MLR, 104.4, 2009 1099 Iwona Piechnik contrastively discusses adposition development in Balto-Finnish and Romance, or more particularly French, noting a trend from postposition to preposition in the former and an opposite drift in the latter. Mariana Tutescu con siders themedieval opposition de revs de dicto and its fundamental importance in the expression ofmodality in logic and language, and Maria Iliescu offers a brief account of the lexical trajectories ofpartenaire, entrevue, budget fromOld French into English and back into French before entering Romanian. The other contributions are of a rather different character and may appeal less to the French specialist. Three consider Latin topics: Hannah Rosen exa mines earlier editorial emendations of the conjunction sed; Heikki Solin calls attention to two second-century ad attestations involving pronominal te in a context demanding the nominative tu and suggests these are early examples of the generalization of the accusative; and Tuomo Pekkanen explores the sources of Horace's references to northern lands, identifying especially the Greek writ ers Aristeas and Pytheas. The five remaining essays are highly varied in na ture.Anna Bochnakowa presents a seventeenth-century Polish multilingual dic tionary; Juhani Harma and Elina Suomela-Harma investigate dedications and textes d'hommage in theses defended at the University of Turku 1640-1828; Witold Manczak, invoking somewhat questionable lexical material, places the origin of the Goths in the extreme south of Germania rather than in Scandi navia; Outi Merisalo gives an account of the correspondence between theGerman philologist Ludwig Traube (d. 1907) and Werner Soderhjelm (d. 1931), the pi oneer of philology in modern languages in Finland; finally, Saara Nevanlinna explores the various nouns designating the pigeon' frommedieval English on ward. The volume is nicely presented with very few misprints. The only regret is perhaps that a littlemore editorial intervention did not take place. A thematic grouping of contributions, not necessarily that attempted above, would surely have been preferable to just setting out the essays according to the alphabetical order of the authors' names. Moreover, the use of Swedish and German in two of the essays does stand out as anomalous inview of the adoption of French or English elsewhere. None the less, this collection is a scholarly feast and ismuch to be welcomed. University of Bristol Rodney Sampson The RevivifyingWord: Literature, Philosophy and theTheory ofLife inEurope's Ro mantic Age. By Clayton Koelb. Rochester, NY, andWoodbridge: Camden House. 2008. xiv+205 pp. $75; ?40. ISBN 978-1-57113-388-5. For readers familiar with Clayton Koelb's previous books, in particular Kafka's Rhetoric: The Passion ofReading (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), In ventions ofReading: Rhetoric and theLiterary Imagination (ibid., 1988), and The Incredulous Reader: Literature and theFunction ofDisbelief (ibid., 1984), it should come as no surprise that in this, his most recent work, he chooses as his focus fictional readers, acts of reading, and cthedrama of revivification' in order to draw 1100 Reviews attention to a fruitful point of intersection between the rhetoric of philosophy and the rhetoric of fiction during the Romantic century: the apostle Paul's well known proposition that the dead lettercan be revivified by the living spirit' (p. ix). While much inkhas been spiltby scholars ofRomanticism, Koelb's novel approach produces a highly original reading of a selection of Romantic texts in an attempt to locate the liminal state between living organisms and dead matter, an essential enterprise, he argues, of Romantic authors and thinkers. Koelb establishes his goal from the outset: 'to demonstrate how one strand of philosophic thought about the relation between Tiving spirit' and 'dead letter'per meated Romantic literature fornearly a century' (p. 12). He bases his understanding of'the Romantic century on thatof William Galperin and SusanWolfson, 'who have suggested redefining Romanticism as "an intellectually and historically coherent century-long category, 1750-1850, which we [Galperin andWolfson] unabashedly call 'TheRomantic Century"" (p. ix). Such unabashed declarations are problematic fornumerous reasons, and subsequent claims often prove more suspect than apo dictic. To borrow from Lovejoy, such a lapidary approach toRomanticism(s) would appear to lack discrimination. For instance, JohannGeorg Hamann, a philosopher who worked within a German Enlightenment context, and who exerted a consider able influence on Sturm und Drang...