Style Of Scholarship Research Articles

The Image of the Roman Empire in the Works of Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff

The article examines the features of the image of the Roman Empire created by the outstanding historian M. I. Rostovtzeff, primarily in his “Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire”. This image is contradictory and ambiguous. It involves a lot of genuine innovative ideas, bright colours, but there are also a number of obvious exaggerations and aberrations, a certain “contemporization” of economic and social realities. Paradoxically, Rostovtzeff ’s Roman Empire turns out to be an empire without imperialism. Its very “empireness”, i. e., specific ties between the center and provincial and “barbaric” periphery; the organization of space; the modes of relations between the “imperial nation” and the subordinate peoples; the unity of diversity as well as geographical (geopolitical) and economic determination of Roman imperial expansion, remains outside the historian’s scope. At the same time, Rostovtzeff perspicaciously grasps the deep drama of Roman history, irreducible either to the tyranny and extravagance of individual rulers or to the merciless struggle of social classes. A significant role in creating such a comprehensive image of the Roman Empire was ensured not only by Rostovtzeff ’s political preferences and life experience, but also by his personality and style of scholarship. This gives the “Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire” a special dimension, making it not only a fact of historiography per se but the substantial evidence of the indissoluble relationship between the personality of the historian, his ideas and the time in which he happened to live and work.

War of the Worldviews

486 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) no one with a serious interest in one of the most accomplished of all sf writers will want to miss this volume.—Carl Freedman, Louisiana State University War of the Worldviews. Richard Grigg. Science Fiction and the Imitation of the Sacred. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. viii+151 pp.£90.00/$120.00 hc, £28.99/$39.95 pbk., £31.30/$35.95 ebk. Grigg’s approach to past scholarship on science fiction, theology, and religious studies is to appeal to the handful of thinkers he finds useful and ignore the rest. This style of scholarship gives him the freedom to advance his argument without critical resistance and with great creativity and efficiency; however, it simultaneously limits its use for other scholars. SFS readers may find its lack of engagement with sf scholarship frustrating, but a subset of scholars who teach courses on “religion and science fiction” could find Grigg’s work interesting and pedagogically useful. The primary value of this work lies in the classroom discussions it might enable, and it is written with the classroom in mind. Unlike the trajectories that contemporary sf studies have taken (looking at global sf, queer sf, Afrofuturism, and so on), Grigg’s text assumes a normative liberal, Western perspective. Christianity is the prototypical traditional “world religion,” with light engagement with an idealized Buddhism, and the primary questions are those of a (post-Christian) theology actively engaged with the contemporary world. To be used responsibly as a foundational text for a class on “religion and science fiction,” one should encourage students to read this text critically, actively engaging with how categories such as the “sacred,” “secular,” and “world religions” have been constructed. Such a class would also do well to interrogate Grigg’s definition of “science fiction” in terms of technology (for an example of Grigg’s running up against his own definition, see 77-78). One of the still-prominent approaches to the study of “religion” regards a certain kind of experience as distinctively characteristic of the phenomenon: a sui generis sense of the “sacred,” “numinous,” “transcendent,” “divine,” “incalculable,” “sublime,” “Other,” “eternal,” and so on. This experience is regarded by relevant members of the phenomenological, perennialist, or experiential school as temporally and geographically panhuman and innate, immediately given to consciousness as opposed to socially constructed and contingent, and lying at the heart of all the “world religions.” This is not the place to go into the details of the critical literature on this subject, but its existence is relevant because of Grigg’s extensive dependence on the category of the “sacred.” Experiences are generated in an interplay of bottom-up and topdown cognitive processes; with the neurotheological authors whom Grigg cites, one can acknowledge a substratum of relatively consistent bottom-up input accessible to at least most humans, while also noting that every experience will be constituted in culturally contingent ways using distinctive attributional systems. Science Fiction and the Imitation of the Sacred assumes a robust metanarrative of secularization that prioritizes ideas of loss and nostalgia, and 487 BOOKS IN REVIEW that assume secularization’s success and God’s nonexistence; in this context and given Grigg’s use of the concept of “imitation,” it would have been nice to see him engage with the literature on the relationship of concepts such as simulation, hyperreality, spectacle, and virtuality to conditions of secularity and postmodernity. That said, Grigg’s critical attitude toward the notion that the imaginative art of science fiction gives access to the sacred or transcendent, as reflected in his insistence on its being an “imitation,” is a refreshing, if only partial, turn away from the virtually universal romanticism under the influence of which most other studies of “religion and science fiction” are developed. Grigg uses the concept of “imitation” to indicate the non-reality of the “sacred” supplied by science fiction; it is not “genuine” (3). His text assumes that past humans experienced a sacred or divine that was given to them without mediation, a sacred that possessed all the attributes described in their sacred texts. He does not seem to think of ancient peoples as engaging with their own experiences and narratives in...

Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women by Kate Cooper, and: Christian Women in the Patristic World: Their Influence, Authority, and Legacy in the Second through Fifth Centuries by Lynn H. Cohick and Amy Brown Hughes

Reviewed by: Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women by Kate Cooper, and: Christian Women in the Patristic World: Their Influence, Authority, and Legacy in the Second through Fifth Centuries by Lynn H. Cohick and Amy Brown Hughes Kate Wilkinson Kate Cooper Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women London: Atlantic Books, 2013 Pp. xxi + 342. $29.95. Lynn H. Cohick and Amy Brown Hughes Christian Women in the Patristic World: Their Influence, Authority, and Legacy in the Second through Fifth Centuries Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017 Pp. xxxviii + 292. $35.00. In the late 1990s, I became interested in the lives and roles of early Christian women and my undergraduate professors sent me to Peter Brown, Susanna Elm, and Kate Cooper. I delved in with relish and didn't mind that much was well over my head. Mostly, my elders had started me off with the primary texts. The intervening years have provided many more academic treatments of women, gender, and sexuality in the early Christian era and an array of excellent new translations and sourcebooks for teaching primary material. Most textbooks treat the subject with care and respect. The current decade has given us two very fine books on women in the first five centuries of Christianity intended for students and general readers. Band of Angels by Kate Cooper and Christian Women in the Patristic World, co-authored by Lynn H. Cohick and Amy Brown Hughes, cover roughly the same material and with similar approaches. Cooper starts earlier with examinations of women in Pauline and Gospel writings, Cohick and Brown commence in the second century, but both travel through the upheavals and metamorphoses of Christianity from its marginal beginnings to the imperial courts of the mid-fifth century. In both books we meet Thecla, Perpetua, Felicitas, Egeria, Paula, the Melanias Elder and Younger, Macrina, Helena, and Pulcheria. Each introduces a few figures that the other does not. Cohick and Brown notably include a chapter on the interpretation of female figures in catacomb art; Cooper devotes a chapter to the desert mothers. The institutional homes of these two books are distinct. Cooper is faculty at a secular British university and Atlantic Books is the "literary" fiction and nonfiction imprint of the larger Atlantic independent publishing house out of the UK. [End Page 491] Cohick and Hughes both work at major Evangelical colleges in the United States and published with Baker Academic, the academic imprint of Baker Publishing group, an American press that explicitly serves an Evangelical readership. Yet there is very little that distinguishes approach or style of scholarship. Both books state a desire to retrieve feminine pasts for Christian women of the present, both are informed by feminist scholarship of the past half century, both wrestle with the dilemmas of how much male-authored sources really tell us about their female subjects. Cohick and Hughes do include a lengthy footnote devoted to Protestant evaluations of early Christian Marian devotion, perhaps in anticipation of a readership with deep reservations about such devotion. Cooper on the other hand takes a strong, and fairly positive, stand on the extent to which Empress Helena identified herself with Mary. In one of the few references to Cooper's earlier book, Cohick and Hughes disagree (117n31). There are some slight differences in emphasis. Band of Angels contains no footnotes; there are endnotes, but they are not marked in the main text. Cooper includes more first person commentary and connects the experiences of early Christian women with presumably universal experiences of motherhood, loss, and hope. Her imagined reader might more likely be a pastor, an active and well-educated member of a Christian community, or an educated person with a general interest in history. My mother, a retired physician, read the book before I did (I bought it for her as a Christmas gift) and is probably just the sort of reader Cooper has in mind. Christian Women in the Patristic World, however, is footnoted and the layout is more textbook than general nonfiction. The authors include a number of black and white open source images, about which more later. The text reads as easily as Cooper's...

Merging Comparative Law and Legal History: Towards an Integrated Discipline

This Article argues that legal history and comparative law ought to merge into one discipline. The two disciplines are both products of the same period, the late nineteenth century, when they were formed as the fruit of the rising positivist legal scholarship. They are, to be sure, opposite sides of the coin. Mainstream legal history was, from early on, a humble servant of positivism, whereas comparative law formed as an antithesis to it. Nevertheless, neither of the twin disciplines would exist as such were it not for the emergence of national legal positivism on both sides of the Atlantic. National legal histories developed as the dominant paradigm of the nineteenth century and for the most part of the twentieth. Legal historians provided an important slice of the nationalistic narrative, explaining how history had led national states to the particular situations in law they found themselves in. Comparative law started early in the nineteenth century as a response to practical legislative needs, as “comparative legislation.” Some of the internationally minded German scholars also reacted against the national emphasis of Savigny’s Historical School. Comparative legal scholarship acquired more academic overtones as the century wore on, and many scholars optimistically expected that comparative scholarship would unify and civilize the world’s legal orders. After World War II, mainstream comparative law had little hope left in its possibilities of civilizing the world. The discipline declined into a “country and western” style of scholarship. The largest obstacle in the way of merging the twin disciplines is the fact that they, as all scholarly disciplines, are also social communities. Most scholars still like to identify themselves as “comparatists” or “legal historians.” The new combined discipline would do away with outdated ways of doing scholarship in both mother disciplines. It would marginalize the kind of legal history that seems unconscious of the world outside national boundaries and of international contexts, and it would supplant the kind of comparative law that is made without reference to the historical paths that have led to the present situation.

Comparative Mythology as a Transnational Enterprise: Friedrich Max Müller’s Scholarly Identity through the Lens of Angelo De Gubernatis’s Correspondence

Max Müller was famous in his time not only for his editions of the Rg Veda and the Sacred Books of the East, but also as the founder of comparative mythology. Emerging from the German scholarly tradition, but developed in the British context, and facing a controversial reception in both countries, Müller’s comparative mythology was often viewed according to prevailing stereotypes about national styles of scholarship. Was Müller’s comparative mythology a representative example, or a betrayal, of German scientific standards? Although Müller himself maintained a decidedly German academic identity, the answers to this question varied according to the commentators. This article examines strategies of national (self)-labelling concerning Max Müller’s work, based on an analysis of his correspondence with Angelo De Gubernatis, his most zealous promoter in Italy.

On patience: thinking with and beyond Karl Barth

AbstractThis article has three goals: (1) to provide a careful analysis of Barth's treatment of divine patience inChurch DogmaticsII/1; (2) to show how Barth's thinking about divine patience helps to illumine his account of human being and human activity in later portions of theChurch Dogmatics; and (3) to offer a series of constructive suggestions which connect Barth's theology with liberationist visions of human existence.With respect toChurch DogmaticsII/1, I argue that Barth breaks with a number of earlier thinkers and focuses attention onGod'sexercise of patience, treating it as a key dimension of God's creative and providential work. This exercise of patience means, specifically, that God accords creatures their own integrity and a capacity for free action, tempers God's punishment of sin and, in Christ, fulfils but does not temporally close the covenant. My analysis of divine patience in II/1 then serves as an interpretative key for reading later volumes of theDogmatics. It sets in vivid relief Barth's belief that Christ's fulfilment of the covenant, achieved through Christ's life, suffering, death and resurrection, is the condition of possibility for humans being able to act with genuine integrity and consequence in the created realm. I propose, too, that Barth develops his thinking about patience by emphasising the ‘pressure’ of the patient God's empowering command – a command which is a constant summons, directed towards each and every human being, to live freely into God's future through acts of gratitude, obedience and responsibility, and to play some part in bringing creation to its glorious end. Finally, I explore the convergence between certain aspects of theChurch Dogmaticsand anti-essentialist construals of the self in contemporary theology. I aim to identify points of connection between Barth and thinkers like Marcella Althaus-Reid, and I voice support for a style of scholarship which elides the distinction between ‘systematic’ and ‘liberationist’ modes of inquiry.

Doing Being Deviant: Deviance Studies, Description, and the Queer Ordinary

The appearance of deviance as a fact of social life—a permanent and unavoidable feature of social life and an object of study for the social scientist—distinguishes postwar deviance studies from the antimethod, anti-institutional, and antinormative field of queer studies. While deviance studies focused on the description and analysis of social norms, queer scholars saw themselves as participating in their subversion. This collapse of the position of the scholar and the social deviant produced transformations in the ethos and style of scholarship, and yet it did not profoundly change the material conditions or the power relations between professional academics and the marginal subjects they study. The refusal of social scientific methods undermines queer scholars’ claims to interdisciplinarity. While queer studies has understood itself alternately as interdisciplinary and as antidisciplinary, it has failed to grapple with methods of description and objectification that would allow for a fuller apprehension of social worlds and of the position of the researchers who study them. Through a return to the history of postwar sociology, this essay shows that the account of deviance as part of the social world rather than a departure from it offers an important model for queer scholarship and for the apprehension of the queer ordinary.

Public Administration Research in Taiwan

This article presents a description of the discipline of public administration in Taiwan and a survey of research on the subject. A total of 1,090 articles appearing in five public administration journals during the period of 1990 to 2010 were examined from three aspects: authorship and productivity, research subject and keyword, and research purpose and method. Comparisons were made across time (1990-1999, 2000-2010) and by type of journal (TSSCI and Non-TSSCI). Research findings indicate that, in Taiwan, the focus of public administration research has been on such topics as public policy, new public management (NPM), public organization management, and intergovernmental relations. The style of scholarship is typically not empirical, though there is evidence of change here over time. In a broader perspective, public administration research has been conducted in an increasingly very competitive circumstance. It is argued that there will be ample opportunity for dialogue between scholars of public administration in Taiwan and the international community in the field.

CATHOLIC ETHICS AS SEEN FROM PADUA

ABSTRACTDuring the summer of 2006, over four hundred Catholic ethicists from around the world gathered for four days in Padua, Italy. About sixty of the conference papers have become available in two edited collections, Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church: The Plenary Papers from the First Cross‐cultural Conference on Catholic Theological Ethics, and Applied Ethics in a World Church: The Padua Conference. As the conference was marked by a distinctive and creative tension—between the diversity which characterized the nationalities and cultural identities of the participants, on the one hand, and the commonness of their religious heritage, on the other—these essays can tell us much about contemporary Catholic ethics in its response to global pluralism. The following develops four reflections. First, the conference papers pursue a style of scholarship that is at once critically creative and ecclesially rooted. Second, the conference raises new concerns about the importance that Christian formation must have in a pluralist world. Third, the participants affirm and defend the ultimate universality of moral goods while also arguing that these goods are expressed and embodied in unavoidably particular ways. Finally, the most important contribution that Catholic ethics can make to public conversations about issues of common concern is through its articulation and defense of key human values.

UNITY IN DIVERSITY: PROSOPOGRAPHIES AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH OTHER DATABASES

Prosopography has a bad name among some historians. It is seen as being elitist, interested only in those who wielded political power. This has some foundation in fact.1 The earliest major prosopographical work was undertaken in the first half of the twentieth century, primarily (though not exclusively) in a Europe that was in its heyday of empire and when honours and titles abounded. In part the style of scholarship reflected the historical milieu in which it was undertaken. It is perfectly legitimate for historians to study power in the spheres of politics and government, but there is no intrinsic reason for prosopography to restrict itself to such research. In essence prosopography can be interpreted as the study of identifiable persons and their connections with others for the purpose of enabling the modern student to discern patterns of relationships. Though the term is used for historical studies, its methods are also used by sociologists and political scientists for analysing contemporary societies and even extends to capitalist enterprises in such guides as Dun and Bradstreet's Who owns whom.2 There is no reason, therefore, for current prosopographical research not to reflect both the emphasis in contemporary society on the importance of the individual and the diversity of relationships that any one person enjoys today in spheres as diverse as business, culture and recreation. Obviously such prosopographical research will be shaped by the nature and range of the source material. Given the high status of classical studies in universities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it is not surprising that path-breaking prosopographical work was undertaken in the history of the Roman republic, already on the rise as an imperial power, by scholars such as Matthias Gelzer and Friedrich Munzer.3 The trinomial system of Roman nomenclature and the relatively simple and interlinked ranks of political office in republican Rome encouraged the study of factions in the city, which could

Myth and Fiction in Early Norse Lands (review)

146 Reviews Dronke, Ursula, Myth and Fiction in Early Norse Lands (Variorum Collected Studies Series C524), Aldershot, Variorum, 1996; cloth; pp. xii, 313; R.R.P. £49.50. Spanning the period 1947 to 1993, this collection of essays is fitting t to Dronke's long-sustained involvement with Old Norse/Icelandic poetry, mythology and sagas, and with related literatures, Old English in particular. To start with an indication of the contents, the heading 'Norse literature and the Classical World' takes in three essays, 'Classical influence on early Norse literature' (1971), 'Voluspd and Sibylline traditions' (1992), and 'The Prologue of the Prose Edda: explorations of a Latin background' (1977). Under the heading 'Poetry and Mythology' w e have 'Eddie poetry as a source for the history of Germanic religion' (1992), "The Scope of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale' (1989), 'Voluspd and satiric tradition' (1979), 'The War of the /Esir an Vanir in Voluspd' (1988), 'Ominnis hegri' (1984), 'Art and Tradition in Skimisma (1962), 'Sem jarlar fordum. The influence of Rigspula on two saga-episodes' (1981), 'Beowulfand Ragnarok' (1969), and 'Pagan beliefs and Christian impact: the contribution of Eddie Studies' (1993). Finally, under the heading of 'Narrative Structures' w e have 'Le caractere de la poesie germanique heroique' (1977), 'The poet's persona in the Skalds' sagas' (1978), "The saga of Hromund Gripsson and Dorgilssaga' (1947-48), and 'The role of sexual themes in Njdls saga' (1981). To these are added a brief introduction and an equally brief but useful index. The volume does not make room for bibliographic or other updates, but understandably so, since effectively the later essays and the newly completed Volume II of The Poetic Edda perform this function. Dronke's approach typically combines intense and subtle 'close reading' with wide-ranging comparative mythology and anthropology. In the latter respect she evidently owes much to Georges Dumezil (cf. VII 226) and, beyond him, to the so-called Cambridge School—a style of scholarship with which she is notably more in sympathy than most of her British contemporaries. Confronting a besetting problem in Old Norse/Icelandic philology, the lack of datable texts, in the course of her review of the methodology (or lack of it) underlying the Corpus Poeticum Boreale, she supplies a characteristic answer: namely that 'the poetic qualities of a workits intellectual content and style of verbal skill—should lead us to its correct dating' (V 97). Correspondingly, the paucity or cryptic expression of the Old Norse/Icelandic mythography encourages her into textual and mythological exegesis via a long succession of comparisons with other texts and mythologies (notably Celtic, Finno-Ugric, Roman, Greek and Indian). In the case of Rigspula dating and the comparative approach are linked in the proposition that the necessity and value of 'external analogues are measures of the antiquity and genuineness of eddic heathen material' (IV 657). Though obviously not much interested in modern metrical and linguistic studies, Dronke otherwise writes with a mastery of philological argument and Reviews 147 an ability to explore all conceivable avenues and analogues at first hand. These qualities can be seen in a series of thought-provoking studies. She forms the oddly heterogeneous motifs associated with Heimdallr in Rigspula and elsewhere into a coherent pattern. She interprets Lokasenna as an example of carnivalesque 'ritual reversal', where blasphemy against the established gods temporarily becomes the order of the day (V 106). She reconstructs a source poem to account for the giant-builder allusion in Voluspd (VI 63-71). She resourcefully combines European folklore with ethology to support the hypothesis that when 09inn brought the mead of poetry home to Asgar3r he did so in the shape of a heron, not, as Snorri would have it, an eagle (VIII). She traces a coherent pattern of euhemerized myths in Beowulf, basing her analysis upon three Scandinavian analogues—though whether she is justified in positing a poet w h o deliberately diminished the stature of older myths for his 'Christian didactic purposes' (XI325) is another matter. From time to time both the literary criticism and the comparative mythology leave m e uneasy. Dronke tends to reify 'genius' and sensitivity as expected attributes of poets and audience respectively. Can w e really know...

Coming Home: [Commentary

Ever since the formation of an academic bar, one which left the practical world of apprentices and clerkships barely 100 years ago, the architects of law's intellectual life have looked outside the canons of lawyers' law to academic life and its deep thinkers for stimulation. From the German social scientists of Pound's time to Foucault in our own, the erotica of the legal academy have often been drawn from French and German philosophers and social theorists. There may be, in fact, a pattern to this inclination in America to draw insights from the wild passion of the French or the dark terror of the Germans. There is certainly an ongoing effort to avoid England in both its commonness and its construction of the savage or the ethnographically primitive other on which English law based its authority for so long.' American sociolegal intellectuals, as part of the legal academy, crave a hit of the other on the continent of Europe, having denuded the American forests of its native occupants. To its credit, the range of insight from this style of scholarship can be sweeping. Marianne Constable's essay, Genealogy and Jurisprudence: Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Social Scientification of Law,2 is an example of the escape and what it offers. We are brought into the spirit of law, carried from the West down to the East, and into the deep structures of the epistemology of legal ordering.3 Indeed, this kind of legal scholarship seems to have a soul, an inner presence barely capable of holding the anxiety and

Styles of Scholarship: “Tonight Let’s Do Thompson”

The way an innovator perceives his role is discussed, along with the concept of the scholar as curator and futurist as well as opportunistic observer and tight thinker.

OfLizards, Intersubjective Zap, and Trashing:

Critical Legal Studies presents numerous challenges to reference librarians. Among them are the difficulty of identifying and collecting materials written by Critical Legal Studies scholars, the problem of locating and acquiring materials about the Critical Legal Studies movement, and the use by Critical Legal Studies scholars of materials, vocabulary, and a style of scholarship not traditionally found in law schools. Librarians, particularly reference librarians, should be able to anticipate trends in the legal community. The Critical Legal Studies movement has existed for ten years, and yet the academic law library community has only recently responded to its existence by collecting matertals relevant to Critical Legal Studies scholars and by making those materials accessible through subject headings, bibliographies, and computerized legal research sources.

Ueberempfindlichkeit und Immunität

The almost exponential rate of growth in immunopathology, as applied to clinical and experimental medicine, has created an urgent need for a comprehensive, reliable, and imaginative presentation of this complex topic. Although the present volume conforms to the traditional "Handbuch" style of scholarship it falls somewhat short of expectations. Essentially, this may reflect the fact that the main portion on morphology of immunopathologic reactions, contributed by E. Letterer, is strong on analysis but much weaker on effective synthesis, eg, while transplantation immunity, tolerance, and the role of the thymus in development of immunologic competence are discussed in several contexts, there is no coherent presentation of these phenomena and their correlates in human disease. The local Shwartzman reaction is discussed on two pages in connection with the Arthus phenomenon, but one page alone deals with the generalized Shwartzman reaction. The rather ponderous German style does not make it any easier for