Love Of Books Research Articles

Carmen Caballero-Navas (ed.), The book of women's love and Jewish medieval medical literature on women: Sefer Ahavat Nashim, The Kegan Paul Library of Jewish Studies, London and New York, Kegan Paul, 2004, pp. 314, £85.00 (hardback 0-7103-0758-6).

The Hebrew Book of women's love (Sefer Ahavat Nashim), here edited and translated for the first time, is known to exist in only one late fifteenth-century copy, made probably in the area of Catalonia or Provence. Caballero-Navas postulates that the text was composed in the thirteenth century, but a more precise dating may never be possible. It gathers together different kinds of knowledge, juxtaposing magic with detailed remedies based on the traditional pharmacopoeia of simple and compound medicines widely used in medieval Europe. After introductory sections on love magic and aphrodisiacs, it organizes the remaining cosmetic, gynaecological, and obstetrical remedies in head-to-toe order. The combination of medicine and cosmetics, topics we would now consider quite distinct, is not at all unusual in the Middle Ages, being found in Latin and vernacular texts on women's medicine throughout Europe. More unusual is the incorporation of mechanisms to improve the sexual success of men, which are rarely found so closely allied to women's medicine in other linguistic traditions until the late Middle Ages. The Book is first and foremost a remedy book, with virtually no theory of causation. As such, it is probably of most interest as evidence for the sociology of the body and will rightly attract a broad audience of historians of women's medicine and sexuality. Such readers will no doubt find this edition and its accompanying commentary a bit obscure not simply because of the unusual nature of the text but also because of certain editorial decisions. Instead of merely stating that the works of the Arabic authorities al-Ra¯zī, Ibn Sīna¯, and al-Zahra¯wī, all of whom are cited in the text, were translated into Hebrew at such and such a date, Caballero-Navas might have confirmed whether the references can be traced or if the author was simply name-dropping. Greater engagement with Latin medical traditions might have also shown that this Hebrew tradition is not as directly derivative of Arabic medicine as it seems. Caballero assumes (pp. 28–9) direct use of the North African Arabic writer Ibn al-Jazza¯r, ignoring the more obvious parallels with the Latin Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum, a twelfth-century Salernitan treatise that drew heavily upon Ibn al-Jazza¯r and was available in Hebrew translation. And most readers are likely to miss the passing clarification on p. 81 that the Catalan cosmetic and gynaecological treatise, which has already been referred to over a dozen times as the Trotula, has no direct relation to the Latin treatise that circulated under that name; they will find no explanation at all that this is actually a rendering of a Latin treatise on cosmetics usually attributed to Arnau of Vilanova. Caballero-Navas is least persuasive in her arguments about the book's intended audience. As the original author himself declares, this book is about “what women like and need for themselves; for this reason it has been called Book of women's love, for you will find in this book what women, and those who are able to have intercourse with them, ask from the art of medicine” (p. 116). Caballero-Navas fails to engage with the significance of that penultimate phrase and with items such as “A love formula … that is so strong that she will run after you” or a concoction which the reader is to make from his own semen (p. 108). Male use of cosmetic and gynaecological texts, whether to treat female patients, to inform themselves about sexuality and generation, or to woo women through knowledge of cosmetics, has now been well documented for other medieval gynaecological and cosmetic literature. The one extant manuscript copy of the Book situates it alongside works of Kabbalah, medicine, and natural philosophy; despite Caballero-Navas's citation of evidence for Jewish women's book ownership, the character of this codex suggests interests more typical of learned males. The present study does not supersede Barkai's 1998 survey of a larger body of Hebrew gynaecological literature, which addressed important questions of the motives for translation and the relation of Jewish learning to that of the majority Christian culture (Ron Barkai, A history of Jewish gynaecological texts in the Middle Ages, Leiden, 1998). Nevertheless, this handsomely produced edition contributes significantly to the recovery of medieval Hebrew learning and, one hopes, will serve as the basis for future analyses of how knowledge of sexuality and medicine was shared or contested between men and women, and who was actually reading books such as this.

My Love of Books: Source of Life Support

My Love of Books: Source of Life Support

I to myself: an annotated selection from the journal of Henry D. Thoreau

It was his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, another inveterate journal keeper, who urged Thoreau to keep a record of his thoughts and observations. Begun in 1837, spans a period of twenty-five years and runs to more than two million words, coming to a halt only in 1861, shortly before the author's death. The handwritten Journal had somewhat humble origins but as it grew in scope and ambition it came to function as a record of Thoreau's interior life as well as the source for his books and essays. Indeed, it would become the central concern of the author's literary life. Critics now recognize as an important artistic achievement in its own right. Making selections from the entirety of the Journal, Cramer presents all aspects of Thoreau: writer, thinker, naturalist, social reformer, neighbour, friend. No other single-volume edition offers such a full picture of Thoreau's life and work. Cramer's annotations add to the reader's enjoyment and understanding. He provides notes on the biographical, historical, and geographical contexts of Thoreau's life. The relation between Journal passages and the texts of works published in the author's lifetime receive special emphasis. A companion to Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, this gift edition of the Journal will be dipped into and treasured, and it makes a welcome addition to any book lover's library.

The Life and Career of Justice Robert H. Jackson

The Life and Career of Justice Robert H. Jackson CONSTANCE L. MARTIN* Introduction Robert H. Jackson was one ofthe most influential Justices ofthe Supreme Court in the twentieth century. His tenure on the Court ran from 1941 to his death in 1954, and during that time he participated in landmark cases involving the programs implemented by Roosevelt’s New Deal to rescue the country from Depression, having previously served the administration in other roles. He authored a memorable dissent in United States v. Korematsu, the notorious Japanese internment case.1 He is also remembered for the role he served as the chiefAmerican prosecutor before the International Military Tribunal that tried Nazi leaders after World War II. In some ways, Jackson’s fierce independence and the lessons he learned growing up in a small town were the ideal training for the demands and competitiveness of the nation’s highest Court. That Jackson’s words and beliefs still have relevance in the twenty-first century is evidenced by the fact that both recent Supreme Court appointees quoted him during the confirmation hearings.2 In this essay, I will examine how Jackson’s life experiences influenced his legal career and informed hisjurisprudence, and to what extent Jackson lived up to his own vision ofthe role of a Supreme Court Justice. The Influence of a Small Town Born near the end of the nineteenth cen­ tury, Jackson was raised in southwestern New York State in a small town called Frewsburg. It was primarily a farming region, although the family’s business activities in­ cluded horse-breeding, which contributed to Jackson’s lifelong love of horses and out­ door sports. Jackson’s descriptions of Frews­ burg and Jamestown, a city fifteen miles away where Jackson later studied, emphasized the THE LIFE AND CAREER OF JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON 43 communities’ core values of self-sufficiency and individualism. There was respect for those who worked hard, and distrust ofthose who did not. Jackson explained, “To an unfortunate in­ dividual there was utmost kindness, but if one was a pauper that was probably his own fault. He either drank, or gambled, or was lazy or something evil.”3 Jackson’s own family was thrifty, hard­ working, and even more independent than their neighbors: they were ‘“sturdy and un­ compromising Democrats’ in an area that was ‘overwhelmingly Republican.’”4 Although Jackson’s parents were not religious, they were nominal members of the local church and taught their son “to respect other people’s reli­ gion and never to start a religious argument.”5 He described his relatives as “practical people who were not carried away by either religious emotions or any other... [They were] too busy making a living, to work life’s annoyances up into a philosophy.”6 This individualism and re­ gional pride developed Jackson’s fundamental beliefin persistence and independent thought, and the conviction that hard work is ultimately rewarded. It is likely he was also influenced by the local justices of the peace, whom he saw dispensingjustice and whose “decisions repre­ sented the community’s collective idea of the decentthing.”7 A sense offairness would char­ acterize Jackson’s work in government, ad­ vancing and defending New Deal programs. Jackson’s Education Jackson is a transitional figure between two very different traditions oflegal education be­ cause he was the last Supreme Court Justice to have received the traditional law-office “ap­ prentice” training rather than a formal lawschool curriculum. Jackson’s determination to obtain more than the basic education avail­ able in Frewsburg sent him north to Jamestown for a post-graduate year of high school. He later spoke often and affectionately of the En­ glish teacher, Mary Willard, who befriended him there, encouraged him to read the classics and to debate and “to develop a notable ca­ pacity for writing and speaking clear, simple, direct English.”8 She was one ofthe most im­ portant influences of Jackson’s life, instilling in him not only a love of books but also legal ambitions.9 In 1911, while still attending school, Jackson began clerking part time in the Jamestown law offices of his cousin, Frank Mott, as had been the tradition for aspiring lawyers in...

Medicine, Gabriel García Márquez, and Love in the Time of Cholera

The Nobel award-winning author Gabriel García Márquez (born 1927) originally released his book Love in the Time of Cholera in Colombia in 1985. For us physicians and surgeons this book contains lessons about medical humanities and the opportunity to apply them to our profession. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, one of the book's central figures, is a distinguished physician with impeccable training in Paris in the late 1870s to early 1880s. He returned to his native Colombian Caribbean coast to practice medicine and surgery. There his practice set an example for contemporary and future generations of physicians. Urbino was knowledgeable, dedicated, committed, studious, and well-intentioned. He mastered the humanities to the benefit of patients and society alike. He was an outstanding professor at the medical school and a favorite teacher to his attentive students. For all his good virtues, however, he did not serve the poor as much as he should have, possibly as a consequence of his opulent origin in the District of the Viceroys of his natal city. In short, Dr. Urbino brought to the medical profession a bright example of responsibility, professionalism, and integrity. Thus, he should be remembered as a physician and professor worthy of imitating in today's practice of medicine.

"The Book of Women's Love" and "Jewish Medieval Medical Literature on Women: Sefer Ahavat Nashim". Carmen Caballero-Navas

<i>"The Book of Women's Love" and "Jewish Medieval Medical Literature on Women: Sefer Ahavat Nashim"</i>. Carmen Caballero-Navas

Making a class book

Most young children love books and find the idea that they can make their own very exciting. Sarah Cruickshank introduces this lesson for year 1 children

The Incendiary: The Misadventures of John the Painter, First Modern Terrorist (review)

Reviewed by: The Incendiary: The Misadventures of John the Painter, First Modern Terrorist Allyson N. May (bio) Jessica Warner. The Incendiary: The Misadventures of John the Painter, First Modern Terrorist McClelland and Stewart. xiv, 298. $32.99 James Aitken (1752–77), a Scot better known as 'John the Painter,' achieved a brief notoriety for his attempts to burn down Britain's six royal dockyards in 1776–77 in support of the American revolutionary war. An unlucky and not particularly competent arsonist, he managed to do no more than set fire to the ropehouse in Portsmouth, although he did put the commercial port of Bristol in fear by lighting fires along the waterfront that caused greater damage. Substantial rewards were offered for his capture and Aitken was soon tried and executed for his crimes. The progress of the war then diverted public attention from his exploits, and he was largely forgotten. In The Incendiary Jessica Warner has rescued him from the obscurity he so loathed. Warner's biography is in part a work of imaginative reconstruction: when Aitken 'vanishes from sight,' she draws on social history and accounts written by contemporaries to fill in the gaps. But The Incendiary is not merely biography. Aitken's story – the picaresque adventures of an anti-hero, a failure – is an interesting one, but in the course of telling it Warner also offers those unfamiliar with eighteenth-century life or criminal justice history a glimpse into a different world, introducing her readers to policing, trial, and punishment, as well as the life of the labouring classes, at the time of the American Revolution. Precisely why Aitken was drawn to the American cause is unknown. Warner casts him as a 'Romantic revolutionary,' a figure who united Enlightenment ideas with a Romantic determination to refashion them 'in his own image.' In the title of her book he is also identified as the 'first modern terrorist,' but this seems little more than a marketing ploy. There is no sustained engagement with the issue of terrorism in her text, nor does Warner attempt to substantiate the claim that Aitken was first in the field. If the terrorist link seems contrived, The Incendiary succeeds in revealing the frustrated ambitions of someone born into the ranks of the poor who glimpsed, through books, another, more desirable world to which he was denied entry. Aitken was educated at Heriot's Hospital in Edinburgh, where he acquired a love of books; but at age fourteen the school authorities decided that he had not distinguished himself sufficiently to be sent on to university. He was instead apprenticed to a house painter, an occupation that consigned him not merely to intellectual boredom but to continued poverty, ill health (most painters succumbed to lead poisoning), and an early death. Warner compares Aitken to Jude the Obscure; I was reminded of a nineteenth-century criminal, Hilda Blake. Gender and geography divide their experience: Blake, a Norfolk working-class orphan fostered in Manitoba, murdered her mistress in the hope of assuming her place as wife [End Page 429] and mother rather than attempting to burn down towns; Blake's reading material consisted of nineteenth-century romantic novels rather than Enlightenment philosophers and political tracts. But like Aitken she was restless and dissatisfied with her lot; she too craved attention and resorted to force to achieve it, and like Aitken she was hanged. No one would help me, Blake raged in an autobiographical poem written while she was in prison. Nor had anyone helped Aitken. He was never able to earn a living as a painter and always had to supplement his income by theft. His consistent attempts to dress above his station earned only mockery. He longed to become a commissioned officer, but a commission was out of the question for someone of his social status. Aitken was 'an ordinary man, and a poorly behaved one at that.' Yet in Warner's version of his life he also epitomizes the wasted potential and blighted hopes of so many of his class. The Incendiary was written for the general public rather than an academic or specialist audience, and it suffers from minor but unnecessary repetition of information (often in...

Speaking of Higher Education: The Academic's Book of Quotations (review)

Reviewed by: Speaking of Higher Education: The Academic's Book of Quotations Michael A. Olivas Speaking of Higher Education: The Academic's Book of Quotations, compiled by Robert Birnbaum. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. 312 pp. ISBN 0275980715. It is a truth universally acknowledged that any dinner speaker must be in want of a good quotation, or why else would this book exist? First, I must issue the requisite disclaimer: Bob Birnbaum asked me to contribute a bon mot for this volume, and I remember sending him one or two, but I swear I cannot remember which ones they were. He mentions me in his acknowledgments, so I know that I sent him one, but none of these jumped out to me as ones of my own excavation. If I had realized that he wanted quotations that were more smart-ass than serious, I would probably have taken more time to go through my library or my own writings, especially since he was even open to bathroom humor. (See p. 219, as just one example, for references to caca and testicle licking. Even so, my daily e-mail inbox spam has more graphic stuff than what is included here. Volume 2 should just concentrate on this phenomenon.) All that said, this kind of work has its place; it will provide readers with time on their hands a few chuckles and dinner (or commencement address) speakers with many snide and self-deprecating asides for their remarks. Speaking of Higher Education is a Bartlett's of sorts, chockablock full of remarks by famous (sometimes) men (mostly) on a variety of academic subjects, although some are borrowed from an earlier volume of academic quotations (the 1995 International Education Quotations Encyclopaedia) and some even from Bartlett's itself. The internet has also provided some of the quotations, while one cranky offering from the dyspeptic conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr., was apparently confirmed by "personal communication" with the compiler. I was a little surprised by the provenance of some of the quotations, such as the often-quoted remark about the reasons academic fights are so strident—because the stakes are so small. Birnbaum attributes this to Henry Kissinger, when I always thought it was by Woodrow Wilson. And some of these quotations date themselves quickly, such as one from Henry Rosovsky's wonderful 1990 The University: An Owner's Manual, where he likens the high quality of U.S. higher education to that of U.S. basketball, obviously written before the men's performance in this sport at the 2004 Athens Olympics. (A better and more quotable Rosovsky story is about faculty-student sexual relationships and John Kenneth Galbraith.) If Birnbaum ever does a follow-up volume, I hope that he increases the number of quotations from rock-and-roll wellsprings. He does cite the immortal [End Page 486] Fats Domino (from a Web site, on p. 92), but where are the more famous academics such as Professor Longhair, Chuck Berry ("With No Particular Place To Go"), Brian Wilson ("Be True to Your School"), Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders ("The Book of Love"), Sam Cooke ("What a Wonderful World It Would Be"), and the college-obsessed rapper Kanye West (College Dropout and Late Registration)? Now that would be worth the price of admission, and you could dance to it. Michael A. Olivas University of Houston Law Center Copyright © 2007 The Ohio State University

The Overcoming of History in 'War and Peace' by Jeff Love

298 Reviews IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), pp. 155-79). Presumably thiswas pub lished too late forLeatherbarrow to take account of it. UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS SARAH HUDSPITH The Overcoming ofHistory in 'War and Peace'. By JEFFLOVE. (Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, 42) Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2004. 2 I I Pp. E45. ISBN 978 90-420-I 632-3. This book is about the historical asides and essays inWar and Peace. Despite being a distinguished piece of scholarship, it isnot thework thatwas needed. Most of the innumerable readers of thismatchless novel are intelligent but ordinary people, and they derive enormous benefit from the experience. The novel is so powerful that it can change lives. If itdoesn't do that, itcan at least entertain and beguile themind in an unforgettable way. The one question that these good people always ask (I know from experience) is, 'Can I skip the historical reflections, especially at the end?' Of course theycan't, and theyneed to be toldwhy not. One practical piece of advice is, incidentally, that they should not leave the second epilogue to be read last; it isbound to seem anticlimactic. It should be read in a deliberate diversion about three-quarters of theway through,before or after thebattle ofBorodino. But what is itsvalue anyway? That needs some explanation, just what you would expect from a book with this promising title.And you will get it in fullmeasure-but only ifyou are an advanced academic or trained philosopher. Anyone else should look away now.At thebeginning the author tells us what his intention is: 'I intend to show that the novel proceeds in stages to an evermore complete reflexivityabout, or awareness of, itsown structures, this ascent itselfbeing a "realization" of both the striving forcognitive mastery over thewhole and a characteristic paradigm of historical development' (p. 5). Have you got that?For those of you who are not concentrating I shall simplify things. Jeff Love has an importantmessage to convey.The historical excursions in thisnovel are of real value. They back up and elaborate one principle that is also apparent on the fictional side of the story.Thinking people in theirordinary lives and historians in theirstudies strive tomake sense of life ingeneral and history inparticular. This is an impossible taskbecause ultimate truthbelongs to infinityand we are pathetically constrained by mortality, human inadequacy, and mere language. One of the strong qualities ofWar and Peace is that the ill-fated struggle tounderstand isdepicted with such sympathy and persuasiveness. The great paradox thatbedevils us-humanity versus infinity has been nowhere better demonstrated. At the end of the book Love summarizes his argument as follows: 'Desire seeks to comprehend the infinite,to encompass the world, and in seeking to do so by finitemeans, it ends up creating by destroying or eliminating its ostensible object. Repetition is thus inevitable: if it is impossible to be a god, it is intolerable to remain aman' (p. I88). In between the opening and closing statements you will finda highly sophisticated argument which has one overall purpose: to show thatTolstoy's historical argumentation follows a path similar to that of the fictional narrative, the two being interdependent. This is academic work of a high order, properly acclaimed on the cover as a tour de force,amajor contribution to Tolstoy scholarship, an important book on Tolstoy, intense, analytical, philosophical. No one would detract from this,but is itenough? Jeff Love has done a serious service toTolstoy studies, his book will go on the highest shelf, but itwould have been a hundred timesmore valuable if these ideas had been filteredand simplified so as to be more readily assimilated by the average student or general readerwho reallywants toknow why s/he should go on readingwhen the firstepilogue comes to an end. WILTSHIRE A. D. P. BRIGGS ...

Towards a Philosophy of Queer Alterity. Faith and Democracy

The text is an intervention in post-secularist and anti-fundamentalist philosophy of affective alterity. It attempts to reconstruct the philosophical tradition of affective alterity and to construct a theory of it. Homosexuality is affective alterity, the other love of Thou and I. We explore dynamic religions in their openness to the Other. Emphasis is on Judaism and the "Love the stranger" postulate in the Hebrew Bible; we go back to biblical and rabbinical literature as well as Erich Fromm's and Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic interpretations of them. The idea of hospitality, rooted in the Bible and the Koran, was revived by Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Griselda Pollock, and Geoffrey H. Hartman. It is of urgent importance in Poland where fundamentalist misogyny and homophobia increase. In our paper, queer rights are examined as human rights - and this is again pertinent in Eastern Europe. The methodology of the intersection of cultural analysis and Jewish studies here are inspired by Mieke Bal and Ernst van Alphen. The particular connection between Jewishness and queerness is stressed by Daniel Boyarin, Ann Pellegrini and Alisa Solomon; as we write, it is to be found in today's Poland in the Shterndlech Iton Babel magazine, published by the younger generation. Also, the feminist studies of Maria Janion, Kazimiera Szczuka and Bozena Uminska are of significance here. We end with visual culture productions: the queer or omni-sexual art exhibition against nationalist censorship Love and Democracy, curated by Pawel Leszkowicz in Poznan (2005), and in Gdansk (2006). Throughout the paper we propose our understanding of love. The text whose part is entitled "Faith and Democracy" is a sequel to our Polish-language book Love and Democracy. Reflexions on the Homosexual Question in Poland (2005) with an extensive English summary. Our loves, our subjectivities are despised and disrespected, but created in art, philosophical research, and activism. Let us exercise (in) love.

Hours of Idleness

No person is exposed to ridicule till he has deserved it, and if the noble lord had not published his Hours of Idleness, no human being would have guessed the quantity of time he had spent doing nothing. (The Satirist, 1807) At first sight life would appear to have been very pleasant for middle- and upper-class young people around 1800 - so long as the proceeds from tenants, trade, investment and slavery kept flowing in.1 But boredom was an ever-present enemy, and the popularity with both sexes of the craze for decorating furniture, print rooms, albums and screens is hardly surprising. Printsellers such as Rudolph Ackermann were kept busy supplying everything from decorative borders to caricature prints. In Pride and Prejudice Mr Bingley exclaims: 'It is amazing to me [...] how young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished [...]. They all paint tables, cover skreens, and net purses.'2 Beau Brummell whiled away his exile in France making a six-panel screen (now lost). His biographer, Captain Jesse, describes how the picture of Byron on the screen, surrounded by flowers, had a wasp at his throat. As Jesse comments, this 'was base ingratitude on the part of Brummell, for the noble lord spoke of and would have pasted him with more charitable feeling'.3 And Byron himself, of course, owned a four-panel screen celebrating pugilism and the theatre, which was rescued by John Murray when Byron's effects were being sold in 1816, and can now be seen at Newstead Abbey. For the past two years I have been studying a small, double-sided firescreen (in a private collection) displaying a collection of scraps, poems, songs and riddles. It was made by Elizabeth Pigot who, as Byronists will know, lived in Southwell, near Nottingham, with her three brothers and their widowed mother. The family was related to several comfortably-off neighbouring families including the Bechers, Lowes and Leacrofts. In 1803 the life of this small market town was suddenly enlivened by the arrival of new neighbours, renting the recently built Burgage Manor - Mrs Catherine Byron, the fifteen-year-old Byron and their pet dogs. Readers of this journal will recall that Byron's relations with his mother were so stormy that he often sought refuge across Burgage Green at the Pigot home. Although Elizabeth was six years older, there is evidence in Byron's letters of a blossoming friendship. In August 1804 he wrote to thank her for copying bookplates with his family coat of arms and urged her to knit a watch ribbon and purse for him. In 1805 John Pigot and Byron took leading parts in the Southwell amateur theatrical productions of Richard Cumberland's The Wheel of Fortune and John Allingham's The Weathercock. Byron wrote a witty prologue and flirted with Miss Pigot's cousin, Julia Leacroft. Elizabeth had quickly discovered Byron's talent for writing poetry. They exchanged verses. She made fair copies of his poems, correcting his spelling and punctuation and encouraged him to publish them during summer 1806 as Fugitive Pieces. Elizabeth was proud of this friendship and happy to share her memories in later life with Thomas Moore and John Murray. Megan Boyes, in her invaluable book Love Without Wings, says Elizabeth regretted having 'cut up original manuscripts in Byron's own handwriting' and sending off the fragments to collectors.4 She never married and stayed in Southwell until her death in 1866. The screen consists of two double-sided, glazed panels, each 24 inches square. It is in remarkably good condition, despite water and light damage. At first sight it presents a random collection of poetry, riddles, music manuscript, quirky caricatures and watercolour sketches. Hand-coloured shells, moths and butterflies are scattered around. In the centre of one panel there is a pastoral scene. The other three each feature a 'fancy' picture by Francis Wheatley: The Rustic Lovers, The Industrious Cottager Mending Cabbage Nets and an untitled one showing a boy stealing washing from a sleeping laundress. …

Reframing Arcimboldo's 'Librarian'

Giuseppe Arcimboldo's The librarian ( ca. 1566), an illusionary painting of a man made out of books, has traditionally been interpreted as an amusing caricature of the Hapsburg court historiographer Wolfgang Lazius. However, given the formal similarities between 'The librarian' and the illustration of the book fool in Sebastian Brant's famous Ship of fools (Narrenschiff, 1494), it is likely that contemporary viewers associated the painting with Brant's satire of slothfully ignorant book collectors. This paper employs The librarian 's similarities to the character of the book fool as a starting point for a reexamination of the painting's significance. Building on my previous discussion of the painting, I present new avenues of enquiry involving texts such as the 'Philobiblon' ( The love of books, 1345) by Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, as well as Reformation imagery and the context of the Hapsburg court. Viewing the painting through the framework of other literary and artistic works, this essay begins to conceptually 'reframe' the painting within the larger context of the artist's cultural milieu.

HELPING YOUTH AT RISK: AN OVERVIEW OF REFORMIST MOVEMENTS IN AMERICAN PUBLIC LIBRARY SERVICES TO YOUTH

One of the hallmarks of the American public library is its service to youth. In fulfilling this mandate, it has often been involved in social reform movements. This was true in the past and it continues today. From the late nineteenth century until the beginning of World War I, the American public library was very much involved in progressive social reform issues of those periods. In those times, librarians tended to define their social reformist role as that of improving culture, in raising standards of literacy, and in fostering the love of reading and good books. On a larger scale these movements, of which the American public library was a part, had both social and political motives in the perceived need to control and contain certain labour and social movements that were viewed as harmful to American social order. Much of the energy for these feared social dislocations was believed to come from the growing American working class in urban areas and its association with the rise of organised American labour and the arrival of European immigrants with non-American socialistic agendas. In concert with other social reform groups, the American public library directed much of its attention to improving the lot of the working-class poor youth (both native and foreign-born) by improving culture and literacy and in helping working-class youth become good Americans. Providing good literature and good books for working-class youth was a mainstay of the public library's reform activities. Understanding this to be a primary social responsibility, librarians easily condemned as harmful to youth certain types of literature and other forms of mass entertainment often enjoyed by both working-class and middle-class youth while at the same time supporting only literature judged by them to be of higher cultural value. Although this aspect of reform has been replaced by more enlightened understanding of the role of the librarian in society, modern-day librarians have much in common with their earlier counterparts as they still seek to improve the lives of at-risk youth. This paper highlights this commonality, and emphasises the role that community and new concepts of community development play in current-day American reform movements.

Reading together

There are so many good reasons to read with young children but for Rhona Whiteford it’s about encouraging a lifelong love of books

Editor's report 2005

Editor's report 2005

Cardinal rules for those entrusted with leading knowledge citizenship

In 1909, Sam Walter Foss, a librarian at the Somerville Public Library in Massachusetts, wrote a paper entitled 'Some cardinal principals of librarian's work'. Interestingly, Foss emphasized and encouraged the role of the librarian to be a fundamentally social and people-oriented character as opposed to a shy and retiring 'book lover'. This is relevant because, even in 1909, Foss recognized that a people orientation was the fundamental ingredient of a leader in an intellectual or knowledge type environment.

Cope's Early Diagnosis of the Acute Abdomen

Old men dream dreams of elegant clinical diagnoses; young men see visions of perfect cross-sectional images. Early Diagnosis of the Acute Abdomen, worshipped by three generations of surgeons, is now in its 21st edition; Zachary Cope's versions (from 1921) are now in the rare-books section of medical libraries; the last seven (from 1980) have been revised by Professor William Silen of Harvard Medical School. He has made a noble attempt to retain the original emphasis on diligent clinical assessment, whilst guiding the reader towards appropriate laboratory and radiological investigations. Sadly the reproduction of the CT (computerized tomography) images is so poor as almost to defeat this objective. Much of the original elegant text (with simple line diagrams) has been retained, and in this age of evidence-based medicine one might question some of Cope's maxims. ‘Severe abdominal pain that lasts more than six hours is caused by some condition of surgical import’. Often but not always! The ‘sweating brow’ may not be caused by a perforated ulcer; the ‘dull gaze and ashen countenance in severe toxaemia’ will not be adequately confirmed by ‘the back of the hand placed on the patient's nose and cheek’. But I exaggerate. Professor Silen has attempted to identify appropriate complementary tests rather than suggest every conceivable investigation; for example, there is evidence that CT is over-used in patients with an ‘acute abdomen’. The saving grace is that this same technique has led to a greater appreciation of applied surgical anatomy, which was always emphasized by Sir Zachary. Yet his standard of clinical evaluation would exceed most of our abilities. How many would ‘personally examine the blood smear and urinary sediment’? To exclude tabes dorsalis would our junior surgeons test the knee jerks and examine the pupils? Mr Cope, as he then was, would have been perplexed by the added sections on laparoscopy or immunocompromised patients, for example, but he would doubtless rejoice that degrees Fahrenheit had not been banished by Celsius. There is much repetition in the text as individual acute abdominal problems are discussed, each with its recurring differential diagnosis; but who could resist the inclusion of Sir Zachary's personal account of his own acute cholecystitis in 1969, at the age of 80—‘one is never too old to learn’, he concluded. No biography is offered in this new edition, nor is it necessary; the original text remains its own definitive reference. This is a brave attempt to continue the resuscitation of a unique book. It will be of interest to those with a love of books and of the history of 20th century surgery. It will appeal less to trainee surgeons seeking a core text to prepare for 21st century examinations; they must look elsewhere. Every surgeon should heed Cope's note of caution when dealing with an acute abdomen: ‘the dextrous hand must not be allowed to reach before imperfect judgment’.

Southern Africa in World Politics: Local Aspirations and Global Entanglements (review)

Reviewed by: Southern Africa in World Politics: Local Aspirations and Global Entanglements Allan D. Cooper Love, Janice . 2005. Southern Africa in World Politics: Local Aspirations and Global Entanglements. Boulder: Westview Press. 235 pp. $24.00 (paper). Janice Love's analysis of southern African politics is the latest in a series of studies that focus on the challenges and promises of this region of the world. Beginning with Potholm and Dale's edited essays on southern Africa (1974), following with Carter and O'Meara's 1982 study, and then Saul's insightful examination of neocolonial influences in southern Africa (1993), we now have with Love the first general text that explores southern Africa in the aftermath of apartheid and colonial rule. Love's work emerges at the same time that Gretchen Bauer, another leading scholar of southern Africa, has published a summary analysis of the region (in collaboration with Scott D. Taylor). Love's book differs from others in that it avoids the case-study approach of describing a region country by country, and instead creates a narrative examination of the region as a whole. Although her attempt to explain why southern Africa constitutes a distinctive region is short on specifics, her study should serve as a well-organized and innovative review of the political history of the region, one that will be valuable to any student wishing a comprehensive introduction to southern Africa. Love summarizes the historical context, accounting for why Europeans settled in the region, how Africans resisted these colonial endeavors, why the United States and the Soviet Union came to compete against each other for influence in the region, how African political elites came to power, and how southern Africa fits into the global world economy. She discusses the economic dilemmas facing the region, and the threat posed by the AIDS pandemic. Love's overview of the region works best when she is describing macro-level interactions between southern Africa and external nodes of power. She offers a thorough explanation of how transnational economic forces have shaped the political development of southern Africa, and how global patterns of financial exchange affect policy options facing current leaders in the region. When Love attempts to explain the more minute details of microlevel phenomena, the facts frequently get distorted and confusing. For instance, she claims that during the colonial era, "most economic exchange occurred between imperial nations and their colonies" (p. 13). This assertion is not accompanied by evidence, and is contrary to many scholarly studies on the subject of the economics of empire. Also, in a discussion of racist ideology as a type of cultural globalization, Love states that in southern Africa, Africans and whites have only rarely socialized with each other (p. 43). This statement follows a well-developed explanation of how mestizos and the "Coloured" population arose in Portuguese colonies and South Africa respectively (pp. 27–32), and is followed by a description of how Portuguese men intermarried with African women and supported these families during colonial rule (p. 46). [End Page 129] Although Love does an admirable job of describing the major events that are shaping the history of southern Africa, she does so at the near exclusion of any analysis of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland, and Lesotho. Her references to Namibia include several inaccuracies and confounding arguments. For instance, she states that the League of Nations assigned South Africa to hold Namibia as a mandate territory (p. 40); in reality, the League of Nations offered this mandate to Britain, which in turn assigned the administration of its South African dominion. A misspelling appears for Namibian leader Toivo ja Toivo (p. 73) on a chart on which Love argues that North Korea was a primary ally of Namibia during the struggle for independence, overlooking the key role played by Cuba. Love suggests that SWAPO never quite succeeded in its goal of broadening its base beyond the majority Ovambo population, but offers no evidence to support this suggestion. Namibia has already had two prime ministers from the Damara community, a vice president from the Nama ethnic group, and several Hereros in other high positions of government. SWAPO has won considerable votes from all regions of the country in...

Love and Death in Goethe: "One and Double." (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Ellis Dye, Love and Death in Goethe: "One and Double." Rochester, NY: Camden House,'2004. xiv +333 pp. This is an idiosyncratic book by a penetrating reader. Even though much of the material has appeared earlier in periodical publications, it is so extensively rewritten and so enriched by the central theme and its structure of repeated reflections that the book merits the attention of even those readers already familiar with some of the essays. While in harmony with current Anglo-American readings, the book is original in two important ways—first in its insistent juxtaposition of Goethe with the love-death tradition, and second in its unusually broad definition of that tradition. For love-death here extends beyond the Liebestod à la Tristan and Isolde to include any situation that brings love and death into conjunction, with or without causality. Romeo and Juliet is as valid an example as Tristan, but so too is any kind of love that connects the lover to psychological or theological otherness.Thus Dye addresses the connection between death and sexuality, but also wants to fill gaps left by Denis de Rougemont (Love in the Western World) and Edgar Wind (Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance), and thus analyze love and death as the passage from the world to the divine, whether conceived in Christian or in Platonist terms. Ultimately in this book the love-death exemplifies the conjunction of unity and duality, the central issue for Goethe and for the German Romantics, and thus Goethe's fundamentally Romantic stance.This proposition consists less of a narrative or of a syntactically arranged argument than of fluent, indeed cascading, juxtapositions—in the book as a whole, within chapters, and even within individual readings of texts. Love-death may seem like an odd concept for organizing one's thinking about Goethe, but Dye marshals a commanding array of texts both to justify the choice and more valuably, to use Goethe to rethink the significance of the love-death. The breadth the concept must take on becomes clear in the first chapter, where Dye lays out his basic categories—individuation, coincidentia oppositiorum, Romantic dialectics and irony, and gender. They derive obviously from psychoanalysis , identity theory, Renaissance Neoplatonism, Romantic philosophy, and contemporary theory. Even within these categories Dye draws on a broad range of thinkers; in the first, for example, he cites with almost equal frequency Freud, philosophers, cultural critics and literary critics. The categories define the themes to which Dye's readings continually return as they situate Goethe texts in juxtaposition to one another, to examples of (mostly) European and American literature from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries, and to the philosophical tradition. The further one reads, the more abstract and general the concept of Goethe Yearbook XIV (2007) 208 Book Reviews love-death becomes, so that the summary chapters at the end focus on truth, paradox, irony and virtuosity The book lands squarely on the paradox that Goethe, like all Romantics, valorizes the higher unity represented by the lovedeath , yet equally valorizes our imperfect life in time: Virtually everything Goethe thinks and writes about the human and the divine, Nature and human nature, subject and object, self and other, fate and freedom, time and eternity, spirit and word requires that a presupposed duality be sublated in a higher unity, as in the Liebestod. The yearning of subject for object or of subject for opposed subject is always for absolute identity, but approximation of this ideal is all that contngent, derivative, time-bound beings can have. Let us grasp, and glory in, the gifts that are ours—the ability to move toward, if never in life to gain, the true, the timeless, the beautiful and the boundless. Perfection is death, says Goethe."Gedenke zu leben!"(282). The middle eight chapters cover Goethe's work in roughly chronological order. Chapter two deals with Clavigo and ballads from the 1770s, while three addresses Götz under the alluring title "FrauWelt. Venereal Disease. Femmes fatale." The fourth chapter elegantly undoes the clichés about Werther with which it begins; the fifth focuses on substitution in relation to unity in Stella, Iphigenie, and "Die neue Melusine "The next chapter deals with...