302 Reviews and the Legenda aurea with portraits of sinners from some texts originating in the Windesheimer convent of St Agnes. As with many ofthe contributions in this volume, this too is part of a much larger scholarly project, viz. research into the presentation of human personalities in the biographical literature of the Devotio Moderna with a view to greater insight into the spirituality ofthe movement. The greatest sinner of all is the subject of Hlatky's essay about the portrayal of the Devil in the Legenda aurea, which constitutes rather a blow to his hubris. She shows that the presentation of the Devil in these legends is substantially dependent on both classical and later pagan traditions of the demonic figure. However, ifwe did not have the Devil we would have to invent him. As Hlatky shows, the interdependence of good and evil, the uncomfortable awareness that without Satan there would be no saints, is woven into these legends and this notion of dualism, heretical in the extreme, was spread much wider through the vernacular translations of the Legenda. That gender changes are not simply a modern phenomenon is confirmed by Claassens's article about the vita of Sinte Marinen, in which neither the main char? acter nor the text itself is what they would seem to be. This uncertainty has further consequences in that it raises larger issues about the extent and nature of the work of the Bible translator of 1360. Claassens proposes an extensive new research project: a thorough investigation into the manuscript transmission with special attention to the manner in which readings deviating from the standard corpus came into being. As I said, busy dwarfs, very gainfully employed in getting all the golden nuggets out and showing that the less glamorous excavations are very useful too. New Hall, Cambridge Elsa Strietman Janus at the Millennium: Perspectives on Time in the Culture of the Netherlands. Ed. by Thomas F. Shannon and Johan P. Snapper. (Publications of the American Association for Netherlandic Studies, 15) Dallas, Lanham, Boulder, New York, and Oxford: University Press of America. 2004. XX+ 304PP. ?58. ISBN o7618 -2832-x. Janus at theMillennium contains a selection of papers presented at the tenth Interdis? ciplinary Conference for Netherlandic Studies held at the University of California at Berkeley in 2000. This large conference attracted participants from centres of Dutch Studies in the US and Europe, particularly the Netherlands and Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. As anyone from a 'small' subject area who has organized an international conference or put together a volume of papers from such a conference knows, there are conflicting requirements: the need forcoherence or at the very least an organizing principle for the contributions on the one hand, and the desire to provide a forum for the range of research interests in a varied field on the other hand. In the case of language and culture studies, this range is both disciplinary?linguistics, his? tory,literature, art history?and also involves differentlocal scholarly traditions and emphases. On reading this volume, I concluded that the juxtaposition of these many and varied approaches, in this case to the language and culture of the Low Countries, is in itselfintellectually stimulating and more than compensates fora lack of cohesion. There is a loose theme running through the volume which is indicated by the subtitle: time in the culture of the Netherlands. But the volume sells itself short geographically speaking, since it also includes Flanders, which, as Els Witte points out in her excellent paper on Brussels, has changed from an 'underdeveloped region where unemployment, failing literacy, hunger, and disease reigned' (p. 229) to a fe? deral state whose position in Belgium she describes as powerful 'at the linguistic and cultural level' (p. 236), no doubt as a result of its economic strength. All the same, the Netherlands-Belgian Intergovernmental Treaty Organization with responsibility for MLR, ioi.i, 2006 303 matters of Dutch language and culture, the Dutch Language Union, would encourage us to view Flanders and the Netherlands as one Dutch-language area, emphasizing what the two language variants and associated cultures have in common. A good example of this approach is Hugo Bousset's 'The...
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