Polemical Context Research Articles

On the closing of the churches and the rebaptism of Latins: Greek perfidy or Latin slander?

Following the testimony of various western medieval authors, historians sometimes assert that Byzantines closed the Latin churches of Constantinople on at least two occasions and rebaptised Latin Christians who married Greek ones from c.1054 on. Both the polemical context of these accusations, however, and statements in contemporary Greek sources call these assertions into question. Latin churches were probably not closed by the Greek patriarch in 1054 or 1089, and rebaptism of Latin Christians was not the policy of the Constantinopolitan church at any point in the Middle Ages.

In Praise of Poverty: Hannah More Counters Thomas Paine and the Radical Threat by Mona Scheuermann, and: The Historical Austen by William H. Galperin (review)

MLR, 99.3, 2004 749 cal variances among the texts [. . .] disprove the universality of women's interests, but their narrative similarities (like the treatment of the mother's absence) suggest that certain writers deliberately imitated each other's strategies, aiming to manufacture a sense of kinship and even of matrilineal descent' (p. 22). Both Kennedy and Greenfield complement the information provided with endnotes that amply supplement the data offered in the text. There are also two exhaustive , comprehensive bibliography sections that include important critical essays that may help to convey the prevalent atmosphere of modern civilization's most influential turn of the century. University of Corunna Maria Jesus Lorenzo Modia In Praise of Poverty: Hannah More Counters Thomas Paine and the Radical Threat. By Mona Scheuermann. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2002. xiv + 255 pp. $36- ISBN 0-8131-2222-8. The Historical Austen. By William H. Galperin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2002. viii + 286pp. $39.95; ?28. ISBN 0-8122-3687-4. Apart from their eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century theme, these two books have one other feature in common?neither provides a bibliography or list of works cited. This omission is a pity,in my view; readers, and more particularly reviewers, should surely be enabled easily to check up on the claims that works of this kind really of? fer the 'bold' and 'startling' new interpretations that are proclaimed on their covers. Reduced to trawling awkwardly through notes and index, readers are distracted from the substance of the book, and, not always unjustifiably, can become suspicious that something has been omitted which ought to be there. Both these books are affected by this uncertainty, as will be demonstrated below. But firstthe good news. Mona Scheuermann's offeringis a vigorous presentation of Hannah More's polemical writing in defence of the contemporary social and political status quo. She deals briskly and in great detail with More's part in the condemnation of Tom Paine and all his works, and with her extension of Edmund Burke's denun? ciation of violent revolution, adapted to the abilities and tastes of the lower orders of English society, who might at the time have found themselves uncomfortable enough to follow their fellows across the Channel into bloody revolt. Scheuermann's survey is outstandingly readable; she carries us along as, with gasps of horror, we recognize the almost total lack of common humanity with which More, in her pamphlets and tracts of the 1790s and later, condones the worst evils of her time?child labour in the mines and factories, incessant physical toil forall workers for minimal wages, and deprivation of even the most common necessities of life, in the cause of an interpre? tation of Christianity that can only be described as brutal, especially to the poor. To great effect she places More's work in its polemical context alongside such similar but lesser-known writings as Joseph Townsend's A Dissertation on thePoor Laws and Josiah Wedgwood's Address to the Young Inhabitants of thePottery. The main motive of the work is to overturn what Scheuermann sees as a mis? taken attempt by modern feminists like Mitzi Myers and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace to 'rehabilitate' More. These writers have sought to reconstruct her as a 'conservative feminist', and with a good deal of ingenuity have presented her as an 'empowerer' of women, who strove to give them the confidence to ameliorate their condition in the teeth of their menfolk's apparent determination to wreck their lives by dissipation, ignorance, drunkenness, and crime. Scheuermann will have none ofthis, claiming that they are failing to see More as operating in an eighteenth-century atmosphere, filtering their analysis through their own modern preoccupations. More had no fellow-feeling 75? Reviews for her lower-status sisters, insists Scheuermann; she simply saw them as a channel through which she might control the men. Though perhaps put with a new firmness, this is not altogether a new view. The writers cited begin with Myers in 1986; the latest is Jacqueline Pearson in 1999. There was plenty of comment on More before and during this period that exposes her politi? cal agenda?I think particularly of Ford K. Brown's...

Review: Rhetoric and Natural History: Buffon in Polemical and Literary Context

Review: Rhetoric and Natural History: Buffon in Polemical and Literary Context

Critical Essays on Elias Canetti

Darby, David, ed. Critical Essays on Elias Canetti. New York. GX Hall & Co., 2000. 299 pp. $49.00 hardcover. David Darby's claim in the introduction to this volume that the 1962 radio conversation between Adorno and Canetti appears here for the first time in English translation is a bit disconcerting in light of the fact that a very handy translation was published six years ago in a special issue of Thesis Eleven (Number 45, 1996) devoted entirely to social thought. One frankly worries especially since judicious selection is fundamental to any collection of essays such as this-about what else might have been overlooked. Fortunately, Darby quickly redeems himself. Indeed, this collection would be worth its price if only for the opportunity given English-speaking readers to learn that Hermann Hesse deemed Auto-da-Fe a brilliantly written page-turner, while Hans Magnus Enzensberger held the novel to be a failure, albeit a thought-provoking one, not to mention horribly monotonous and murdersously compulsive. And this is just a sampling of the riches contained in this marvelous book. Until now, such material was indeed available almost exclusively in German, and then usually rather inconveniently strewn about in various sources. Darby has assembled an array of crucial documents and critical voices that will aid students and researchers alike. The translations are scrupulous and the notes fastidious. So, even if he was not the first to translate the (by the way, very interesting and largely neglected) Adorno-Canetti discussion, Darby is undoubtedly the best. One very practical advantage of this book is pedagogical. Though there has long been scattered work in English on Canetti, including especially the 1987 collection, Essays in Honor of Elias Canetti (which includes Susan Sontag's magisterial essay, Mind as Passion), Darby's book now makes it possible to assign an undergraduate term paper on Canetti with the assurance that enough material-including interviews, journalistic reviews, as well as scholarly articles--is now readily available. Researchers will also find value here: Darby not only reproduces classic essays (carefully noting all allusions to the Canetti oeuvre that often went unmarked in the original publication), but commissioned some very interesting new pieces as well. First the classics. Dagmar Barnouw, author of the first comprehensive study of Canetti (Metzler, 1979), certainly deserves a place here, though her first essay in this collection (Elias Canetti-Poet and Intellectual), while informative, simply tries to cover too much ground. She is better on the dramas (Utopian Dissent: Dramatic Fictions), especially in situating The Numbered (Die Befristeten) within the context of anti-religious polemic. Here one senses a seasoned scholar moving away from an earlier, more adulatory, mode toward a more critical stance vis-a-vis Canetti. Peter Laemmle is also interesting, though less for his commentary than for the documentation of the scandal that erupted over the 1965 Braunschweig production of The Wedding (Hochzeit). There is simply no better or more concise precis of lengthy and complex anthropological study Crowds and Power (Masse and Macht) than Iris Murdoch's graceful essay, originally published in The Spectator, Mass, Might and Myth. Nor will one find a pithier critique of analytical method in Crowds than J.P Stern's Canetti's Later Work, which, despite its misleading title, is principally concerned with Crowds and Power. (Indeed, we ought to be particularly grateful to Darby for turning up this essay, as its title and journalistic provenance may not otherwise have commanded our attention. …

"Servants of Satan," "False Brothers" and Other Opponents of Paul

-Servants of Satan, False Brothers and Other Opponents of Paul, by Jerry L. Sumney. JSNTSup 188. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999, Pp. 360. $85.00. Jerry Sumney addresses a critical issue for interpreter of Paul's letters: any interpreter will suppose or articulate a hypothesis identifying the opposition and his successors faced. To date, however, insufficient attention has been paid to employment of that conform to accepted canons of critical historical research and that conform to genre of documents involved (p. 13). Interpreters have generally begun with findings that are only appropriate as conclusions; otherwise such presuppositions influence findings beyond what is appropriate to historical enterprise. Sumney seeks to challenge common presupposition that there was an anti-- Pauline movement that purposefully sought to undermine Paul's authority and supplant his teachings, such as is found, for example, work of F. C. Baur, W. Schmithals, and G. Ludemann. He also questions those identifications dependent on set theological categories, such as Christology or soteriology, as well as those composed around heresy/ orthodoxy or heteropraxy/orthopraxy schemes. The historical controversies were not so one-dimensional; social life seldom is. Labeling opposition as heretics may skew matter, so that they are not considered apart from author's polemical context. In addition, many interpreters have an investment emphasizing distance of these from Paul's views and practices, privileging Paul's perspective because it is their own, and thus risking exaggeration of differences. Yet it may be that any difference's importance is greater to than to these opponents, who emphasize perhaps more agreement with than is readily apparent. This is how social conflict has been shown to work by certain sociological theorists and can be observed historical analogies: importance placed on difference is heightened with respect to who is significantly similar, while radically different other is more easily dismissed. The extremely useful methodology Sumney sets out to apply to letters of Pauline corpus (including those disputed as pseudo-Pauline) specifically for purpose of identifying (except Romans, Ephesians, and Philemon, where Sumney finds no opponents) is primarily a restatement of what he develops his earlier work Identifying Paul's Opponents (JSNTSup 40; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990). Rather than list details of various methods or attempt a survey of every chapter, I will discuss some of results of Sumney's method and its employment his chapter on Galatians, entitled: Paul Makes Some Enemies. Be advised, however, that while this approach offers a window into details of one of his many engaging discussions, it is inadequate to communicate scope of this monograph, which addresses issue of throughout entire Pauline corpus. Sumney recognizes that any decision on rhetorical genre of Galatians as forensic or deliberative must not be made until at least explicit statements about have been examined (pp. 134-35), an important point too often overlooked current debate about such classification. However, at least three presuppositions are already recognizable Sumney's statement of case: (1) whether assignment of any one or combination of such formal rhetorical classifications is an appropriate goal, as though it is certain that this text represents any such case; (2) if pursued, ostensible exclusion of consideration of epideictic classification (presupposed because it has few advocates current debate?); and (3) prejudicing of investigation by labeling of others view as opponents prior to demonstrating that s/he or they oppose (cf. p. 136: in a letter written to combat opponents). …

Romanità and Grazia: Giulio Clovio's Pauline Frontispieces for Marino Grimani

By 1539 Giulio Clovio had produced three frontispieces for manuscript copies of a commentary written by his patron Cardinal Marino Grimani. A reading of the commentary, which belongs to a body of literature written against Martin Luther in the 1530s, establishes the relationship of these miniatures to each other and the text. Within the context of a religious polemic, style becomes an important vehicle for meaning. The romanità of the cardinal's language and of Clovio's miniatures both supplements the commentary's argument, promulgating the authority of the Roman Church, and represents their desire for grazia—religious, courtly, and artistic.

On the Fabric of the Human Body. Book I, The Bones and Cartilages. A translation of De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (review)

Reviewed by: On the Fabric of the Human Body. Book I, The Bones and Cartilages Ynez Violé O’Neill Andreas Vesalius. On the Fabric of the Human Body. Book I, The Bones and Cartilages. A translation of De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem. Translated by William Frank Richardson, in collaboration with John Burd Carman. San Francisco: Norman Publishing, 1998. lxii + 416 pp. Ill. $225.00. Arguably, Andreas Vesalius deserves to be as well known as Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei. Of course he is not, but occasionally, about once in a [End Page 697] generation, a book in Vesalian studies appears that is clear, well written, and important. Such a work was C. D. O’Malley’s Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564 published in 1964. That volume was the product of more than twenty years’ research instigated by a conversation in 1943 with George Sarton, who urged O’Malley to formulate a new interpretation of the life and works of Vesalius. This generation now has a monument to Vesalius in a careful and readable translation (the first in any modern language except Russian) that is elegantly bound, printed, and illustrated: Book I, “The Bones and Cartilages,” of the Belgian anatomist’s greatest work, De humani corporis fabrica. As much as we appreciate O’Malley’s volume, it contains only a few selected passages rendered from the Fabrica, with characteristics that demonstrate the magnitude of William Frank Richardson’s effort and the value of his contribution. O’Malley strove to preserve Vesalius’s elaborate Renaissance Latin style, and therefore his renderings frequently are difficult for the modern student to understand. In fairness to him, however, it should be noted that his translations from the Fabrica were offered only to supplement the scholarly discussion in the main body of the great anatomist’s biography. This circumstance led to a second problem. O’Malley was greatly concerned with striking a balance between the excesses of worshipful praise and the consequent exercises in debunkery that had obscured Vesalius’s true significance. Steeped in controversies on all-too-many historical issues as he was rendering the passages in his appendix, O’Malley occasionally fell into the classic trap awaiting the too-erudite translator: that of unconsciously “manipulating the version in the light of later” controversies (to paraphrase Richardson, p. xxiii). The intricate and notoriously difficult preface of the Fabrica would be a natural place to find such an error, and indeed we do. After saluting the emperor and deploring to him the neglect of and lack of respect for surgery among his contemporaries, Vesalius points out that all the medical sects of the ancient world honored the complete medical triad—regimen, medication, and a third, indispensable tool: tertium manus opera, quae vel prae caeteris medicinam esse deficientium additionem, & superfluorum ablationem, eleganter ostendit, ac nunquam non sui usum in affectuum curatione praebet, quoties in re medica obimus, quorum beneficio hanc generi humano saluberrimam esse, tempora ususque docuerunt. (Fabrica, fol. 2r) and the third the use of the hands. Except for this last, the other methods clearly indicate that medicine is the addition of things lacking and the withdrawal of superfluities; as often as we resort to medicine it displays its usefulness in the treatment of sickness, as time and experience teach, and its great benefit to mankind. (O’Malley, Vesalius, p. 317) The third was surgery, which demonstrates more elegantly than the others that medicine consists in the addition of what is lacking and the removal of [End Page 698] what is in excess, and which never fails to recommend itself for use in the treatment of health problems whenever in the medical field we review those things with whose help, as time and experience have shown us, this art is of prime benefit to the human race. (Richardson, p. xlviii) O’Malley seems to be assuming that Vesalius, with his lack of interest in pathology based on the four humors, would not be praising surgery in terms that strongly suggest that old schema, “the addition of things lacking and the withdrawal of superfluities”; in consequence, he inserts a phrase not supported by the text: “except for this last.” The polemic context of Vesalius...

"Come un bene ereditario". Costantino e la retorica dell'impero-patrimonio

The author discusses the transformation of some crucial political concepts during the Constantinian era by analyzing the change in usage of one particular rhetorical image (the association of empire and private patrimony). In classical (pre-Constantinian) times that image had a strongly negative connotation and was employed in polemical contexts in order to express disagreement with deviant political behavior and attitudes. In the last part of Constantine's reign however, it underwent a radical modification and was used positively to symbolise the new ideology of a mystical, dynastic monarchy. The origin of this development must be sought on the one hand in the evolution of political thought which occurred in the late third century and the Tetrarchic period, and on the other hand in the extrapolation and partial absorption of some Biblical models.

Image-Making in the Verbal and Visual Arts: A Renaissance Obsession

T his study is centered on Renaissance conceptions of the poetic image and its relevance for the verbal and visual arts in general and for the poetry of John Milton in particular. In reexamining this subject I shall consider the complex relationships existing between reality and poetic invention in Renaissance theory: the paradoxical efficacy of falsehood as a mirror of truth in exemplum and allegory; the role of the imagination as an image-making faculty instrumental in both literature and painting; and, finally, the notion of truth as a Delphic riddle resistant to verbal and visual depiction yet powerfully conveyed through the greatest poetry. Especially notable are the polemical contexts of much of this body of aesthetic theory and the persistent but sometimes contradictory influence of Plato. For many, perhaps most, of Milton's near contemporaries, a poem was a kind of enchanted mirror: an artfully constructed fiction that might nevertheless serve as an image of and vehicle of reality. Bound neither by the facts of history nor the realities of nature, the poet might nevertheless teach, delight, and move his reader to embrace the truth through his fictive images. Both in theory and in practice, Renaissance conceptions of the relationships between the poetic image or idol and the realities that the latter professed to imitate or shadow showed remarkable diversity. Ranging widely between the poles of scrupulous verisimilitude and seemingly unlicensed fantasy, they exhibited a complex and variable mixture of moral or historical fact and free, imaginative invention. In the alchemy of art, diverse poets or theorists might prefer to combine much the same elements and constituents, but they combined these components in very different proportions. Even in the same poem the modern reader may detect (if it is permissible to vary one's metaphor) a sort of sliding scale of reality-an epistemological slide-rule that involves diverse (and sometimes incompatible) degrees of fiction and truth.

Les penseurs des Lumières face à l'Islam

Enlightenment thinkers dealt with Islam in two ways. Contemporaries living in Muslim countries recounted, according to their religious orientations (Anglican, Calvinist, Lutheran, liberal Catholic, Jansenist or Salesian), what they believed to have seen or understood. Their information was often superficial, especially in the area of theology, but globally they developed the corpus of texts which subsequently served the growth of orientalism. Theoreticians remaining in Europe essentially hoped to deconstruct the devout testimony of the preceding century. Islam was for them a simple pretext within a wider polemical context. This said, attitudes remained ambiguous due to the coexistence of forms of de-demonization and demonization of Islam; neutral attitudes were the exception rather than the rule.

Suetonius, Henri de Valois and the art of political biography

During the closing years of his reign, Henri III was the object of a sustained and bitter polemical attack from his adversaries, especially those who supported the League and Guise family. Amongst the numerous pamphlets appeared a number of “biographies” of Henri which sought to destroy his credibility as King. This article examines briefly the nature of the biography as a form of history in sixteenth-century France, it replaces the biographies in their polemical context and examines the possibility of their having been written by authors from the English College in Rheims or by persons who had a similar training. It then goes on to establish parallels between their structure and content and that of theLives of the Caesars by Suetonius and shows how the French polemicists were intent on discrediting Henri, often at the expense of inventing “crimes.” The article concludes that the rhetorical structure of such works owes a great deal to the Suetonian model and that they establish in Early Modern Europe a tradition of “character assassination” as a powerful element in political and polemical biographies.

The Polemical Context and Content of Gregory of Nyssa's Psychology

The Polemical Context and Content of Gregory of Nyssa's Psychology

Athanasius of Alexandria: The Scope of Scripture in Polemical and Pastoral Context

Athanasius of Alexandria: The Scope of Scripture in Polemical and Pastoral Context

Max Weber's Construction of Social Theory.

Part 1 The formation of Weber's world-view: religious faith in an intellectual's world reason and the indiviudal - the Kantian Unity the Nietzschean challenge the scientist in search of salvation towards a science of social reality. Part 2 Constructing an empirical social science: the scholarly and polemical context the meaning of rationality from premises to constructs - modelling social life the structure of collective action the historical development of rationality. Part 3 Explorations in Weberian social theory: understanding and social structure the empirical study of values society and the market from social theory to sociology.

‘Christology From Above’ and ‘Christology From Below’

' CHRISTOLOGY FROM ABOVE' AND ' CHRISTOLOGY FROM BELOW' TIE TERMS ' Christology from above ' and ' Chrisogy from below' are much used today, nort only or en primarily in the serious literature of teology, hurt rather in V'aJiious polemical contexts, both theological and ecclesiastical . Here they often serve as symbols which distinguish one's own Chrristological position from those with which one disagrees. In this way they have become practically equa.ted with two other terms, ' high ' Christology and ' low ' Christology , the former representing a position in which the divinity of Ohrist is stressed (its opponents often holding that this is to the detriment of the humanity), the latter a position in which his humanity is stressed (its opponents often holding that this is to the detriment or even exclusion of the divinity). 'Dhe position taken in this ess·a.y will be that such use of the terms ' Christology from above ' and ' Christology from below' is indeed a misuse, that it is an error ,to equate them w~th ' high ' Christology and ' low ' Christology respectively. Rather, our position will be that ' Christology from above' and ' Christology from below' should refer both to an initial process from which Ohristo1ogy originates, as well as to a method for elaborating Ghristology on the basis of that process, while ' high ' Christology and ' 1ow ' Christology refer to the possible terms of Christologies ' from above ' ·and ' from below '. 'Christology from Below' The Process, or the Proximate Ground of Christology ' Christology from below ' as a process refers to the proximate origins of Ohristology in the apostolic response to Jesus of Nazareth, and in the deV'eloping understanding of the implications of that response in the history of the early Church. Although God's action in t:he Incarnation preceded in absolute priority the public ministry of Jesus •and the apostolic re- ~99 300 EDWARD L. KRASEVAC, O.P. sponse to it, that action was only fully understood in all of its implications in a gradual historical process thait took place over many years. In a re.al siense, the foundation or proximate source of Ohristian faith is the apostolic witness to God's salvific actions, rather than those actions themselves (which aire its ultimate source) . Christofogical faith is an apostolic faith that has its origins in a historical process which began with the public ministry of the Lord, and which was developed and clarified over many centuries. 'Christology from Above' The Process, or the Ultimate Ground of Christology The final term of 1 the process 'Christology from below '-the ' high ' Christology of ithe Church-brought to light the ultimate ground of the historical phenomenon that was Jesus of Nazareth. It made possible the insight that Christology really did not begin at the public manifestation of Jesus (his baptism ), but rather began in the eternal moment when God decided to send his son into the world, and had its first decisive tempmal moment when the humanity of that son wais conceived in the womb of Mary. In other words, the historical process, 'Christology from below', was grounded in an ontological reality-the hypostatic (or personal) union (or identificrution ) of Jesus with the eternal Word of God-thait preceded it. In this sense the ' above ' in ' Christology from above ' refers to God's actions in the Incarnation, and the ontological result of that action (the hypostatic union), whereas the ' below ' in ' Christology from below ' refers to the gradual process by which the ·apostolic understanding of that action developed. As a process, ' Christology from above ' holds absolute priority over ' Christology from below.' 'Christology from Above:' The Method Only when the final term of the process of ' Christology from below' was reached-a 'high ' Chrisrtology thait recognized both the full humanity and the full divinity of Christ-was it possible to recogn:ize the :actions of God which were prior to the ' CHRISTOLOGY FROM ABOVE AND BELOW ' 301 historical public manifestation of Jesus. It was only at this point that it became possible to ' trace', as it were, the ultimate origin and ground of Jesus Christ in the Godhead and the ontological 'process' of t·he Incarnation. Only now was it possible to evolve a method for the academic construction of a...

Ideology and Class in Hobbes' Political Theory

f S A CONSEQUENCE of the extraordinary attention paid to the logic and scientific methodology of Thomas Hobbes' writings by recent scholars, we have all but set aside the importance of the fact that Hobbes was, in the first instance, apoliticaltheorist.1 In this essay, I will focus upon the political importance of Hobbes' thought to his contemporaries. My concern will be with the rather specific political motives and objectives which underly his writings, the polemical context within which Hobbes' thinking developed. This polemical context was no passing historical phase in Hobbes' thought, but, on the contrary, supplied the structural framework for all of his political theory. Beginning with the recognition that avoidance of civil war is the central objective of Hobbes' political theory, I will try to show that this proposition presupposes a prior understanding of the causes of civil war. More specifically, it is Hobbes' interpretation and explanation of the English Revolution which provides the basic parameters within which his political recommendations are offered. Moreover, in considering Hobbes' analysis of the causes of the English Revolution, I shall argue that the role he attributed to class divisions and ideological conflict explains why his own political theory is premised upon the exclusion of ideology and class as factors of political life. Hobbes' understanding of class and ideology as revolutionary forces, therefore, lies at the heart of his political theory, and his opposition to those forces, as manifest both in his contemporaries' behavior and in their

Historians and the Evidence of Literature

essay I want to appeal to historians to treat literature seriously. My argument will be that literary texts offer important and sometimes unique kinds of historical evidence, and that, by and large, the historical discipline has been curiously diffident about exploiting this evidence with vigor and confidence. Yet to take up such a theme, even in general terms, requires a formal apologia of sorts. The literature-and-history question is an old one, especially for literary scholars. The increasingly introspective mood of literary scholarship in recent decades has undermined the ebullient self-confidence about the autonomy of our undertakings and sent us scurrying across campus in search not merely of historians, but sociologists, psychologists, and even biologists. A recent compilation of essays published by the Modern Language Association, including a fine essay on Literature and History by the late Rosalie Colie, an eminent scholar with formal credentials in both history and English, gives some idea of the scope of the search as well as some suggestions of its promise.' There is a substantial bibliography on the literature-and-history question; and it is significant, even if entirely explicable, that practically all of it comes from the pens of literary scholars rather than those of historians.2 The literature-and-history question has maintained a certain urgency in the agenda of literary studies, and it has often been debated in a polemical context which has hardly been welcoming to outsiders. The burden of past debate inevitably weighs heavily upon any literary scholar who approaches the literature-and-history question, but it is