Subtle Critique Research Articles

The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics and Poetics of Transcendence par Kathryn M. Grossman

Reviews 221 monnayeurs by stating:“Nous vivons pour manifester.”His later reportages from Africa should have been discussed to underscore the earnestness of this statement. Clotilde Landais insightfully explores how Stephen King’s fictive writers discredit the institutional distinction between high and popular literature. Unfortunately, no overview or synthesis unites these essays. Because the editors concentrate on professional writers and their associates, dating from the advent of the mass market for prose narratives, the volume offers workers in that market the dreary fascination of shop-talk and professional gossip. It has relatively little to offer to students, teachers, and critics of French and Francophone culture. Oberlin College Affiliate Scholar (OH) Laurence M. Porter Grossman, Kathryn M. The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics and Poetics of Transcendence. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. ISBN 978-0-19-964295-3. Pp. xii + 285. £64. This study announces an ambitious double goal: first, to read Hugo’s final three novels within the Second-Empire context of their creation and initial reception; and second, to read Hugo “today” (meaning in the post-9/11 world) in order to explore “our own moral, political, and aesthetic challenges and to put them in a wider perspective ” (5). The second goal seems to be a response to the (truly worrisome) dearth of recent publications on Hugo’s novels: according to Grossman, apart from her own works, there have been only four major books devoted to Hugolian narrative since the 1960s (6). Yet Grossman’s work tends to be more convincing and interesting when it focuses on how Hugo responded to and attempted to shape events in his own time. Grossman argues that together, Les travailleurs de la mer (1866), L’homme qui rit (1869) and Quatrevingt-treize (1874) blend poetic and historical discourse in ways that reflect the aging Hugo’s preoccupations with revolutionary violence, with an ideal vision of social justice, and with his own legacy, both literary and political. This focus on the contemporary context yields some solid insights. For instance, Grossman convincingly demonstrates that the introductory “travelogue” chapter of Les travailleurs de la mer does not merely describe the geography and communities of the Channel Islands, but also mobilizes a subtle critique of Louis-Napoléon’s France. In her analysis of L’homme qui rit, Grossman interestingly applies critical theories of George Sand’s idealism to Hugo’s work, looking past overstated gendered distinctions between realist and idealist aesthetics. Her analysis of Quatrevingt-treize compares double identities of characters, objects, and places in order to talk about the complex role of history in a novel that brings together past Terror with a utopian vision of the future, in an effort to confront the recent events of the Paris Commune. By seeking always to prove the existence of an all-encompassing unity of vision that transcends the “superficial chaos” (7) of Hugo’s oeuvre, Grossman tends to downplay or gloss over some of the tensions and contradictions that make him (to some readers) so compelling. I appreciate more Grossman’s attention to small details. For instance, a reference to “Hugue(o)nots” living in the Channel islands demonstrates Hugo’s habit of slyly alluding to himself through coincidences of sound; as Grossman asks,“What better way to signal his status as a (political) protestant?” (47). These clever close readings make The Later Novels of Victor Hugo memorable and fun. Arcadia University (PA) Kate M. Bonin Harrington, Katharine N. Writing the Nomadic Experience in Contemporary Francophone Literature. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012. ISBN 978-0-7391-75712 . Pp. 147. $60. The introduction, which explores the changing significance over time of such terms as nomadism, diaspora, and exile, sets the stage for a thought-provoking discussion of several well-known contemporary Francophone writers and the narrative conceptualizations of place and identity in their respective oeuvres.As Harrington posits, a primary aim of the volume is to “widen the scope of the study of nomadism in contemporary French and Francophone literature” (12) through her selection of four authors with complex bicultural and/or bilingual backgrounds who “envision writing as a way to anchor themselves in their uncertain position between nations, cultures, languages, and even between the...

My Reference Is Prejudiced: David Lamelas's Publication

This article addresses David Lamelas's 1970 work Publication, arguing that it represents a subtle critique of the internationalization of conceptual art by a recent entrant into the West European milieu. Exhibited at Nigel Greenwood Gallery in London after the artist's 1968 relocation from Argentina, Publication consists of thirteen written responses to three statements about the possible use of “language as an Art Form” that were sent by Lamelas to international figures in conceptual art such Daniel Buren, Gilbert and George, Lucy Lippard, and Lawrence Wiener. A close reading of this and others of Lamelas's experiments works leading up to this moment reveals affinities with earlier artistic experiments in Buenos Aires, the artist's original context, that have anything but membership in a preexisting movement or the adoption of an established genre as their goal. Between the years 1965 and 1968, Lamelas was part of a group of artists associated with the Torcuato di Tella Institute and the writer Oscar Masotta, who advocated an analytical and antagonistic “dematerialization,” in which prevailing tendencies were to be systematically examined, voided from within, and superseded. In Buenos Aires, Lamelas experimented with breaking his works into sections as a way of calling attention to given objects of attention—a practice of “signaling” that is also present in Publication. Invariably, these works were positioned in critical relationship to those of his peers, applying Masotta's model to each new milieu. In what follows, I compare select works of Lamelas with his contemporaries in Buenos Aires and abroad between 1964 and 1970, contending that Publication represents one of the first appearances of a specifically Argentine, and highly critical, mode of conceptualism in the international art field.

Stefan George, Thomas Mann, and the Politics of Homoeroticism1

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Stefan George and Thomas Mann envisioned starkly different futures for Germany: the former espoused a geheimes Deutschland, a geistiges Reich that would limit itself to an intellectual elite, while the latter—after coming to terms with the consequences of World War One—championed the cause of democracy. In this paper, I argue that the political differences dividing George and Mann must be read as a disagreement over the question of how homoeroticism would figure in the new Germany. The argument culminates in my claim that, in his novel Der Zauberberg, Mann performs a subtle yet trenchant critique of George, his homoerotic theology, and his circle in general.

La critique de l’univers de Peurbach développée par Albert de Brudzewo a-t-elle influencé Copernic ? Un nouveau regard sur les réflexions astronomiques au XVe siècle

In 1454 Georg Peurbach teaches astronomy at the Collegium Civium in Wien by reading a work of his own: the Theoricae novae planetarum. Intended to replace the old Theorica planetarum communis which had dominated the mediaeval culture, this new book is very soon adopted in the major universities of Europe and enjoys a broad diffusion being published, studied and taught up to the middle of the 17th century. Among the numerous commentaries which have been preserved -both in manuscript and printed form- the tradition of the Cracow University, started by Albert of Brudzewo, distinguishes itself because it submit Peurbach’s contribution to a subtle critique which, while recognizing the merits to which its large acceptance is due, focuses also its limits. In the name of the reality of the celestial world, Brudzewo critiques the presence, in the universe of the Theoricae, of abstract entities like the equant and the mean apogee, to which the uniformity of the movements must be referred according to an active interaction with the “real” orbs. In the name of the celestial perfection, he grasps the weaknesses and incoherences of Peurbach’s universe and arrives, ultimately, to question this point of view which acts as the mean between the real celestial world and the way it appear to an observer. In this paper, I will try to show that what was strongly supported by Brudzewo as a requirement which must be respected -i.e. the perfect uniformity and circularity of celestial movements- becomes, in Copernicus, the reason to research an alternative solution: “a more reasonable model composed of circles from which every apparent irregularity would follow while everything in itself moved uniformly, just as the principle of perfect motion requires”. So, the better known among the students of the Cracow school proves that it is not only possible, but even necessary to make astronomy from a new point of view.

Dottie, Cruel Optimism and the Challenge to Culture

Gurnah's fictional world evinces an anti-reductionist sociology which constitutes in part a subtle critique of culture as identity. His work is infused with cultural flows, rhizomatic and liquid connectivities that challenge both the certainties and categories of his characters as well as the institutional ascription of a single cultural voice to Gurnah himself. His determination to write narratives that cannot be aligned with his own aetiology or location is especially evident in Dottie, centred not only on a woman but on one whose family origins and history are not mappable onto Gurnah's own. The refusal to use fiction as only a type of cultural alibi can be related to a view of personal and collective identity flows which this article explores with recourse to Seyla Benhabib's rejection of radical incommensurability and self-consistent cultures in The Claims of Culture. What will be seen to structure Dottie's pragmatic daily struggles is rather the ‘cruel optimism’ as elaborated upon by Lauren Berlant, the desire for something that hinders and frustrates you but which continues to organize your plans and choices, in this case the connectedness of family.

Listening in the Wilderness: The Audience Reception of Oliver Mtukudzi’s Music in the Zimbabwean Diaspora

Abstract Documenting the diasporic audience reception of Zimbabwean popular musician Oliver Mtukudzi, I argue that transnational identities and subjectivities are not only shaped through live performance, but are also negotiated, articulated, and produced through musical listening. Foregrounding intersections between diaspora, kinship, and moral obligation, I suggest that Mtukudzi’s songs enable audiences to symbolically reposition themselves within the social relations of a remembered home. In the process, audiences routinely interpret Mtukudzi’s songs about migration and diaspora, ostensibly directed beyond Zimbabwe’s borders, as reflecting back within the nation, conveying a powerful yet subtle critique of postcolonial domestic politics.

Self‐esteem and other‐esteem in college students with borderline and avoidant personality disorder features: An experimental vignette study

An experimental study investigated self-esteem and other-esteem responses to either fully supportive or less supportive interpersonal feedback in college students with avoidant and borderline personality disorder features (APD and BPD respectively). Disturbances in self-esteem and in evaluations of others are central to definitions of both APD and BPD, but the extent to which such interpersonal appraisals are responsive to contextual features, such as evaluative feedback from others, is not yet clear. In theory, we would expect that individuals with pronounced PD features would show more inflexible and more negative self-evaluations and others- evaluations than those without PD features. In this study with 169 undergraduates, APD but not BPD features were associated with other-contingent state self-esteem and other-esteem. A significant interaction indicated that highly avoidant respondents felt particularly negatively about themselves and their close others in situations that conveyed subtle criticism but not in situations signalling unequivocal support. This suggests that their self-esteem and other-esteem, rather than being rigidly negative, are instead highly contingent upon interpersonal feedback. Such context contingency has implications for the trait-like description of diagnostic characteristics within current taxonomies and is in line with contemporary dynamic models of personality structure and process.

Clandestine Schemes: Burney’s Cecilia and the Marriage Act

This essay reads Frances Burney’s Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) alongside the debates surrounding the 1753 Clandestine Marriages Act in order to show how the novel responds to and participates in one of the most divisive public controversies of the Enlightenment. In doing so, the essay challenges the view of Burney as a conservative defender of patriarchal culture, while highlighting the balances that she strikes between individual freedom and filial duty. The novel criticizes secret matches not only because they challenge the legitimate authority of parents and guardians, but also because they enable men to undermine women’s consent. Burney is keenly aware that parents and guardians sometimes abuse their authority, but she ultimately affords them considerable control over marriage: Cecilia suggests that all couples—even those over the age of majority—ought to obtain the approval of parents or guardians before they wed. While the novel imaginatively extends the reach of the Act, however, it offers a subtle critique of the patriarchal principle that underwrites this law. In Cecilia , Burney shows the dangers of turning marriage into an exchange between men. Shifting the locus of authority from Cecilia’s guardian and prospective father-in-law to her prospective mother-in-law, Burney highlights the importance of maternal as well as paternal consent. She also affirms Cecilia’s own agency in the negotiation of her union with Mortimer and even hints at Cecilia’s autonomy as a wife. In the bequest that Mrs. Delvile’s sister leaves Cecilia when she dies and the change that Mortimer undergoes after Cecilia’s illness, the novel offers a model of marriage as an affective agreement between two equal agents.

<em>Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading</em>, by Clinton Machann

Reviewed by: Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading by Clinton Machann Martin Danahay (bio) Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading, by Clinton Machann; pp. vi + 166. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010, £55.00, $99.95. Clinton Machann’s book attempts to resuscitate and rehabilitate arguments that emerged in the 1990s when the field of masculinity studies was new and the publications of R. W. Connell and Michael Kimmel helped delineate the field. This comes across most strongly in his chapter on Aurora Leigh (1856) which focuses largely on the role of Romney Leigh. Machann argues that Romney is a “heroic figure” and “sincere in his love” for Aurora (66), and is simply acting according to his “Christian humanistic vision”—an argument that glosses over Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s subtle critique of his hegemonic use of the language of selfless devotion (70). Romney is, in Machann’s terms, just trying to be a good man. The chapter as a whole could unfortunately be used as an argument against masculinity studies because the focus on masculinity occludes troubling issues of power in gender relations. The argument in this chapter and throughout Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics seems largely untouched by critical developments over the last few decades, especially the impact of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and the sustained critique of normative heterosexuality by those working in queer theory, despite Machann’s nod in the introduction toward critics who see gender as socially constructed. Machann points out correctly in this introduction that the Victorian long poem has been increasingly neglected, and as a result he focuses on four of the best examples from the period: Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–85), Aurora Leigh, Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage (1858), and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–69), in that order. While it’s admirable to see a book-length treatment of these poems as a remedy for their neglect, it is not clear why this genre rather than, say, four Victorian novels should be analyzed in terms of masculinity. Indeed the most successful of the chapters, on The Ring and the Book, notes its affinities with the novel and goes on to make some interesting and perceptive comments on changing attitudes toward violence against women as they inform the poem. Machann analyzes character in all senses of the word here as he does elsewhere, and his analysis works best with the complex psychological portraits in The Ring and the Book. [End Page 117] The analysis of these long poems is yoked to a defense of literary Darwinism, and again it is not entirely clear why these poems are the best subject to be studied from this perspective. As Machann says, he takes a “somewhat revisionist stance” in his approach to Victorian masculinities and goes on to argue that gender differences “ultimately derive from an interaction of innate qualities and cultural concepts” (16). This assumption seems to be what qualifies this analysis as literary Darwinist. However, the appeal to an innate human, especially male, propensity to violence flattens out the historical landscape so that Homer’s The Iliad might as well have been the topic of this book as the Victorian long poem if the aim were to examine such innate masculine traits as a tendency toward violence. The introduction of literary Darwinism into the mix, therefore, seems largely irrelevant, and a glance at the index shows that, after the discussion of the topic in the introduction, it is referred to again only twice in the rest of the book (81, 107–08). This raising, then dropping, of key theoretical points makes reading Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics a frustrating experience. While it is the work of an astute close reader of Victorian texts, it is often unclear what is at stake in the close readings. By the time one reaches the conclusion it’s not evident why the Victorian long poem was chosen as a focus for the book, why literary Darwinism would be brought to bear on it, and how it relates in its treatment of masculinity to other Victorian art forms such as the novel or...

Life in the Valley: Figures of Dehumanization in Heinrich Heine's “Prinzessin Sabbat”

This article extracts from Heinrich Heine’s famous poem “Prinzessin Sabbat” a portrait of the Jew as a figure that occupies a liminal state between humanity and animality. This figure of the Jew, who spends the week as a dog and regains his humanity on the Sabbath, has been conventionally read as allegorical of Jewish existence in the diaspora. Without challenging this interpretation, I propose an alternative reading of the figure of the Jew in Heine’s poem as emblematic of his own deteriorated physical condition during the last eight years of his life, and link it to his departure from the “Hellenic” persona he had previously espoused in his writings, and to his renewed interest in Judaism. The Judaism with which Heine identified toward the end of his life had little to do with the “Nazarene” mentality that he had fiercely denounced in his earlier writings. Rather, the figure of the Jew in Heine’s late writings problematizes the prevalent anthropocentric outlook that maintained since biblical times the supremacy of humanity over all of creation, and breaks the traditional boundary between human and earthly nature. From the perspective of the Jew who shares the suffering that epitomizes creaturely life, Heine articulates a subtle critique of German Romanticism.

The Homeschooling of Scout Finch

Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most widely taught texts in language arts classrooms through the English-speaking world and is greatly valued by many readers today for its depiction of youth grappling with racism in the American South of the Depression Era. However, the novel’s subtle and sustained critique of public education has remained largely unrecognised. This essay identifies in the novel an underlying nostalgia for the past homeschooling of Southern white aristocracy as well as disdain for modern public institutions and for the democratic values that those institutions seek to instil in youth.

History as a “Well-Told Lie” in Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family

This paper reads Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family as both a subtle critique of the exclusionary narratives of nation-building in Sri Lanka and an imaginative reconstruction of personal and national history. Through a brief study of the nation's history, this paper first traces the creation of the dominant national narrative. In the second part, this paper demonstrates how Ondaatje attempts to reclaim the nation for those who exist in the periphery by placing his eccentric father at the center of the novel. This recuperation of both familial and national history establishes the essential fictionality of all narratives.

Errata

To the Editor: Professor Phillip Brian Harper, Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, has pointed out to me in a recent email exchange that twice in my essay “Marilynne Robinsons Gilead and the Difficult Gift of Human Exchange” (59:2, Winter 2010) I misnamed John Ames' second wife (Lila) as Delia. I did this once while supplying Ames' wife's name as a parenthetical reference within a quote (218) and once while describing Ames' reference to his second wife and their unexpected falling in love as evidence that “transformations just that abrupt do occur in this life” (225). But Delia was the name of Jack Boughton's African-American wife, or perhaps former wife, for whom he wonders if there would be room in Gilead. The Iowa town may not be as hospitable to a biracial couple in the 1950s as it would have been earlier in the century. My mistaking Delia's name for Lilas, Professor Harper writes, “seems worth noting because the slip could be read as a recapitulation of the very disavowal of personalized racial politics that Ames and old Boughton themselves enact, and of which Robinson is arguably offering a subtle but clear critique.” I see his point, however much I would prefer not to identify with—much less further—the racial politics which Robinson critiques. Later, Professor Harper writes that the mistaken attribution “might be seen as a comparable—albeit unintentional (though that unintentionality is part of my point)—disavowal of the real significance of racial difference in the very sites of daily personal experience and familial domesticity that are the focal points of the novel.” “Disavowal” might name what Robinson exposes in the novel and finds that critics haven't given enough attention to. It would be good to hear Professor Harper develop this point further. In unintentional and ironic ways, I reversed the direction of the following statement by Ames, once fear of Jack is replaced by recognition of shared flaw and fellow-feeling. “I felt,” Ames writes his son, “as if I'd have bequeathed him wife and child if I could to supply the loss of his own” (quoted on p. 230). It's interesting to speculate whether Ames would have done any better with my misattribution than old Boughton would. I like to think he would have. Robinson seems pretty critical of Ames at the end, but she allows him a fair bit of self-criticism, too. More interesting is whether we readers run hard enough against the flow of American racial politics as it influences us—this is Professor Harper's concern—in our daily personal experience and familial domesticity. I hope my unintentional error points out the difficulty of that running rather than unwittingly strengthens the current. It's no wonder that Augustine refers to human custom as a flood we can hardly withstand. Maybe the last word should go to Lila. She's mostly the listener as Jack, old Boughton, and John Ames discuss questions about predestination on the front porch (152-53). Glory has already gone inside, saying that she's heard this argument a thousand times before, and hates it. Suddenly Lila interrupts the awkward discussion. Robinson presents the interruption this way: ‘“What about being saved?’ She said, ‘If you can't change, there don't seem much purpose in it.’ She blushed. ‘That's not what I meant.’” But she does mean something like that. The conversation ends with her answering Jack, though still not looking at him, “A person can change. Everything can change.” With difficulty. For Jack, for Ames, for us. Respectfully, Michael Vander Weele Trinity Christian College

The Politics of Translation in Francis Sylvester Mahony's “The Rogueries of Thomas Moore”

This article re-examines the satirical writings of the Irish wit, essayist and journalist, Francis Sylvester Mahony (1804–1866) (“Father Prout”), who in the 1830s authored a series of comic articles for the conservative London periodical, Fraser's Magazine. It focuses on his best-known essay, “The Rogueries of Thomas Moore” (1834), which provides an ironic commentary on the politicization of historical debate in post-Emancipation Ireland. The article looks afresh at his nuanced critique of the patriotic verse of Thomas Moore (1779–1852). The concept of “original translation,” or translation as “transformation,” is explored in relation to Mahony's supposed discovery of foreign-language precursors to Moore's nationalist ballad collection, the Irish Melodies. In addition, the article explores Mahony's parodic upending of Moore's efforts to recreate an authentic Gaelic past in his English-language poetry, as well as Mahony's subtle critique of the role played by translation in the politicized rewriting of Irish history. It also uses critical theory to examine Mahony's ironic conception of textual transformation in his reworked ballads, resituating his comic re-assessment of Moore's poetry in the broader context of the emergence of a post-Romantic literature in 1830s Ireland.

The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North (review)

Reviewed by: The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North S. Chandler Lighty (bio) The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North. By Michael Thomas Smith. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. vii, 229. $35.00 cloth) Generations of historians have followed T. Harry Williams’s 1952 thesis in interpreting the Civil War as “the first of the modern total wars” (p. 2). McNeese State University professor Michael Thomas Smith, however, detects a paradox in describing the war as modern since many wartime Americans adhered to “elements of . . . premodern political philosophy” characterized by an “intense suspicion of corruption” (p. 2). Smith applies the word corruption in the nineteenth-century sense of the word to encompass any misuse of power that threatened economics, society, morals, or politics. Civil War Northerners rooted in republican values and ideology “were deeply fearful of the centralization of power . . . [and] consistently perceived its encroachment as dangerous corruption rather than welcome protection” (p. 10). Some vigilant Northerners would point to various scandals that cropped up in the Federal government as evidence of widespread corruption. While Smith considers most Civil-War-era corruption scandals as “overblown” and “bogeymen,” he interprets the very real fears of corruption as illuminating “key aspects of the values and beliefs central to Americans of this era—specifically, their attitudes towards republicanism and masculinity” (pp. 13, 175, 12). Smith illustrates his argument by assessing several Civil War corruption [End Page 113] scandals involving government contractors, political generals, recruitment fraud, wanton activity in the Treasury Department, and the cotton trade. These scandals, for some Northerners, threatened to undermine civic and societal virtues. The concern over government contractors stemmed from the sale of “shoddy” merchandise and the perception that they were war profiteers (a “shoddy aristocracy”), which was antithetical to prized mores of “self-sacrifice and . . . condemnation of greed” (p. 21). Political generals, like Benjamin F. Butler and John C. Frémont, were also lightning rods for corruption fears. Both generals had self-interested designs for political power that often were at odds with mid-nineteenth-century ideals of manhood such as self-restraint and disinterested benevolence. Smith concludes that for some Northerners, “The preservation of the republic . . . came to depend as much on keeping [men like] Frémont out of power as it did on defeating the Confederates” (pp. 93–94). Another unmanly group, bounty jumpers, oftentimes drew the ire of citizens who reviled them for their “greed, cowardice, and a lack of patriotism” (p. 127). Many of the scandals examined had a strong correlation between “private and public virtue”—when people failed to be virtuous in private life, Northerners questioned their ability to be virtuous in public life (p. 112). Smith offers the titillating accusations of sexual misconduct between male and female Treasury Department employees as an example. This hyperbolic scandal likely added fuel to the fire for Northerners who were already suspicious about Treasury policies, like issuing paper money, which encroached upon republican values. The cotton trade was another profit-motivated scandal that corrupted “anyone who had anything to do with cotton” and besmirched the reputations of otherwise upstanding leaders like political general Nathaniel P. Banks and even Abraham Lincoln (p. 161). The Enemy Within is concise, well-written, and provides a subtle critique of much standard historiography regarding the Civil War as a “modern” war. One notable, and inexplicable, omission from his secondary-source bibliography is Mark Wilson’s The Business of the Civil War (2006), which one needs to engage if one is to argue [End Page 114] that the Civil War was not a “modern” war. One gets the impression from Smith’s often all-inclusive use of “Northerners” that all Northerners harbored fears of corruption. However, his examples fail to conclusively show this. His evidence does show that there were some Northerners who cherished republican values, but he does not show that there were also Northerners who endorsed and rallied to the actions of the Federal government. It remains to be seen which group was the more populous or influential. In the end, The Enemy Within is a generally informative and entertaining monograph; the chapter on the Treasury Department scandal is original...

To what extent did censorship affect the writing of Cinco Horas con Mario?

The censorial regulations introduced by the Franco regime created a harsh environment for authors wishing to include dissenting messages in their writing. Despite being published after the supposedly liberating Press Law of 1966, Miguel Delibes clearly felt the need to self-censor while writing Cinco Horas con Mario as letters between the Spanish author and his editor testify. Although perhaps less conservative in his approach to censorship than his predecessors, the minister of culture and tourism, Manuel Fraga, who introduced the law, only appeared to encourage greater caution from Spanish writers while approaching their work. If any viewpoint criticizing the regime was traced, the offending novel would be confiscated and its author either fined or imprisoned. Through intelligent use of characterisation, imagery and authorial silence, Delibes edited and altered his work sufficiently in order to smuggle his dissenting opinions past censors. As a result, his novel Cinco Horas con Mario included subtle criticism of the on-going ideological conflict, the Church’s dubious relationship with the regime and the disadvantaged situation of women in Francoist society whilst maintaining a legitimate relationship with the regime after its publication.

Michele Savonarola: Medicina e cultura di corte (review)

Reviewed by: Michele Savonarola: Medicina e cultura di corte Joseph Ziegler Chiara Crisciani and Gabriella Zuccolin, eds. Michele Savonarola: Medicina e cultura di corte. Micrologus Library 37. Florence: Sismel, 2011. xxii + 299 pp. €48.00 (978-88-8450-400-5). The grand narrative of premodern medicine draws a clear line between learned medicine (scholastic in style and nature, theory oriented, Latin, bookish, university based, an agent assimilating a substantial body of ancient and Islamic sources, and inventor of refined technical vocabulary) and practical medicine (vernacular, experimental, empirical, patient oriented, lacking an institutional base, often related to astrology and other auxiliary sciences). Courts (royal, princely, or papal) were responsible for a significant output of medical texts before 1500 in the Latin [End Page 123] West. The role of courts in patronage of medical knowledge and professionals is well known, but was the medicine that emerged from these courts different from the medicine emerging from other centers of knowledge? Michele Savonarola: Medicina e cultura di corte is a collection of eleven essays originating from a similarly titled 2005 conference in Pavia and centering on the activity and medical writings of Michele Savonarola, who from the 1440s was linked to the Este court in Ferrara. For the editors of this volume the complex figure of Michele Savonarola provides a typical case study that allows us to draw the distinctive characteristics of court medicine in Quattrocento Italy. Chiara Crisciani’s useful and heavily annotated introductory chapter supplies a detailed survey of the vast secondary literature on premodern court medicine in general and Michele Savonarola in particular. His career displays themes typical of court medicine: political patronage, a strong empirical orientation and attention to particulars, and recourse to descriptive heuristics expressed by specific case histories. The fluid, open, varied, and often changing situation of the court physician facilitated alliances between medicine and other bodies of knowledge: astrology, physiognomy, alchemy, and magic as well as ethics, history, pedagogy, and politics. Monica Ferrari supplies a historiographic survey of court culture with particular reference to the important role of the physician in the formation and education of the new prince, in regulating life and defining well-being at court, and in furnishing political advice. The general scientific culture in fifteenth-century Ferrara is covered by Silvia Nagel (the contribution of the Jewish community to the local culture, in particular the presence of prominent Jewish physicians such as Amato Lusitano and Moses Alatino); Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti (the scientific books in the Este library, which faithfully reflects the intellectual interests of the Ferrara ducal family); and Stefano Cracolici, who elegantly examines the physiological and psychological meanings of the term bizzarria (eccentricity, oddity) and their implications in some of Savonarola’s works, thereby illuminating his moralistic view of courtly life and courtly behavior. Cracolici thus enables us to better understand Savonarola’s place within his contemporary intellectual setting and uncovers his subtle critique of the courtiers, tainted by a capricious mood and thus prone to anger, which potentially undermines the state’s well-being. But the heart of the collection is dedicated to the study of medical practice through the reading of Savonarola’s writings. Danielle Jacquart explores Savonarola’s Practica maior to sketch the complex medical and intellectual profile of this court physician. This Latin text, which often was the source for his later vernacular practical treatises, reveals the author’s piety and his belief in the direct link between successful cure and the physician’s religious gestures and behavior. His dietetic advice is dictated by essential norms of courtly art de vivre and etiquette, not just by physiological principles and needs (e.g., a detailed excursus on the proper way to slice meat at a nobleman’s table is inserted into the chapter on meat). Jacquart examines the place of astrological considerations in Savonarola’s practice, his pharmacological strategy and attitudes to surgery as alternative ways [End Page 124] to treat patients, as well as the incursion of theoretical considerations into his medical practice. Riccardo Gualdo formulates guidelines for the vast project of a critical edition of Savonarola’s vernacular medical works, which are studied by four of the contributors to the volume. Marilyn Nicoud carefully examines a specific...

We and them rhetoric in a left-wing secessionist newspaper: a comparative analysis of Basque and Spanish language editorials

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