McGill-Queen's University Press Research Articles

<i>Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada Laura Dixon (bio) Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker, and Ezra Winton, editors. Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. 574 pp. $24.95 (paper), $105.00 (cloth). The Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle (CFC/SN) program was launched in 1967 by the National Film Board of Canada and other governmental agencies with the primary social goal of alleviating poverty in Canada by producing and distributing documentary cinema. The program, innovative in its use of participatory filmmaking for social justice and its mission to use film to reveal Canadians' thoughts and opinions to one another, launched the highly acclaimed Fogo Island film experiment, a filmmaking and community-building project in Newfoundland led by Colin Low that aimed to "give voice" and political agency to the people of Fogo Island. The history and legacy of CFC/SN, well-known in certain circles but never before dealt with in a comprehensive academic study, can provide much-needed historical contextualization to contemporary trends in activist filmmaking. The editors, Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker, and Ezra Winton, state that the goal of the book is to document the politicized history of CFC/SN because of the "renewal of interest in activist, community-based documentary" (8). And it is true: the prevalence of theatrical documentary with political objectives, the increasing audience base due to more documentary festivals, and the converging and evolving multimedia landscape all invite a collection that closely examines a major movement in documentary film history. Acknowledging and seeking to avoid the danger of filmmakers and scholars opting to "reinvent the wheel" because of a lack of knowledge about the CFC/SN program, the editors put together this multifaceted collection to investigate the history of and theoretical impetus behind one of Canada's most celebrated media activist programs. The book consists of two interviews, thirty-five mostly original but some previously published essays organized into five parts according to their aims, as well as a foreword and an introduction. The book also includes a complete annotated filmography of the CFC/ SN catalog and a bibliography featuring previously published work on the subject, two research tools that can be extremely helpful to scholars. The foreword features an interview with activist writer and filmmaker Naomi Klein, daughter of CFC filmmaker Bonnie Sherr Klein. The interview—part remembrances of her childhood experiences as the daughter of a CFC filmmaker, part a discussion of the current activist documentary landscape, and part a discussion of the future of documentary—sets the tone for the collection as both historical and investigatory of the present moment. Part 1 seeks to provide historical context for the CFC/SN movement by featuring articles mostly from the official newsletter, Access/Médium-Média. Ranging in publication date from 1968 to 1984 but concentrated in the first few years of the program, these articles provide a sense of the generative moment and explain the process of CFC/SN projects by providing detailed snapshots of programs [End Page 71] at particular moments in time, such as Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein's article, which documents and reflects on their videotape recording project in St.-Jacques. In this section, the editors offer only brief commentary and leave any extended analysis up to the reader. Of note is the inclusion of John Grierson's forward-looking piece published in Access in 1972 about decentralizing the means of production and Colin Low's memoir on his challenging but educational experience as a guest lecturer in Grierson's class at McGill University in 1971. Moving into current scholarship, part 2 analyzes the antipoverty and development stance of the organization in relationship to the films it produced. Peter K. Wiesner takes a focused look at the Fogo Island project and its American replications, analyzing the aesthetics and politics of community media in contrast to auteur documentary. Gerda Johanna Cammaer writes on documentaries on housing and the complications of reception due to the ethical concerns over representing the poor. Ethics come to the fore as well in Brenda Longfellow's essay...

Culture in Camouflage , and: Media, Memory, and the First World War (review)

Reviewed by: Culture in Camouflage, and: Media, Memory, and the First World War Debra Rae Cohen Culture in Camouflage. Patrick Deer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 329. $125.00 (cloth). Media, Memory, and the First World War. David Williams. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 321. $59.95(cloth); $29.95 (paper). These two imperfect but fascinating books—each hugely ambitious, each offering a model that only partially contains its material, each implicitly addressing the lacunae of the other—meet on the plane of war and representation. David Williams argues that film precipitated, in the First World War, a new kind of cinematic remembering, in which visual images of the past catapulted violently into the present; Patrick Deer deploys a potent set of visual tropes—blackout, camouflage, oversight—to trace the growth of war culture, and literary resistance to it, in the years and the war that followed. Though Deer's book is by far the more satisfying and substantial, both books show the extent to which the study of war literature and war culture has become increasingly nuanced and theoretically inflected over the past decade and more. Williams has in the past been a sensitive commentator on the relations of media and literature; his 2003 book, Imagined Nations: Reflections on Media in Canadian Fiction, deftly negotiated both the problems of tracing a mediated nationhood and the McLuhanesque paradox of doing so in print. Much like this one, that book cast a wide net, harking back to the Aeneid to make claims for the entwined genealogy of communications and community. Here, he begins with Homer's Achilles, spending two chapters discussing the transition from oral to written memorialization of the warrior figure before chronicling the unsettling advent of cinema. The new medium, he reminds us, "overturned familiar notions of temporality . . . for a past actualité appeared actuellement (at present), here and now, to invade the present, making the pastness of the past seem 'unnatural'" (109). This created, argues Williams, "a new verb tense in the grammar of existence [End Page 195] . . . the past-progressive-present tense" (30), soon to be deployed in the syntax of war memory. The Battle of the Somme, however real or staged, serves for him as a key moment in the history of remembrance, as a mediatized link between combatant and noncombatant. Matt Matsuda's The Memory of the Modern (1996) is the touchstone for this argument, as central to this book as Harold Innis to Imagined Nations; one wishes that Williams had also interacted with Mary Ann Doane's discussion of the afterimage in The Emergence of Cinematic Time (2002), which seems inescapably germane to his thesis. Given Williams's obvious concern with the national particularities of Canadian First World War memory—which often seems to contradict his Fussellian claims of a broader epistemic shift—it's both telling and unfortunate that his central chapters on the literature of the war largely center on Owen and Sassoon. Yet these rereadings of canonical works are in many respects the strongest in the book; they are certainly the most convincing in regard to his thesis about cinematic epistemology. Grounding his interpretation in Owen's letters, including his references to film, Williams recasts "Dulce Et Decorum Est" as both an example of cinematic focus and as a reader-implicating enactment of the moment of "filmic" invasion of the present. Sassoon's Sherston trilogy, as translated from his war diaries, becomes, in Williams's reading, an example of the "ontological doubling" that bemused early cinema-goers, with Sassoon positioned as both narrator and diarist, "soldier-camera" and "poet-projector" (147). These two solid chapters carry the weight of the argument vis-à-vis cinema, which Williams largely abandons later in the book, examining more recent works of First World War memory such as Timothy Findley's novel The Wars (1977). In his last section—comprising a nuanced close reading of the six-part For King and Empire (2001), made for Canada's History Television, and less convincing analyses of three First World War museum exhibitions—Williams comes full circle, arguing that the "liveness" of television enables "a new Homeric mode" of war memory...

Joan Sherwood, Infection of the Innocents: Wet Nurses, Infants, and Syphilis in France, 1780–1900, McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health and Science, 37 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010), pp. xiii + 214, $75.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-7735-3741-5.

Until the advent of safe artificial feeding, a good wet-nurse made all the difference to the survival of an infant whose own mother was unable to breastfeed. However, as detailed historical examination has shown over the past thirty years, the practice of wet-nursing was once widespread and by no means limited to emergencies. George D. Sussman’s ground-breaking work in France brought out both the economic contribution that routine wet-nursing made to both nurses and mothers and its association with different attitudes to infants; interpretations taken up by other authors, particularly by Valerie Fildes in her comprehensive overview of the topic from classical Greece to the present. However, although there is currently increasing interest in medical involvement in wet-nursing, there has been little examination of a small but significant aspect, the transfer of infection between nurse and nursling, the theme of Joan Sherwood’s new book. Infection of the Innocents uses detailed examinations of the records of the Vaugirard Hospital in Paris, and of nineteenth-century legal cases, to focus on a failed experiment to treat congenital syphilis by mercurialising breastmilk and its long-term impact on French medicine. Infection of the Innocents falls into two parts. The first locates the establishment of the Hospital in 1780 within contemporary understanding of venereal disease and its management. Government-sponsored, it was founded specifically to discover whether infants with congenital syphilis could be cured by being fed the milk of syphilitic nurses treated with mercury, then believed to be an effective treatment. As such, it was envisioned primarily as a ‘clinical workshop’, and displayed a stark attitude towards its patients, in contrast to contemporary British voluntary hospitals. Outside, women typically enjoyed an independent role in both healing and childcare, but inside Vaugirard, Sherwood stresses they were seen only as the ‘technology’ of cure, under strict medical control and following an almost military regime. Nonetheless, she argues that some moral rehabilitation was still expected; citing the Hospital’s belief that supervised wet-nursing would encourage maternal feelings and high-quality care. Sadly, the extremely high mortality among foundlings led rather to despair and even suicide among their young nurses, feelings presumably compounded by their own ill health. Detailed analysis of all patients from the first and final years of the Hospital’s life in fact demonstrates wide variation in outcome – there was a contrasting higher-than-average survival rate among children cared for by their own mothers. However, this reader would have appreciated both a firmer guiding hand through the data, and the making of closer connections with events outside the Hospital. By 1790, the revolutionary government considered the experiment a failure, and Vaugirard Hospital was closed. Yet its unsuccessful treatment lived on, and the second part explores the changing attitudes among the medical profession revealed through a number of compensation cases brought against their employers by wet-nurses infected with syphilis by their nurslings, some of whom had also been treated with mercury without their knowledge or consent. Here, Sherwood illustrates developing medical ethics, arguing that, although initially the doctor felt loyalty only to the family that retained him, and thus might not inform the wet-nurse either of the infant’s condition or the nature of any medicines she was asked to take, by 1870, he was considered to have an over-riding duty of care towards public health in general. Such arguments combine with the earlier exploration of the Hospital to suggest that, while on the surface Infection of the Innocents describes a minor aspect of both wet-nursing and venereal disease, it nevertheless makes a much deeper contribution to the history of medicine.

Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism by Anthony J. Hall

Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism by Anthony J. Hall

Kenichi Matsui Native Peoples and Water Rights: Irrigation, Dams and the Law in Western Canada. Montreal & Kingston: McGill–Queen's University Press, 2009, 243 p.

Kenichi Matsui Native Peoples and Water Rights: Irrigation, Dams and the Law in Western Canada. Montreal & Kingston: McGill–Queen's University Press, 2009, 243 p.

A Stability-Seeking Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and Secessionist Conflicts. By Jonathan Paquin. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. 230p. $85.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

A Stability-Seeking Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and Secessionist Conflicts. By Jonathan Paquin. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. 230p. $85.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Seek Stability and You Shall Find: US Policy and Secessionist Movements

A Stability-Seeking Power: U.S. Foreign Policy and Secessionist Conflicts. By Jonathan Paquin. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. 230 pp., $27.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-7735-3737-8). In a book that seems long overdue, Jonathan Paquin explores what drives the United States to recognize certain secessionist movements but not others. Traditionally an overlooked or marginalized subject, Paquin seeks to elevate secessionist movements from a subcategory of civil wars or domestic conflicts to that of a unique field of study. Paquin's A Stability-Seeking Power more than provides a starting point for such an endeavor. Paquin defines secessionist movements as political units that seek to become new independent and sovereign entities. He notes they have the potential to be a destabilizing force in international politics. This is what makes them a concern for the global hegemon. Yet, the United States has been selective in both to whom and when it gives diplomatic recognition. For Paquin, the dependent variable of diplomatic recognition is key. He notes that aid or an expressed solidarity is simply not enough, as both can be a form of low-cost support or simply rhetoric. Instead, diplomatic recognition automatically gives a sense of legitimacy to the secessionists because of the political leverage and stature of the United States. Having this blessing may ultimately determine a movement's success or failure. According to Paquin, the problem with the existing literature has been either its overwhelming normative slant, its inability to explain US specific variation, or a lack of …

Into Deep Waters: Evangelical Spirituality and Maritime Calvinistic Baptist Ministers, 1790–1855. By Daniel C. Goodwin. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion, Series Two. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. xiv + 330 pp. $90.00 cloth.

Into Deep Waters: Evangelical Spirituality and Maritime Calvinistic Baptist Ministers, 1790–1855. By Daniel C. Goodwin. McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion, Series Two. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. xiv + 330 pp. $90.00 cloth. - Volume 80 Issue 4

Linda Bryder, Flurin Condrau, Michael Worboys (eds), Tuberculosis Then and Now: Perspectives on the History of an Infectious Disease, McGill-Queen's/ Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society, No. 35, (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010), pp. viii + 243, $29.95, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-7735-3601-2.

Linda Bryder, Flurin Condrau, Michael Worboys (eds), Tuberculosis Then and Now: Perspectives on the History of an Infectious Disease, McGill-Queen's/ Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society, No. 35, (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010), pp. viii + 243, $29.95, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-7735-3601-2. - Volume 55 Issue 4

The Ordinary People of Essex: Environment, Culture, and Economy on the Frontier of Upper Canada. By John Clarke. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. xxxiii + 738 pp. Illustrations, tables, maps, bibliography, and index. Cloth $135.00, paper $39.95.

<i>The Ordinary People of Essex: Environment, Culture, and Economy on the Frontier of Upper Canada</i>. By John Clarke. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. xxxiii + 738 pp. Illustrations, tables, maps, bibliography, and index. Cloth $135.00, paper $39.95.

These Mysterious People: Shaping History and Archaeology in a Northwest Coast Community. SusanRoy. Montreal: Mcgill‐Queen's University Press, 2010. 218 pp.

These Mysterious People: Shaping History and Archaeology in a Northwest Coast Community. SusanRoy. Montreal: Mcgill‐Queen's University Press, 2010. 218 pp.

Infection of the Innocents: Wet Nurses, Infants, and Syphilis in France, 1780–1900. By Joan Sherwood (Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010) 214 pp. $75.00

September 01 2011 Infection of the Innocents: Wet Nurses, Infants, and Syphilis in France, 1780–1900. By Joan Sherwood (Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010) 214 pp. $75.00 George D. Sussman George D. Sussman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information George D. Sussman Online ISSN: 1530-9169 Print ISSN: 0022-1953 © 2011 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.2011 The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2011) 42 (2): 291–292. https://doi.org/10.1162/JINH_r_00252 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation George D. Sussman; Infection of the Innocents: Wet Nurses, Infants, and Syphilis in France, 1780–1900. By Joan Sherwood (Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010) 214 pp. $75.00. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2011; 42 (2): 291–292. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/JINH_r_00252 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2011 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Climate Change in the 21st CenturyClimate Change in the 21st Century, Stewart J. Cohen and Melissa W. Waddell . McGill-Queens University Press. Montreal, Québec, Canada ( 2009). 379 pages; $95.00 (US) hardcover, $32.95 paperback.

Climate Change in the 21st Century<i>Climate Change in the 21st Century</i>, Stewart J. Cohen and Melissa W. Waddell . McGill-Queens University Press. Montreal, Québec, Canada ( 2009). 379 pages; $95.00 (US) hardcover, $32.95 paperback.

Diane Tye, Baking As Biography: A Life in Recipes, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010, 268 pages

Diane Tye, Baking As Biography: A Life in Recipes, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010, 268 pages

Review: An American by Degrees The Extraordinary Lives of French Ambassador Jules Jusserand

AN AMERICAN BY DEGREES The Extraordinary Lives of French Ambassador Jules Jusserand Robert J. Young Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. 368pp, $59.95 cloth ISBN: 9780773535725Although Lyon, the city of his birth in 1855, has an Avenue Jules Jusserand, the longest-serving French ambassador to Washington (1903-25) is well-nigh forgotten today in his home country. He is better remembered in the United States, especially thanks to the Theodore Roosevelt scholars in whose works he features prominently. Canadian historian Robert J. Young's biography, published exactly 100 years after the end of Roosevelt's presidency, is a most welcome study that underscores the scarcity of French publications about this Quai d'Orsay luminary. Jusserand's close friendship with Roosevelt, under whom he served seven of his 22 years in Washington, is only one of the many extraordinary lives of this exceptional man, who died in 1932 at age 77. Jusserand represented France under five US presidents (Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge) and proved an efficient but discreet player in all of the great world affairs of the first quarter of the 20th century, including the Russo-Japanese War, the Moroccan crisis, America's intervention in World War I, the Versailles peace negotiations, the French mission to Poland after the Russian invasion, and the Washington naval conference. He was a long-time dean of the diplomatic corps in Washington. Young's thoroughly researched and elegantly written book offers his readers an extensive and fascinating slice of diplomatic and cultural history on both sides of the Atlantic during France's third republic.Jean Jules Jusserand was appointed to Washington as France witnessed the advent of a leftist coalition whose raUying cries were the republican defence of the regime and the anticlerical struggle. This radical republic, a sequel to the Dreyfus affair, led to the 1905 separation of church and state and the deterioration of France's relations with the Vatican. Ironically, Jusserand would be recaUed 23 years later foUowing the 1924 electoral victory of another leftist bloc headed by another Lyonnais, Premier Edouard Herriot. Jusserand was a renowned historian and English literature scholar, an Anglophile with a perfect command of the English language. He was an authority on the middle ages, pre-Shakespearean theatre, and 17th- and 18thcentury novels, and he wrote countless books on those subjects. He had been a member of the most important fin-de-siecle artistic, literary, and political circles in Paris and London. He knew Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, Albert Sorel, Anatole France, Edmond Rostand, Alexandre Dumas fils, John Morley, William Gladstone, Robert Browning, Bret Harte, and Henry James, and was a contemporary of Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, Pierre Loti, Maurice Barres, and Emile Zola. He traveUed extensively in northern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and North Africa. …

Sissela Bok. Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. 224 pp. $24.00 (cloth). ISBN‐13: 978‐0300139297. Larry Davidson, Jaak Rakfeldt, and John Strauss. The Roots of the Recovery Movement in Psychiatry: Lessons Learned. New York: Wiley, 2010. 294 pp. $95.00 (cloth). ISBN‐13: 978‐0470777633. Andrea Tone. The Age of Anxiety: A History of America's Turbulent

Journal of the History of the Behavioral SciencesVolume 47, Issue 3 p. 329-331 Briefly Noted Sissela Bok. Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. 224 pp. $24.00 (cloth). ISBN-13: 978-0300139297. Larry Davidson, Jaak Rakfeldt, and John Strauss. The Roots of the Recovery Movement in Psychiatry: Lessons Learned. New York: Wiley, 2010. 294 pp. $95.00 (cloth). ISBN-13: 978-0470777633. Andrea Tone. The Age of Anxiety: A History of America's Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers. New York: Basic Books, 2009. 320 pp. $26.95 (cloth). ISBN: 0465086586. John C. Weaver. A Sadly Troubled History: The Meanings of Suicide in the Modern Age. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. 447 pp. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN-13: 978-0773535138 First published: 05 July 2011 https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.20507Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume47, Issue3Special Issue: The Human Sciences and Cold War AmericaSummer 2011Pages 329-331 RelatedInformation

When the French Tried to Be British: Party, Opposition, and the Quest for Civil Disagreement, 1814–1848. By J. A. W. Gunn. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. 498p. $95.00.

When the French Tried to Be British: Party, Opposition, and the Quest for Civil Disagreement, 1814–1848. By J. A. W. Gunn. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. 498p. $95.00.

Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy: The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774-1874 (review)

Reviewed by: Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy: The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774-1874 Denis McKim Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy: The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774-1874. Calvin Hollett. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. Pp. 368, $85.00 In Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy Calvin Hollett fundamentally rethinks Methodism's early history in Newfoundland. He convincingly demonstrates that, rather than being an elite-driven phenomenon, the denomination's expansion during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was fuelled by lay initiative. Hollett is concerned mainly with debunking a longstanding interpretation of Methodism's development in Newfoundland — that isolated population centres and a forbidding set of environmental circumstances combined to stunt the denomination's growth prior to 1815, which witnessed an influx of clergymen dispatched to the colony by the metropolitan Wesleyan Methodist Church. The activities of these elite clerical figures have traditionally been credited for sparking Methodism's growth in Newfoundland, which in turn 'rescued' inhabitants of remote communities from the state of moral destitution in which they had purportedly languished before the clergymen's arrival. Hollett rejects the notion that clerical elites were responsible for bringing about Methodism's expansion in Newfoundland in the years after 1815, maintaining instead that the denomination's growth was nurtured and sustained by spontaneous expressions of religious fervour [End Page 359] by members of the laity beginning in the late eighteenth century. His analysis ambitiously covers the hundred-year span between the 1780s, which witnessed early outpourings of Methodist enthusiasm in such communities as Island Cove and Old Perlican, and the 1880s, by which point Methodism's distinctive evangelical characteristics had been tempered as a result of the denomination's absorption into Newfoundland's socially respectable Protestant mainstream. As for its spatial parameters, Hollett's discussion concentrates on several communities clustered around the six following bays: Conception, Trinity, Bonavista, Notre Dame, Placentia, and Fortune. He contends that 'ordinary' inhabitants of Newfoundland derived from Methodism a heady sense of spiritual liberation and were responsible primarily for precipitating the denomination's expansion within the colony. The mobility of the colonial populace, Hollett explains, was instrumental to the extension of Methodism's spiritual influence across large swaths of territory. Rather than being isolated in remote settings, lay adherents of the denomination were able to propagate Methodism's tenets and traditions in numerous outport communities as a result of their participation in such economic pursuits as fishing and sealing, which often involved travelling from one location to another. It was thus not the clergy, who frequently proved reluctant to leave the confines of St John's, but rather the laity who were responsible for bringing about the spiritual invigoration of communities scattered along Newfoundland's northern and southeastern coasts. Newfoundland's religious character was significantly altered as a result of the rise of Methodism, which assumed a position alongside Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism as one of the colony's most influential religious entities. Hollett argues that Methodism's growth in Newfoundland was aided by developments taking place within the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, both of which gravitated during the nineteenth century toward hierarchical doctrines — tractarianism and ultramontanism, respectively — that reinforced the authority of their churches' clergy. Methodism, by contrast, was an informal 'vernacular' religion that downplayed the importance of clerical influence and encouraged repentant individuals to pursue a personal — and potentially soul-saving — relationship with God and to propagate the Gospels among their fellow citizens in as vigorous and wide-ranging a manner as possible. Such characteristics, which differed dramatically from the increasingly top-down orientation of Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism, empowered 'ordinary' people and contributed to Methodism's growth. [End Page 360] Hollett's analysis brings into focus the pronounced extent to which Methodism's expansion in Newfoundland contributed to a decline of deference among the denomination's laity. Rather than looking to clerical elites to mediate between themselves and divinity, zealous lay Methodists attained confidence in their own ability 'to communicate with God and to communicate God to others' (6). Hollett intriguingly hypothesizes that the waning of deference among lay Methodists may have had important ramifications beyond the religious realm, potentially contributing to demands...

Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy: The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774–1874. By Calvin Hollett. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. xviii + 368 pp. $85.00 cloth.

Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy: The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774–1874. By Calvin Hollett. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010. xviii + 368 pp. $85.00 cloth. - Volume 80 Issue 2

Power without Law: The Supreme Court of Canada, the Marshall Decisions, and the Failure of Judicial Activism, Alex M. Cameron, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009, pp. viii, 244.

Power without Law: The Supreme Court of Canada, the Marshall Decisions, and the Failure of Judicial Activism, Alex M. Cameron, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009, pp. viii, 244. - Volume 44 Issue 1