History

What influences the Northern media’s coverage of events and abuses in explicit human rights terms? Do international NGOs have an impact, and, if so, when are they most effective? This article addresses these questions with a regression analysis of human rights reporting by The Economist and Newsweek from 1986 to 2000, covering 145 countries. First, it finds that these two media sources cover abuses in human rights terms more frequently when they occur in countries with higher levels of state repression, (...) economic development, population, and Amnesty International attention. There is also some evidence that political openness, the number of battle deaths, and civil societies affect coverage, although these effects were not robust. Second, it finds that Amnesty International’s press releases appear to have less impact on media coverage when dis- cussing abuses in countries that are central to the media’s zone of concern. Indeed, Amnesty’s press advocacy may be more effective when addressing violations in lesser-noticed countries. The article attributes this to the saturation of coverage of abuses in highly mediatized countries. Cumulative attention by multiple journalists and others raises a country’s media profile but also makes it more difficult for any one voice to be heard. The authors conclude that Amnesty’s press advocacy may have greater media impact when focused- ing on abuses in countries located away from the media’s core areas of concern. Overall, the authors are encouraged by the Northern media’s sensitivity to actual patterns of repression and Amnesty’s lobbying, since both indicate that the media is potentially a useful ally in efforts to combat abuses worldwide. Yet, the discouraging effects of poverty on the media’s human rights coverage are cause for concern. (shrink)

This special issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution contains six articles discussing the link between primary commodities, political instability, and civil war, as well as a response essay by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler. The latter is especially welcome given that all our contributors wrestle, in one way or another, with the implications of Collier and Hoeffler's early claim for a correlation between a country’s propensity to experience civil war and its dependence on the export of primary commodities. Although (...) the robustness of this statistical finding is increasingly being questioned, we are in its debt for helping to initiate a barrage of elaborations, criticisms, and extensions. Cumulatively, these have helped reinvigorate debates over the sources of political violence, spurring the creation of new paradigms for studying civil war and its associated resource curse. (shrink)

This article develops a political economy approach to the study of international NGOs. We argue that many aspects of these organizations can be explained through a materialist analysis. We advance two theoretical propositions. First, the growing number of international NGOs has increased uncertainty, competition, and insecurity for all actors in a given NGO sector, disputing the claim that NGO proliferation is invariably positive. Second, we suggest that the "marketization" of many NGO activities, including competitive tenders and renewable contracts, may generate (...) perverse incentives that can lead to dysfunctional outcomes. We test these claims on three cases of NGO behavior, including humanitarian aid for refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo, civilian protection during the Bosnian war, and technical assistance in Kyrgyzstan. (shrink)

Why focus on only one perspective? Authentic communication occurs when each person can imagine the other’s point of view. That imagining must be creative if we are to deeply understand each other. Then integrating our varied perspectives results in an increased ability to assess critically. This book outlines ideas and reflections on my experience of teaching the Cambridge IGCSE History syllabus and contains some samples I wrote to prepare my students for the exam sessions from 2022 to 2025. CLIL History (...) teachers may find this book helps to reflect on the learner-centred approach. History students in Italian language classes may benefit from quickly revising the final year topics for the esame di stato or at university. (shrink)

In 1988, Israeli security forces engaged in a wide variety of repressive tactics aimed at putting down the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Rather than viewing these methods solely as products of instructions handed down from on high, this article regards Israeli tactics as emerging from processes of innovation and elaboration by military personnel. Rules stipulating the legal use of lethal force placed important limits on Israeli military behavior. Within those limits, however, soldiers were free to (...) invent new methods of repression. The article draws on 50 open-ended interviews with Israeli military veterans. (shrink)

Since its founding in January 1920, the National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC) has played a fundamental role supporting microbiological research in Britain and globally. NCTC is an international repository for authenticated bacterial strains of medical and veterinary significance, making many available to researchers. Among the oldest collections of its kind still operating today, it presently holds almost 6,000 historically and microbiologically significant strains. Drawing on records of the Medical Research Council, which sponsored the NCTC, and uncataloged, previously unstudied archival (...) holdings at the UK Health Security Agency, this article lays out and for the first time critically examines details of the establishment of the NCTC, and explores its far-reaching impacts on microbiology in the 20th century, and particularly on microbial taxonomy and classification. (shrink)

James Ron uses controversial comparisons between Serbia and Israel to present a novel theory of state violence. Formerly a research consultant to Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, Ron witnessed remarkably different patterns of state coercion. Frontiers and Ghettos presents an institutional approach to state violence, drawing on Ron's field research in the Middle East, Balkans, Chechnya, Turkey, and Africa, as well as dozens of rare interviews with military veterans, officials, and political activists on all sides. Studying violence (...) from the ground up, the book develops an exciting new framework for analyzing today's nationalist wars. (shrink)

This article examines Euripides’ portrayal of Heracles in his eponymous play, exploring how the once-excellent and glorious hero, favored by Zeus as his son, falls from grace and rejects all ties to divinity. This turning point in his characterization and its departure from the traditional Homeric paradigm are analyzed against the background of Euripides’ typical manipulation of mythical tradition. In this tragedy, Heracles, who is now also the biological son of Amphitryon, rejects his problematic divine heritage and instead chooses his (...) human father. Since resilience in the face of pain, which Heracles sees as the last vestige of his virtue, is a quality he shares with all humankind, the Euripidean Heracles no longer embodies the characteristics of an exemplary hero. The article concludes with an analysis of the tragedy’s reception by the Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson, and the resonance of Euripides’ conception of Heracles in her recent work, H of H Playbook (2021). (shrink)

This article is not the first to examine the relationship of art and text in Heliodorus’s novel. But rather than reduce the text’s engagement with visual culture to the paragone of word and image, or to the conjuring of specific object after specific object, it asks what happens if we take seriously the piling in of different media from different periods and different places, emphasizing the shifting perspectival planes and modes of engagement that these demand of the reader/viewer. Revisiting some (...) of the most frequently discussed passages of the novel, it shows how these harness the effects of this visual culture in ways that keep the reader/viewer engaged and enargeia “enactive.” This is of a piece, it argues, with a text that has been described as being “beyond interpretation” (Hunter 1998: 40–59 and Whitmarsh 2022: 4–5), a text that is self-conscious about following in Philostratus’s footsteps. (shrink)

Pausanias has often been represented, by the standards of modern travel writing, as an author who is reticent about describing his personal experiences. There have been some important attempts to reassert the experiential nature of his account, but there is still a tendency to understate the importance of bodies and bodiliness for his text. Repeatedly Pausanias offers us images of mythical and historical bodies immersed in the landscapes he passes through. Every so often, interspersed with those passages, we come across (...) moments where the land is equated with a human body. My aim is to explore the function of those passages within Pausanias’ text. I argue that they imply a conception of antiquarian travel as a surprisingly corporeal enterprise, in the sense that Pausanias appeals repeatedly to the reader’s haptic imagination. I further argue that these passages play an important role in articulating Pausanias’ distinctive vision of the continuing but always elusive presence of the past in the landscapes of Roman Greece. Pausanias has a powerful sense of the permeability between human bodies and the environment and, intertwined with that theme, often articulated through it, an awareness of the permeability between the past and the present. (shrink)

The so-called Attic Stelai list far more enslaved men than enslaved women among the confiscated possessions of those condemned in 415 BCE for the mutilation of the Herms and the profanation of the Mysteries. One potential bias in this evidence is that the wives of the condemned could retain their own female slaves and thus keep them from being confiscated. The Attic Stelai thus record fewer women slaves than the households of the condemned originally contained. How many fewer is a (...) difficult question, one deserving of as rigorous and as sophisticated an approach as possible. We can at best estimate a wide range of possibilities (see appendix) based on uncertain starting assumptions. But within the range of reasonable assumptions, the gender imbalance in the AS persists; only with extreme and unlikely starting assumptions can it be conjured away. Thus, these inscriptions continue to suggest that the slaves of the wealthiest Athenians were mostly male. This investigation also argues that Athenian women could sometimes assert their property rights in public, official settings. A focus on litigation in the courts and on strict concepts of ownership has led scholars to overlook the ways that Athenian women controlled their own property, not informally but officially. In the complicated and high-stakes process of confiscation, wives were able to play an active role and assert their property rights—including those over enslaved persons—in a public, official context. (shrink)

The Odyssey presents a striking series of situations in which the protagonist is reduced to the status of a helpless spectator, watching the action unfold but unable to act. These situations include a number of episodes in the apologoi, as well as Odysseus constrained by his disguise on Ithaca. I argue that the significance of this series can be brought out through comparison with Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema, which turns precisely on the point at which protagonists in film change from (...) actors who can affect their situations to viewers who can only watch. By examining the construction of the “action-image” from its ontological foundations in Bergson’s concepts of image and movement, we see how Homeric poetics presents alternatives to subject-centered and action-oriented narrative. Further, through Deleuze’s analyses of how time becomes visible when cinematic action is inhibited, we find parallel processes underlying the Odyssey’s helpless spectators. Finally, the connection between helplessness, spectatorship, and time offers—with help from Adorno’s notion of “epic naïveté”—an explanation of the power of the formulaic phrase “for a little, not for very long” (μίνυνθά περ, οὔ τι μάλα δήν, Od. 22.473), which ends the episode in which Odysseus’s maidservants are hanged. (shrink)

This article argues that the thinking accomplished in Pindar’s epinician poetry pertains as much to the domain of the sensory as to the conceptual. The claims that characterize this poetry are experiential as well as propositional, insofar as they draw attention to and aim to inflect the affective and attitudinal processes which occur when epistemic or ethical positions are adopted. My readings locate the poems’ capacity to accomplish interventions into the lives of their listeners or readers in the formal means (...) that they employ to structure and organize thought. Particularly important in this respect are their use of metaphor and narrative, and their presentation of temporal experience. In order to examine these techniques, I look first at a truth claim, a description of aging, and a metapoetic metaphor (fr. 205, Isthmian 7.40–42, and Olympian 6.80–82), before discussing Pindar’s account of witnessing Hagesidamus’ victory at Olympia (Olympian 10.97–105). I then consider the depiction of Achilles’ youthful exploits in Nemean 3. (shrink)

Niniejszy artykuł poświęcony jest kluczowym osobom w postępowaniu honorowym – sekundantom, którzy zwani byli również zastępcami honorowymi. Poprzez dokonanie analizy porównawczej kodeksów honorowych Włdysława Boziewicza Polskiego kodeksu honorowego (1919)oraz Ogólnych zasad postępowania honorowego (1927) dokonana ostanie rekonstrukcja zawartej w nich normatywności w zakresie roli sekundantów. Pozwoli to prześledzić kierunek zmian w refleksji Boziewicza nad istotą przebiegu postępowania honorowego, która zawarta jest w jego kodyfikacjach. Tym samym ujawni się jeden z punktów jego krytyki społecznej wymierzonej względem praktyki postępowań honorowych. Badanie ujawni (...) jak w refleksji Boziewicza nad postępowaniami honorowymi wzrosła rola autonomicznej refleksjimoralnej zastępców honorowych i wspólnoty etycznej, którą reprezentują, względem woli ich mocodawców. (shrink)

The past is fixed—what happened happened. But our descriptions of that past are in constant flux, creating branching networks of contradictory accounts more complex than any fictional franchise. Revising Reality uses pop culture and media concepts of revision to untangle our real-world histories—with startlingly revelatory results.

This paper reconstructs the evolution of human cognition as a trajectory of frame transitions—shifts in the dominant epistemic architectures that define how reality is perceived, narrated, and navigated. From mythic participation and theological authority to rational abstraction and metacognitive self-reflection, the timeline reveals consciousness not as a fixed faculty, but as a recursive, frame-sensitive process. Each epoch is analyzed through its mode of sense-making: narrative embedding, textual revelation, axiomatic modeling, and finally, frame-awareness. The emergence of Pure Reason—defined here not as (...) Kantian idealism, but as reflexive cognition—is positioned as the threshold where thought becomes self-modifying. This timeline is both historical and structural: a map of how reflexivity emerges through the breakdown and recomposition of cognitive systems. It offers a framework for understanding the epistemic architecture required for both human and artificial systems capable of conscious self-revision. (shrink)

We explore the topic of self-translation in migration through the biography of Fritz A. Kuttner, a German Jewish economist who became a musicologist during the years he spent in his native country just before he managed to escape from the Nazis. His interest in musicology intensified as an immigrant in Shanghai from 1939 to 1949, where he also studied pre-modern Chinese musical culture. After his emigration and becoming a US citizen, Kuttner emerged as a pioneer in this new field. We (...) trace Kuttner’s path as a whole, but focus especially on his Shanghai years. Among other things, these are marked by his study of the Chinese language, life in the multilingual Jewish refugee community, music as a meeting point between East and West, his growing understanding of a connection between Chinese language, music and culture as a whole, and his efforts to translate his understanding of the semiotics of ancient Chinese music into the language and theoretical perspective of Western musicology. In addition to documenting his experiences and academic self-translation, we argue in favour of a broader concept of self-translation as being relevant to an intercultural sense of self. (shrink)

Welchen Einfluss Lust grundsätzlich auf Platons Ethik hat, scheint in der Forschung zur Genüge behandelt worden sein. Die Rolle von wahren und falschen Lüsten wird dabei aber nur selten explizit angeführt. Die These lautet, dass genau jene Unterscheidung allerdings eine ganz wesentliche Rolle für das Verständnis der Lust in der Ethik des guten Lebens spielt, weshalb eine klare Analyse von seiner Unterscheidung wissenschaftlich relevant und von Interesse ist. Die Fragestellung, mit der sich diese Arbeit beschäftigt lautet daher „Wie begründet Platon (...) die Idee, dass nicht alle Lüste gut sind und welche Konsequenzen hat das für sein ethisches Denken?“. (shrink)

Beyond the Senses, Abstraction - At the center of this study are three nonmimetic examples: a twelfth-century cloister pillar, a thirteenth-century reliquary, and a fourteenth-century manuscript illumination. These nonfigurative objects, representing three media and spanning three centuries, show that abstraction - predicated as it was on the theological articulation between truth, facts, and language - emerged in the Middle Ages as the primary vehicle for materializing the ineffable. The analysis begins by considering medieval notions of abstraction as a mode of (...) figuration. It goes on to demonstrate how the abstractive operations at work in these images, each in a distinctive visual method, encouraged the pursuit of truth that lies beyond sensory perception by engendering the process of abstraction as it was understood in the Middle Ages: that of withdrawal, removal, paring down. This subtractive process, both visual and intellectual, allowed the beholder to reach through the perceptible and the graspable, and thus to apprehend what is most emphatically unavailable to the senses. (shrink)

Golgotha in Mind. Charles the Bald and the Carolingian Combs - The ivory comb “of Saint Heribert”, probably carved in Metz around 870 and today held in Cologne’s Museum Schnütgen, features one of the most elaborate Carolingian representations of the Crucifixion. Yet it remains surprisingly little studied. Together, its function as a comb and its iconographic program imply an identification of the combed head with Golgotha, the “place of the skull” - that is, with Adam, and with Christ as the (...) new Adam. In light of current scholarship on related objects, connections can be established with Charles the Bald, whose imperial coronation in Rome in 875 involved a comb with zodiac signs (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Analyzing the textual and material evidence on ivory combs in the ninth and tenth centuries, the essay explores the possibility that the Crucifixion comb was made in connection with Charles’s coronation at Metz in 869, and discusses the comb’s later attribution to Archbishop Heribert of Cologne (r. 999-1021). Golgota v mysli. Karel Holý a karolínské hřebeny - Slonovinový „Heribertův“ hřeben vytvořený pravděpodobně v Metách kolem roku 870 byl poprvé publikován v roce 1858. Dnes je uložený v muzeu Schnütgen v Kolíně a je jedním z nejobdivovanějších předmětů raného středověku. Paradoxně ale zůstává málo studovaným, bezpochyby kvůli své funkci, která je považovaná za triviální. Představuje však jedno z nejpropracovanějších znázornění ukřižování z karolínské doby. Umístění obrazu na hřebenu nabádá k identifikaci česané osoby s Golgotou, „místem lebky“ - tzn. s Adamem a s Kristem jako novým Adamem. Česání se tak pro česaného stávalo rituálním aktem pokání. Komplexní dekorace akantovými listy na druhé straně hřebenu podtrhuje vztahy mezi instrumentalitou a ikonicitou, dvoj- a trojrozměrností a vyjadřuje myšlenku naděje na nový život. Autor na hřeben pohlíží nově díky poznatkům o blízkých předmětech, jako jsou především vazba Evangliáře z Lindau (dnes v Morgan Library a New York Museum), slonovinový trůn sv. Petra v Římě, modlitební kniha Karla Holého v Pokladnici Královské residence v Mnichově a bronzová jezdecká socha v muzeu Louvre. Nachází tak vazby na filosofii Jana Scota Eriugeny a na insignie moci Karla Holého. Karel Holý pravděpodobně nebyl plešatý a při příležitosti jeho korunovace císařem v Římě na konci roku 875 byl vytvořen hřeben zdobený znaky zvěrokruhu, který byl bezpochyby ihned darován katedrále v Pavii. (Hřeben se nyní nachází ve Victoria and Albert Museum v Londýně.) Autor představuje hypotézu, že hřeben ze Schnütgen muzea vznikl v souvislosti s královskou korunovací Karla Holého v Metách v roce 869. Autor také shromažďuje textové a materiální prameny hovořící o dalších slonovinových hřebenech v devátém a desátém století a nově pohlíží především na hřeben z kolegiátního kostela v Quedlinburgu, který byl přivezen z jižního nebo východního Středomoří a poté byl zasazen do zlata a drahého kamení tak, že jeho ikonografie připomínala koně ozdobené pro vojenskou přehlídku. Nakonec si autor klade otázku, jak se kolínský hřeben dostal do vlastnictví opatství v Deutz, které založil arcibiskup Herbert z Kolína (999-1021), a proč byl pravděpodobně ve 12. století tomuto arcibiskupovi připsán. (shrink)

The lid of an Anglo-Saxon burial found in St Mary the Virgin at Wirksworth (Derbyshire, England) displays scenes of the life of Christ and the Virgin Mary that reflect a hope for eternal salvation; many of these scenes have eastern models. Going beyond a quest for iconographic models, however, this study examines the scenes featuring the Virgin, particularly her Funeral and Assumption, in the context of interchanging ideas, beliefs, and artifacts between the eastern Mediterranean Basin, continental Western Europe, and Anglo-Saxon (...) Britain in the seventh and eighth centuries. This conjunction resulted in a funerary monument on which the Virgin’s supernatural transition from earth to heaven was memorialised despite being underpinned only by current beliefs, rather than by Scripture or theology. Analysis of the scenes featuring the Virgin aims not only to contextualise them in the visual and religious cultures of the Mediterranean and beyond, but also - since they are the earliest in the West - to draw attention to their novelty. The connections with the eastern Mediterranean may also help to better define the stone’s chronology. Referring to the figure of the Jewish priest lying below the Virgin’s bier with hands “dried up” as a consequence of his sacrilege in attempting at overturn her body, the study contends that the scene of her Funeral is a vivid reminder that the mystery of her transition into heaven lies beyond human grasp and can only be apprehended through a mystical approach that transcends the senses. (shrink)

Three silver crosses created in Catalonia in the fourteenth century - from Vilabertran, St Joan de les Abadesses, and Girona Cathedral - have an archaic design that differs from the Gothic models more common in the region and throughout Western Europe by that time. Recent research on these crosses, particularly on that from St Joan de les Abadesses (now in the Museu Episcopal de Vic), has yielded new findings that contribute to our understanding of this design’s final flourishing in the (...) late Middle Ages. These three objects were the last examples created in Catalonia of an old type of multi-functional goldsmith’s cross. Crosses of this type were filled with relics that were not always evident to the faithful but that enhanced the ability of the objects’ being turned into ideal representations of the True Cross. This, in turn, imbued them with significance beyond sensory perception of their material properties. (shrink)

The twelfth-century Latin treatise De diversis artibus, by Theophilus Presbyter, presents detailed information about the crafts of painting, paint making, glassmaking, and metalwork. This article focuses mainly on two questions raised by Theophilus’s prologues: the author’s evaluation of each of the materials on the basis of its optical qualities in relation to its use in the sacred space; and his notion of the aspects of visual perception of items placed in the sacred space. The analysis here focuses on the Latin (...) text’s multilayered hierarchic structure. According to Theophilus, the human eye can discern categories of objects on the basis of their use in liturgical procedures and can organize materials into a hierarchy. The optical characteristics of a given material yield crucial criteria for this sorting and ranking. The optical effects are also the determining feature in defining the role of objects within the liturgy. On this spiritual path of artisanal creation, Theophilus appoints human sight as the ultimate judge, corrector, and guide. (shrink)

Emaciated Saints, Relics and Images in the Late Middle Ages. Visual Dynamics and the Prospect of Salvation - In the late Middle Ages, according to several theological and philosophical theories connected especially to the spirituality of mendicant orders, the soul is the body’s substantial form, and it gives living humans their individuality. When death destroys the form, the person dissolves into anonymous material flux; this dissolution occurs when the soul - the substantial form - leaves the body. This does not (...) happen, however, with bodily relics, because they preserve their material aspect. The deep understanding of these philosophical and theological texts (such as the writings of Thomas Aquinas or Robert Grosseteste) offered versatile, semantically rich material that could have determined the visual choices of artists who depicted saints as emaciated, dead-seeming figures. The combined analysis and interpretation of these written and visual sources offer insights into the fact that the contemplation of images of emaciated saints, even more than the view of their bodily relics, could establish, in the minds of the faithful, catalytic semantic connections with salvation and eternal life. (shrink)

Throughout the Victorian era, the metaphor “living fossil” repeatedly crisscrossed social and scientific domains. The term existed in popular culture before and after Darwin’s _Origin_. Most notably, it also operated as two distinct scientific concepts, one introduced by Darwin and another in cultural evolutionists’ depiction of human living fossils. Serving in different ways, living fossils were typically aberrant, persistent and unchanging examples that contradicted an expectation of ongoing change and associated progress. We explore the development and relationships of living fossil (...) applications, focusing principally on Darwin’s concept. In _Origin_, Darwin deployed living fossils as exceptions that prove the rule of his principles of natural selection and divergence. He structured a case for the causal adequacy of these principles to explain living fossils’ persistence, invariance, and taxonomic positions in gaps between other groups. As other natural historians began discussing living fossils and labeling new ones, Darwin’s concept endured, but was subject to perceivable variation; associations with natural selection or divergence varied greatly and attributes of his living fossil examples were sometimes ignored. Cultural evolutionists adopted a view that human societies developed over time in a unilinear succession of stages. In this view primitive groups, their implements, languages, and cultures, stopped evolving at different points in the past and persisted unchanged into the present. While Darwin’s concept and this anthropological concept were connected associatively to the evolution of languages and to themes of spatial isolation, prolonged stasis and disruption of expected progress, they inherited significantly different theoretical backgrounds and commitments. (shrink)

In 1975, a meeting on the potential hazards of recently invented recombinant DNA techniques was held at the Asilomar Conference Center in California. This meeting gave rise to a global debate over the safety and regulation of recombinant DNA (rDNA). In this paper, I use the historical development of recombinant DNA regulation in the Greater Boston Area—now home to the densest cluster of the biotechnology industry in the world—to provide a different interpretation of the legacies of Asilomar. While most accounts (...) of Asilomar have considered its brief and dramatic impact on molecular biology on a national scale, an equally meaningful and overlooked impact is to be found in the development of regulations around recombinant DNA at the local level. Rather than hindering research, these events enabled the operations of the modern commercial biotechnology industry, which was founded on the promise of recombinant DNA. This approach highlights a different legacy of Asilomar, one which did not end with expert consensus that recombinant DNA was safe. Instead, attending to the material, infrastructural aspects of working with recombinant DNA in commercial settings reveals a wide range of communities involved in determining the social impacts of Asilomar—communities asking a broader set of questions about recombinant DNA than those originally posed in 1975. (shrink)

This article proposes Arthur Danto’s ‘analytical narrativism,’ and his conceptualization of history as representation, as an unexplored path which can be an alternative to the development of postnarrativism from Hayden White’s ‘figurative realism.’ Danto’s historiographic can shed some light on postnarrativism and on the present-day dilemmas which cloud the academic debates around the writing of history. The article also highlights the need for interdisciplinary dialogue.

In 1971, Paul Berg asked Francis Crick about his views on a controversial proposed experiment involving recombinant DNA; to Berg’s surprise, Crick had no comment to make. This article first describes the multiple reasons why Crick did not respond to Berg, including psychological factors that affected Crick at the time, the limits of his unstated reflexively positivist approach to social issues, and his reluctance to pursue social or political issues when challenged. Crick’s lack of involvement in discussions about recombinant DNA, (...) including in the Asilomar process, is then used to explore two other notable absences from Asilomar: the immunologist Niels Jerne, who was invited to be on the organizing committee but was not involved for reasons that are unclear; and molecular biologist and biological weapons campaigner Matthew Meselson, whose presence would have added a layer of understanding to the discussions, particularly regarding the threat of bioweapons. These enigmatic absences raise questions about the representativeness of Asilomar and suggest future investigations as to how the legacy of Asilomar was shaped both by those who were present–and by those who were not. (shrink)

This study explores the Śrīvaiṣṇavas’ commitment to upholding both the Sanskrit and Tamil scriptures or ubhayavedānta (literally, the dual Vedāntas). In particular, it focuses on how one of the most influential post-Rāmānuja ācāryas in the community, Vedāntadeśika (1269–1369), supported the two-scriptures principle in his Dramiḍopaniṣattātparyaratnāvalī. In this work Vedāntadeśika summarizes and translates the Tamil scripture, the Tiruvāymoḻi of Nammāḻvār, arguably the most authoritative South Indian Vaiṣṇava poet of a group collectively known as the Āḻvārs (ca. sixth to tenth century), into (...) Sanskrit. I argue that Vedāntadeśika’s main goal is to secure the status of Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi as the Tamil Vedānta or Upaniṣad (and as the Tamil Veda in some cases). His attempt to bridge the gap between the Sanskrit and Tamil scriptures can be seen in three different aspects: their scriptural status, theology, and linguistic expression. Vedāntadeśika reinforces the scriptural status of the Tirūvāymoḻi, restructures the text so that it consistently illustrates God’s qualities, similar to the Sanskrit Upaniṣads, and, through the linguistic medium of Sanskrit, deemphasizes the poetic tropes of classical Tamil love poetry. While there were other summaries of the Tiruvāymoḻi before, during, and after his time, Vedāntadeśika’s summary is remarkable for its systematic approach and clear agenda. (shrink)

Commentaries represent the best-known evidence for scholarly activities and the exegetical tradition of Mesopotamia. However, commentaries were not the only textual expressions of exegetical activity and scholarship took many different forms. The aim of this article is to elucidate the ways and purposes of the use of various hermeneutic practices other than the writing of commentaries. By analyzing mostly hemerological compilations and simultaneous bilingual compositions, a particular kind of bilingual text, this article illustrates the multiplicity of forms, functions, and scholarly (...) strategies of exegesis and how they are deployed for different kinds or genres of texts. These alternative strategies will be compared to commentaries and their unique features and limitations will be highlighted through an analytical approach. (shrink)

Rashīd al-Dīn Ṭabīb (d. 1318) has been called the “first world historian” because of how foreign historical sources are treated in the second volume of his Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh. New manuscript materials have shown, however, that his contemporary courtier and historian, ʿAbd Allāh Qāshānī, is likely the real author of much of the Jāmiʿ. This article advances the discussion about the creation of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh by describing and analyzing an alternate version of Rashīd al-Dīn’s introduction to the collection. This alternate introduction, (...) preserved in a single manuscript in Munich, suggests that Rashīd al-Dīn initially had a very different purpose in mind for his world history than what has come down to us, envisioning it not as an ecumenical description of the world but as a programmatic argument for his patrons’ sovereign legitimacy. Examining this alternate introduction forces us to rethink Rashīd al-Dīn’s historiographical motive. It also helps answer open questions about the structure of Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh, its production, and how Qāshānī’s text came to be included in it. (shrink)

In the eleventh century Yang Ningshi 楊凝式 (873–954) was simultaneously praised as a supreme master of cursive script and dismissed as utterly incompetent with regular script. This article demonstrates that the Chive Flowers Letter (Jiuhua tie 韭花帖), the only one among Yang’s five surviving works written in regular script, is the key to solving this historical paradox. It argues that the Chive Flowers Letter followed the popular guides to letter writing (shuyi 書儀) in the epistolary culture of the late Tang (...) and Five Dynasties and represents the tamed side of Yang’s calligraphy that was rejected by Huang Tingjian and many Northern Song “classical prose” (guwen 古文) scholar-officials for an ideological rather than aesthetic reason. This study also reveals how the traditional Chinese historiography on calligraphy and beyond might have been manipulated to serve ideological agendas. (shrink)

Manuscripts excavated and looted from tombs in recent decades have greatly enriched our understanding of Western Han verse. Some of these documents have been designated by scholars as poems, and a few have even been assigned to particular poetic genres. In this article, however, I am less concerned with sorting texts into neat formal or generic categories and more interested in exploring the range of texts and contexts in which verse was employed. To that end, I introduce, analyze, and at (...) least partially translate five new or little-known texts retrieved from various Western Han sites that make extensive use of rhyme and metrical rhythm: *Xiangma jing 相馬經 from Mawangdui M3, Tang Le 唐勒 from Yin- queshan M1, Wang Ji 妄稽 and Fan yin 反淫 from the looted Peking University manuscript corpus, and *Daowang fu 悼亡賦 from Haihunhou M1. Some of these documents are very similar to sources in the transmitted literature, while others are quite different from any verse previously known from the period. Taken together, however, they greatly enhance our understanding of the different ways verse functioned in various Western Han cultural contexts. (shrink)

History and Memory in the Abbasid Caliphate: Writing the Past in Medieval Arabic Literature. By Letizia Osti. Early and Medieval Islamic World. iIB. Tauris, 2022. Pp. xiii + 183. $115.

À la découverte du jaïnisme: Une tradition indienne. By Nalini Balbir. Les Éditions du Cerf, 2024. Pp. 450, color illus. €36.