Medieval Sense Research Articles

The Meaning of Infinity in Sufi and Deconstructive Hermeneutics: When Is an Empty Text an Infinite One?

In this article I examine the role of infinity in the hermeneutics of two very separate thinkers—a thirteenth-century Sufi and a contemporary French poststructuralist. In both cases, the way a certain idea of infinity (be it the inexhaustible mind of an infinite God or the infinite array of different contexts for a text) leads to an infinitizing of the text itself is the subject. Ultimately, the article suggests that deconstruction actually restores a medieval sense of infinity to the text—albeit in a very different way from its mystical predecessors—by emphasizing the endless range of contexts a text can be read in. We may conclude this history of hermeneutics with the following remark. The initial purpose of hermeneutics was to explain the word of God. This purpose was eventually expanded into an attempt to regulate the process of explaining the word of man. In the nineteenth century we learned, first from Hegel and then more effectively from Nietzsche, that God is dead. In the twentieth century, Kojève and his students, like Foucault, have informed us that man is dead, thereby as it were opening the gates into an abyss of postanthropological deconstruction. As the scope of hermeneutics has expanded, then, the two original sources of meaning, God and man, have vanished, taking with them the cosmos or world and leaving us with nothing but our own garrulity, which we choose to call the philosophy of language, linguistic philosophy, or one of their synonyms. If nothing is real, the real is nothing; there is no difference between the written lines of a text and the blank spaces between them. —Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics

Objects, images, and the word: art in the service of the liturgy

The medieval liturgy was in many ways a performance in which the worshipper was transformed into both actor and audience - an act of intense involvement steeped in spoken words, music, and images alike. Of all these elements, was arguably paramount: it transformed the physical setting of this ritual, shaped the medieval sense of belief, and guided the faithful toward a fuller comprehension of the word. The complex and always evolving relationship between the liturgy and the wide range of that it influenced is the subject of the thirteen scholars who present their recent work in this richly illustrated volume.The authors' approaches are as varied as the objects they examine, which range from sumptuous codexes, altarpieces, metal shrines, ivories, and the expansive stained-glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle to more humble artifacts such as baptismal fonts, choir stalls, and drinking horns. One of the many conclusions that emerge from these essays is that liturgical art was far from being a rigidly controlled or formulaic genre. Throughout the Middle Ages it could - and did - respond readily and in nuanced detail to the changing expectations of the devout, the taste and demands of individuals, and even the lingering presence of secular and pagan objects. The contributors are Adelaide Bennett, Elaine C. Block, Lisa Victoria Ciresi, Michael Curschmann, William J. Diebold, Julian Gardner, Alyce A. Jordan, Peter Lasko, John Lowden, Carol Neuman de Vegvar, Harriet M. Sonne de Torrens, Elizabeth C. Teviotdale, and Beth Williamson.

Latin Drama and Leveller Ideas: Pedagogy and Power in the Writings of Richard Overton

IThe Presbyterian cleric Thomas Edwards has been awarded the title of 'first discoverer of the Levellers'. The 'prime targets' of the third part of Edwards's voluminous heresiography Gangraena (three parts, 1646) were 'the men who were later to be recognized as the leaders of the Leveller party' - John Lilburne, William Walwyn and Richard Overton - and his summary of their constitutional radicalism anticipates fairly accurately the contents of the first Agreement of the People (3 November 1647).1 By attacking the political theories of the future Leveller leaders within the genre of the heresiography, Edwards explicitly linked political radicalism with religious heterodoxy. Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton had a history of religious activism and involvement in separatist congregations: the three men appear in the first and second parts of Gangraena as prominent heresiarchs as well as in the third part as political radicals or 'civil heretics'. Most scholars have concurred with Edwards's connection between radical religious belief and Leveller ideas, even if they cannot agree over the nature and importance of that connection.2 For Edwards, the seditious political opinions of men such as Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton confirmed the anarchic consequences of allowing the laity to engage openly in religious speculation. The multitude of 'Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices' infecting England in the 1640s was a consequence of allowing 'illiterate Mechanick persons' to debate theology and voice opinions 'both unsound and weak, fit to take women and weak people, but not to satisfie any scholar'.3There might appear to be a curious contradiction in Edwards's characterization of the radicals as 'illiterate'. He frequently quotes from heretical books in the margins of Gangraena and explicitly connects the usurpation of the university-trained clergy by 'illiterate Mechanick persons' with Parliament's failure to enforce both its 1645 Act against lay preaching and its Licensing Act of 1643.4 However the apparent contradiction in Edwards's simultaneous accusation of illiteracy and citation of radical texts is the effect of an anachronistic understanding of terms. In the early seventeenth century 'literate' and 'illiterate' largely retained the medieval sense of their Latin roots, litteratus and illitteratus. These terms denoted 'two educationworlds: literate, the education-world of Latin and the cleric . . . illiterate, the education-world of the vernacular and the lay person'.5 It is literacy in Latin, not in the vernacular, that Edwards erects as a boundary between clergy and laity. Christopher Hill, the most influential historian of seventeenth- century English radicalism, has repeated these hostile contemporary claims about the lowly educational background of the radicals but from a positive and sympathetic Marxist perspective: 'the eloquence, the power of the simple artisans who took part in these disputes is staggering'.6 Edwards uses the charge of ignorance to disqualify radical voices from being heard, whereas Hill celebrates the conditions in which ordinary people were free to engage openly in religious and political speculation. Like Edwards, however, Hill sees radical ideas and writings as an authentic expression of popular beliefs that evolved outside the institutional educational and cultural structures of early modern England:[P]ersons (including women) who had no university education, often no grammar school education even, found no obstacles to publication . . . [s]o in the interregnum discussions there was no longer a shared background of classical scholarship; the rules of logic which structured academic controversy were ignored. University scholars treated the newcomers with contempt, and this in turn fuelled opposition to the universities as such. The whole classical curriculum and the conventions of academic argument were called in question.7As this extract indicates, Hill does not identify radical ideas exclusively with the oral culture of the illiterate; such a position would be untenable given his total reliance on printed sources for evidence of those ideas. …

Handel's ‘Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno’: A Petrarchan Vision in Baroque Style

Handel's first oratorio, Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, was composed in Rome during the spring of 1707. Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili's libretto owes its inspiration to the last two of Petrarch's six poems entitled I trionfi. Petrarch's meditative, even mystic, poems are a literary authority (in the medieval sense) for Pamphili's allegory of conversion from preoccupation with the sinful flesh to the spiritual life. Several passages from the libretto are directly based on Petrarch. The puzzling final aria, which seems to die away tonally and dynamically, can be interpreted as a reflection of the ending of Petrarch's series, in which Eternity, that is God, triumphs over Time.

Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: temporality, meaning and the scope of heritage studies

With the apparent focus of work carried out by the heritage 'community' very much directed towards heritage practices in the present, the potential historical scope for the discipline as a whole, becomes ever-more temporally closed. This paper makes space for a longer historical analysis of the development of heritage as a process. The paper ranges over the evolution of a medieval sense of heritage and how it is related to transitions in the experience of space and place, and also explores some early modern developments in the heritage concept, relating them to societal changes associated with colonial (and post-colonial) experience. This deeper understanding of the historically contingent and embedded nature of heritage allows us to go beyond treating heritage simply as a set of problems to be solved, and enables us to engage with debates about the production of identity, power and authority throughout society.

The practice of medicine in England about the year 1000.

The paper begins with the medical practitioners of late Anglo-Saxon England, were apparently both physicians and surgeons, describing the kinds of ailments they are evidenced as treating. The majority were monastic; whether there were also lay medics is uncertain. Most Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical foundations appear to have had an infirmary, where sick monks or nuns, or those who were about to die, were looked after. Some infirmaries may have tended lay people, but there do not appear to have been any hospitals in the later medieval sense. The rest of the paper looks at the contents of one manuscript written about the year 1000: London, British Library MS. Harley 585, which contains texts of three compilations in old English: the Herbarium and the Medicina de Quadrupedibus, both translated from Latin, and the Lacnunga, which is a collection of remedies from diverse sources, some translated from Latin, some of native origin, some wholly rational, some containing Christian or folkloric incantations and rituals, and including four metrical charms. Because of its lack of selectivity and orgarization, it gives an invaluable insight into the condition of, and the attitude to, Anglo-Saxon medicine about the end of the first millennium.

A Visual Pun at Vézelay: Gesture and Meaning on a Capital Representing the Fall of Man

In a description of a trip through the Midi of France in 1835, Prosper Merimée devotes a lengthy paragraph to the analysis of the Christ in Vézelay's Pentecost tympanum (fig. 1). He marvels at the carving of the figure's feet and “blessing” hands, as well as the placement of the thighs in relation to the torso. Later in his treatment of the abbey church and its sculpture, the author notes that figures on the nave capitals convey a “savage zeal” (zèle farouche) by means of posture and facial expressions. Gestures, in the widely construed, medieval sense of the word, clearly struck the celebrated French author as a salient feature of Vézelay's sculpture. Merimée sympathized with Romantic visions of the Middle Ages as a period less tainted by the stifling effects of civilization, and perhaps his fascination with the dramatic body movement carved throughout the abbey church reflects the belief that these were unfettered by the artistic or social constraints of the early nineteenth century. Yet throughout his description of Vézelay's sculpture, he never attempts to explore the meanings that the carved body might have held for a medieval audience; their meaning is not considered to be historical, but rather to be self-evident. The operative assumption that gestures in medieval art are transparent in meaning anticipates much subsequent scholarship.

Psychoanalysis—the Major Concepts

BURNESS E. MOORE AND BERNARD D. FINE, EDS. Psychoanalysis-the Major Concepts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, 577 pp., $60.00, ISBN 0-300-06329-6. This book, in painfully small print for aging eyes, essentially constitutes the Summa Psychoanalytica of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In 1990, the editors published the third edition of their Glossary of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, an outstanding collection of important definitions. The book under review here is a sequel, consisting essentially of a series of essays on innumerable clinical and abstract topics. The authors are prominent members of the American Psychoanalytic Association and, although the editors claim that the book is published independently of that organization, represents a thorough coverage of the traditional United States views on the practice and theory of that would be endorsed by that organization. The essays range widely in style, from those exceptionally clearly written, as for example by Pulver, and as such with special value for beginners, to those that are exceedingly scholastic in the high medieval sense, such as the chapter on narcissism by Moore (one of the editors of the volume) or on self by Vann Spruiell. Some of the chapters, for example those by McLaughlin on resistance and by Renik and Grossman on working with are of great technical value and go into considerable detail. The book is divided into two main parts: clinical and theoretical concepts. The section on clinical contains essays on therapeutic applications, technical issues, and other clinical phenomena such as dreams, character, somatization, narcissism, and sadomasochism. The section on theoretical concepts covers factors affecting normality and pathology, instinct theory, sexuality, affects, development, self, objects, identification, conflict, defense, structural theory, metapsychology, and finishes with essays on psychoanalytic education and research. Thus all conceivable aspects of the major concepts of are covered by these essays. The authors are very conservative and seem to agree with each other on most major issues. For example, Pulver maintains that five sessions per week are desirable and four the minimum number to constitute a psychoanalysis (p. 8). His opening chapter is the only one specifically addressed to the beginner, and in he states that Eissler's concept of is now passe (p. 22). This issue of parameters seems to haunt some of the authors; for example, Seelig, in an attempt to differentiate individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy from psychoanalysis, states that it is useful to think of the psychotherapy as being the first stage of an analysis, essentially a parameter of technique that must be employed in the initial period of the work but which can be analyzed later (p. 54). Her chapter deals with one of the most controversial topics in the book, and I suspect every reader will take issue with some of the statements to be found there. Also on this conservative line, Pulver opposes the constructivists without giving details of their radical point of view in his chapter on analytic processes and mechanisms of change. …

Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100- 1600 (review)

Reviewed by: Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100–1600 Darrel W. Amundsen Steven Bassett, ed. Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100–1600. Leicester, U.K.: Leicester University Press, 1992. x + 258 pp. Ill. $69.00. In 1989, the Urban Research Committee of the University of Birmingham (England) began hosting a biennial international conference to review recent progress in premodern urban research. This volume is the fruit of their second conference. One’s heart cannot help but go out to the volume’s editor, who laments in the book’s preface that a written version of “Aeternaliter in Urbe: A Summing-up,” which “brought the 1991 conference to such a memorable end” (p. vii) was never submitted. Perhaps the derelict scholar, whose promise to transform that presentation into “a wide-ranging introductory discussion for the volume was enthusiastically taken up by the Committee” (p. vii), was so preoccupied that he never even got around to procrastinating. But when publication could be delayed no longer, the editor elicited the help of two colleagues to write a short, synthetic “Introduction” (pp. 1–7). This introduction is the successful fruit of three desperate scholars’ efforts to weave together into the semblance of a pattern some disparate strands from the diverse essays contained in this volume. The first essay (“The Palaeopathology of Urban Infections,” by Keith Manchester), which is an attempt, as the author so poignantly expresses it, “to apply clinicopathological concepts and palaeopathological evidence to the palaeoepidemiology of infectious disease in urban contexts” (p. 13), and the concluding paper (“Dispersal or Concentration: The Disposal of the Winchester Dead over 2000 Years,” by Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle), which argues that “In the last century and a half the pattern of burial at Winchester has come full circle, reverting to the [End Page 149] Roman practice” (p. 245), have only this in common: they cover an even greater span than the temporal purview of this volume. The intervening essays are arranged chronologically. Essays 2 through 5 deal with the Roman imperial period. John Patterson (“Patronage, Collegia and Burial in Imperial Rome”) explores “the relationships between the funerary and burial practices of non-elite Romans and the political and social structures in which they were enmeshed” (p. 16). Simon Esmonde Cleary (“Town and Country in Roman Britain?”) determined that, at least in Roman Britain, settlement types did not significantly influence burial types. Theya Molleson (“Mortality Patterns in the Romano-British Cemetery at Poundbury Camp near Dorchester”) provides paleopathological analyses of the skeletal evidence from a Romano-British cemetery. In “Death and the Dead in the Late Roman West,” Jill Harries explores the effect of the cult of martyrs on generally held views about the dead. The remainder of the essays deal with the Middle Ages and slightly beyond. Alan Morton (“Burial in Middle Saxon Southampton”) concludes that “the role of the Church is not clearly reflected” by such evidence as there is for burial practices there: “Indeed it is tempting to argue that the urban corpse was, figuratively as well as actually, a piece of rubbish—but archaeology is the wrong discipline to support such an interpretation” (p. 76). In “Urban Cemetery Location in the High Middle Ages,” Julia Barrow discusses the significance of cemetery locations for social history. Roberta Gilchrist (“Christian Bodies and Souls: The Archaeology of Life and Death in Later Medieval Hospitals”) argues that while “the incidence of hospitals [sc. the medieval sense of that word] is one criterion for indicating a hierarchy of medieval towns . . . such figures [also] act as a scale of urban deprivation and need” (p. 101). In “Burial Choice and Burial Location in Later Medieval London,” Vanessa Harding discusses the motivations for, and the significance of, the choice of type and location of burial. John Henderson (“The Black Death in Florence: Medical and Communal Responses”) seeks to determine “the relationship between physicians’ beliefs about the causes, nature and methods of transmission of plague and the policies adopted by city governments” (p. 136), especially that of Florence. In “Death and Rebirth in Late Medieval Bury St. Edmunds,” Robert Dinn attempts “to reconstruct funeral rituals” in order to “decode the...

A Survey of Medieval Drama and Theater in Germany

A Survey of Medieval Drama and Theater in Germany Hansjürgen Linke ? My aim is to provide a general introductory survey for scholars and students in the field of drama which will present the largest possible variety of factual information about drama in Germany and other German-speaking countries. Of course, as the other papers in the present collection also show, medieval drama and theater are a common European'phenomenon of immense interest with regard to the content of the plays and performance practice. Nor was all drama that was performed in the Germanspeaking region of Europe in the German language. As all specialists in the field know, medieval drama is bilingual since it comprises purely vernacular plays as well as pieces written entirely in Latin—in addition to a large number of mixed-language plays in both the vernacular and Latin. Furthermore, even in vernacular plays we more often than not find Latin stage directions. Chronologically, it is important to remember that Latin offices and plays were staged for several centuries after the close of the Middle Ages. Though they appear as early as the tenth century, they also extend as late as the eighteenth century—a period of time spanning more than eight centuries. And German vernacular plays also had a very long run, being played from the mid-thirteenth century up to the Reformation, which affected different areas at different times during the sixteenth century, and even later in the Southwest—the Swabian and Alemannic region —and in the Tyrol. These plays were played simultaneously with the drama of the Reformers, the Humanists, and the Jesuits, and continued up to the early decades of the seventeenth century. This is still a range of time longer than that from the baroque through contemporary drama. In Germany as in many other parts of Europe, the richness 17 18Medieval Drama and Theater in Germany of medieval drama, including its full historical diversity, is largely unknown except among specialists. Not only are the medieval drama and theater of Germany dead to the contemporary public, but also, due to peculiarities in academic training, even philologists tend not to be knowledgeable about this field. One of the reasons for this predicament is, most importantly, the way in which the drama has been approached by critics and the inadequacy of their standards of judgment. While there has been some improvement in academic circles in the past twenty years, the old stereotypes can be found even today. The codification of older expectations concerning drama by Gustav Freytag in his "Technik des Dramas" (1863) revealed exactly what people believed drama must be, and there was also the continuing reliance on Aristotle as a source of prescriptive theory of the stage. The medieval drama, which was rediscovered in the nineteenth century , failed to come up to the standards of Aristotelian dramaturgy or, for that matter, to the aesthetic and moral values expected during this time. Medieval drama was found to be entirely different in content and form, in intention and function, comparable neither to anything preceding nor to anything following it. If an approach was nevertheless ventured, it was motivated by national-historical, religious, or partly ethnological interests, never by any recognition of the artistic value of the plays. While the cultural and historical situation has recently received considerable attention, especially in English-speaking regions with the advent of the Records of Early English Drama and Early Drama, Art, and Music projects, it may still be useful to outline some aspects of the medieval drama from a German perspective.1 Importantly, the performances may not be grouped under the term Laienspiel, which indicates amateur performance, and indeed the term 'amateur' is inappropriate in a time when there were no professional theaters and in which also the word 'lay' denoted only non-clerics (not, as nowadays, non-professionals —a denotation which did not appear until later). As we know, laymen (in the medieval sense) were quite often joined on stage by clerics, and in some cases religious plays were in fact produced entirely by the clergy. Also inappropriate, although still frequently in use, is the term Volksschauspiel ('folk play') because it blurs the borderline between medieval theater and...

Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs and Modern Theory , and: Naming the Rose: Essays on Eco's "The Name of the Rose" (review)

Reviewed by: Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs and Modern Theory, and: Naming the Rose: Essays on Eco's "The Name of the Rose" Michel Viegnes Theresa Coletti . Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs and Modern Theory. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. 212 pp. $19.95. Thomas Inge , ed. Naming the Rose: Essays on Eco's "The Name of the Rose. " Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1988. 214 pp. $27.50. It is meaningful that two books dealing with Eco's cult novel, and published almost at the same time, should bear the same main title: Naming the Rose, indeed, signals that at the core of this postmodern masterpiece of "fiction" lies a radical questioning of signs and interpretation. Theresa Coletti's study is a rigorous development of a seminal idea: as she states in the Introduction, she wants to show that "out of a concrete rendering of medieval society and intellectual life Eco . . . crafts a distinctly contemporary statement about language and meaning." Paralleling very successfully The Name of the Rose as a novel that "thematizes decoding" with Eco's main scholarly essays on semiotics, she concentrates on three capital narrative networks at play in the text: 1) Adso's narrative, centered on the sex scene where he finds himself involved with the peasant girl, 2) the "hermeneutics of heresy" by which the medieval powers that be strive to dispose of certain categories of revolutionary outsiders, with respect to the sensitive doctrinal question of poverty, and, 3) the quest of the mysterious book that will turn out to be Aristotle's lost treatise on comedy and laughter, the hypothetical Poetics II. Coletti reads the Rose as a labyrinth-like text where these three narrative avenues appear intertwined, each one functioning in organic symbiosis (/semiosis) with three foundational intertexts: Adso's bildungsroman with the Song of Solomon, the historico-political background of the struggle between Empire and Papacy with the Fransiscan Rule, and the mystery plot with Aristotle's book, as well as the Apocalypse of St. John and the Coena Cypriani. This very "archeological" reading is consistent with Eco's assertion in his Postscript to "The Name of the Rose" that this novel is "a textile of texts . . . a book made of books." Coletti, in the first three chapters, achieves a brilliant [End Page 362] demonstration of these intertextualities. In her last two chapters, she is equally brilliant although at times somewhat less convincing. Trying to decipher the "novel's overarching medievalization of [modern hermeneutic] theory," she tends to read it almost as a roman à clef, where the main personae embody major contemporary discourses. She offers striking formulas to encapsulate what the key characters, according to her, stand for: thus Jorge, as a radical realist (in the medieval sense) is labeled a "Platonic extremist" (145), whereas the Oxford-educated William is defined as "the perennial doubter, the prober of signs and intellectual codes," and therefore constitutes the epitome of nominalism. From that basis it follows, according to the author, that the Franciscan Sherlock Holmes, who concludes at the end of the novel that the world has no order, is a deconstructionist. Coletti defends her point by showing that William's philosophizing echoes developments in Theory of Semiotics and La Struttura Assente where Eco follows Derrida's critique of Levi-Strauss and expounds his notion of "unlimited semiosis," which is akin to the Derridean concept of "difference." However, although Coletti again refers to Eco's theoretical work, some readers may find it more difficult to see Jorge as an allegory of structuralism on the basis of an alleged similarity between this current and medieval realism. But this does not diminish by any means the remarkable insight of her wandering through Eco's labyrinth. Her study, indeed, contains illuminating references to major modern theories: Barthes's eroticization of reading and interpretation, Derrida's description of the "idea of the book" as a metaphor of the totality and closure of the signified, and Bakhtin's concept of dialogic heteroglossia, of which Salvatore, this living tower of Babel, is viewed as an embodiment. Theresa Coletti is right to expect her book to reach "medievalists and persons interested in contemporary theory." The ten essays edited by Thomas...

Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love

Medieval examines the poetry of courtly love with unprecedented thoroughness. Douglas Kelly offers detailed analyses of numerous works within a historical, conceptual, and artistic framework to establish the underlying concept of Imagination in courtly poetry. He capitalizes the term to underscore its medieval sense: the poet s invention of significant images to represent a certain conception of truth. Imagination, thus, in its metaphorical sense of providing an idea with a suitable representation in an image, permitted an allegory of love in romance and dream vision from the twelfth century on. The techniques employed in Imagination allegory, personification, metonymy, synecdoche are analyzed in detail as amplification. In addition to his complete coverage of the better-known poets like Guillaume de Lorris, Machaut, and Froissart, Kelly examines the work of such rarely treated writers as Rene d Anjou and Oton de Grandson, as well as the Echecs amoureux and related medieval Latin writings. The concluding chapters including Charles d Orleans, Chartier, and Christine de Pisan. The later chapters are a rare boon to French scholars in providing a survey of Middle French courtly literature, a little-explored area of scholarship. Kelly s documentation is a fresh and useful contribution to the interpretation of this too-often neglected period.The flower of medieval French culture, the poetry of courtly love, is examined with an unprecedented thoroughness in this work. Douglas Kelly offers detailed analyses of numerous works within a historical, conceptual, and artistic framework.

An Ockhamite Criticism of Church Semantics

Ockham's criticisms of earlier theories of universals depend on the fact that they are universals, that the supposed entities are essentially different in kind from particulars. Since modern theories which postulate the existence of senses or propositions as part of a semantic theory1 make no such claims about those entities it would seem that Ockham's views are irrelevant to dis putes over the value of those semantic theories. That is, for Frege, Church and others the senses or propositions postulated are not claimed to be univer sal in the traditional medieval sense,2 but are rather abstract objects which in the theory are treated as particulars exactly on a par with rocks, tables and numbers. However, if one considers Ockham's positive theory of language it becomes clear that his views are at odds with modern abstract semantic ac counts just as much as they were with the traditional universalist semantic accounts.3 For Ockham the universality of any expression is always and only un iversality of signification.4 The fact that a general term may refer to more than one object derives entirely from the acts of the individual mind:

Suum cuique tribuere

What is Law? The question has been given many answers.' If we are nominalist enough we can list the various ways the word is used, as did Marsiglio of Padua and William of Occam in the fourteenth century. If we are realist enough (in the medieval sense) we can try to construct definition of the genus. We can define human law with Montesquieu as one variety of the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. We can define it Positivistically with Austin as the command of the sovereign; or Realistically (in peculiar moder sense of the word) as officials do about disputes, or a prediction of what courts will do. We can equate law with morals or distinguish the two. We can make justice the defining quality of law or say law is law whether just or not.

Thomas Pownall's The Administration of the Colonies: The Six Editions

HOMAS POWNALL'S The Administration of the Colonies is remarkable in political literature, not only for the timeliness of its first publication, but for the way in which subsequent editions kept pace with changing events. It was first published as a pamphlet early in I764. New editions came out in I765, I766, I768, and I774, by which time the modest essay had become a substantial treatise in two volumes. As such it was reissued, almost unchanged, in I777. Before this sixth, and last edition, no two were identical; and the successive modifications amount to a running commentary on the imperial problem from the Stamp Act to the Revolution. Pownall had been educated at Trinity College, Cambridge-Isaac Newton's own college-and his writing was permeated by Newtonian thought. Even when he wrote of politics and empire, the principle of gravitation was in his mind. He sought earnestly for the equivalent of such a force in the pattern of empire, and he frequently used the cosmic analogy to illustrate the relationship between Britain and her colonies. He set forth his ideas in A Treatise on Government: being a Review of the Doctrine of an Original Contract, published anonymously in I750, and in Principles of Polity, an version of the same work issued under his own name in I752. Writing at a time when the ideas of Bolingbroke and Hume were in the air, he denounced the false Policy, that calls Factions and Parties, and Checks, and independent Interests, and such Stuff, Constitutional, and he saw a vision of unity and cooperation in almost the medieval sense.' Society should be an enlarged Communion in accord with the divinely or-

Nempu-uri _??__??__??_ in Okukumano

Nenki-uri _??__??__??_ was a common legal practice in Japan both in the medieval and the modern times. In the medieval age, Nenki-uri meant sales of a certain property or properties for a limited period of time. But in the modern times (roughly 16-19 century), the word came to be used to denote pledge or Honzeni-gaeshi _??__??__??_ (conditional sale for redemption), according to the theory now commonly accepted. But all of the Nenki-uri practices and similar customs were not pledge or conditional sale for redemption.In Akabadani of the Okukumano district, there was a legal practice called _??__??__??_.It was a kind of sales of woodland. The property right was transferred for a limited period of time called Nempu, which was usually about 60 years or the time required for a young tree to grow up. After the term expires, the woodland was automatically returned to the former owner (konushi _??__??_). The practice of Nempu-uri cannot be interpreted as lease of land, pledge, conditional sale for redemption or Uwatsuchiuri _??__??__??_ which derived from the concept of divided domain. Nempu-uri should be literally interpreted as sales of land for a limited period of time. It was a kind of Nenki-uri in the original or the medieval sense of the word.

The Nature and Origins of Scientism

Fr. John Wellmuth, S.J. has chosen a timely topic. Our age is suffering under disease of 'scientism' which has wasted many an outstanding mind and which has for a long time been blocking way to a sound metaphysics as science (in Medieval sense). Scientism is defined as the belief that science, in modern sense of that term, and scientific method as described by modern scientists, afford only reliable natural means of acquiring such knowledge as may be available about whatever is real (p. 1-2). The further explanations and characterizations of scientism are clear and very useful. What has been called 'inductive Metaphysics' falls also under diagnosis of scientism. About extent of it, and infection of even some Neo-Scholastics by it, Fr. Pacificus Borgmann, O.F.M. has published a thorough investigation in Franziskanische Studien (1934, pp. 80-103; 125-150): Gegenstand, Erfahrungs-grundlage und Methode der Metaphysik. Eine wissenschafts,theoretische Auseinandersetzung mit August Messer.