Historical Reputation Research Articles

“The dread of something after death”: Hamlet and the Emotional Afterlif

The Shakespearean corpus provides fifty instances of the word “dread.” My examination suggests that an atmosphere of dread correlates with specific genres (the Roman plays, English histories), subjects (politics and history), and works (The Rape of Lucrece and Hamlet). In a few cases, notably Lucrece, “dread” is also associated with an acute awareness of life-after-death in the form of history and reputation. Dread of God’s judgment is a common theme in uses of word before 1600, as recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary. In Hamlet, however, there emerges a more modern connotation of “dread” as a malaise that persists after death. The old-fashioned ghost has confidence that his material condition in whatever afterlife he inhabits could make Hamlet’s hair stand on end; he has a traditional early modern sense of dread as terror that expresses itself through the body. But the dread that stays Hamlet’s hand is different. I place Hamlet and his father’s ghost within the context of other early modern revenants who relive emotionally their pasts. These revenants belong to the poetic female complaint, a tradition popular in the 1590s that specifically informs The Rape of Lucrece. The dread felt by Lucrece and Hamlet comes from anticipating historical reputation but also from a perception of the conflict between historical character and lived reality that haunts historical actors in the afterlife.

Studying Kanonbildung: An Exercise in a Distant Reading of Contemporary Self-descriptions of the 19th Century German Philosophy

In 19th century Germany, the number of publications in the history of philosophy increased dramatically. According to Ulrich Schneider’s calculations, from 1810 through 1899, 148 original textbooks by 114 authors were published in German. The aim of this article is to analyse how the documented in these publications canonic vision of 19th century German philosophy evolved. An analysis of 66 treatises published from 1802 through 1918 allows dividing 19th century philosophers into groups based on the frequency of their names across the tables of contents, describing the changes in the leading group composition and in the share of attention received by a given philosopher over time (the patterns of attention for Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Herbart, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Jacobi and Fries are discussed in detail). The paper presents thus a formal analysis of how historical reputations of philosophers were made, how they stabilised, or faded. The authors claim that the current understanding of the history of 19th century philosophy differs significantly from the one recorded in the German textbooks of the era (e.g. Herbart’s key position within the 19th century philosophical Canon; Schopenhauer’s recognition by university philosophers during his own lifetime).

RECrowd: a reliable participant selection framework with truthful willingness in mobile crowdsensing

In crowdsensing systems, participant selection as one of main problems attracts a lot of attention. Most studies focus on how to select reliable participants for task allocation to assure task quality and minimise incentive cost. Conventional methods are mainly based on historical reputation, which is from the statistical result of participant behaviours during a past period. However, these methods could cause unreliable assignment that reduces the task quality, since historical reputation cannot exactly reflect the current state of participants. In this paper, we advocate RECrowd, a reliable participant selection framework that considers both historical records and current truthful willingness. In RECrowd, we formulate an optimisation problem with the objective of minimising incentive cost while ensuring task quality, and design a two-stage online greedy algorithm with the pre-assignment step. During the participant selection, we also consider participants' position privacy. Experiment results with real datasets demonstrate our algorithm outperforms other methods.

Operations and marketing alignment to reduce operational risk: how airlines circumvent well-guarded markets

Building upon the concepts that: 1) efficiency can be achieved by a better integration between operations and marketing functional units; 2) the intensity of competition is depicted by the correlation between service frequency and price dispersion, this empirical investigation intends to explain how airlines apply an operations and marketing alignment strategy to achieve a competitive advantage. Using US domestic carrier competition behaviours as an example, the methodology involves applying the Pearson product moment correlation (PPMC) to analyse 241,230 observations from panel data of real-life service frequencies and price dispersion from 2014, 2016 and 2017. The findings show that to align internal processes with external events, firms may wish to: 1) increase marketing efforts to gain market share or maintain competitiveness in markets shielded by historical rigid endogenous barriers or long-established reputations; 2) reduce operational resources and fall back from entrenched primary markets that are strategically guarded by powerful incumbents; 3) increase integration of operations and marketing to potentially expand into new secondary markets, since fare structures and services are increasingly indistinguishable between strategic groups.

RETHINKING NEW WAYS AND MEANS OF ADDRESSING GENDER BASED VIOLENCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

Ponte Academic JournalJun 2018, Volume 74, Issue 6 RETHINKING NEW WAYS AND MEANS OF ADDRESSING GENDER BASED VIOLENCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONSAuthor(s): B. B. CHITSAMATANGA ,NASILA. S. REMBEJ. Ponte - Jun 2018 - Volume 74 - Issue 6 doi: 10.21506/j.ponte.2018.6.6 Abstract:Gender Based Violence (GBV) in Higher Education Institutions (HEI) pose a serious human rights violation. Globally, the rate of GBV in HEI - which are known for holding a historical reputation as being a vanguard of social spaces for human development - is prevalent among female students. Though both genders are prone to experience GBV, female students bear the grudge and long lasting scars that go unheeded. South African HEI are not an exception to this form of brutality. Thus, questioning the existing education system in HEIs is meant to be value based and produce good citizenry. This review aims to discuss the violation of human rights on female students in HEI which statistically, remain intolerably high. A report by World Health Organisation indicates that at least 35% of women experience some kind of GBV in their lives. On the other hand, a demographic and health survey carried out by Statistics SA in 2016 revealed that, on average one in five females older than 18 years have experienced GBV and that one in three females are assaulted and abused in their lifetime. Therefore, developing a better understanding of the prevalence and manifestations of GBV by informing and educating the HEIs in a myriad of ways through gender sensitivity and awareness programmes is critical. However, the absence of effective and appropriate university platforms to facilitate dialogue between HEI and surrounding communities on GBV; shortage of strategies and structures that spur the development of ongoing intervention programmes which address the underlying factors of GBV remain scanty. Moreover, HEIs have been accused of failing to have in place primary prevention initiatives that are transformative and encourage collaboration between male and female students in reducing GBV. The review also highlights the need to adopt pockets of best practices from pieces of legislations and institutional charters on how to curb GBV, thereby reducing the degeneration of human dignity in HEI. Download full text:Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution Username Password

A Man for All Seasons: Historical Memory and John Marshall

The heroes of American politics are often represented as timeless figures, sometimes literally carved in stone. A growing literature on collective memory, however, has emphasized the ways in which historical reputations are socially constructed—and reconstructed—over time. This article considers Chief Justice John Marshall as a case study in this dynamic process of constructing historical reputation. Marshall stands above all others as “the great chief justice,” but nonetheless his reputation has not always been secure. Surveying both citations to Marshall’s key opinions and popular and scholarly discussions of the chief justice himself across time, the article shows how Marshall’s reputation has been remade over time to fit the political needs of the moment. Marshall’s durability as a historical figure has turned not on a single set of particularly timeless accomplishments but on the diversity of his contributions to the constitutional canon.

The Duke of Newcastle and the Diplomatic Revolution, 1753–1757: A Historical Revision

ABSTRACTDrawing on a diverse array of archival and secondary sources, this analysis examines the role of Thomas Pelham Holles, First Duke of Newcastle, against the background of the famous Reversal of Alliances that ushered in the Seven Years War. Contrary to historical tradition, Newcastle showed an admirable grasp of finance, politics, and diplomacy—a precondition of the political stability that facilitated Britain’s successful pursuit of military operations during the war. Unlike most noble contemporaries, with a sound understanding of European/colonial developments, Newcastle was capable of pursuing coherent policies with intelligence and resolution. In a political system that relied heavily on social connexions and diplomatic ritual, Newcastle performed as well as any minister could hope; in an extremely dynamic international environment, contending with dubious allies, implacable enemies, and the vicissitudes of military fortune, he conceived, negotiated, and executed policies that raised necessary funds and sent British forces around the globe on an unprecedented scale. This should be remembered when assessing his historical reputation.

The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha

Reviewed by: The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha Thomas Coens (bio) The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. By Manisha Sinha. ( New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 768. $37.50 cloth) Despite being, to all appearances, among the heroes of American history, abolitionists have not always been looked upon kindly by American historians. In the estimation of many, if not most, historians writing in the century after the Civil War, they were self-righteous meddlers, at whose feet was placed a large share of the responsibility for plunging the nation into civil war. Skepticism about abolitionists, surprisingly, persisted long after the overt racism of the Dunning and Phillips schools was replaced in the 1960s and 1970s with more sympathetic attitudes toward the plight of African American slaves. In The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975), David Brion Davis famously argued that abolitionists performed ideological dirty-work by valorizing free labor and thereby buttressing (if half-unwittingly) nascent capitalism. To Charles Sellers, and indeed to the entire generation of social historians whose work he synthesized in his Market Revolution (1991), abolitionists represented a “vanguard of capitalist liberalism”; their ostensible humanitarianism masked an agenda of cultural imperialism and “social control.” Denigration of abolitionism has abated somewhat in recent years, but it has by no means disappeared from within the profession. That abolitionist-bashing is still alive and well, at least in some quarters, is demonstrated [End Page 424] by Andrew Delbanco’s The Abolitionist Imagination (2012), which portrays antislavery crusaders as impatient zealots guilty of hastening an avoidable bloodbath. Rehabilitating the historical reputation of abolitionists is just one of the several accomplishments of Manisha Sinha’s magnificent new study The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. Drawing on an impressive array of both primary and secondary sources—the footnotes are truly a marvel to behold—it traces the abolition movement’s personnel, writings, and activities from the colonial period to the start of the Civil War. Sinha deftly combines a chronological approach, which allows her to move steadily forward in time, with chapters that treat one or another theme or issue, such as “The Woman Question,” “Fugitive Slave Abolitionism,” and “The Politics of Abolition.” According to Sinha, abolitionists were at the vanguard not of capitalism but of an expanded and more capacious conception of democracy and human rights. “Abolition was a radical, democratic movement,” Sinha writes at the start of her book, refusing to mince words about where she stands, one that “made a signal contribution to the discourse of both human rights and humanitarianism.” “It is no coincidence,” she notes, “that the brief, incomplete triumph of the abolitionist vision resulted in the greatest expansion of American democracy, and that the demise of abolition went hand in hand with the greatest contraction of democracy” (pp. 3–4). Sinha’s association of abolitionism with democratization not only runs counter to historians’ traditional skepticism about abolitionists’ motives but also questions the dominant understanding within the profession of the three-way relationship between capitalism, democracy, and antislavery activism. The dominant “market revolution” school sees antebellum American democracy as evolving in reaction to and in tension with the rise of capitalism and tends to lump antislavery crusaders with the aiders and abettors of capitalism rather than of democracy. Because abolitionists professed to be advocates of liberty and equality for all, arguing that they were actually carrying water for industrialists has always been akin to pounding a square [End Page 425] peg into a round hole, with concepts like “false consciousness” and class “ideology” acting as the hammers. According to Sinha, this is all nonsense. Not only were abolitionists sincere and passionate small-d democrats, but closer attention to their writings shows that most excoriated the excesses of capitalism and the emerging culture of the market. Within many of her rapid-fire but colorful and evocative portraits of individual abolitionists, Sinha is quick to emphasize their tendency to condemn not just slaveholding but the larger sins of acquisitiveness and rapacity with which they associated it. The Quaker John Woolman, for example, denounced “luxuries and wealth, developing an incipient critique of market society,” the black...

The Novatian ‘Indifferent Canon’ and Pascha in Alexandria in 414: Hypatia’s Murder Case Reopened

In an earlier paper I suggested that the murder of the Alexandrian philosopher Hypatia by a clique of Bishop Cyril’s zealots resulted from her involvement in the conflict between the Roman and Alexandrian Churches regarding the date of Easter in the year 417. The murder would have been committed in March 416 after she had performed controversial astronomical observations that supported the Roman date over the Alexandrian one. This version faces severe problems from various sides. Therefore, I suggest here another scenario, where an unorthodox position of the Novatian Church on determining the time of Easter and early Passover celebration in 414 triggered the chain of events leading to Hypatia’s murder. This scenario places the murder in March 415 and offers a unique time frame for all the related events. Here Hypatia displays astronomy skills that justify her subsequent historical reputation. I also shed light on the immediate circumstances of her murder, specifically suggesting it happened on the day she was making the equinoctial observations. Finally, I propose instituting a memorial day for Hypatia on the day of the vernal equinox.

Matthew Fontaine Maury: Scientist

While US naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury is frequently celebrated by naval historians, historians of science have treated him more poorly. He is often portrayed as an uneducated amateur who jumped to conclusions about the oceans based on slim evidence and biblical reasoning, and who missed the opportunity provided by the founding of the US Naval Observatory to place American scientists on a competitive footing with their European counterparts. Consigning Maury to the category of disappointing amateur, however, misses the opportunities his case presents to better understand the historical milieu in which he worked, as well as his enduring contributions to the scientific exploration of the deep ocean. This article reconsiders Maury as scientist, siting the origins of his poor historical reputation in arguments over the professionalization of science and of the navy. His reputation also suffered after his departure from Washington, DC, for the Confederacy at the beginning of the American Civil War. The article examines his participation in a practice of science flavoured by its location in the nation’s capital, where science required as much attention to lobbying and leveraged connections as to the calibration of instruments. In this context, Maury was a serious scientist who embraced the task of doing science in the public interest, and he participated in an ongoing effort to further the USA’s ability to be competitive on the world stage, whether that stage was dressed for scientific achievement or commerce. Maury sought authority for his claims with a strong sense of the geopolitics of geophysics. Re-examining Maury as scientist provides a window onto a pattern of scientific practice in Washington, DC, in the middle of the 19th century whose echoes propagated through the rest of that century and into the 20th.

A female war correspondent on the Italian front, 1915–17: the Austrian travel journalist and photographer Alice Schalek

In July 1915, Alice Schalek was accredited to the Austro-Hungarian Kriegspressequartier (War Press Office) as one of a small number of female war correspondents, publishing her war reports and photographs in the prestigious Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse and in the illustrated German magazine Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. Schalek’s writings and photographs were very popular, but also sharply criticized in some quarters for their alleged lack of objectivity and a tendency to glorify the war. Her most prominent critic was the Austrian writer and journalist Karl Kraus, whose negative judgment dominated Schalek’s historical reputation for many decades. Focusing on Schalek’s assignments to the Italian front during 1915–17, this article looks at the working conditions faced by Schalek as a female war reporter and reconstructs the war images she transmitted to the public through her writings, photographs, and lectures. Moreover, it asks in what ways Schalek’s work reflects a female perspective on the war.

Public reputation and organised crime: explicating the relationship between racket subcultures and informal social control

This paper examines the influence of traditional organised crime on informal social control in community areas that once had a presence of organised crime while controlling for neighbourhood attachment, satisfaction with the police, social and organisational ties, and tolerance of deviance. The data comes from the Community Survey of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. The comparative quantitative method was used to analyse the data. The findings indicate that neighbourhoods with an historic reputation for organised crime can report higher levels of informal social control when compared to current racket areas in the city of Chicago. These findings have important implications for the study of deviance. Not only do they suggest that criminals can play an important role in controlling street crime, the findings also suggest that this public reputation remains long after organised crime activities have ceased in the area.

An Evaluation of Ecotourism Potentials of Rumkale Archaeological Region

In this study, the Rumkale Archaeological Region and its vicinity located in Gaziantep City, Turkey, were examined in terms of potential value for ecotourism activities. The region has high historical reputation and natural beauty which avails magnificent structures for visitors. In examining the ecotourism potential of Rumkale Archaeological Region, a standard questionnaire form was designed and administered to respondents who came on visit to this region. The study revealed that majority of respondents (70%) has heard of Rumkale’s reputation from friends. It also realized that visitors mostly tripped to Rumkale Archaeological Region in order to access the natural beauty and archaeological features. With regard to activity of interest undertaken by visitors to the area, their preferences centered on doing nature walks, trekking/hiking and seeing archaeological residues including historic structures. It also came to the fore that lack of accommodation and difficulties with transportation to the region has negatively affected development of ecotourism activities in this area. Rumkale and its vicinity was scored by visitors according to its suitability for ecotourism activities and in this regard it was revealed that 85% of the respondents ranked this region as suitable for nature walks (trekking/hiking), followed by field photography (73%) and trips to historical and archaeological sites (70%) in that order of importance. After the detailed

Madame Meed:Fauvel, Isabella, and the French Circumstances ofPiers Plowman

This essay returns to the uses of the Roman de Fauvel in Piers Plowman, in order to show the unusual depth of Langland’s engagement with that poem and Fauvel’s close association with Isabella of France, Edward II’s much-maligned widow - and in turn to claim that the figure of Meed begins in part as a topical satire on Isabella herself. In this and other ways, Meed epitomizes ‘topicality’. Yet the process of revising Piers Plowman (the essay argues) included increasing distance from any one topical meaning. The essay traces the literary and historical reputation of Isabella, and measures that against more immediate evidence of her resolutely pro-French patronage and cultural agenda in the realm of Essex and London to which the poet was probably connected. This context helps explain Langland’s response to the topical Fauvel, a surprising spur for his own assessments of literary value and his production of a unique selfreflective and philosophical satire.

Missionary zeal: some problems with the rhetoric, vision and approach of the AHELO project

The OECD's Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) project is an important contribution to discussions of how to define and measure the quality of global higher education. There is a genuine need for quality measures that can help to ensure students have equitable access to high-quality higher education wherever they study but do not reinforce existing institutional hierarchies that are simply based on historical reputation. However, I identify three problems with the approach that has been taken to AHELO which mean that even if it succeeded in its own terms, it would not meet this need. I conclude by arguing that rather than pursuing the illusion of a simple and robust measure of the comparative quality of learning outcomes globally, we should focus on the more everyday task of engaging stakeholders internationally in discussions about the development of high-quality undergraduate higher education.

Has bioscience reconciled mind and body?

The aim of this discursive paper is to explore the question 'has biological science reconciled mind and body?'. This paper has been inspired by the recognition that bioscience has a historical reputation for privileging the body over the mind. The disregard for the mind (emotions and behaviour) cast bioscience within a 'mind-body problem' paradigm. It has also led to inherent limitations in its capacity to contribute to understanding the complex nature of health. This is a discursive paper. Literature from the history and sociology of science and psychoneuroimmunology (1975-2015) inform the arguments in this paper. The historical and sociological literature provides the basis for a socio-cultural debate on mind-body considerations in science since the 1970s. The psychoneuroimmunology literature draws on mind-body bioscientific theory as a way to demonstrate how science is reconciling mind and body and advancing its understanding of the interconnections between emotions, behaviour and health. Using sociological and biological evidence, this paper demonstrates how bioscience is embracing and advancing its understanding of mind-body interconnectedness. It does this by demonstrating the emotional and behavioural alterations that are caused by two common phenomena; prolonged, chronic peripheral inflammation and prolonged psychological stress. The evidence and arguments provided has global currency that advances understanding of the inter-relationship between emotions, behaviour and health. This paper shows how bioscience has reconciled mind and body. In doing so, it has advanced an understanding of science's contribution to the inter-relationship between emotions, behaviour and health. The biological evidence supporting mind-body science has relevance to clinical practice for nurses and other healthcare professions. This paper discusses how this evidence can inform and enhance clinical practice directly and through research, education and policy.

Processing of Leather Using Deep Eutectic Solvents

Processing of leather has an historical reputation as a chemically and energetically intensive process that produces large volumes of aqueous waste. Saline pollution combined with heavy-metal, dyes and acid and base streams make leather production an ecologically sensitive industry. The current study shows that a variety of deep eutectic solvents (DESs) may be used for the tanning, fatliquoring and dyeing of animal hides, being particularly useful for mineral (chromium) and vegetable tanning processes. The tanning agents are able to penetrate rapidly into the hide, driven by lyotropic swelling due to their high ionic strength. The samples are shown to have similar tanning agent content to the currently used aqueous chromium(III) sulfate solution; however, the waste metal content is shown to be significantly reduced. Incorporation of the DES Ethaline into the leather significantly alters the swelling properties of the leather increasing the flexibility and ductility of the material, therefore acting in the...

Leibniz's Observations on Hydrology: An Unpublished Letter on the Great Lombardy Flood of 1705

SummaryAlthough the historical reputation of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) largely rests on his philosophical and mathematical work, it is widely known that he made important contributions to many of the emerging but still inchoate branches of natural science of his day. Among the many scientific papers Leibniz published during his lifetime are ones on the nascent science we now know as hydrology. While Leibniz's other scientific work has become of increasing interest to scholars in recent years, his thinking about hydrology has been neglected, despite being relatively broad in extent, including as it does papers on the ‘raising of vapours’ and the formation of ice, as well as the separation of salt and fresh water. That list can now be extended still further following the discovery of a previously unpublished letter of Leibniz's on the causes of the devastating Lombardy flood of October and November 1705. This letter, which will be the focus of our paper, reveals the depth of Leibniz's understanding of key hydrological processes. In it, he considers various mechanisms for the flood, such as heavy rains on high ground, underwater earthquakes, and a mountain collapse. Over the course of the paper we examine each of these mechanisms in depth, and show that Leibniz was in the vanguard of hydrological thinking. We also show that the letter contains one of the first scholarly attempts to apply aspects of the still-forming notion of the hydrological cycle to account for a flood event.

A General Who Will Fight: The Leadership of Ulysses S. Grant by Harry S. Laver (review)

Reviewed by: A General Who Will Fight: The Leadership of Ulysses S. Grant by Harry S. Laver William B. Feis (bio) A General Who Will Fight: The Leadership of Ulysses S. Grant. By Harry S. Laver. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. Pp. 208. $32.50 cloth; $32.50 ebook) Ulysses S. Grant has never lacked for biographers and in their hands his historical reputation as a Civil War commander has been savaged, sanctified, and everything in-between. Ever since William McFeely brutalized him in 1984, other historians have taken a more balanced—if not more friendly—approach toward the Union commander. Many of these biographers—and even Grant himself—have wrestled with the Big Question: What made a man of seemingly average talents and intellect into the most successful soldier of the age? Put another way, how did a lackluster, down-on-his luck Galena store clerk become the architect of Union victory in the Civil War? In A General Who Will Fight, Harry S. Laver finds the answer in Grant’s “analytical determination,” which he defines as the combination of “professional competence and unshakable resolve” (p. 7). This characteristic emanated not from West Point but from within Grant’s own temperament fine-tuned by later observations and experiences. [End Page 138] During the Mexican War, Zachary Taylor taught him to accept each situation as it was and find a way to extract victory, while Winfield Scott revealed that success rode with the general best able to press on despite the obstacles. Though Laver makes a fine case for the influence of Taylor and Scott, it seems just as likely that instead of revealing to him the value of these things, his heroes likely only confirmed what he already knew instinctively. When Grant took command during the Civil War, these ideas shaped his overall approach to military operations, especially the primacy of the initiative. From them he concluded that only striking hard and moving on would kill the rebellion and end the war. “Whoever assumed the offensive,” he stated bluntly, “was sure to win” (p. 47). Laver details the evolution of Grant’s analytical determination from the first defining moment in 1861 in Missouri when he battled his inner doubts to his impressive triumphs in Tennessee, Mississippi, and finally against Robert E. Lee in Virginia. Throughout, Laver demonstrates how Grant employed—though not always skillfully or without difficulty—this concept to win the sort of stunning and strategically meaningful victories denied other Union generals who— both on paper and in their own minds—seemed far better suited to achieve that kind of glory. Laver also analyzes other arguments for Grant’s successes, including the contention that commanding in the distant and less politically charged Western theater afforded him a “grace period” to “grow into his job” and make mistakes that would have earned him a pink slip in the East. However, Laver believes that the men who headed the Army of the Potomac also had ample opportunities “to refine their leadership skills” before taking the helm but failed because they lacked analytical determination. As for the old “Grant the Butcher” argument, Laver examines the overall casualty rates of Lee and other principal Confederate generals and concludes that Grant’s casualties were lower than all of them, making him “far from the most accomplished of the ‘butchers’” in the war (p. 159). Overall, this is a very insightful, thought-provoking, and exceptionally well-written book that deftly handles this weighty topic. Pinpointing and analyzing this critical quality that transformed the [End Page 139] Grant of Galena into the Victor of Vicksburg adds much to the ongoing debate on his generalship and lands another deserved blow on the “Grant the Butcher” crowd. Since 1865, the general has weathered more than his share of body blows to his reputation. But much like his Overland Campaign in 1864, just when you think he’s down and ready to retreat from the fight, he sidles to the left and moves on. This time, Harry Laver provided the assist. William B. Feis William B. Feis is professor of history at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. He is author of Grant’s Secret Service...

George Buchanan: Political Thought in Early Modern Britain and Europe, edited by Caroline Erskine and Roger A. Mason

George Buchanan: Political Thought in Early Modern Britain and Europe, edited by Caroline Erskine and Roger A. Mason. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Farnham, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing, 2012. xvi, 315 pp. $125.00 US (cloth). Edited collections of essays, particularly those emerging out of earlier conferences, do not always make the most coherent finished products. This is most definitely not the case with this fine collection on George Buchanan (1506-82). Buchanan stood Scotland's most distinguished humanist, and was widely celebrated throughout Europe a Latin poet, playwright, historian, and political theorist. Thanks to this celebrity, however, and his infamy the scourge of Mary Queen of Scots and an architect of radical rebellion, Buchanan has remained famous, while also being surprisingly ill-understood and neglected. Outside of specialist scholarship on Renaissance and Reformation Scotland, he is often remembered in caricatured, two-dimensional terms, and effectively reduced to a stock hero or villain of Scottish history and lore. This collection of essays helps remedy this, and its success and coherence owes much to the theoretical work done by Erskine and Mason in their short but important introduction. Positioning this volume in the emerging field of the study of historical reputations, the editors have produced the first survey of Buchanan's through the centuries, well his contested, often shadowy (pp. 79, 288), and constantly mutating reputation (p. 306) a political thinker and cultural icon. While many of the contributors to this volume variously explore the influence of Buchanan's ideas and writings, this is generally done with caution, consciously reflecting the challenges inherent in the elusive methodological task of demonstrating how, or to what extent one thinker influences another. Instead, Erskine and Mason shrewdly emphasize the importance of usage: that is, the way Buchanan's ideas and have been used (and abused) by successive generations. Thus, this book is concerned less with Buchanan's influence, and much more with his legacy, another alternate term discussed by the editors; it is as much a celebration of Buchanan's readers and their responses to his texts it is of the man and his writings (p. 10). The result is a collection that is both stimulating and, the subtitle promises, wide-ranging in its scope. While Buchanan is obviously a central focus, it should be noted that he is also the lens through which we view the book's other main subject: exchange, interaction, and cosmopolitan engagement in early modern Europe. For instance, in his essay on Buchanan's chorography, or geographical descriptions of Scotland and the Scots, Roger Mason explores not only the impact Buchanan had on the way Scotland's distinct geographical and historical identity was understood at home. He also looks at how Buchanan's enduring scholarly legacy shaped the way Scotland was defined and understood in Europe. Mason's is the opening essay and it helps set the tone for much of the volume. Indeed, one of the book's main themes is the translation of texts and contexts, and the contributions of Astrid Stilma, Robert von Friedburg, and Allan Macinnes all shed valuable light on how the Buchanan-inspired concept of political resistance was exported and adapted linguistically and circumstantially across continental Europe. …