Pillars Of Hercules Research Articles

A Hypothesis on the Pillars of Hercules and their True Location

A Hypothesis on the Pillars of Hercules and their True Location

Free Pass Through the Pillars of Hercules? Genetic and Historical Insights Into the Recent Expansion of the Atlantic Blue Crab Callinectes sapidus to the West and the East of the Strait of Gibraltar

The invasive Atlantic blue crab Callinectes sapidus has considerably extended its distribution along the Gulf of Cadiz and Moroccan coasts in the northeast Atlantic. This could indicate a new introduction event in the Gulf of Cadiz from the native area, in case of detectable genetic differences from the Mediterranean Sea populations. To test this and reconstruct the invasion, we assessed the genetic structure of crabs in the Gulf of Cadiz and Alboran Sea. We used sequences of the mitochondrial gene cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI), in almost its full length (1511 basepairs), of 149 individuals from three sites along the Spanish Mediterranean coast, two in the Alboran Sea, and two in the Gulf of Cadiz. Our data reveal low genetic variability, with only two haplotypes (here referred to as CSWM1 and CSWM2), compared to its known high genetic diversity in the native range, indicating a strong founder effect in the study region. Here we document an inversion of haplotype predominance between regions, haplotype CSWM2 being dominant in most of the Spanish Mediterranean coast, but less frequent in the Gulf of Cadiz and Alboran Sea. This suggests a secondary introduction of propagules into the investigated area, rather than a new introduction from the native area, nor a natural westward expansion with environmental selection of one haplotype over the other. Further studies with additional populations would help to better unveil the history of yet another invasive species in the Gulf of Cadiz.

«Комедия» Данте в «Преступлении и наказании»

The article is dedicated to the possible presence of Dante’s Comedy in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. After a brief introduction dedicated to the existing research on the matter and to enumerate some of the macroscopical elements that are common to both works, the author focuses on two passages of Dostoevsky’s text. The first one is Raskolnikov’s decision to go down in the tavern, that is very similar to Dante’s entrance in the Inferno, as “going down” is the only (even if unexpected) way to salvation for both characters. The article goes on underlining some details that allows to think that the scene presents more than casual similarities. The second passage are Porfiry Petrovich’s words in the second chapter of the sixth part of the novel, where a great number of allusions to Dante can be found, starting with the recurring remark about the Pillars of Hercules. Thanks to the analysis of this passage, it is possible to submit the hypothesis that Dostoevsky had in mind not only the Inferno, but (at least) also Dante’s Purgatorio while creating the novel. Here can also be found a new element in favor of the recently proposed convergence between the figures of Raskolnikov and Dante’s Mahomet. The notes to the article present other elements that can possibly be identified as allusions to Dante.

The Voyage of Human Reason in and beyond Kant's The Critique of Pure Reason

The Copernican Revolution had meant for modern Europe surer navigation, bolder voyages and wilder discoveries. With the declaration of independence of America in 1781 and the publication of The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant in the same year, the age of Enlightenment defined itself as an age of coming of age and of daring to know. This essay tries to draw out the peculiar enlightenment ethos of a youth against youth through Kant’s depiction of the voyage of human reason in the First Critique. It will do so by examining the four-fold sense of objects, the island of truth surrounded by illusion, amphibolic insularity, the mirror of schema and the “No Further!” of the Pillars of Hercules. Interrogating the dual sense of “limit” as both infinitizing, transgressively de-territorializing and yet at the same time self-delimiting, self-critiquingly re-territorializing, this essay argues for a hermeneutic vantage point to comprehend Kant as the unwilling mariner who by way of the transcendental as-if attempted to gain a certain spectatorship, a particular possibility of seeing - at a shore already and increasingly lost to the European and global humanity of centuries to come.

Towards and beyond the Pillars of Hercules: Integration and transformation of destructiveness in child psychosis (the case of Amine)

ABSTRACTDrawing on detailed clinical material taken from the first two years of the psychotherapy of Amine, a six-year-old psychotic child, the author shows how the destructiveness of the most extreme clinical realities can be transformed and integrated in the course of the treatment. During the first period of the treatment, the patient’s continuity of being was missing and he could not control his body and actions. In this situation, destructiveness was Amine’s only way to express and communicate the devastation of his inner world. Amine’s mind sought a container that might be able to receive, tolerate and symbolise his destructiveness. Thanks to the stability and reliability of the setting, together with a careful work of binding, a first border between inside and outside and between self and other could be developed. This led to the emergence of intrusion and persecutory anxieties and Amine’s original destructiveness was transformed into hate and rage. Separation was furthermore experienced as intolerable and ultimate abandonment. Only through a thorough process of working-through pertaining to the analyst’s countertransference could this impasse be overcome. Eventually, Amine could symbolise, through a dream, the possible acknowledgement, acceptance and integration of the borders that substantiate the existence of otherness.

This Is Also Tangier

This Is Also Tangier Joseph Pearson (bio) You come from the other side?" a young man later asks me, in the bar in Tangier. ________ On the flight from Lisbon to Morocco, I try to see where Europe ends and Africa begins. The coast must be somewhere below me, but it's lost in the diffusion of clouds. I stare at the cabin wall opposite, where strange shapes, long trapezoids, morph; they're projected from the late sun blazing to the south. I want to say "African sun," but that rings false, like something said in the nineteenth century. The iconic Tangier arrival is, of course, by boat, but these days a flight is less expensive. I bargained away seeing the continent loom from a ferry navigating between the two pillars of Hercules. The first step taken from the boat to land would have felt somehow more decisive. New rules would have applied. I would have felt it in my feet. But up here in the air all I see, at first, is an indistinct, pale band. Then a pronounced beach, an estuary, a perimeter fence. The airplane turns, we plunge into shadow, the light disappears, then, lower, dimly, the hills are articulated, variegated in patches, and winter green. There is surprise when the view fully opens. I do not see an organic maze of a city, but an illuminated geometry, interlocking polygons of suburban housing estates, precise and planned. I feel a twinge of disappointment. Perhaps the scruffy port, with its would-be guides and jostling taxi drivers fighting for my tender, would've been more reassuring than this arrivals hall. It is arid, spotless, tiled with perfect squares, and I wait less than a minute for my stamp. I should be walking from the port up to the Medina. There should be details out of a novel by Paul Bowles, a storm, a palm pounding a wall in the wind. I should reach a hotel without electricity, with just a lonely candle in the window. I should be on my knees in the darkened hallway, searching for where I've dropped the key. Burial In Bowles's Let It Come Down, a sixteen-year-old girl turns to look across the straits to Europe from Tangier. She shudders: "That is where they kill people." The novel was set in the shadow of both the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Europe must have seemed a savage land. Now, it is the sea, below [End Page 14] the Medina, that buries those fleeing to Europe. A graveyard lies between the two continents. The Window From the airport, I am in the capsule of an old Mercedes—with torn cloth walls, a silent driver—and the vehicle threatens to go dead at any time, depositing me in some suburb, aimless with my bag, looking for something I do not expect. Then the taxi picks up speed and rounds the coast of the central city. It's past dusk. I see the Medina illuminated, white. We chug up the old alleys; men are rapping on the car windows. I find the hotel easily, just across from the Grande Mosquée. In my room, the shower drain emits a sickly sweet smell. But the space is tidy, with white walls and ironed sheets, a purple embroidered coverlet, an industrially produced kilim rug, and bronze lamp. I go out to explore immediately, into the maze. Everything is closer than I expected: the Petit Socco where the Beat poets picked up their rent boys, and then the Grand Socco almost around the corner. I had wanted to get lost here. I shouldn't have studied the map. I should have left my smartphone in the room. The Grand Socco is busy with night hawkers, dusty carts, lottery ticket sellers. The bar of the Cinema Rif bursts with Moroccan hipsters, men who spill into the square. The ritual evening stroll, a poorly-lit paseo, is more tawdry than on the other side of the Mediterranean. There are more shadows. I criss-cross through side streets. Soon I find myself wandering down a very dark road along a construction site...

Signos de poder como marcadores del territorio hispano: una característica de la política urbanizadora de Augusto

During the Augustan Age, there seems to be no intention of colonising Hispania as a whole, of systematically occupying the entire territory. Quite the opposite, Augustan settlements, very much like Caesarean settlements, seem to be solutions that are limited regionally and with a short-term perspective, an answer to internal organisational problems: more specifically, the discharging of army veterans. Nevertheless, Rome dominated the entire country and, especially from the Augustan Age onwards, Landmarks/Herrschaftszeichen were introduced in the territory as symbols of power. This article introduces the concept of Landmarks/Herrschaftszeichen in the Hispanic scientific discourse. They are the material manifestation of the Roman Empire, especially in the provinces. Although this concept can be extended also to symbols or texts, in this case it will refer to architecture, monuments and buildings. The term references the demonstration of Roman authority through an imposing, original architecture that is monumental in nature. That is, the signposting of the Empire’s territorial expanse through monuments that are spread across the territory. The Arae Sestianae, such as the Pillars of Hercules, are mainly symbols of power that afford a reference to the extreme confines to which the world spans in the discourse of any Roman citizen. The Roman lighthouse of La Coruña not only lit the way for seafarers; it was also a cartographical point of reference. Symbols of power act both ways. For indigenous populations they point to the presence of Rome as the new dominating power by means of a monument that is physically present and is capable of appraising the new order; at the same time, they are useful, accessible and functional in one way or other. For Roman citizens, these symbols of power are a means to mentally understanding how far their Empire extends.

Milton and the "Savage Deserts of America"

Milton and the "Savage Deserts of America" Elizabeth Sauer "Whether a reader wishes to see a New World connection or not, the language of Paradise Lost creates it." —Rodger Martin, "The Colonization of Paradise" Tzvetan Todorov applied the descriptors "astonishing," "intense," "extreme," and "exemplary" to characterize early modern Europeans' first reported encounters with the alterity of the Americas and the indigenous peoples. Over the centuries Europeans demonstrated an awareness of Africa, India, and China; "some memory of these places was always there already—from the beginning," Todorov confirms.1 As for the Americas, given the belated public record of a European contact, this alien, captivating place still required comprehension and possession. Literary works enabled and instantiated some of these efforts—intellectual and territorial. "Of late / Columbus found the American," Milton declares in recounting the immediate aftermath of human disobedience in Paradise Lost.2 Two books later, in a long, globe-consuming epic catalog (PL 11.383–411), Milton's prophetic narrator, Michael, directs Adam's gaze slowly westward, while [End Page 3] mapping and naming capitals and historic rulers of Asia, Africa, and Europe, which, until the late fifteenth century, were the known continents. By Milton's day, the Americas were, as the geographer and antiquarian Peter Heylyn states in his massive chorographical project Cosmographie, "lately known."3 In Milton's encyclopedic epic, the Americas still lie beyond Adam's view, beyond the horizon and the ecliptic, the path of the earth with respect to the sun. Essentially, Adam needs to be hoisted on the shoulders of Atlas, Hercules, and Milton's Michael to experience "in spirit perhaps" (PL 11.406) the Americas, which extend, if not geographically then conceptually, into the unknown Southern Hemisphere. Still in Milton's day, the Americas were an otherworldly place, occupying a liminal space between the known and unknown, and thus inviting reclamation and representation. The earliest encounters with the Americas may have predated Columbus by many centuries. In the first century BCE, Greek geographer Diodorus of Sicily (Siculus) wrote of the islands beyond "the Pillars of Hercules" or the Straits of Gibraltar, "There lies out in the deep off Libya an island of considerable size. … Its land is fruitful, much of it being mountainous and not a little being a level plain of surpassing beauty. … the island contains many parks planted with trees of every variety and gardens in great multitudes." Diodorus goes on to suggest a possible encounter of a western land by the Phoenicians and Carthaginians from Northern Africa.4 The land mass in question was known as "India Occident" (India Occidentalis), "occident" meaning "going down" or, in some cases, "setting" like the sun. In the early modern era, the first terrestrial globe, produced by the German cartographer and navigator Martin Behaim in 1492, may contain some traces of the latterly identified South America, but it features no clear indications of the continent's existence. Columbus's 1492 voyage would result in the early modern "discovery" of the Caribbean islands, and in 1498 he would land on the South American mainland. Given the relative novelty of the Americas, the indirectness of transatlantic routes, and the vastness of his own imagination, Milton's virtual travels to the Americas are marked by detours, [End Page 4] circumnavigations, and chance encounters. To devote an essay to an investigation of how the New World—as a whole and as a precursor to the latterly defined North, Central, and South America—registers in Milton's works can be a daunting and frustrating exercise. Scholars venturing into the territory of Milton in the Americas readily discover that there is no conspicuous New World orientation in Milton, J. Martin Evans's influential argument in Milton's Imperial Epic notwithstanding.5 Literary evidence confirms Milton's familiarity with Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empyre of Guiana (1596), Samuel Purchas's Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), and Peter Heylyn's Cosmographie (1652); yet "America occupied no significant place in Milton's mental geography," William Spengeman concedes in "Milton's American Poem."6 In the few allusions to the New World in Milton's prose and verse, the Americas appear as degenerate or inferior...

Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination by Joyce Appleby

Reviewed by: Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination by Joyce Appleby John Gascoigne Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination. By joyce appleby. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013. 308 pp. $15.95 (paper). Placing the development of science in a global setting is an understandable preoccupation of historians of science—a natural response to the dynamics of an increasingly globalized age. Responding to this leaven of world history, Joyce Appleby’s attractively written book sets out to demonstrate how European contact with the new Worlds of both the Atlantic and the Pacific provided the stimulus for a new mentality conducive to the growth of science. The bulk of the book is concerned with how Europe responded to the seismic event of the encounter with the Americas. This brought with it much new data and, more fundamentally, a questioning of the assumptions of the ancients and the church fathers, which had hitherto constituted the boundaries of knowledge. Going outside the Mediterranean meant access not only to new goods and territories but also to new ways of looking at the world—a transformation captured in iconic form by the frontispiece to Francis Bacon’s plea for the promotion of the new sciences in his Great Instauration (1620) with its depiction of ships venturing beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the gateway to the Mediterranean. As Appleby shows, assimilating the knowledge that the Columbian encounter brought with it was the work of some centuries. In her interpretation the impact of the New World was the catalyst for such an increase in the pace of scientific activity that it helped to promote the development of new instruments (such as the microscope) for the study of nature. The growing volume of specimens was also a stimulus for the development of systems of classification, notably that of Linnaeus. With the fruits of the Atlantic encounter having become more and more an accepted part of the European mental universe in the age of the Enlightenment, there was, then, a shift of focus to the Pacific. This in turn gave rise to the great nineteenth-century global synthesizers of the natural world, Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, to whom the book devotes its last [End Page 941] chapter. Though Humboldt’s fame has greatly faded, Appleby underlines the enormous impact his work had on contemporaries—including one Charles Darwin whose fame becomes ever brighter. Such a broad sweep is covered with aplomb and elegance. The framework that holds it together, however, is open to some questioning. The connecting thread through these diverse historical episodes is that Europe, before the contact with the New World, was intellectually blinkered and dominated by an obscurantist church, the hold of which it took the shock of the New Worlds to loosen. Once again we see the persistence and prevalence of the basic paradigm of the trope of the warfare of science and religion which was established in the Enlightenment and given wide currency in the nineteenth century by figures such as John Draper and Andrew White (though it has been subject to much revision in recent historiography). Yet Appleby’s own exposition should give some pause to such a way of understanding the emergence of science in a largely Christian Europe. As she indicates, the Spanish encounter with the New World was given scholarly form by some clerics who eagerly sought to integrate the novel wonders before them into the established body of knowledge. The intellectually omnivorous Jesuit José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590), for example, receives a glancing mention but much more could be made of the way in which it viewed the acquisition of new knowledge not as a departure from religion but as a study of the work of the creator, a reinforcement of it. Acosta also challenged some of the obstacles to science that derived not from Christianity but from its pagan classical heritage: Thus, Acosta refuted Aristotle’s claim that the Southern Hemisphere would be largely uninhabitable because it was a “burning Zone” with firsthand evidence from South America. Indeed, a subterranean theme of the book is the persistence and importance of the...

The Pillars of Hercules as a bathymetric barrier to gene flow promoting isolation in a global deep-sea shark (Centroscymnus coelolepis).

Knowledge of the mechanisms limiting connectivity and gene flow in deep-sea ecosystems is scarce, especially for deep-sea sharks. The Portuguese dogfish (Centroscymnus coelolepis) is a globally distributed and near threatened deep-sea shark. C. coelolepis population structure was studied using 11 nuclear microsatellite markers and a 497-bp fragment from the mtDNA control region. High levels of genetic homogeneity across the Atlantic (Φ(ST) = -0.0091, F(ST) = 0.0024, P > 0.05) were found suggesting one large population unit at this basin. The low levels of genetic divergence between Atlantic and Australia (Φ(ST) = 0.0744, P < 0.01; F(ST) = 0.0015, P > 0.05) further suggested that this species may be able to maintain some degree of genetic connectivity even across ocean basins. In contrast, sharks from the Mediterranean Sea exhibited marked genetic differentiation from all other localities studied (Φ(ST) = 0.3808, F(ST) = 0.1149, P < 0.001). This finding suggests that the shallow depth of the Strait of Gibraltar acts as a barrier to dispersal and that isolation and genetic drift may have had an important role shaping the Mediterranean shark population over time. Analyses of life history traits allowed the direct comparison among regions providing a complete characterization of this shark's populations. Sharks from the Mediterranean had markedly smaller adult body size and size at maturity compared to Atlantic and Pacific individuals. Together, these results suggest the existence of an isolated and unique population of C. coelolepis inhabiting the Mediterranean that most likely became separated from the Atlantic in the late Pleistocene.

La tempête dans les romans français d’Alexandre du xiie siècle: un stéréotype éclaté

The versions of the Roman d’Alexandre, composed by Thomas de Kent and Alexandre de Paris include the motif of the tempest inside the India episode, after passing through the Pillars of Hercules, that is, during the time when the hero contravenes the prohibition of the gods. Both authors amplify the model taken from the Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem, but they deal with it in a different way. In Thomas de Kent’s version the tempest is a digressio, whereas Alexander de Paris disintegrates and allocates it in successive laisses to associate it with other motifs, either epic ones like the planctus, or fictional ones, like the mirabilia of the East. The result presents, in either case, a new, more human and vulnerable image of the legendary Alexander.

The Most Archaic Ocean: Beyond the Bosphorus and the Strait of Sicily

From immemorial time, many Tyrrhenian places of ancient Sicily and Italy were identified (also by the local people) with the main stages of the return of Ulysses (Cyclopes, Aeolus, Circe, etc.). Some Hellenistic critics (for example Aristarchus and Polybius) assumed that it was from the various ancient and pre-Homeric myths that Homer drew inspiration, in the same way that he did with the myth of the Trojan War, which certainly occurred before him. Thus, the voyage of Ulysses, after his losing the course because of the storm at Cape Malea, had to be located in those sites. But how can one explain the fact that Homer places the voyage from Circe to the Hades over the Ocean? Is it only a pseudogeographic poetic touch, aimed to magnify the exploit? Crates of Mallus did not think so: in his opinion, only some of the numerous adventures had taken place in the Tyrrhenian Sea, whereas Homer had purposefully placed some other exactly on the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the ancient name given to the Straits of Gibraltar). Whichever of the two models one chooses, the route of Ulysses seems to be completely unlikely, both from the point of view of objective reality and from the point of view of poetic imagination (if one desires to retain at least some plausibility). It appears to be a senseless coming and going that takes the shape of some sort of a labyrinth. Furthermore, the navigation times suggested by the text do not accord at all (even approximately) with the distances among the real sites. For this reason, Eratosthenes held that, from Cape Malea onwards, Ulysses switched from the real world to that of fantasy, or better still to the world of some narrative fable that does not heed geography at all. The modern critics are inclined to agree with him and this thesis is nowadays the most popular one. Yet, a very serious objection can be raised here: the myth and the epos (since the most archaic era), are strictly linked to the geography and the topography as well – they are radically refractory to a narrative fable that totally contradicts the then realities of time and space. Why should Ulysses plunge from Cape Malea onwards straight into the Neverland kingdom? If we combine Odyssey’s data with those we can reconstruct for the earliest form of the Argonautic saga (taking also into account the chronology of the Greek western colonization), then we get the solution that neither the ancient nor the modern critics have guessed correctly: up to around the middle of the 8th century B.C., the Greeks thought the Ocean to flow just after the Sicily Channel, essentially coinciding with the so-called Tyrrhenian Sea, still completely unknown at that time. This new perspective can well justify the objective disorder of Ulysses’ route. Above all, it also bears a deeper poetic sense: the Hero had the chance to know and to experience not only some far and exotic countries in general terms (as it can happen to any off-course sailor), but he also met the very boundaries of the surfacing lands and the rushing waters which encircle the terrestrial disc, bordering the external cosmic abyss. Ulysses came back home alive. He was able to tell the stories about the lands where no human being could ever sail. This borderline that geographically is clearly located marks at the same time the insurmountable chasm between the physical and the meta-physical world.

Music and Ceremony at the Court of Charles V: The Capilla Flamenca and the Art of Political Promotion by Mary Tiffany Ferer (review)

Music and Ceremony at the Court of Charles V: The Capilla Flamenca and the Art of Political Promotion. By Mary Tiffany Ferer. (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music, no. 12.) Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2012. [xii, 304 p. ISBN 9781843836995. $99.] Illustrations, tables, appendices, bibliography, index. The study of music and ceremony at important courts is neither new nor controversial. For many years scholars have documented the music produced for various events by court composers and performers and sought to understand the motivations behind certain style choices by parsing documentary, historical and theoretical ideas. In so doing, they began to explain the manner in which the music might have been significant and aided the promotion of the ruler's image and agendas. Few scholars, however, have attempted such a broad topic as the music at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. In Music and Ceremony at the Gond of Charles II The Capilla flamenca and the Art of political Promotion, Mary Tiffany Ferer takes on that challenge, producing an encyclopedic discussion of many aspects of music at one of the most prestigious courts in Europe. Her choice of title suggests the focus on Charles's chapel of musicians from the Low Countries. Indeed, Charles had two significant chapels, the Capilla Flamenca and the Capilla Espanola; the former traveled with the peripatetic emperor and thus would have produced the music that many Europeans associated with the emperor, while the second chapel remained resident in Spain. The thesis for the volume, although informed by new findings (p. 15), does not rely so much on new interpretation or newly uncovered information, but rather on a painstaking collation and review of the extensive scholarship that documents the life, travels and musicians of Charles V. The author discusses the chapel membership and rituals using documentary evidence, from payroll documents and chapel registries, to prescribed duties included in various ordinances. Finally, the study attempts to identify specific musical compositions, looking primarily at compositions that might have been written to celebrate important events and activities of the emperor, and their political contexts. In constructing the concept of Charles's image and direction as a leader, the author opens with an examination of his idea of his primary roles: that of defender of the faith and that of monarch ruling over both inherited and conquered territories so vast that he might even be considered universal. His constructed image as protector, defender, and fortress led him to choose as his personal device (adopted at the 1516 meeting of the Order of the Golden Fleece) a banner reading Plus ultra (Even further), with the motto set between the Pillars of Hercules. The author continues by listing known musical settings of the device text (among the composers are Lupi, Gombert, and Festa) and some issues regarding their performances and transmission. Fever also provides it list of the known sources and scholarly editions of the same works (a helpful practice which is repeated in quite a number of the other tables listing musical works). Omitted are discussions of the music itself, as well as full texts of these compositions. although there is mention that one of the Plus ultra settings doubtfully attributed to Lupi convey[s] an image of military, power (p. 8). In order to give adequate context for the political-musical traditions that Charles inherited, in chapter 2 the author examines the situation of his parents. Philip the Fair and Juana of Castile, and their development and use of their musical chapel. Fever also examines the musical court of his aunt, Margaret of Austria, who assumed the role of guardian and oversaw Charles's education while he stayed at her court in Mechelen after his father passed away when he was six years old. As a result, he was instilled with a sense of the role that the arts (and music in particular) could play in the promotion of his perception as leader of what would rapidly become a broad and multicultural empire. …

Jan Albert Bakker 2010 Megalithic Research in the Netherlands, 1547-1911: From ‘Giant’s Beds’ and ‘Pillars of Hercules’ to Accurate Investigations.

Jan Albert Bakker 2010 Megalithic Research in the Netherlands, 1547-1911: From ‘Giant’s Beds’ and ‘Pillars of Hercules’ to Accurate Investigations.

The Plus Oultra writing cabinet of Charles V: Expression of the sacred imperialism of the Austrias

The “Plus Oultra” writing cabinet of Charles V on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum of London is an intarsia piece made by Italian craftsmen ca. 1532. This article examines the iconographic programme of the cabinet as an expression of the universal Christian empire of Charles V and the sacred imperialism of the Spanish Austrias. This programme is revealed in three scenes depicting the story of Gideon that decorate the outside of the cabinet fall front: the revelation of the angel to Gideon and the woollen fleece in allusion to the Order of the Golden Fleece of which Charles V was the grand master, the selection of the three hundred men, and the battle against the Midianites. These scenes are complemented by medallion heads of Roman emperors to portray Charles V as legitimate successor to the Ancient Roman Empire. The inside of the fall front is emblazoned with the emblems of Charles V: the Pillars of Hercules, the ‘Plus Ultra’ motto, Saint Andrew’s crosses and laurel motifs, while the allegorical figures of Temperance and Justice adorning the sides of the cabinet symbolise the virtues of a good governor. The fall front opens to reveal a set of drawers and doors decorated with one of the earliest examples of the vanitas: objects alluding to the fleeting nature of life and the pursuit of wisdom. From a stylistic standpoint, the scenes and decorative motifs of the cabinet suggest that it may have been made in the workshop of the Dominican friar Damiano da Bergamo which Charles V visited in 1529.

Jan Albert Bakker. Megalithic research in the Netherlands, 1547–1911: from ‘Giant's beds’ and ‘Pillars of Hercules’ to accurate investigations. viii+318 pages, 67 illustrations. 2010. Leiden: Sidestone; 978-90-8890-034-1 paperback £26.

Jan Albert Bakker. Megalithic research in the Netherlands, 1547–1911: from ‘Giant's beds’ and ‘Pillars of Hercules’ to accurate investigations. viii+318 pages, 67 illustrations. 2010. Leiden: Sidestone; 978-90-8890-034-1 paperback £26.

Cryptogenic Liver Diseases: Sailing by Sight from HIV Co-Infection with Hepatitis Viruses to HIV Mono-Infection Through the Pillars of Hercules

Liver injury in the HIV-positive population has been classically associated with hepatitis B or C viruses (HBV and HCV). While HBV or HCV co-infections have represented "Pillars of Hercules" for hepatic disease (not further beyond), it is now time to move forward and shed light on liver disease in HIV-infected patients without HBV or HCV co-infections. Indeed, over the last years, liver disease in HIV-mono-infected patients has emerged and fated to become one of the main non AIDS-related complications. Although several cases have specific etiologies (e.g., alcohol abuse), other cases are most challenging for the clinicians because the actual causes are only hypothesized, such as it is difficult to treat them appropriately. This new clinical entity has been named "cryptogenic" liver disease; it is polymorphic (e.g., hepatic steatosis, nodular regenerative hyperplasia or noncirrhotic portal hypertension) and multifactorial in nature, but HIV per se may play a key role. In this paper, we present a critical review of the relevant literature data, focusing on practical implications (including diagnostic tools and differential diagnosis), and delineate priorities for future research on this important topic.

Illuminating Darkness: Approaches to Obscurity and Nothingness in Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Illuminating Darkness: Approaches to Obscurity and Nothingness in Literature Shira Wolosky Päivi Mehtonen, ed. Illuminating Darkness: Approaches to Obscurity and Nothingness in Literature. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 2007. 219 pp. Illuminating Darkness presents a series of essays variously connected to notions of negation and obscurity in literature and literary theory. The essays are wide-ranging, across literary periods and languages, as well as philosophical, theoretical, and religious engagements — all of which introduce variations of the notions of nothingness. No consistent definition or understanding of negation in literature emerges from the collection, but such a definition is also clearly not its goal. Rather, each essay examines the shapes of negation in different literary contexts. One unifying strength in the collection, despite its variety of approach, is the very high level of scholarship and the very up-to-date bibliographies and discussions in each essay. Anyone interested in how topics of negation are being addressed in contemporary discourses would benefit from reading this book. The first group of essays, under the heading “Myths of the Unknown and the Materiality of Language,” are largely literary-historical. They examine writers from Dante to Early Modern English corpus, from Dryden to German Romanticism, as well as considerations of genre, such as aphorism, and of topoi, such as literary uses of Pan. Thus, the first essay by Pekka Kuusisto, “Closing in Sublunary Darkness? On the ‘Material Vision’ in Dante’s and Paul de Man’s Cosmos,” places medieval and modern discussions against the core background of Augustinian typology. Tina Skouen’s “What I Desire the Reader Should Know Concerning Me: John Dryden’s ‘The Hind and the Panther’” focuses on rhetoric; Sari Kivisto’s “Pan Hour: Midday as a Moment of Epiphany, Nothingness and Poetical Illusion” traces the figure of Pan across literary history. “Textual Voyages Beyond the Pillars of Hercules” by Maria Salenius explores the “unknown” in terms of cosmological change in the Early Modern period, with special emphasis on John Donne. Salenius reflects on theological implications of these momentous changes in the maps of the world, both in geographical and astronomical senses, and their cultural importance both to the Reformation and to Humanism as both focus on language (51). The essay particularly explores John Donne’s ambivalence to this new learning even as he inscribes it in a wide range of texts, with the trope of “nothingness” here linked to the “unknown” of these newly opening and destabilizing worlds. The most theoretical among this first group of essays is Anders Olsson’s “Aphoristic Obscurity.” Beginning with a discussion of Friedrich Schlegel’s “Über die Unverstandlichkeit” (“On Incomprehensibility”), this article ranges from German Romanticism in Schlegel and Herder back to Greek and Latin Antiquity, then forward to French Classicism and Modernism. Nietzsche and Blanchot emerge as backdrops to broad questions of interpretative stances, genres and contemporary concerns such as textual materiality, with the aphorism as central axis of discussion. Traced through the essay is a transformation of aphorism from a mode of truth claim to that of fragment and incompletion, with the [End Page 225] philosophical and theoretical implications this transformation implies for modernism and post-modernism. Such theoretical interest governs the articles in the second section of the volume, under the heading “Nothingness and Literature.” These essays focus on contemporary writers and thinkers, notably Heidegger, Blanchot, and Derrida. Leena Kaakinen’s “Nothingness and Absence in the Poetry of Wislawa Szymborska” has the special interest of bringing into discussion a Polish poet less familiar to most Western readers. Here the focus is on how contemporary discourses of Nothingness draw on and reflect traditional mystical discourses, such as Meister Eckhart’s, and the philosophical discourses of Heidegger. In both the poet Szymborska and Heidegger Nothing is the ground of Being, as a foundational anxiety but also, or thereby, a creative power. As Kaakinen writes, “in this way, anxiety is a kind of illumination — finding oneself on the edge of nothingness, where the ground of existence is revealed” (130), which in turn links Heidegger to earlier discourses, including Meister Eckhart’s. To what extent this modern nothing — or, the author argues, the medieval one for that matter — does or does not...

Editorial and Retrospective 2008

Editorial and Retrospective 2008

The Pillars of Hercules as Metaphors for Fertility and Health among Bedouin and Fellahin in the Southern Levant

The Pillars of Hercules as Metaphors for Fertility and Health among Bedouin and Fellahin in the Southern Levant