BRILL
La fiction des déclamations.
Mal-Maeder (Latin language and literature, U. of Lausanne) examines Latin declamations, elements of language that were a central element in literary antiquity and the highlight of a rhetorical education but are now receiving little attention. She focuses on their role in the Roman education system, the novel and poetry, bringing to light their importance as historical sources. She begins by explaining the reasons why declamations are so important but have been the subject of so little study, then analyzes the uses of declamations in rhetoric and rhetorical education. She examines examples of their use as literary devices, including their role in persuasion, horror, intertextual studies and reflection, and in a particularly interesting section describes their use by "other voices," those of women and homosexuals. She traces the influence of declamations on the development of the novel with fine examples and includes a fascinating set of samples in an appendix. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Law and ethnic plurality; socio-legal perspectives.
Shah (law, Queen Mary, U. of London, UK) presents nine papers originally delivered as a series of lectures under the rubric of "Cultural Diversity and Law" at the UK's Institute of Advanced Legal Studies from January to March 2006. The papers address, from a variety of perspectives, the socio-legal realities of diasporic ethnic minorities in Britain (for the most part) and elsewhere. Specific topics include cultural diversity and the importance of normative foundations for legal responses; the limitations of European Union law with respect to immigration, diversity, and integration; implications for the black community of changes in UK drugs policy and practice; juries and the challenge of ethnic plurality; artistic license, free speech, and religious sensibilities in a multicultural society; the politics of planning law and mosque development in the city of Birmingham; alternative dispute resolution in a diasporic Muslim community in Britain; ethnic minority marriages in British legal systems; and ethnicity and the senior judiciary in England and Wales. Martinus Nijhoff is an imprint of Brill. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Law of the sea, environmental law and settlement of disputes; Liber Amicorum Judge Thomas A. Mensah
The chief editors (a pair of judges of the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea) present a legal festschrift dedicated to Judge Thomas A. Mensah, the first President of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. The festschrift contains 59 papers examining topics related to Mensah's areas of interest. Naturally, the bulk of the papers relate to the international law of the sea and include discussions of such topics as public trusteeship for oceans, the penal law of ship-source marine pollution, fair treatment of seafarers in the event of a maritime accident, sea boundary delimitation and internal waters, military activities and the regime of the exclusive economic zone, offshore bunkering in the exclusive economic zone, states parties and the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, the regulation of navigation under international law as a tool for protecting marine environments, delimitation disputes under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and international litigation as a weapon to combat sub-standard ships. Reflecting other significant concerns of Mensah, the volume also contains papers dealing with the rules and principles of international law, rules and procedures of international dispute settlement, and environmental law. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Legitimising rejection; international refugee law in Southeast Asia.
Although the region is home to some of the largest number of refugees in the world, most of the countries of Southeast Asia are not signatories to the international instruments constituting international refugee law. Davies (law, Queensland U. of Technology, Australia) seeks to explain this lack by examining the region's response to international refugee law in general and, more specifically, the politics of refugee law in response to the Indochinese refugee crisis from 1975-1996. His key focus is to find an answer to the question of whether having nations involved in law formation is more likely to lead to participation in law application. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
LXX-Isaiah as translation and interpretation; the strategies of the translator of the Septuagint of Isaiah.
Troxel (Hebrew and religious studies, U. of Wisconsin-Madison) challenges the view of scholars over the past half century that the translator of Isaiah deliberately infused beliefs and issues of his day into the text. That conclusion is based on undisciplined associations between unique phraseology in the book and significant events known from the second century BCE, he argues. As an alternative approach, he considers how translation was conceived in the Hellenistic era, how ancient scholars studied and revered texts, and how to determine what a distinctive Greek locution is based on. Readers are expected to be able to compare Hebrew and Greek versions of passages. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Meddlers or mediators?; African interveners in civil conflicts in eastern Africa.
Taking conflicts over the past 20 years in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Sudan as case studies, Khadiagala (international relations, U. of Witwatersrand) examines why and how African mediators intervene in civil wars, and the outcomes of their interventions. He looks at the motives, resources, and intervention strategies, in order to explain the constraints and opportunities at the three levels of state mediation, elder statesmen, and regional mediators. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Metaphor and ideology; liber antiquitatum biblicarum and literary methods through a cognitive lens.
Independent scholar DesCamp asks whether contemporary cognitive linguistic blending theory is appropriate in the analysis of first century Judaic texts, and what the stories of women say about that text, the Liber Antiquarium Biblicarum. Convinced that the author of the text is a woman, DesCamp develops a systematic reading of the work and its characters and comes to the conclusion not only that the methodology is valid but that the lives of the women in the work personify its theology and ideology. After she introduces the text and the conceptual blending and metaphor theory, she describes the work's narrative and rhetorical methods and describes her results in applying cognitive methods. The result reveals, among many other interesting findings, that the author of the Liber Antiquarium Biblicarum was deeply concerned by the possible disruption of family life at a societal level. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The Mongolia-Tibet interface; opening new research terrains in Inner Asia; proceedings.
The four-session panel was held to extend the discussion began in a special 2002 edition of Inner Asia devoted to the interface between Tibetan and Mongolian cultures. Scholars from the region and elsewhere in the world present a wide range of material and approaches. The topics include the demise of Buddhism in Inner Mongolia, the story of Dugar Jaisang and popular views of Mongolian-Tibetan relations from Mongolian perspectives, Danzan Ravjaa as the fierce drunken lord of the Gobi, and Mongol cultural sites and customs in modern 'Dan Gzhung (Tibet Autonomous Region). No index is provided. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Navigational servitudes; sources, applications, paradigms.
Gillis offers more than 30 years of thought and experience in this text on international and municipal navigable waters issues. He notes the absence of a connecting theme or conceptual matrix for these bodies of related laws and jurisdictions, a reality with which he has long dealt. He describes navigational servitudes in terms of the history of North American perceptions from the seventeenth century onwards, the issues of transmittal as well as consolidation and merger, sources, public trust, prerogative, constitution, the parallels in the conventional law of the sea and in historic waters, commerce, and the public law of the oceans. The result elucidates theory considerably and yet is logical, very well-grounded and practical, with plenty for practitioners to use. Martinus Nijhoff is an imprint of Brill. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
New aspects of international investment law.
Research undertaken under the auspices of the Centre for Studies and Research in International Law and International Relations during its session in 2004 is presented in 16 contributed chapters, some in English and some in French. The introduction, in both languages, offers a brief overivew of the evolution of international economic law and its current state, pointing to the contents of the book for more precise delineation of these topics as well as a look toward the future. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography focusing mainly on the legal aspects of international investment since the 1900s through 2006, as well as analytic tables and indices. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The New Testament in Greek IV; the Gospel according to St. John, edited by the American and British committees of the International Greek New Testament Project; v.2: The Majuscules.
The photographs of some of the oldest parchment manuscripts of the Gospel of St. John in Greek are actually exciting. The texts include such important witnesses as the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus. The scholars involved have wisely chosen to focus on fragmentary copies and those that are difficult to read. The project, which those involved decided early would have to be compiled in stages, allows for the latest developments in editorial methods and tools. Along with the base text the editors include a fascinating description of the technologies involved, descriptions of the individual transcriptions and their use in this edition, a summary of material in the printed and electronic version, dates of the majuscules, and a complete critical apparatus of all the parchment copies of the gospel. The result is invaluable. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
NGO involvement in international governance and policy; sources of legitimacy.
Vedder (ethics and law, Tilburg U., the Netherlands) and colleagues examine the normative reasons non-governmental organizations can and cannot legitimately display power and be legitimate participants in international governance. Contributions address perceptions of legitimacy among stakeholders, legal status and accreditation as forms of regulatory legitimacy, state perceptions of legitimacy, legitimacy and NGO Internet activities, and the relationship between the legitimacy of NGOs and the legitimacy of the global order. Martinus Nijhoff is an imprint of Brill. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Obtaining evidence abroad in criminal cases.
First published in 2001, this volume contains updates from 2004 and February 2007. International cooperation at the police, prosecutorial, and judicial levels are described before turning to laws over obtaining evidence from foreign countries by the U.S., cooperative methods for obtaining evidence in absence of mutual assistance treaty, use of coercive methods, and U.S. assistance to foreign authorities and defendants. The appendices contain forms, treaties, provisions, and related documents. Abbell is former director of the office of international affairs of the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice. The guide is published in 3-ring binder with loose-leaf pages for ease of copying and updating. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
One foot in Heaven; narratives on gender and Islam in Darfur, West-Sudan.
Willemse (anthropology, Erasmus U., Rotterdam, the Netherlands) lived in the town of Kebkabiya for a year and a half between 1990 and 1995, so her account predates both 9/11 and the emergence of the Darfur War into international attention. She compares the lives of two women as examples of merchant and teacher classes to explore varying national and local interpretations of Islamic teachings about gender. The study served as her 2001 Ph.D. dissertation for the University of Leiden; she has added section introductions setting her findings within the context of recent events. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Orthodoxies and heterodoxies in early modern German culture; order and creativity, 1500-1750.
From an April 2005 conference at Duke University, the fourth in a triennial series on early modern German thought, 10 papers look at such topics as the role of adiaphorism in early modern Protestantism, editing Italian music for Lutheran Germany, God's plan for the Swiss Confederation, and the provocation of the void for Baroque culture. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Painting faith; Li Gonglin and Northern Song Buddhist culture.
Pan (Chinese art history, Cornell U.) places Li Gonglin, a premier artist of the twelfth century, firmly within the painter's proper context, within the northern Song Buddhist regional culture and specifically in the local Longmian Chan. In the process, he investigates the institutional environment of the Longmian Chan circles, the landscape of his early working years and the artist's White Lotus Society Picture for the Pure Land faith of its creator. His analysis is precise and compelling, the illustrations he has chosen are exquisite, and the result is the invocation of a flesh-and-blood artist and his most beloved work. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Parenthesis in Biblical Hebrew.
Zewi (Hebrew language, U. of Haifa, Israel) points out that parenthetical words or phrases are relatively rare constructions in Biblical Hebrew. In this major contribution to studies on the subject, she identifies and discusses all examples of such peripheral narrative units in classical Hebrew — following an overview of their general place in relevant disciplines — via the multidisciplinary approaches of biblical translations, linguistics, text linguistics, discourse studies, textual philology, comparative Semitics, and literature. While content rather than structure often provides clues to categorization as parenthetical, she treats their linguistic properties as well and compares their use to that in later stages of Hebrew. Indexing is by citation, subject, and author is this finely-crafted (content- and production-wise) volume. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The persecution of the Jews and Muslims of Portugal; King Manuel I and the end of religious tolerance (1496-7).
The story of religious tolerance and its dramatic end in 1492 in the three Christian kingdoms that became modern Spain is well known, but Soyer, a specialist on religious minorities and the Inquisition in Medieval and Early Modern Spain and Portugal, reminds readers that there was a fourth Christian kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula. He discusses parallel developments in Portugal during the late 15th century: in December 1496, Jewish and Muslim minorities were given 10 months to leave. The study began as his 2006 Ph.D. dissertation in history at the University of Cambridge. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Petrarch and the textual origins of interpretation.
Drawn from those delivered at The Italian Academy at Columbia U. in December 2004, these ten essays focus on Petrarch's hermeneutics and philology as expressed in the interplay between his texts and their material preparation and reception. Topics include Petrarch's editorial lapses and narrative impositions as compared to Wilkins's doctrine of the nine forms of the rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Wilkins's approach to the manuscripts of Canzoniere, erasures in MS Vaticano Latino 3195, scribal practices and book formats in three manuscripts of vernacular poems, Petrarch's approach to Boccaccio in the Triumphs, the grammar beneath the rerum vulgarium fragmenta (in Italian), Petrarch's imaginary arts, Andreae and Familiares IV 15 and 16, traditional materials for autobiographies (in Italian), and Pertrarchan hermeneutics and the rediscovery of intimacy. The result is well-balanced, rigorous, and interesting even to non-experts. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Plympton Priory; a house of Augustinian Canons in south-western England in the late Middle Ages.
Fizzard (history, U. of Regina, Saskatchewan), finds that the history of the priory of Saints Peter and Paul in Plympton, Devon, England reveals a good deal about the nature of the Augustinian religious order and its place in medieval religion and society. She discusses how the priory was an integral part of the social fabric of Devon and Cornwall from the 12th to the 16th centuries, interacting with various groups. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
