BRILL
A spirited exchange; the wine and brandy trade between France and the Dutch Republic in its Atlantic framework, 1600-1650.
Kops (history, Georgetown U.) believes it is time to reassess the attitude that only the Baltic and trans-oceanic grain trade were important in the early seventeenth century. She intends to give the coastal wine and brandy trade in France and the Dutch republic its due, in part because its economic value at least rivals that of the more prestigious grain trade and it provided ready cash, without which other commercial enterprises would have been impossible. She focuses on how trade between Nantes and Rotterdam developed and those cities' function as distribution points. She examines the impact of the imports and exports within Dutch, French, Jewish and Atlantic regional trade history, noting especially how success in trade affected minority cultures such as the Dutch in Nantes and the Sephardim in Rotterdam, and closes by describing how the coastal trade impacted the regional Dutch-Atlantic economy. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Strength beyond structure; social and historical trajectories of agency in Africa.
Anthropologist de Bruijn (African Studies Centre, Leiden) calls agency "... perhaps the most slippery and fuzzy concept the tool-kit of social science has ever produced." Nonetheless, she believes that agency research has contributed to African studies by elucidating researchers' values. Following an introduction to the Manchester School and other approaches to studying Africa, international scholars present a dozen case studies (one in untranslated French) treating agency-structure dynamics, e.g., a Nambibian chief's opposition to South African rule, concepts of agency in the Kapsiki religion of Cameroon and Nigeria, family dynamics in the changing Zimbabwe economy, and how street children in Chad act out their agency. The volume includes a map showing the featured case study sites but lacks an index. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The study of religion under the impact of fascism.
Historians and other scholars of religion from across Europe open doors that have been closed for two generations and look at how members of their profession conducted their work during the 1930s and 1940s under the Nazi and Fascist rule. They discuss the Aryan myth, southeastern Europe, the Catholic perspective and the Protestant paradigm, and the quest for theories. The 22 essays, 12 in English, are from a July 2004 conference in Tübingen. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Supplementum epigraphicum graecum; v.53-2, 2003.
This second physical volume of the 53rd virtual volume contains epigrams 451 to 2267 arranged by region from Boiotia to Varia with passages through such places as Thessaly, Moesia, the north shore of the Black Sea, Crete, Gaul, Susiana, and Egypt. Each article describes the medium inscribed, its original and current location, discovery and provenance, meaning, relations to other inscriptions, and other information useful to dedicated scholars. There are eight indices, some with more than one section, by names of ships and animals, Roman Emperors and their families, religious terms, and important Greek words as well as more conventional features. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Teacher in faith and virtue; Lanfranc of Bec's commentary on Saint Paul.
Before he was adviser to William the Conqueror and other kings, served as Archbishop of Canterbury, and helped shape the doctrine of transubstantiation, he was the simply monk Lanfranc (d. 1089), a teacher at the monastery of Bec. There he wrote a commentary on the letters of Paul for the first class he taught. Revising her doctoral dissertation completed in 2002 at the University of Pennsylvania, Collins examines that commentary as a window into the young man's ideas before his life was transformed by international power politics. The quotations are in English. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Time and the warm body; a musical perspective on the construction of time.
Burrows (music emeritus, New York U.) makes his central topic musical aesthetics but takes an entirely different approach, examining music theory in comparison with the study of time, cognitive science, neurobiology, ethnography, ethnomusicology, and cosmology, holding that theorizing any musical practice is inherently multidisciplinary because it is based on what music does and what is important in it. His lively text, punctuated by commentary on such as Mozart and Einstein, necessarily ranges widely amongst such topics as the balancing point of dynamical systems, the now and the proto-present, the geometries and hierarchies of time, and the relations of time and narrative. Some of his most interesting material covers the influence of music in how the body senses time and includes a sarabande by Bach as a final test case. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Time in ancient Greek literature; studies in ancient Greek narrative; v.2.
The second in a series intending to investigate "the forms and functions of the main devices which [Ancient Greek] narratology has defined for us, such as the narrator and his narratees, time, focalization, characterization, description, speech, and plot," this volume edited by De Jong (Greek, U. of Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and Nünlist (classics, Brown U., US) is dedicated to the examination of the diachronic history of Greek narrative forms and functions concerning time over the course of 12 centuries and thus helps answers narratologist Monika Fludernik's 2003 call to explore such questions as how much reader address occurs across centuries, the temporal origins of certain techniques or constellations, and shifting functions of narrative features and techniques across time. The volume's 30 chapters are organized into sections on epic and elegiac poetry, historiography, choral lyric, drama, oratory, philosophy, biography, and the novel. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Tolerance through law; self governance and group rights in South Tyrol.
After long conflict, the German speaking minority in the northern Italian province acquired self-governance within its own territory in 1992, a solution that has been hailed as one of the most successful examples of such approaches. Here a multinational team of legal scholars from the European Academy report the findings of their multi-year research project into the framework, self-governance, minority rights, and lessons to be learned in South Tyrol. Martinus Nijhoff is an imprint of Brill. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Towards a reorganisation system for sovereign debt; an international law perspective.
In what appears to have been written first as a doctoral study for the U. of Gießen, Germany, the author aims to identify minimum standards of international law that can be applied to the regulation of the relationship between insolvent sovereign states and their creditors. He introduces the topic with a brief history of state insolvency and previous legal proposals before turning to his own proposal, which he derives from general principles of international law as identified from comparison of common features of corporate reorganization laws in Argentina, England, France, Germany, Indonesia, and the United States. He also addresses enforcement mechanisms, rejecting the usefulness of retorsion, reprisal, and sanctions in favor of an international compliance control mechanism. Martinus Nijhoff is an imprint of Brill. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Trinity and man; Gregory of Nyssa's Ad ablabium.
Maspero (Pontifical U. of the Holy Cross), whose doctorates in physics and theology serve him well here, ably analyzes the mystery of why the Trinity is one God. As he works through the Ad Ablabium as his test case, he finds the details behind Gregory of Nyssa's social analogy of the Trinity and delineates its contexts, including questions relevant to Gregory's interpretations and the linguistic devices Gregory uses. Maspero makes his case by describing the relation between the human name and the divine name, the natures of human and divine activities and energies, the role of unity of action, the full interpretation of the concept of "person," including the theology of name and image, and the role of the Holy Spirit in unity. The result is more than simply a close reading of Gregory and provides new possibilities for both debate and doctrine. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The trinitarian theology of Hilary of Poitiers.
Weedman (biblical and historical theology, Crossroads College, Minnesota) offers an account of the fourth-century bishop's Trinitarian theology in a manner designed to clarify his contribution to Latin Trinitarian theology generally. He begins by setting Hilary's work within the Trinitarian controversies of his time and the particular people he encountered. Then he describes the main themes, scope, and structure of his Trinitarian theology. The treatise is much revised from his 2004 Ph.D. dissertation in religious studies at Marquette University. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The value of victory in Pindar's odes; gnomai, cosmology and the role of the poet.
Boeke (D. Litt. in classics, U. of Stellenbosch) investigates the cosmological context of the victory odes of the canonical Greek lyric poet Pindar (c. 522-443 BCE). She approaches the topics from two directions. First, she discusses the gnomai (proverbs and maxims) interspersed through out the works, describing their main function as providing the basis for Pindar's central ideas about the gods and man's relationship to the divine, the human condition, and man in society. Second, she conducts close readings of three of the odes — Olympian 12, Isthmian 4, and Olympian 3 — to see how the elements of the above cosmology are applied in specific circumstances. She also includes a discussion of the role of the poet in mediating cosmological premises. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Virtue ethics in the middle ages; commentaries on Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, 1200-1500.
Medieval philosophers had more than theology to guide them in building their understanding of ethics. In this collection of 12 accessible and lively articles, drawn from a conference held January 2006, contributors describe the tradition of commentaries on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics from its rediscovery in the thirteenth century, including work by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas on courage, magnanimity and justice. Topics include the ethical concepts expressed in early commentaries, ideas about moral and intellectual virtues in the earliest Latin commentaries, and notions in the Naples Commentary; concepts about heroic virtue and the Aristotelian theory of friendship in the second half of the thirteenth century; commentary on the cardinal virtues, politics and virginity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and the teaching of ethics at the University of Vienna in the fifteenth century. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Wisdom literature in Mesopotamia and Israel.
Clifford (Old Testament, Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Cambridge, MA) chaired a panel on "Mesopotamian Wisdom Literature and Its Legacy in the Ancient Near East" at the 2004 meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. A contributor to this collection of seven panel-derived papers notes that biblical scholars have paid more attention to the influence of Egyptian literature than they have to that of Semitic literature, undoubtedly because the latter has not been as accessible as the former until recently. Authors redress this imbalance by tracing the evolution and social/ intellectual contexts of this genre, and examining specific Babylonian texts (e.g., the epic "Gilgamesh," the humorous "Dialogue between a Master and his Servant") and their parallels to biblical literature. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Women, gender, and radical religion in early modern Europe.
Scholars mostly of literature, but also of women and religion, look at the role of women in radical religion in Britain and across Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. Among their topics are the gender dynamics of early Quaker women's injurious speech, spiritual maternity in the works of Jane Lead (1624-1704), and radical religion in the life and poetry of Luisa de Carvajal. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Yearbook of the European convention on human rights; v.49A.
This annual publication, presented in both English and French, contains the proceedings of the colloquy, "Protecting and supporting human rights defenders in Europe," held in Strasbourg in November of 2006. It contains all the contributions to the plenary session as well as the reports from the three workshops, which discussed the obstacles encountered by human rights defenders and the responses by the Council of Europe and other international actors to their concerns. The colloquy consisted of exchanges between representatives of civil society and governments from the 46 member states of the Council of Europe. Keynote and introductory speeches and opening addresses are included. There is no index. Martinus Nijhoff is an imprint of Brill. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
