and Vickers 2000, 8). Until then, the Ides of March holds no special significance or association in history, where Ides generally marked the 15th day of a month. Being Marcus is a work of speculative fiction that refers to this day on the Roman calendar (Idus Martias), a fateful one for Caesar. The story toys with alternate history and takes us to the life of Brutus (Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus) following the assassination of Caesar. Same Brutus upon whom Caesar had entrusted ‘important commands in the Gallic and civil wars, he held the governorship of Transalpine Gaul for three years, returning to Rome in 45 B.C. Caesar then designated him to be governor of Cisalpine Gaul in 44–43, and consul with Plancus in 42. The reason why such a favourite of Caesar – even named secondary heir in Caesar's will – joined the conspiracy remains unclear.’ (Lewis 1983, Introduction, xviii). Beware the Ides of March … Centuries later, Marcus recollects the Empire, the reign of a legend. Brutus is now immortal, is living in the shadow of his once hero Caesar.

Personal Circuits: Official Tours and South Africa's Colony

This paper focuses on the visits of Sydney Buxton, Governor-General of South Africa, and his party to South West Africa (SWA, now Namibia) in 1915 and 1919. These, I argue, formed part of a broader economy of what might be called ‘personal circuits’ – journeys and visits by important personages – which helped to construct networks of power within the southern African region and beyond, and, in the case of the Governor-General, acted to promote British imperial power.In this case, the tours took place at two crucial moments: during the South African conquest of Namibia in 1915, and after the granting of the League of Nations mandate for SWA to South Africa in 1919. The records of the tours illustrate not only that South Africa was eager to impose its symbolic authority on Namibia at (almost) the highest level, but also, to an extent which historians have overlooked, that this authority was conceived as that of imperial Britain as well as of the Union of South Africa.The tours, during which the public performance of power and consent was repeatedly staged, also opened up a significant space for negotiation and dissent on the part of both the conquered German population and the African population. The petition from Africans in Windhoek reveals much about the trajectory of oppositional politics in Namibia at this time. The article also looks at the gendering of power during these visits by considering both the audiences at the public performances, and elite women, especially Mildred Buxton, whose significant role is argued to have been inherently political.

SAİD NURSİ'NİN SİYASET ANLAYIŞI

Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, who lived in the four major political periods is an important personage. He lived respectively in the period of Abdulhamit II, the Union and Progress, a single-party and multi-party of the Turkish Republic. He closly followed all changes of those period and he revealed his opinions and attitudes towards them. In addition, he didn’t ignore to evaluate the politicals subjects having been discussed throught the history of Islam. Said Nursi has explained the concept of political as both the top managers in the comminity and authority that gives orders to a lower level. He has widely discussed whether the politics is factually necessery or not, the rates of politics in religious matters, the relationship between religion and politics and the attitudes that a secular sistem must take towards religion. Also he discussed the issue of four caliphs being the most virtuous and the influence of the issue on opinion differences between Shia an ahl al-Sunnah sects.

France Divided: The French and the Civil War in Spain par David Wingeate Pike

Reviews 249 avec le déroulement linéaire des événements liés à la Révolution, plusieurs d’entre ces événements ayant d’ailleurs pu servir de point d’origine de la nouvelle ère. Perovic étudie minutieusement la dimension symbolique de la volonté de rupture qu’exprimait ce nouveau calendrier (un moyen pour la Révolution de faire table rase du passé). Cependant, il aurait été utile d’apporter plus de précisions quant aux effets pratiques de cette transformation radicale des rythmes de la vie quotidienne. Par exemple, quelles furent les réactions des paysans et des employés à l’innovation des mois divisés en trois décades, innovation qui, suivant le principe décimal, instaurait un jour de repos tous les dix jours, au lieu du dimanche hebdomadaire traditionnel? Pourquoi la division décimale de la journée (il était initialement prévu que chaque jour serait divisée en dix heures) n’a-t-elle jamais été appliquée? Si les lecteurs risquent de rester sur leur faim en ce qui concerne les conséquences matérielles et sociales de l’instauration du calendrier républicain, ils n’en trouveront pas moins dans ce livre une étude de grande envergure sur les conceptions fluctuantes du temps et de l’histoire durant la période révolutionnaire. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin Pike,DavidWingeate. France Divided: The French and the CivilWar in Spain.Brighton: Sussex AP, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84519-490-1. Pp. 433. £80. The bloody Spanish Civil War between Republicans and Nationalists (July 1936– April 1939) can be considered as a dress rehearsal for World War II. Not only did it pit future allies, such as democratic England and France and the Communist Soviet Union, against the fascist powers of Germany and Italy, it also initiated the disastrous Western policy of appeasement of dictators that fed Hitler’s ambitions. Civil war broke out in Spain when a number of generals, among them Franco, staged a coup against the democratically elected Popular Front government and quickly took control of the south and west. However, for much of the war a stalemate prevailed with neither side able to win a decisive victory. In France at the very same time (July 1936), Léon Blum’s Popular Front government came to power but, although it would have liked to assist the legitimate republican government of Spain, could not or dared not for fear of upsetting a delicate balance of power in France, possibly igniting a French civil war and maybe even provoking an international incident. France and England cautioned the Axis powers not to intervene either; but they did nevertheless. France occasionally looked the other way when it came to letting supplies or soldiers from the International Brigades into Spain, but remained reluctant to openly send aid to the Republicans. Both France and England belatedly began to rearm, finally realizing that war with Germany was fairly certain but by then it was too late to stop the Nazi juggernaut. Ironically, Franco’s Spain remained neutral during the war and survived the demise of both Hitler and Mussolini. Pike’s book presupposes some knowledge of the Spanish Civil War because it focuses almost exclusively on the war of words in France, in the press, between supporters and opponents of intervention, showing how French journalists and writers—some admirably objective, others violently partisan—at once expressed but also manipulated public opinion to suit their ideological purposes. Through the lens of French newspapers, the reader is treated to op-eds, reports from Spain (including from the battle front), outright propaganda, and current events (frontier incidents,the delivery of arms,the arrival of foreign volunteers,and espionage activities). However, it remains uncertain to what extent public opinion was swayed by the press since opinion polls had not yet become the norm to gauge it. In all likelihood the press is still the most reliable barometer of public opinion—though we should note that the truth is usually the first victim of war. This original, meticulouslyresearched , and well-written study features several useful appendices, including an annotated list of important personages and a brief history of the French press. It will...

Joie de Vivre: Secrets of Wining, Dining, and Romancing Like the French par Harriet Welty Rochefort

Civil War because it focuses almost exclusively on the war of words in France, in the press, between supporters and opponents of intervention, showing how French journalists and writers—some admirably objective, others violently partisan—at once expressed but also manipulated public opinion to suit their ideological purposes. Through the lens of French newspapers, the reader is treated to op-eds, reports from Spain (including from the battle front), outright propaganda, and current events (frontier incidents,the delivery of arms,the arrival of foreign volunteers,and espionage activities). However, it remains uncertain to what extent public opinion was swayed by the press since opinion polls had not yet become the norm to gauge it. In all likelihood the press is still the most reliable barometer of public opinion—though we should note that the truth is usually the first victim of war. This original, meticulouslyresearched , and well-written study features several useful appendices, including an annotated list of important personages and a brief history of the French press. It will be well-received not only by specialists but also by the general reader interested in 1930s France. St. Norbert College (WI) Tom Conner Rochefort, Harriet Welty. Joie de Vivre: Secrets of Wining, Dining, and Romancing Like the French. New York: St. Martin’s, 2012. ISBN 978-1-250-00456-7. Pp. 304. $25. In her third guide to the French lifestyle, Rochefort identifies joie de vivre, reveling in the moment and taking pleasure in all things, as the key to understanding what the French are about. She discusses male/female relations, small pleasures and attention to detail, savoir-faire, conversational style, and contrarian behavior as cultural traits, leisure,the French woman,food,wine,and the associated rituals.Her summary: pleasure is not sinful, time is not money, work is not your life, expressing yourself is good for the heart, the French think of the pleasure of others and“put out for them”(303–04). Her account is more a synthesis than a chronicle, and not overall original, but the style is engaging and she offers a welter of examples. She is most acute on: conversation; Americans’ food issues; the reasons for French insouciance as well as pessimism, compared to Americans; and generally looking for what is instructive rather than problematic about other lifestyles. She is good at unpacking French cultural logic, although given her thematic approach this involves some repetition and some procrustean squeezing.As she acknowledges, she has deliberately not sought to resolve contradictions (even grouchy service fits in). She usually follows a protocol of observation first, then an explanation, and finally—but not consistently—the exception(s) to the rule. She has for example several interesting if familiar pages on la Parisienne, but only one sentence acknowledging there are few Parisiennes on the Metro, and only belatedly brings up the question of equality with men as a kind of footnote to her 250 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 251 lengthy and admiring portrait. Rochefort draws principally on her own experiences, her French husband and his family, and her circle of friends, as well as quoting frequently from other American writers, most often Edith Wharton (implying cultural continuity). These are also the limits of her vision, however. She and her husband live in a trendy quartier populaire but we learn that they own their apartment and have a second home near La Baule. Her in-laws have downsized from their large Paris apartment and also own a home in the country. Moreover, she reports the trend toward second homes got “democratized” in the 1970s, by which she seems to mean other Europeans are buying in France, not less affluent French. Her scattered allusions to the contrary notwithstanding, and given her shopping priorities, we have to wonder which France she is really talking about, in terms of place, social class, variation in general. And to which America she is comparing that France. More pointedly, how much does she really know firsthand about today’s America(s), having grown up in a small Midwest town, moved to France after college over 40 years ago and lived there longer than here? Even accurately interpreted behavior is not perforce characteristic of a majority...

El jesuita y confesor de Santa Teresa de Jesús, Rodrigo Álvarez: características y genealogía de su espiritualidad

We will study to one of the most influential personages of the Sevillan spirituality of first half of century XVI: the Jesuit confessor of Teresa de Avila Rodrigo Alvarez. In this period a group of evangelical spirituality, paulina, visionary and prophetic organizes itself that has its origin in the axis Jerez-Lebrija and that soon will connect, through Rodrigo de Valer, with the evangelical ideas and from return to a primitive Church of the skillful canon of the cathedral of Seville Egidio, and through Rodrigo Alvarez with the Congregation of Granada, a species of school of hermetic spirituality composed by artists (Juan Bautista Vazquez, Vasco Pereira, Juan Martinez Montanes), clergymen and nuns whom its descendants in important personages in the eventful journeys of the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception will have as they were Hernando de Mata and Bernardo de Toro.

Post-Qadhafi Libya: interactive dynamics and the political future

Libya's contemporary history has been dominated by the interplay of the perpetual dynamics of religion, tribalism, oil and ideology. After 42 years in power Qadhafi was killed at the hands of revolutionaries and the final chapter of his dictatorial reign was terminated. With direct and powerful support from NATO and some Arab governments the revolution, led by the National Transitional Council and military councils in many Libyan cities, was another reflection of the supremacy of the perpetual dynamics. The purpose of this article is to examine the interaction of these dynamics and how they are echoed in post-Qadhafi Libya. An assessment is made of the manifestations related to these dynamics by providing a sketch of existing social and political features. This will help determine the fundamentals that shape the foreseeable future of the country and predict the role of the various political forces interacting in the field. The article is a product of direct research, analysis, eye-witness accounts and interviews in Libya with important personages and representatives of powerful currents now currently competing on the scene and vying for influence in the determination of the future of the country after Qadhafi.

Susan Kern . The Jeffersons at Shadwell . (The Lamar Series in Western History.) New Haven : Yale University Press . 2010 . Pp. xi, 362. $30.00.

Very little is known about Thomas Jefferson's life before February 1, 1770. On that date, fire destroyed his ancestral home at Shadwell and all of its furnishings, including Jefferson's papers and the books that he inherited at the time of his father Peter's death in 1757. Susan Kern's book attempts to fill this void based on archaeological excavations of the Shadwell sites; wills and probate inventories; Peter Jefferson's account book and accounts of Jane Jefferson after her husband's death; Jane's Bible, which she purchased after the 1770 fire; and lists of the names of Shadwell's slaves and their assignment of responsibilities. Kern's piecing together of this evidence allows her to draw conclusions—many of them impossible before this book—regarding the Jefferson family, including the man who became its most important personage. The fact that her conclusions come with significant caveats, however, will also raise serious questions in the minds of some concerning their validity.