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The French Revolution generated a wave of popular piety and religious excitement in both France and England, where millenarians--prophets of the millennium--attempted to interpret the Revolution as the fulfillment of the predictions of Daniel and St. John the Divine. This study discusses the millenarian ideal in the context of the intellectual and religious attitudes of the time. Rejecting interpretations of millenarianism that chalk it up to class struggle or mass hysteria, Garrett stresses the interaction between politics and religion, viewing the phenomenon as the interpretation, by a varied assortment of individuals, of coincident political events in eschatological terms. Faced with a change as significant as the French Revolution, people found in the prophetic books of the Bible an understanding of what was happening to them. If the Revolution was God's will, if its development had been foretold, then surely the final outcome would be beneficial, at least for the faithful. Political events became eschatological events, and dangers and misfortunes became simply the chastisements that a fallen world must undergo before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ can redeem it. Although some of the beliefs may now seem bizarre, Garrett shows that, at the time, they attracted many followers for whom these ideas were both reasonable and respectable. Focusing on the careers of three millenarians--Suzette Labrousse, Catherine Théot, and Richard Brothers--Garrett tries to understand these prophets as persons rather than dismiss them as fanatics. Their prominence resulted from their success in transmitting a new political consciousness through familiar religious imagery. While the Revolution gave urgency and tangible reality to millenarian convictions, Labrousse, Théot, and others were convinced, well before the Revolution, that they were the bearers of divine revelations and thus welcomed the Revolution as confirmation of their own missions.

Historical writing on the Renaissance has usually focused on the social extremes that co-existed in the great metropolitan centers--on either elites or the underclass. As a result, the world of the middling families and provincial societies remains largely unexplored. Daily experiences in the lesser cities are, however, no less rich and revealing than those of Florence, Venice, and Milan. In addition, writes historian James Grubb, these experiences offer new perspectives from which to reassess familiar assumptions about domestic life in the fifteenth century.Based on memoirs and other records left by thirteen merchant families from the Veneto cities of Verona and Vincenza, Provincial Families of the Renaissance is an engrossing study of daily lives that have until now been overlooked by scholars. Grubb examines the attitudes and experiences of families undistinguished in their modest means and local ambitions from the majority of their compatriots, uncovering a detailed historical landscape rich in social obligations, commercial activities, and religious beliefs.Grubb's comprehensive analysis of his subjects' compelling, if inconspicuous, lives investigates every significant aspect of private experience during the Renaissance: marriage, birth, death, household relations, work, land, social status, and spirituality. In reconstructing provincial life in the Veneto, Grubb discovers in his subjects an independence of mind that mediated their reception of metropolitan ideologies far more than the historiography of the Renaissance might suggest. These "unremarkable" provincials were agents of their own destiny, influenced in equal measures by prevailing attitudes, local customs, and personal convictions."James Grubb is exploring new terrain in this book. Distinguished by its clarity and eloquence, this is a superior work of historical writing and analysis that merits comparison with the best monographs on the social history of Renaissance Italy."--Gene Brucker, University of California at Berkeley

In four essays, Professor Mandelbaum challenges some of the most common assumptions of contemporary epistemology. Through historical analyses and critical argument, he attempts to show that one cannot successfully sever the connections between philosophic and scientific accounts of sense perception. While each essay is independent of the others, and the argument of each must therefore be judged on its own merits, one theme is common to all: that critical realism, as Mandelbaum calls it, is a viable epistemological position, even though some schools of thought hold it in low esteem.

In The Defense of Berlin, Jean Edward Smith discusses Berlin from the time of arrangements set during the war through 1962, with an emphasis on the effect that the crisis of division had on the city.

The old sense of community yielded to a new and equally compelling sense of place, and La Serenissima remained stable throughout the later Renaissance.

It sets banking-and panics-in the context of more generalized and recurrent crises involving territorial wars, competition for markets, and debates over interest rates and the question of usury.

In addition to undermining the continuity in the intellectual history of religious thought, Lightman exposes the religious origins of agnosticism.

The Sage in Harlem demonstrates how Mencken, through the example of his own work, his power as editor of the American Mercury, and his dedication to literary quality, was able to nurture the developing talents of black authors from James Weldon Johnson to Richard Wright.

William T. Walker, Presidential Studies Quarterly

Gellman shows how tenuous a government policy can be when so much of it depends on personal control and influence.

In exploring these modern philosophers of the animal and its instinctual life, the author inevitably rebiologizes them even against efforts to debiologize thinkers whose works can be studied profitably for their models of signification.

Looking at the work without novelistic expectations of the illusion of some "keyto unlock the mystery, Norris explores Joyce's rationale for committing his last human panorama-a bit sadder than Ulysses in its concern with aging, killing, and dying-to a form and language belonging to the deconstructive forces of the twentieth century.

Poetic Presence and Illusion allows readers who have read Krieger's earlier work to understand the development of his critical position.

Our reading of the poem, Krieger concludes, must be double: we must see the poem as a linear and chronological sequence reflecting real life, and we must read it as a circular, imitative, mutually implicative mode.

And he argues that, for all its brilliance, deconstruction has not yet been able to fulfill the social or academic functions of the older, aesthetic-based disciplines that it set out to deconstruct.

As he examines the conflict between the spatial and temporal, between vision-centered and word-centered metaphors, Krieger reveals how literary theory has been shaped by the attempts and the deceptive failures of language to do the job of the "natural sign."

In light of the shriveling of the tragic concept in the modern world and the reduction of a total view to the psychology of the protagonist, Krieger contends that the protagonist in a tragedy is now more appropriately designated a "tragic visionarythan a "tragic hero."

Having defined his critical position in these ways, Krieger relates it to other schools of criticism and applies its methods to the analysis of works by Shakespeare, Pope, Arnold, Hawthorne, and others.

Taken together, they chart a line of development with representative examples of what literary history calls romanticism, realism, modernism, and postmodernism, and thus they suggest a certain story about the continuity of the American novel.

Leopold and Lytton John Musselman, skilled botanists and the foremost authorities on these plants, this superior quality guide will appeal to residents of and visitors to the Adirondacks and northeastern mountains, including wildlife professionals, citizen scientists, backpackers, campers, photographers, bird watchers, artists, and wild food foragers.

With its shift away from Derrida's philosophical studies to his experimental texts, Ulmer's book aims to inaugurate a new movement in the American adaptation of contemporary French theory.

Sundquist's approach to the texts is psychoanalytic, but he does not attempt a clinical dissection of each writer; rather, he determines how personal crisis became material for engaging with larger questions of social and literary crisis.

Concerned not with the development of Arnold's ideas nor with their sources in classical antiquity and the Romantic period, he considers Arnold a self-conscious poet who, though sometimes successful, became increasingly unsuccessful in his efforts to imbue a landscape with meaning for individual or social man.

He recreates a landscape littered with unfamiliar issues, intractable problems, unattractive choices, and partial solutions, all of which influenced congressional decisions on matters as prosaic as military logistics or as abstract as the definition of federalism.

He was a vigorous critic of the industrial age, demanding the utilization of federal power in behalf of equality, democracy, and economic justice.

The European dramatic tradition rests on a group of religious dramas that appeared between the tenth and twelfth centuries. These dramas, of interest in themselves, are also important for the light they shed on three historical and critical problems: the relation of drama to ritual, the nature of dramatic form, and the development of representational techniques. Hardison's approach is based on the history of the Christian liturgy, on critical theories concerning the kinship of ritual and drama, and on close analysis of the chronology and content of the texts themselves. Beginning with liturgical commentaries of the ninth century, Hardison shows that writers of the period consciously interpreted the Mass and cycle of the church year in dramatic terms. By reconstructing the services themselves, he shows that they had an emphatic dramatic structure that reached its climax with the celebration of the Resurrection. Turning to the history of the Latin Resurrection play, Hardison suggests that the famous Quem quaeritis--the earliest of all medieval dramas--is best understood in relation to the baptismal rites of the Easter Vigil service. He sets forth a theory of the original form and function of the play based on the content of the earliest manuscripts as well as on vestigial ceremonial elements that survive in the later ones. Three texts from the eleventh and twelfth centuries are analyzed with emphasis on the change from ritual to representational modes. Hardison discusses why the form inherited from ritual remained unchanged, while the technique became increasingly representational. In studying the earliest vernacular dramas, Hardison examines the use of nonritual materials as sources of dramatic form, the influence of representational concepts of space and time on staging, and the development of nonceremonial techniques for composition of dialogue. The sudden appearance of these elements in vernacular drama suggests the existence of a hitherto unsuspected vernacular tradition considerably older than the earliest surviving vernacular plays.

Even in certain of Moliere's own works, in fact, the comic vision shades into something close to Romantic irony.

Although Sainte-Palaye had a surprising influence on the literature and historiography of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-in France, England, and Germany-eighteenth-century medievalism, Gossman argues, is best understood not as anticipation of things to come but as part of a complex of ideas and feelings peculiar to the Enlightenment itself.

As such, it has significant implications for the novel as a genre and for understanding its development in America.