Nineteenth-century Scholars Research Articles

WILLIAM GELL'S ENCOUNTERS WITH ISLAMIC SPAIN, 1808–36

The British antiquary William Gell (1777–1836) is known for his work on ancient Greece and Rome, which he based on a lifetime of Mediterranean travel and two decades of residence in Italy. This article uses a remarkable notebook held at the British School at Rome to explore his unheralded interest in Islamic Spain (al-Andalus), which emerged from his Iberian travels of 1808–11 and took up much of his energy in the early 1830s, the final years of his life. As such, the notebook shows how engagement with other cultures might continue well beyond an initial encounter through travel. It brings together Gell's on-the-spot sketches and descriptions of the Alhambra, his copious later reading on the Emirate of Granada and evidence that he was teaching himself Arabic, offering a case study of early nineteenth-century scholarship that straddles the transition between eighteenth-century antiquarianism and Romantic, Orientalist approaches. The materiality and the contents of Gell's notebook chart the changing ways in which British travellers and writers incorporated al-Andalus into their understandings of Europe and the Mediterranean.

For the Freedom of Zion: The Great Revolt of Jews against Romans, 66–74 CE. By Guy MacLean Rogers

This is a fine specimen of narrative history. After a tribute to the late Sir Fergus Millar, Rogers cruises through the story in twenty-four chapters bearing curious titles: “The Owl and the Golden Chain,” “The Camel’s Hump,” “The Son is Coming.” Since chapters rarely exceed twenty pages and frequent subtitles combine with lively prose, arresting vignettes, and plentiful images, the journey is easy going. Rogers adopts the needed confidence, declaring what happened and dismissing what did not. He notes occasional debates, usually to say that however one resolves them, “we know” X. For more enquiring minds, he includes sixteen appendices on technical questions and eighty-two pages of endnotes. Five topographical maps, twenty-three images, and a granular index complete the support suite. This is the work of a skilled researcher and communicator. What story does he tell? Its main lines have been familiar since they congealed in nineteenth-century scholarship: Jews could not abide Roman rule and fought tenaciously for independence. Because we have an ancient eyewitness narrative in Josephus’s War, Antiquities, and Life, modern versions are more or less critical retellings of Josephus. A standard view, shared by Rogers, holds that Josephus, harboring a post-war antipathy toward rebels, obscured their aims and the nobility of their values. Nevertheless, one can see through his account to their righteous desire for freedom. Already in 6 CE, Judas the Galilean seeded a biblically grounded freedom movement in Judea. After six decades—though Rogers insists on the contingency of events at each point—Judas’s heirs persuaded a sufficient number of compatriots to confront Rome.

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848, by Clare Pettitt

Reviewed by: Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 by Clare Pettitt William Lee Hughes (bio) Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848, by Clare Pettitt; pp. xviii + 348. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, $94.00. Clare Pettitt’s Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 sets out to develop an interdisciplinary methodology for understanding how ordinary people, particularly the working poor, came to feel like agents of history. This project is the first in a planned series of three books, which draws upon print media studies, affect theory, and nineteenth-century historicism to argue that “seriality is the defining form of modernity” (2). It will be of great interest to scholars of the Victorian period, but it is particularly noteworthy for its closely- and well-researched chapters that cover the Regency and Georgian periods, which are too frequently ignored in nineteenth-century scholarship. The greatest strength of the book is its meticulous research of periodicals, including The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (1822–49), Penny Magazine (1832–44), Olio; or, Museum of Entertainment (1828–33), Parterre (1834–6), Saturday Magazine (1832–44), Chambers’s Edinburgh Magazine (1832–54), Howitt’s Journal (1847–8), and Frederick Douglass’s North Star (1847–51). In chapter 1, “Yesterday’s News,” Pettitt argues that repressive taxes on print that were passed after Peterloo, especially the Newspaper Stamp Duties Act (one of the Six Acts), created a time-lag in the distribution of news, so that poorer people experienced print not in terms of the ephemera of an empty homogenous time of modernity, but rather as part of a multi-media culture. The repressive taxes encouraged poorer people to purchase chapbooks, broadsides, ballads, and almanacs instead of the costlier newspapers. These older forms of print media provided a different model of time and history, which overlapped with the newer models of time and history created by the daily newspaper. Pettitt shows that these serial rhythms did not synchronize until mid-century, after the repressive taxes had been repealed. Serial Forms opens new directions for the study of nineteenth-century periodicals by thinking of them as media rather than as literature. As media, these texts are not just texts. Rather, they are tools to be actively manipulated and engaged with in various ways that enable the reader or user to imagine themself as a historical agent and to feel like a part of history. Pettitt creates a cogent set of terms for analyzing and theorizing seriality in the period, particularly in her chapters on Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. While Scott is often read as the progenitor of the historical novel, Pettitt argues that his work is “unbound” by its close relationship to ballads, broadsides, and popular oral, material, and print culture (69). For Pettitt, it is best to “abandon the idea of the novel” to understand Scott’s work. Instead, Scott’s works are “print objects” (71). This term highlights the ways in which the illiterate and semi-literate engaged with print media through illustrations and as toys, for example. The chapter on Byron argues that his work is best understood in terms of serial performance (rather than as plays or poems) in an “immersive media revolution” (123). This performance creates a structure of feeling, “feeling at a distance,” which makes possible the extention of civic culture to the illiterate and semi-literate working poor (129). Readers will notice Pettitt’s engagement with critical theory and with affect theory in particular. Indeed, Serial Forms offers a refreshingly material engagement with affect studies. In Pettitt’s argument, the working class’s increasing access to serial print media renegotiates their place in history and enables them to feel and “imagine themselves into a historical [End Page 697] present” (250). The chapter on Mount Vesuvius argues that “emerging serial news media” created a shared sense of ordinary dailiness for a widening portion of the population (165). This sense of dailiness precipitated a feeling of living in a potentially historical moment in which an event could emerge. Without the feeling of ordinary dailiness, no true historical difference (event) could occur. The chapter on the biopolitics of seriality brings Pettitt’s...

China Is in the Bible

Abstract Isaiah 49:12 mentions “the land of Sinim.” Gesenius and most nineteenth-century scholars identified this place with China, but virtually all scholars today identify it instead with Aswan (Syene) in southern Egypt. It is argued here, based on the literary context, the wording “the land of [plural gentilic],” and the phonetics of Sinim, that the term means China.

Jesus in Context: Making Sense of the Historical Figure by David Wenham

Reviewed by: Jesus in Context: Making Sense of the Historical Figure by David Wenham Glenn B. Siniscalchi david wenham, Jesus in Context: Making Sense of the Historical Figure (Cambridge Studies in Religion, Philosophy, and Society; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Pp. xii + 249. Paper $29.99. David Wenham’s evenhanded, concise, and accessible book is dedicated to the basic themes of contemporary research on the historical Jesus. It is strongly recommended for introductory-level college courses that are related to historical approaches to the NT writings. One of the best aspects of Jesus in Context is the comprehensive coverage of most of the pertinent subjects in the current state of historical Jesus research. Whether it is the broad contours of the Roman Empire or the Jewish matrix from which Jesus and his first followers emerged in ancient Israel, there is plenty of informative and digestible material in this book. Wenham’s impartial coverage of the current findings of Jesus research is both ecumenically sensitive and consistent with the presuppositions of Christian theology. In this way, W.’s text subtly reports that christological orthodoxy and many well-established conclusions about the historical figure of Jesus can now be seen as comrades-in-arms. W. is keen on informing the reader where the consensus of NT scholars stand with respect to Jesus and his self-understanding; his teachings, actions, and miracles; and the immediate impact that he made on his followers. One might profit from understanding the political and socioreligious contexts in which Jesus lived (part 1) and some of the major themes that characterized his sayings and ministry (part 2). Toward the beginning of Jesus in Context, W. discusses the literary sources that ancient historians commonly use to study Jesus, the geographical and archaeological discoveries that seem pertinent for the relevant contemporary studies, and the history of ancient Israel and the Roman Empire up to and including the first century of the Common Era. [End Page 168] Wenham’s text is also excellent with regard to the fundamental reliability of the canonical Gospels. He rightly reports that form criticism, redaction criticism, the fascination with the second-century apocryphal Gospels, and the notion of oral traditions in ancient Palestine are not relevant enough concerns to lead one to conclude that the Christian Gospels are unreliable. Moreover, the current state of NT scholarship is not on the side of the revision-ist views of Rudolf Bultmann (who was known for separating the theology of the canonical Gospels from whatever history might lie behind them) or the older nineteenth-century scholars who saw the Gospels as fabricated myths. In the words of W., “The skepticism that ends up with scholars concluding or implying that much gospel tradition is the creation of the early Christian church rather than Jesus is curious, to say the least. It is much more likely that the main creative genius reflected in the gospel stories and teaching was the person who inspired the Christian movement, rather than . . . his followers” (p. 76). Rather, most of the newest questers in the guild endorse the historicity of Jesus and his various teachings about the reign of God, his baptism by John the Baptist, his wondrous miracles, and his resurrection from the dead. Recognizing that Paul’s letters were not understood as inspired texts by the original recipients, W. pointedly brings home the relevance of the apostle Paul for Jesus studies: “Both these early letters and others that followed, . . . give a lot of evidence about what the first Christians said and believed about Jesus. The letters are not telling the stories of Jesus, but are dealing with issues that had arisen in the churches; their references to Jesus are all the more revealing for being incidental” (p. 47). One of W.’s areas of special interest is that the apostle Paul and the four Gospel writers were not literarily dependent on one another. Despite that barrage of technical publications on early christology and historical criticism, W.’s book should be warmly welcomed as one of the best introductory texts on the current state of the basic questions on the historical Jesus and the reliability of the NT. In terms of accessibility and depth of...

:Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet

:<i>Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet</i>

:Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, PostSaxon Futures

:<i>Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, PostSaxon Futures</i>

Transmediality: A Model in Global Nineteenth-Century Studies

I argue that the nineteenth century is particularly pertinent to our understanding of transmediality and, moreover, that transmediality offers a valuable framework to rethink and study the period itself. In what follows, then, I sketch some of the advantages of what I call nineteenth-century transmedia studies, and of global transmedia studies in particular. I begin by outlining how a focus on transmediality transforms our understanding of the era. Against this backdrop, I show the value of transmedia practices for global nineteenth-century studies, and, last but not least, spotlight some of the implications this may have for the shape of future nineteenth-century scholarship and funding.

A Life Together: Lucas Alamán and Mexico, 1792–1853

On the first page of his monumental biography of Lucas Alamán, Eric Van Young admits that the historian, politician, and entrepreneur—exceptionally intelligent but haughty, severe, and inscrutable—cuts a rather lackluster figure among the swashbuckling generals (Antonio López de Santa Anna), adventurous clergymen (Fray Servando Teresa de Mier), and romantic Liberals intent on saving the world (Valentín Gómez Farías, Lorenzo de Zavala) who made up Mexico's founding generation. Historians have, apparently, felt as put off by Alamán as did many of his contemporaries. Despite his looming large over the first decades of Mexico's postindependence history, we have, perhaps with the exception of José C. Valadés's solid 1938 biography, but snippets of Alamán's life and work, partial (in both senses of the word) images of an eventful existence: that of Mexican conservatism's sinister éminence grise, born reactionary and intolerant; the forward-looking architect of Mexico's first development bank; the nostalgic chronicler of Mexico's colonial past and contrarian critic of its independence revolution.A Life Together provides an efficient remedy to this fragmented vision. It painstakingly reconstructs the life of a man whose path mirrored the narrative that he manufactured for the nation: “from youthful promise, optimism, and experimentation following independence” to “chaotic adulthood” and, in the end, “crisis and near death” (p. 3). There are many reasons why it is fortunate that this laborious task was taken up by Eric Van Young, the most obvious being his evocative, witty prose. But as a historian of independence, he is less obsessed with ideology and the inexorable, timeless, and not particularly useful Liberal/Conservative divide that many nineteenth-century scholars rely on. His interest in markets and economic structures underpins his thorough analysis of Alamán's constant, probably exhausting efforts to keep his family in the style expected of them, which took up more of his time and energy than his intermittent incursions into politics. Van Young carefully parses don Lucas's activities as a bold but unsuccessful businessman and diligent administrator of Hernando Cortés's “feudal remnant”: the defender of Cortés's mortal remains against angry mobs and of his patrimony against both radical politicians intent on avenging the conquistador's crimes and insolvent, sometimes devious tenants. Van Young's reading of Alamán's meticulous, well-documented historical work productively draws the lines that informed the way that Alamán thought, what he wrote as a historian, and what he did when in power.Van Young does not set out to rescue Alamán from those who have maligned him. His carefully drawn portrait is captivating but not endearing. Van Young highlights the civil servant's capacity for systematic thinking and follow-through and the rookie minister's ability to keep things from falling apart despite his temper, his own conception of sovereignty, the topography of power, and the equivocal positions adopted by politicians of all stripes. He also shows how Alamán's impatience—with popular politics on principle, needled by what he saw as incompetence, frivolity, or posturing—and his need to micromanage everything—probably inevitable in someone who thought that he knew better—undermined his endeavors. Don Lucas suffered no fools—unless he had to work for one (President Guadalupe Victoria, the rather obnoxious Duke of Terranova and Monteleone) or forge a political alliance with another (the irritatingly ubiquitous Santa Anna). His rigidity did not place him above some very dirty politics, such as the “shameful proceedings” surrounding Vicente Guerrero's execution (p. 471). The author traces the strong fatalism that undergirds Alamán's visions but also reveals his persistence, his willingness to get back into the political fray when so many of his contemporaries had exited the scene, by describing his increasingly desperate attempts to wring a well-ordered polity out of “the most complete anarchy” (p. 170).Van Young's assessment of Alamán's career, attentive to context and change over time, is nuanced and suggestive, even if, perhaps too often, he looks for the features of an old and bitter man in the young politician's features. The alleged founder of Mexican conservatism embraced no unyielding principles or hard political programs; he was motivated “less because of what he feared to lose than because of what he had lost already”; he was a “situational monarchist” rather than a true believer (pp. 15, 602). Alamán appears, first and foremost, as “a practical man in politics, in business, even in the writing of history” (p. 333). A Life Together thus allows for a more balanced interpretation of a controversial character as it destabilizes many of the frameworks that structure our understanding of independent Mexico. Van Young's portrait of one of its most exceptional denizens, a complex man engaged in many things, invites us to reimagine the turbulent politics of the nineteenth century.

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century by Charles LaPorte

Reviewed by: The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century by Charles LaPorte Marija Reiff (bio) The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century by Charles LaPorte; pp. 213. Cambridge UP, 2021. Charles laporte begins his engaging examination of Victorian "bardology" (a term he invents as a counter to George Bernard Shaw's pejorative "bardolatry") with a simple request to the reader: to view the [End Page 131] Victorians' literary and religious investments in Shakespeare with "readerly sympathy" (24). This modest admonishment belies the capacious sweep of LaPorte's thesis, which details not just the Victorians' penchant to read Shakespeare through a religious lens but also the indebtedness of contemporary literature departments to reading literature, and Shakespeare in particular, with competing pieties that mirror those of nineteenth-century scholars. Although the bulk of The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare focuses on archival work, with each of its five chapters exploring little-known documents that reveal the creative ways Victorians imbued Shakespearean texts with religious meaning, LaPorte aims to do more than just recuperate the ostensibly naive Victorians who worshipped Shakespeare with a cult-like reverence and produced dubious, frequently humorous scholarship. Rather, he seeks to re-enchant literary studies as a whole by reclaiming the Biblical-studies roots of its hermeneutic past. LaPorte traces the origins of cultic Shakespeare and contemporary literary criticism to the appearance of Higher Criticism, which treated the Bible not as the direct word of God but as an ancient, possibly mythical text worthy of critical examination. In LaPorte's account, as Higher Criticism transformed the Bible from the factual word of God into the "inspired poetic expression" of God, "the most sublime secular poetry" showed promise "to become its own Bible, as well" (33). In light of the Higher Criticism, Shakespeare came to be seen as a Biblical supplement, a type of modern-day prophet. This move to make Shakespeare into something of a fifth Evangelist is evidenced through a trove of artifacts found from the mid-1800s on, most notably the proliferation of "Shakespeare sermons" and the appearance of Shakespearean devotional books, which mined Shakespeare's plays and sonnets for their possible theological and religious meanings. LaPorte's book is at its best and most illuminating in the first three chapters, wherein he explores these archival materials. Chapter 1 examines the "occasionally ridiculous, invariably quaint" Shakespeare sermons of the nineteenth century (24). These sermons treated Shakespeare's wisdom much like the Bible's: that is, as "timeless, universal, and divinely inspired" (29). These sermons had their heyday in the celebrations of Shakespeare's tercentenary, in 1864, and they proliferated both in the pulpit and in published pamphlets. They looked to Shakespeare's plots and his characters' words to reveal truths about sin, temptation, and corruption, topics that could be placed within the framework of a larger Christian discourse. If the Shakespeare sermons connected Shakespearean wisdom to Biblical wisdom, then the appearance of devotional Shakespeare volumes, the subject of chapters 2 and 3, flat-out conflated them. These volumes placed Shakespeare's work in dialogue with the Bible, often comparing individual phrases with analogous phrases from the holy book. While the Shakespeare sermons often pulled religious meaning out of Shakespeare's themes, these [End Page 132] printed devotional works moved beyond thematic meaning and instead focused on exact words or phrases and their supposed Biblical counterparts. This direct comparison was indicated not simply by their content, but also by their mise-en-page, wherein Shakespeare's words were placed on facing pages to the Bible's, often in matching fonts. LaPorte argues that these devotional texts became a sort of "secondary Bible, showing divine wisdom refracted through English genius" (64). These cuttings and juxtapositions were often absurd in the context of the plays themselves and could only be examined for wisdom when removed from the intricacies of Shakespeare's plots. LaPorte argues that these compilers frequently exhibited a "sublime indifference to literary contexts" (84), with Victorian scholars drawing ostensibly meaningful moral lessons from Shakespearean villains and clowns. Such creative interpretations oftentimes went far beyond the confines of the text, and LaPorte draws our attention to other such instances of "hermeneutic extravagance...

A forgotten chapter in Egyptology: Sir John Gardner Wilkinson's investigations into a dynamic Nile

Recent landscape archaeology projects have assumed that previous generations of Egyptologists eschewed research into environmental change, with the exception of one mid nineteenth century pioneer, Joseph Hekekyan. This article shows that this narrative is mainly a historiographical artefact with little basis in reality: scholars and travellers in Egypt were interested in environmental change, mainly in relation to the River Nile, as far back as the early eighteenth century. Debate about the extent to which Egypt's present-day topography had been shaped by ongoing geomorphological processes on the one hand, and ancient catastrophic events on the other was particularly lively in the early years of the nineteenth century, as was linking such geographical research to historical problems. This article concentrates primarily on the work of one English Egyptologist, Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875), in relation to the ancient extent of the Nile Delta, and of the agricultural lands of the Nile valley, at Thebes. Wilkinson followed leading catastrophist geologists, notably Georges Cuvier and Déodat Dolomieu, and investigated alluvial deposition in relation to ancient sites, including the Isle of Pharos, Alexandria, and the Colossi of Memnon, Thebes, in order to reconstruct the ancient landscape, and answer questions relating to Egyptian prehistory and political economy. Although Wilkinson's work may have fallen short of modern standards, it nevertheless demonstrates that early nineteenth century scholars appreciated that Egypt's landscape was dynamic rather than static, and that they used this knowledge to further their understanding of ancient Egyptian history.

Xenophon and Plato’s Meno

Not only was it a reference to Ismenias the Theban (Men. 90a4-5) that allowed nineteenth-century scholars to establish a date of composition for Plato’s Meno on the basis of Xenophon’s Hellenica but beginning with “Meno the Thessalian” himself, immortalized as a scoundrel in Xenophon’s Anabasis, each of the four characters in Plato’s dialogue is shown to have a Xenophontic resonance, thus revealing Meno to be Plato’s tombeau de Xénophon.

Objects of Empathy

Objects of Empathy

Unapologetic Apologetics: Julius Wellhausen, Anti-Judaism, and Hebrew Bible Scholarship

Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) is in many ways the ancestor of modern Hebrew Bible scholarship. His Prolegomena to the History of Israel condensed decades of source critical work on the Torah into a documentary hypothesis that is still taught today in almost all Hebrew Bible courses in some form. What is not taught as frequently is the anti-Judaism that underpins his hypothesis. This is in part due to unapologetic apologetics regarding Wellhausen’s bias, combined with the insistence that a nineteenth-century scholar cannot be judged by twenty-first century standards. These calls for compassion are made exclusively by white male scholars, leaving Jewish scholars the solitary task of pointing out Wellhausen’s clear anti-Judaism. In a discipline that is already overwhelmingly white, male and Christian, the minimizing of Wellhausen’s racism suggests two things. First, those who may criticize contextual biblical studies done by women and scholars of color have no problem pleading for a contextual understanding of Wellhausen while downplaying the growing anti-Judaism and nationalism that was a part of nineteenth-century Germany. Second, recent calls for inclusion in the Society of Biblical Literature may be well intentioned but ultimately useless if the guild cannot simply call one of its most brilliant founders the biased man that he was.

Dawud al-Fatani’s Thoughts on Marriage in Īḍāḥu l-Bāb li-Murīdi l-Nikāḥ bi-l-Ṣawāb

Abstract This paper examines Sheikh Dawud al-Fatani’s Īḍāḥu l-bāb li-murīdi l-nikāḥ bi-l-ṣawāb (“Explanation of the chapter for the one who desires a good marriage”), which outlines his understanding and mastery of the jurisprudence of Islamic family law. Al-Fatani is a renowned nineteenth-century Malay Muslim scholar, and his work is widely referred to in Islamic education institutions in the region. A close scrutiny of Īḍāḥu l-bāb offers a profound understanding of nineteenth-century Malay Muslims’ view of the institution of marriage. The foci of this paper include the general concept of marriage in Islam; guidelines on spouse selection; the obligations of both husband and wife; and the law on inter-religious marriage. In summary, al-Fatani shows that marriage requires a meticulous consideration of all parties involved; after all, family is a paramount social unit that needs to be preserved to ensure stability in the development of a society.

Fryderyk Zoll (starszy), Leon Piniński i zakres zastosowania actio negatoria. Koncepcje dwóch XIX-wiecznych romanistów a regulacja Kodeksu cywilnego

Przedmiot badań: Kwestia zakresu zastosowania actio negatoria budziła spore zainteresowanie w XIX-wiecznej doktrynie i stanowiła przedmiot ożywionych dyskusji. W artykule odniesio­no się do koncepcji sformułowanych przez Fryderyka Zolla (starszego) oraz Leona Pinińskiego. Zwrócono również uwagę na uregulowania polskiego Kodeksu cywilnego, poszukując jednocze­śnie śladów teorii tych dwóch dziewiętnastowiecznych uczonych we współcześnie obowiązują­cych regulacjach.&#x0D; Cel badawczy: Celem artykułu jest nie tylko przypomnienie poglądów dwóch wybitnych pol­skich romanistów: Fryderyka Zolla (starszego) i Leona Pinińskiego, ale także odniesienie ich za­patrywań do współcześnie obowiązujących uregulowań dotyczących skargi negatoryjnej. Artykuł jest próbą udzielenia odpowiedzi na pytanie, czy we współczesnej regulacji skargi negatoryjnej można odnaleźć ślady koncepcji tych rodzimych uczonych.&#x0D; Metoda badawcza: W artykule wykorzystano metodę prawno-historyczną oraz dogmatyczną.&#x0D; Wyniki: Koncepcje sformułowane przez F. Zolla (starszego), a także L. Pinińskiego, dotyczące skargi negatoryjnej z pewnością zasługują na uznanie. Klarowność ich przedstawienia, a także precyzja wywodów uprawnia do stwierdzenia, że warsztat tych uczonych stał na najwyższym po­ziomie. W obecnie obowiązującym Kodeksie cywilnym odnaleźć można ślady poglądów dwóch polskich romanistów. Prawdopodobnie nie da się jednak ustalić, czy twórcy aktualnie obowiązu­jących uregulowań sięgali bezpośrednio do dzieł F. Zolla (starszego) oraz L. Pinińskiego podczas prac związanych z kodyfikacją prawa

The Year in Conferences—2020

The Year in Conferences—2020 Rachel Heffner-Burns (bio), E. Dean (bio), Delisa Hawkes (bio), Sam Plasencia (bio), Brianne Dayley, Senior Advisor (bio), Daniella Cádiz Bedini (bio), Mara Curechian (bio), Amanda Louise Johnson (bio), Ali Tal-Mason (bio), Monica Urban (bio), Georgia Walton (bio), and Amanda Louise Johnson, Senior Advisor (bio) The "Year in Conferences" (YiC) accelerates the circulation of ideas among scholars by covering the field's major conferences. Graduate students from across the country collaboratively author an article that appears annually in ESQ's first issue. Now in its twelfth year, this report includes MLA and C19. ________ mla, 9–12 january 2020, seattle, wa written by: rachel heffner-burns, e. dean, delisa hawkes, sam plasencia senior advisor: brianne dayley In their plenary addresses at this year's convention, Gayatri Spivak, Viet Nguyen, Jennifer Wallace, and Charles Johnson called upon our discipline to avoid assuming a shared definition of humanity. Spivak, in particular, instructed us to view the assignment and use of the term "human" as both a medicine against immoral acts and a poison that grants those who are labelled "human" the "right" to committing acts of destruction and hate. Because, as Nguyen similarly observed, our professions similarly support and dismiss—humanize and dehumanize—simply by grouping certain individuals, groups, and ideas under the moniker "the humanities," we have an imperative to develop a more critical understanding of what it means to deploy the term "human." The nineteenth-century scholars this piece examines pose adjacent questions: Is "being human" a question [End Page 279] of individual subjectivity or is it communal? How does "human" function as a value judgment in social and political spheres? How has the attribution of nonhuman or parahuman qualities to certain genders, races, and social classes contributed to social value judgments? Does "human" demarcate a unique set of experiences, character qualities, or abilities? Does the term separate certain creatures as mentally and physically unique, or does it only highlight the conflation of the human, the animal, and the environment? And finally, can studies of nineteenth-century texts help us reevaluate human interactions today? Together, these scholars indicate that such studies can, and they demonstrate methods of doing so. Program Link: mla20.org or https://mla.confex.com/mla/2020/meetingapp.cgi ________ readers, reading practices, and their relationship to race Altering our understanding of race as a socially constructed but subjectively understood discourse, numerous panels explored questions about who reads and how they read. In "Racialized Reading in Nineteenth-Century America," panelists examined how reading practices have reflected and developed social ideas about race. Jackson Truschel argued that Thomas Dixon Jr.'s "Reconstruction trilogy" is central to the development of a distinctively white supremacist aesthetic. Truschel showed how white supremacy functioned through literary language rather than as an effect of writing. Lori A. Leavell then invited scholars to examine reading and news distribution practices in Charles Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition (1901) as racialized. By depicting white characters reading reprinted messages from Wellington's Black newspaper [End Page 280] to the audience rather than reprinting the messages themselves, Chesnutt draws readers' attentions to how racialized reading practices, and not the messages, incite racial violence. Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus reflected on the reception history of Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) to examine issues surrounding authors' self-proclaimed racial identifications and their consequent textual limitations. Daniels-Rauterkus read Toomer's writing as exemplifying what she called "Afro-realism," a counter to culturally monolithic Blackness. In "Race, Recovery, and Early African American Print Culture," panelists examined the various tactics writers implemented to garner readerly engagement. Benjamin Fagan showed how the New Orleans Tribune/La Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orléans' (1864–1870?) editors required Civil War-era readers to read both English and French in order to fully understand the draft process. In this context, Fagan suggested that language acquisition might serve as a racial and class barrier. Sarah Sillin examined how Yankee Notions Magazine (1852–1875) used black and white caricatures in its cartoons to direct feelings about the war, while simultaneously removing Black people's feelings from the conversation. Thus, Sillin questioned how the cartoons' Black caricatures question who can identify with and conceptualize...

German Empire historical scientific displays and the formation of the history of science discipline

The history of science as a discipline took place in the period of the German Empire, but the historiography of its development insufficiently recognizes both its proto-institutionalization during this period and the critical role played by Germans in effecting its initial development. In this article, while alluding to the several areas in which Germans took the lead in establishing the discipline, the focus is on one representative area: the mounting of temporary and permanent exhibitions relating to the history of science during the Empire period. Reasons why Germans were motivators in these efforts include the importance of past and present excellence in science, eminence in and fascination with historical research to the new nation’s construction after German unification in 1871, and of the assertion of the nineteenth century German bourgeoisie in its role in advancing the culture of the nation. The larger argument, that subjects of the German Empire achieved critical institution-building in history of science, is supported by the incidence of displays organized by Germans, and buttressed by the fact that a number of these organizers also participated in the field’s enlarged late nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship that was most marked among Germans of any national group.

Critical Remarks on Codices in which Galen Appears as a Member of the gens Claudia

Abstract Some nineteenth-century scholars misleadingly thought that no Greek codex supports Galen’s legal affiliation to the gens Claudia. When the manuscript Thessalonicensis Vlatadon 14 was thrust into the limelight with regard to this issue in 2011, it was promptly imagined that the relevant information derived from Renaissance Italy, thanks to the voyages and studies of John Argyropoulos. Allegedly there also is a codex gemellus of the Vlatadon witness, the MS Athous Iviron Graecus 184, which does not transmit that gentilic name. The article shows that the latter codex cannot reasonably be regarded as a twin manuscript of the former. Moreover, it disproves the widespread scholarly claim that Galen is never named Claudius in documents that antedate the Age of Humanism, drawing attention to some insufficiently explored Byzantine sources, the oldest of which dates back to around 1200 AD.

The Case of Beethoven: A Tie by Any Other Name...

ABSTRACT In several late works of Beethoven, we find a curious tie over the barline, in string and especially in piano works, where we find the numbers 4,3 over the tie, seemingly indicating fingering. Since the late nineteenth century scholars and performers have been discussing whether or not the second note should be struck or bowed again. Interpreting this curious tie goes not only to the problem of execution, but to the deeper musical question of Affekt.