bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“…to make amends for One ill Dance”: Conventions for Dancing in Restoration Plays
Authors: Price Curtis A.
Published: May 2006

In 1700 the London theatrical world was in crisis. The quality of English plays had deteriorated during the 40 years of restored Stuart rule. Playwrights, believing themselves to be working in the tradition of the finest Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic poets, were churning out ranting tragedies, stripped of the subtle heroes and comic relief of Shakespeare, and amoral comedies, rarely showing the sparkling wit of Jonson. The two London theatre companies were locked in bitter competition for the small, mostly aristocratic audience, and managers compromised the poets and actors by introducing into their plays music-hall entertainments, from ventriloquists to tumblers. At the center of the crisis, however, was not the lack of playwrights of genius nor a fickle, world-weary audience; rather British drama was seriously weakened by a tradition that had since 1660 allowed the play to become the vehicle not only for spoken drama, but for large quantities of music and dance as well.
Annual International Bibliography of Dance History: The Western Tradition. Works Published in 1978. Part I.
Authors: Ruyter Nancy Chalfa
Published: May 2006

As the literature of dance proliferates, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of what is available. The need for current bibliographies of dance materials has been addressed during the past few years at meetings of both CORD and the Dance History Scholars; this first installment of a western dance history bibliography is the direct result of such discussions. At the historians' meeting held during the August 1978 ADG-CORD Dance Conference in Hawaii, plans were formulated and a number of people offered to contribute to the project in one way or another. A report was made at the February 1979 history conference in New York City, and again the response was positive. A few months later, CORD offered to help support the project.

This is the first installment of materials published in 1978. It includes books and articles in twelve categories. An index in seven sections guides the reader to time, place, and area of subject matter; people, dance works, and institutions named in titles; and to authors. Part I of the bibliography is far from complete and only minimally international in coverage since most of the collecting has been done by one person located in the United States. Some periodicals have not yet been searched at all, and some categories of materials that may be included in the future – book and performance reviews, for example – have generally been omitted here.
II. The Identity of Tudor's Dark Elegies as Mediated by Two Dance Companies and Two Technologies
Authors: Maletic Vera
Published: May 2006

This discussion focuses on the extent to which the essential components of a choreographic work are transmitted in different renderings of it. Tudor's Dark Elegies is observed in performances by two different companies as mediated by film and television. The 1976 American Ballet Theatre (ABT) production of the work is documented in a black and white archival film of a stage rehearsal in which dancers perform in tights and leotards and are accompanied by a piano rendering of the score. The 1974 videotape produced by Swedish television and performed by members of the Royal Swedish Ballet translates Tudor's proscenium work into a television event. The comparative analysis of these two productions addresses (a) variants in the performance of choreographic motifs that were made by Tudor for the two companies, and (b) the perceptual differences arising from the nature of the film record versus the television adaptation. The discussion of film and television interventions in rendering a work conceived for the proscenium stage is of particular relevance at a time when much of western theatrical dance research relies on resources in which the material is transmitted by these media.
Form as the Image of Human Perfectability and Natural Order
Authors: Jowitt Deborah
Published: May 2006

In 1954, when I was dancing in Harriette Ann Gray's company, Doris Humphrey (with whom Harriette had danced in the 1930s) invited us to see a run-through of the reconstruction of With My Red Fires she had staged with Juilliard students. Karen Kanner was an astounding six-foot-tall Matriarch. I remember sitting in a cramped studio of International House feeling not as if I were watching dance, but as if I were surrounded by forces on the verge of slipping out of control. The following year, Day on Earth was presented on one of the mixed bills Bethsabée de Rothschild sponsored at the ANTA theater. I think I remember (could it have happened?) Day on Earth and Cave of the Heart back to back! José Limón, Letitia Ide, and Ruth Currier performed; I thought it was the best modern dance I had ever seen (although I hadn't seen much and vastly preferred doing to watching).

Humphrey's Dawn in New York in 1956 galvanized me into auditioning for Juilliard Dance Theater—then a semi-professional company under Doris's direction, open to anyone. Accepted, I took Doris's composition course—her last, it would turn out. I had studied Modern Forms with Louis Horst, but I had also been taught to think of composing a dance in terms of locating a great emotional eruption within and running with it. Harriette Ann Gray had shown me the impulsive, ecstatic side of Humphrey-Weidman dancing and its potential for communicating feeling. Doris's guidelines for composing dances were refreshingly objective. I later came to see a slight rigidity in her viewpoint; much 1960s vanguardism would have fallen beyond her pale. At the time, I found it liberating.
Mental and Psychophysiological Tension at Professional Ballet Dancers' Performances and Rehearsals
Authors: Helin Pertti
Published: May 2006

The purpose of this study was to examine basic psychophysiological response levels in professional ballet dancers and the effects of different performances on these responses. Electrical activity of the trapezius muscle, blood pressure, heart rate, and skin-conductance level were measured during a resting state and before, during, and after rehearsals, first-night performances, and shows performed from 10 to 50 times. Subjective mental tension during performance was evaluated, as was performance success. The influence of sex, age, experience, artistic level, role, and the type of performance were studied.

Principals had less tension in the trapezius muscle in the resting state than corps de ballet dancers and soloists. Principals' psychophysiological activation during performances was increased more than that of soloists and corps de ballet dancers as compared with baseline values. The type of performance influenced subjective mental tension and physiological responses. During the last general rehearsals (with an audience) physiological activation was higher than during first-night and other performances. Age and experience did not affect physiological activation. Sex differences in subjectively estimated success and mental tension, as well as in physiological measurements, were small.
Early Modern Dance in Spain: Tórtola Valencia, Dancer of the Historical Intuition
Authors: Garland Iris
Published: May 2006

Spain's contribution to the evolution of theatrical dance is acknowledged within the categories of ballet and ethnic dance. Spanish folk dance elements have been incorporated into the classical ballet vocabulary, and exotic adaptations of dances from Spain have enriched the established ballet repertory: Fanny Ellsler's Cachucha, Petipa's “Spanish Dance” divertissement in Swan Lake, and Leonide Massine's Tricorne (The Three Cornered Hat) are wellknown examples. Soloists such as Pastora Imperio, La Argentina, José Greco, and Carmen Amaya have popularized around the world what has become known as the Spanish style of dance (for example, fandango, bolero, seguidillas, flamenco). However, Spain has not been associated with the history of early modern dance, a phenomenon largely attributed to a handful of American and German dancers.

Tórtola Valencia (1882–1955) claimed Spain as her country of origin, and made a flamboyant contribution to early modern dance in western Europe, Spain, and Latin America from 1908–1930. Her vast, eclectic repertory of Oriental, classical, and Spanish themes echoed the preoccupations of her contemporaries with whom she was favorably compared—in particular, Isadora Duncan, Maud Allan, Ruth St. Denis, Mikhail Fokine, and Anna Pavlova (1). In her time she received critical acclaim as one of the most famous dancers in Europe, yet she is not cited in the English language history of dance (2). This is only part of the mystery that weaves through the fabric of Tórtola Valencia's intriguing life and career.
The Sleeping Princess: an Analysis of Her Failure to Charm
Authors: Sticklor Susan Reimer
Published: May 2006

The Diaghilev Ballets Russes introduced its startled audiences to a revolutionary dance theatre. History recognizes Diaghilev and his collaborators as an indelible influence on the course of twentieth century dance; an influence re-orienting ballet's goals as well as audience expectations. It is difficult to chart the progressive re-education of the public over a twenty-year period (1909–1929). London, however, in the year 1921, provides an excellent vantage point for a retrospective evaluation of the Ballet Russe's impact.

The year 1921 found Serge Diaghilev in a difficult predicament. Massine, his productive and inventive choreographer, left the company ending “a period that for length and the fertility may be compared with the first period of Fokine.” Diaghilev now faced the opening of a new London season without fresh choreographic talent. He turned to unprecedented recourse—the presentation of a full length Petipa ballet, never before seen in the West. His choice was La Belle au Bois Dormant, the pride of Petipa's reign, unveiled in London as The Sleeping Princess. A summary glance at historical backgrounds reveals how uncharacteristic a venture this was.
Body Composition and the Comparison of Measurement Techniques in Different Levels and Styles of Dancers
Authors: Chmelar Robin D. , Fitt Sally S. , Schultz Barry B. , Ruhling Robert O. , Shepherd Terry
Published: May 2006

The physical appearance required in dance, particularly in terms of body weight and fat, is often a demand that hovers over the aspiring and professional dancer's career (Vincent, 1979). This investigation was intended to measure various aspects of body composition in different types of dancers, as well as use various methods. Measurements of percent body fat and lean weight may serve as a means of quantifying appearance in dance so that dancers may be guided towards appropriate body composition goals. This may be more reflective of the dancer's true physique than relying simply on total body weight, which does not take proportions of muscle and fat into account. Kirkendall and Calabrese (1983) have noted that attention must be paid to lean mass in dancers as well as percent fat. A method of evaluating the relationship between height, lean mass (fat free weight), and total weight was developed for this study to address the issue of proportion (i.e., a dancer who perhaps has a low percent fat level but is still considered too “heavy” because of a large muscle mass).

Although hydrostatic weighing has been noted as “the gold standard” in body composition measurements (Nash, 1985), such methods are often unavailable or impractical for professional dancers or university dance departments. Anthropometric (or “skinfold”) methods have greater practicality, but may lack the individual accuracy of hydrostatic methods (Nash, 1985). Recently, electrical impedance has been cited as a convenient alternative to both underwater and skinfold techniques (Harrison & Van Italli, 1982; Presta, et al. 1984).
The “New Learning”: a Semantic Note
Authors: Chester Allan G.
Published: May 2006

Modern scholars are well aware of the inexactitude and ambiguity of the terms “Renaissance” and “humanism”. We continue to find the words useful, but we have adopted the practice of employing them cautiously, with precisely stated qualifications. It is the purpose of this paper to point out, especially to students of the cultural history of England, that contradiction and ambiguity also lurk in the equally useful term “the new learning” and to urge a similar caution in employing it.

Historians of English literature commonly identify the New Learning (usually capitalized) with the revival of classical learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They may use the term narrowly to mean the revival of interest in the language and literature of ancient Greece, or somewhat more broadly to include the revival of “classical” Latin. Some writers will also include the Biblical scholarship of such men as Erasmus and Reuchlin.
The Paradox of Money Imagery in English Renaissance Poetry
Authors: Blum Irving D.
Published: May 2006

The standard opinion about poetic images involving money is that they are conventional devices to depict the crass, prosaic details of existence. Robert B. Heilman, for instance, in ‘The Economics of Iago and Others', writes of such words as riches, gold, buy, and gain that these economic terms ‘constitute a precise, unsentimental vocabulary for keeping before us the problem of values, especially in terms of an always possible gain and loss’.

W. L. Clemen, another student of Shakespeare's imagery who examines the figures of speech used by Iago, makes this observation: ‘lago's imagery teems with repulsive animals of a low order; with references to eating and drinking and bodily functions and with technical and commercial terms.’ Here we see the language of commerce placed in a vocabulary of metaphors that shouts of earthy things.
Tudor Writings on Rhetoric
Authors: Ong Walter J.
Published: May 2006

The literature of the Tudor age, like that of earlier and immediately subsequent ages, has some of its deepest roots in the rhetorical tradition. This tradition is represented by a massive accumulation of writings and patterns of behavior which fed Western education and culture from antiquity well into the eighteenth century, but which until a generation ago had grown increasingly unfamiliar even to most scholars, following the Romantic reluctance to take rhetoric seriously as a conscious art. Recent scholarship, particularly in the United States, has re-explored the tradition, but the results and implications are not always widely known. The theory and practice of rhetoric can still be excluded from consideration in histories of Tudor literature, although by now one meets sometimes with wry acknowledgment of the central importance of what is being excluded.
'Mansus' and the Panegyric Tradition
Authors: Condee Ralph W.
Published: May 2006

In its most obvious aspect, Milton's ‘Mansus’ is a panegyric to Giovanni Battista Manso, the old Neapolitan nobleman and patron of poets whom Milton met on his Italian journey in 1638-1639. But ‘Mansus', like so many of Milton's mature poems, refuses to rest passively within its genre as a panegyric—it combines praise with the contemplation of death, it turns poetic conventions upside down, and in the end it creates not merely an encomium of Manso but a celebration of the harmony of things.
The Rejection of Learning in Mid-Cinquecento Italy
Authors: Grendler Paul F.
Published: May 2006

In the years 1535-1555 a group of Italian authors rejected much of Italian Renaissance learning. Humanists in the Quattrocento had wished to educate man for the active life. During the sixteenth century humanist education became a broad pattern of learning stressing grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, history, and literature, based on both the Latin classics and vernacular models like Petrarch. Its purpose was the training of the young patrician to serve his family, city, or prince in the affairs of the world. But a group of critics mocked liberal studies, spurned the classical heritage, rejected authorities like Cicero and Pietro Bembo, ridiculed humanists, thought that history was widely misused, denied the utility of knowledge, and argued that man should withdraw into solitude. Nicolò Franco of Benevento (1515-1570), Lodovico Domenichi of Piacenza (1515-1564), Ortensio Lando of Milan (c. 1512-c. 1553), Giulio Landi of Piacenza (1500-1579), and Anton Francesco Doni of Florence (1513-1574) reached maturity in the fourth decade of the sixteenth century and expressed these critical themes in their many books published from 1533 to the early years of the 1550s.
Who Read Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola?
Authors: Schmitt Charles B.
Published: May 2006

Among the philosophers of the sixteenth century who deserve wider attention than they have hitherto received is Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469- 1533).x As nephew and near contemporary of the more famous member of the Pico family, Giovanni (1463-1494), he has often been obscured by his uncle's brilliance and originality in the eyes of later scholars. His own work as a philosopher, however, is not without interest, both for its content and for its historical importance.

Gianfrancesco Pico was a man of many interests and his personal life was filled with enough exciting episodes to make it sometimes seem more like fiction than fact. Widely praised by his contemporaries as a poet, humanist, and scholar, he was friend and correspondent to some of the foremost figures of his time.2 It will be my purpose here to determine what, if any, philosophical influence his works had on thinkers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century.
William. Gager's Additions to Seneca's Hippolytus*
Authors: Binns J. W.
Published: May 2006

William Gager, the leading writer of Academic Latin drama at Oxford in
the late sixteenth century, celebrated on 6, 7, and 8 February 1591/2 the
most sustained triumph of his dramatic career. On Sunday 6 February, his new
play Ulysses Redux received its first performance
at Christ Church. On the following day, Monday 7 February, his famous comedy
Rivales, first performed in June 1583 before
the Polish Prince Alasco, was revived for a second performance. On Tuesday 8
February (Shrove Tuesday) Seneca's tragedy
Hippolytus was presented. Gager expanded the
play for this occasion by writing some additional scenes, including a
Prologue and Epilogue of his own. At the end of the performance of
Hippolytus, Gager brought on to the stage
first the figure of Momus, the carping critic, and then an ‘Epilogus
Responsivus’ who refuted Momus’ objections one by one.
Seyssel, Machiavelli, and Polybius vi: the Mystery of the Missing Translation
Authors: Hexter J. H.
Published: May 2006

Somewhere between 1510 and 1520, Niccolò Machiavelli composed the Discorsi sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio. The second chapter of that work contains what for Machiavelli is a rather elaborate theoretical disquisition. It deals with such arcane matters as the origin of civil polities, the beginnings of law, the forms of political rule, and the succession that those forms naturally follow in their historical sequence. Never before and never again did Machiavelli concern himself in so concentrated a way with the higher and more ghostly issues of political theory. Never before and never again was Machiavelli literally so un-Machiavellian. In Chapter 2 of Book I of the Discorsi he was literally un-Machiavellian in the simple sense that he cribbed most of that chapter without acknowledgement from another writer. In so doing he initiated a minor literary mystery—the Mystery of the Missing Translation or the Puzzle of Polybius vi.
The Scale of Man
Authors: Knowlton Edgar C.
Published: May 2006

The present study extends a series of articles dealing with the history of the doctrine of Nature and Genius. From Greek times on the doctrine was illustrated—often allegorically—in literature and other arts, and manifested various phases of culture.

In the Detroit Institute of Arts hangs a magnificent sixteenth-century Flemish tapestry labeled “Hilly Landscape”. It has been provisionally described by Mrs. Ardèle Coulin Weibel, Curator Emeritus of Textiles and Islamic Art. The accompanying plate describes it as a landscape with staffage by Franz Geubels, Brussels. It is dated about 1560.

The main scene, which is framed by a border, is more than a landscape. In the foreground lies an area of undergrowth including bracken, blackberry brambles, clover, and other plants, as well as decaying remnants of former vegetation.
A Note on Religio Medici and some of its Critics*
Authors: Bennett Joan
Published: May 2006

Sir Thomas Browne has puzzled his critics. His high rank as one of the great writers of English prose is well established, but he has been read in different and sometimes incompatible ways. Professor Basil Willey, in his illuminating chapters on Browne in The Seventeenth Century Background, reminds us that “It is a romantic falsification to ‘relish’ Browne for his ‘quaintness’”. This was the nineteenth-century tendency from the time when Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge rediscovered him to the essays of Walter Pater (Macmillan's liv, 1886; Appreciations, 1889) and Sir Leslie Stephen (Hours in a Library, Second Series, 1876) at the close of the period. Pater uses the word quaint and also humourist, although he circumscribes each with definitions.
Lodrisio Crivelli of Milan and Aeneas Silvius, 1457-1464
Authors: Smith Leslie F.
Published: May 2006

The primary object of this article is to give the text of six poems by Lodrisio Crivelli (Leodrisius Cribellus), only one of which, no. I, appears to have been printed before and that from a defective manuscript. Secondary objects are to determine what light the texts of the six poems throw on the life of Crivelli from January 1457 to February 1464 and to bring out, principally in notes, any evidence which may tend to add detail to our knowledge of the period.

Of these six poems only the first appears in the list of Crivelli's writings given by Dr. Giulio C. Zimolo in the account of Crivelli's life and works with which he prefaces his edition of one of them, De expeditione Pii papae II adversus Turcos.
Thomas More's Use of the Dialogue Form as a Weapon of Religious Controversy
Authors: Pineas Rainer
Published: May 2006

On 7 March 1528, Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of London, sent a letter to Thomas More asking him to write against heresy. Tunstall pointed out that heretical literature of both German and English authorship was coming into England in such quantities that, unless good and learned men could be found to confute these heretical books in English, the Catholic faith in England would be in grave danger. He was entrusting More with this task, the bishop concluded, because More was a master of eloquence in English as well as in Latin.

When More decided to carry out Tunstall's commission in dialogue form, he was not satisfying the predilections for the dramatic he had already evinced in his Richard the Thirde and Utopia but was availing himself of a weapon proven potent in the art of religious and secular controversy.
The Latin Drama of the Renaissance (1340-1640)
Authors: Bradner Leicester
Published: May 2006

The Latin drama of the Renaissance and Reformation has been studied mostly in Germany. Bahlmann and Bolte laid the bibliographical foundations in the 1890s, and at the same time Creizenach was publishing the volumes of his great Geschichte des neueren Dramas, which still contain the most comprehensive survey that we have of neo-Latin drama up to 1550. Rossi and Sanesi have dealt to some extent with the Latin drama in Italy, but their treatment is superficial compared with Creizenach's. In French there is no significant scholarly work in this field. In England J. A. Symonds gave a good account of the humanist drama in his Renaissance in Italy (1875) twenty years before Creizenach, but it was not until the appearance of Boas’ University Drama in the Tudor Age in 1907 that any work on Anglo-Latin dramatists was available.
Giovanni Conversini's Consolatio ad Donatum on the Death of Petrarch
Authors: Kohl Benjamin G. , Day James
Published: May 2006

Late in the summer of 1374 news of the death of Francesco Petrarca swept through Italy and soon crossed the Alps into the rest of Christendom: during the night of the 18th of July the humanist had died surrounded by his books in his study at Arquà, a village in the Euganean Hills to the south of Padua. Six days later he was buried in pomp in the parish church of that village; it was a funeral attended by a throng that included the signore of Padua, Francesco il Vecchio da Carrara, and the bishops of Padua, of Vicenza, of Verona, and of Treviso. The funeral oration was pronounced by one of the poet's closest Paduan friends, the Augustinian friar Bonaventura Badoer; in a stately ceremony the coffin, borne by sixteen doctors of law, was deposited in the Chiesa Arcipretale.
The Discourse of Demetrius Chalcondyles on the Inauguration of Greek Studies at the University of Padua in 1463
Authors: Geanakoplos Deno J.
Published: May 2006

Few historians today would challenge the dictum that it was the development of Greek studies in the West that did more than any other single factor to enlarge and widen the intellectual horizon of the Italian Renaissance. The broad lines of this pattern of development are now reasonably well known, and scholars are devoting efforts rather to elucidating details in the transmission of Greek learning from Byzantium to Italy. Nevertheless, occasionally a document may be discovered that will not only provide new details but clarify an entire episode of capital importance in the development of Western Greek studies.
Renaissance Latin Aristotle Commentaries: Authors A-B
Authors: Lohr Charles H.
Published: May 2006

Aristotelianism occupies a unique position in the intellectual history of the Latin West. From Boethius to Galileo—from the end of classical civilization to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and in some circles even beyond—die works of the philosopher had a decisive influence, not only on the development of theology, philosophy, and natural sciences, but also on university structure and the system of education. The history of Aristotle's influence in the Middle Ages, especially the history of its thirteenth- century beginnings, is quite well known. But renaissance scholars have generally concentrated on the revolt against the Scholastic Aristode, the revival of other ancient philosophies, and the birth of the new science, only recently turning their attention to the history of Aristotelianism and university philosophy.
The Concept of True Nobility at the Burgundian Court
Authors: Cannon Willard Charity
Published: May 2006

The view of the fifteenth century as an age of transition rather than as a period of decline, even in northern Europe, has made considerable progress in recent years, but there is still much to be learned about the various means by which the transition took place, especially how it came about in the minds of men. Too often investigations in this direction have been limited by the practice of studying the intellectual life of a given period almost exclusively through what men wrote rather than through what they read or what they saw about them. Besides this, sufficient importance has not always been given to the international and multilingual nature of the culture in the more civilized parts of Europe during both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Egypt and Egyptian Antiquities in the Renaissance
Authors: Dannenfeldt Karl H.
Published: May 2006

The true beginnings of Egyptology and the scientific collecting of Egyptian antiquities in the museums of Europe are properly assigned to the nineteenth century. However, the first signs of interest in the ancient land of the Pharaohs and its fabulous monuments were evident in the time of the Renaissance, for the humanistic regard for the material vestiges of the classical civilizations and the literature of Greece and Rome quite naturally led to an interest in the preclassical civilizations of the near east.
Fame, Poetry, and the Order of History in the Literature of the English Renaissance
Authors: Benjamin Edwin B.
Published: May 2006

Fame is surely one of the key words of medieval and Renaissance thought, like Love, Nature, Fortune, Envy. Such terms had for centuries a life of their own which they no longer appear to have; it is as if the years of myth-making, allegorizing, personifying gave them a concrete reality that our more positivistic age cannot accept. In spite of the difficulties of isolating such a term as Fame in the welter of material available, I would like to discuss some uses of it in the English literature of the later middle ages and Renaissance.
The Influence of Thomas Watson on Elizabethan Ovidian Poetry
Authors: Staton Walter F.
Published: May 2006

The phrase ‘Ovidian poetry’ or sometimes ‘mythological poetry’ is commonly used to denote a group of English poems written in the manner of Ovid during the 1590s and thereafter. Most importandy the group includes Lodge's Glaucus and Scilla (1589), Marlowe's Hero and Leander (1593), Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (1593), T. H.'s Œnone and Paris (1594), Drayton's Endimion and Phoebe (1595), Thomas Edwards’ Cephalus and Procris and Narcissus (1595). All the poems recast, or rather amplify, myths from Ovid and other classical writers; all treat a love story, usually with that precious combination of sensuality and sentiment for which Ovid is famous; all are highly ornate, employing rhetorically worked up love arguments, rich descriptions of clothing, buildings, tapestries, and the like, and minor embellishing myths like that of Neptune trying to embrace Leander in Marlowe's poem.
Mythe et remous historique: A Lunda Response to De Heusch
Authors: Hoover J. Jeffrey
Published: May 2006

Oral traditions are the common patrimony of a varied group of scholars. Although professional historians embraced African traditions only in the late 1950s, local -- and usually amateur -- historians had been writing from them throughout the colonial period and occasionally before. Meanwhile, students of anthropology and comparative religion from Frazer on have been studying the same traditions from very different perspectives. They have pointed out the common motifs recurring within the genre in widely scattered and disparate areas, and have related myth to its functions in present-day society, watching how it is molded to fit changing realities.

At the same time that academic historians at last began to overcome their doubts about the historical value of African oral traditions and began to use them, a French anthropologist was propounding a new approach to myth, a principle he called “structuralism.” Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that even the seemingly most direct and least stereotyped American Indian traditions he examined were actually philosophical expositions of world-view and religious belief encoded in symbolism. This article tests the structuralist approach through a detailed critique of one particular example of its application.

Luc de Heusch, a Belgian disciple of Lévi-Strauss, has recently studied the traditions of Lunda state formation as myth in Le roi ivre, ou l'origine de l'Etat. His aim is to discover the univers intellectuel of the Lunda and the other peoples of the Central African savanna, but his work touches the historian in two crucial respects. First, he highlights dangers in the path of the naive and helps paint parts of the larger human dimension in which historical events and historical records have existed.
English Bosman and Dutch Bosman: A Comparison of Texts - IV
Authors: van Dantzig Albert
Published: May 2006

[This continues the comparison of texts of the English and Dutch versions of Bosman. For earlier instalments see History in Africa 2(1975, pp. 185-216; 3(1976), pp. 91-126; 4(1977), pp. 247-273. Procedural matters are discussed in the first instalment, to which the reader is referred.]
Hagiographies and the History of Medieval Ethiopia
Authors: Kaplan Steven
Published: May 2006

The hagiographic literature of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church may be divided into two major categories: the translated lives of the saints and martyrs of the early Christian church and the lives of local saints. The essentially foreign works, which constitute the first of these groups, will be of only peripheral concern in this paper. While books such asBarlaam and Joasaph, The Life of St. George, andThe Conflict of Severusdid serve as models for the traditions dealing with local saints, they are of little interest to the student of Ethiopian history.

The most interesting of these local hagiographies are those about saints who lived between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. These traditions, which recount the lives of some kings and many monastic leaders, are of great importance for the reconstruction of the history of medieval Ethiopia. As Conti Rossini has written,

The more I preoccupy myself with the history of Ethiopia, the more I realize the importance of the study of local traditions. Only when we are a little more informed of these traditions with their accounts of the movements of peoples, with the advent (even if sometimes legendary) of successive chiefs, will we have an accurate idea of the history of Ethiopia.

However, while specialists in Ethiopian literature and history have long realized the potential value of thesegadlāt(singular:gadl) as sources for the study of Ethiopian history, the tendency towards idealization displayed in these works, as well as their abundant miracles and anachronisms, have left historians uncertain as to how to extract reliable information from them.
Strategic and Socio-Economic Explanations for Carnarvon's South African Confederation Policy: the Historiography and the Evidence
Authors: Cope R.L.
Published: May 2006

Although Carnarvon's attempt to unite South Africa in the 1870s was a failure, the forward movement represented by his “confederation policy” marks an important turning point in South African history. The destruction of the Zulu and the Pedi polities, which resulted directly from the confederation scheme, together with the last Cape frontier war and a rash of smaller conflicts, constituted the virtual end of organized black resistance in the nineteenth century and the beginning of untrammelled white supremacy. Britain's annexation of the Transvaal in 1877, which Carnarvon had hoped would be the decisive move towards confederation, instead set the scene for the conflict between Boer and Briton which dominated the history of the last two decades of the nineteenth century in South Africa.

Carnarvon's confederation scheme had important effects, but there is little agreement on its causes. The author of the standard work on the subject, Clement Goodfellow, took the view that Carnarvon's interest in South Africa arose essentially from its strategic importance within the empire as a whole. The Cape lay athwart the vital sea-route to Britain's eastern possessions, and confederation was designed, in Goodfellow's words, “to erect from the chaos of the subcontinent a strong, self-governing, and above all loyal Dominion behind the essential bastion at Simon's Bay.” This view, or some variant of it, sometimes with “Simonstown” or “Cape Town” or “the naval bases” or “the Cape peninsula” substituted for “Simon's Bay,” has been widely accepted and now appears as a matter of fact in the most recent and widely used general accounts of South African history.
Material on Africa (Other than the Mediterranean and Red Sea Lands) and on the Atlantic Islands in the Publications of Samuel Purchas, 1613–1626
Authors: Hair P.E.H.
Published: May 2006

In an earlier study I described the material on Morocco, the Saharan coast, sub-Saharan Africa, and the neighboring Atlantic islands, which appeared in Richard Hakluyt's collection of English voyages, in its two editions of 1589 and 1598-1600. Up to his death in 1616 Hakluyt continued to collect additional material for an intended third edition. This material passed to Samuel Purchas (1577-1626), an Essex and then London clergyman, who had already begun to collect and publish voyage material on his own account.

In 1613 Purchas published his Pilgrimage, which appeared again in progressively enlarged editions in 1614, 1617, and 1626. Pilgrimage presented a synthesis of contemporary knowledge of the outer continents, based on accounts of voyages and journeys to and descriptions of exotic lands, some of them published, others from manuscripts collected or inspected by Purchas, the whole notionally organized as a review of religious practices throughout the world. Although Pilgrimage cites a vast range of sources and sometimes quotes from them, the work is basically a summarizing of the sources in Purchas' own words. Of much greater interest, therefore, is Purchas' other major work, his masterpiece, his Pilgrimes, which appeared in 1625 in four very large volumes running to some 4000 pages. Pilgrimes is a collection of sources, on the model of Hakluyt's collection, though Purchas more frequently presents his sources in cut versions. The material covers voyages and journeys to all parts of the known world, and is not limited to English voyages--the major limitation being only the extent of material Purchas could lay his hands on.
Early European Sources Relating to the Kingdom of Ijebu (1500-1700): A Critical Survey
Authors: Law Robin
Published: May 2006

The history of the Yoruba, as is well known, is very poorly documented from contemporary European sources prior to the nineteenth century, in comparison with their neighbors Benin to the east and the states of the ‘Slave Coast’ (Allada, Whydah, and Dahomey) to the west. There is, however, one Yoruba kingdom which features in contemporary European sources from quite early times, and for which at least intermittent documentation extends through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is the kingdom of Ijebu in southern Yorubaland. The availability of contemporary European documentation for the early history of Ijebu is especially valuable since the historical traditions of Ijebu itself do not appear to be very rich.

Such, at least, is the impression given by published accounts of Ijebu history: although a large number of kings of Ijebu are recalled, thereby suggesting for the kingdom a considerable antiquity, and though there is some recollection locally of early contacts with the Portuguese, it does not seem that Ijebu traditions record much in the way of a detailed narrative of the kingdom's early history. At the same time, the European sources referring to Ijebu present considerable problems of interpretation, particularly with regard to establishing how far successive references to the kingdom constitute new original information rather than merely copying a limited range of early sources, and consideration of them helps to illuminate the character of early European sources for west African history in general. For these reasons, it seems a useful exercise to pull together all the available early European source material relating to Ijebu down to the late seventeenth century.
History of Bantu Metallurgy: Some Linguistic Aspects
Authors: de Maret P. , Nsuka F.
Published: May 2006

Under the influence of certain conclusions in comparative linguistics, historians, archeologists and ethnologists have been led to believe that the diffusion of the Bantu languages could be linked to that of iron metallurgy. Yet from a purely linguistic point of view, the only indications of metallurgical knowledge by the Proto-Bantus are the reconstruction of terminology directly related to metallurgical techniques, reconstructions made on the basis of words gathered from the ensemble of present-day Bantu languages.

It is thusly that Guthrie was able to reconstruct certain terms such as: “iron,” “forge,” “hammer,” and “bellows,” which led him to the conclusion, as expressed in his last article on the subject, that “the speakers of the proto–language probably knew how to forge iron before the Bantu dispersion began.”

A conclusion of such historic import, however, was based on only a few words, the reconstructions and the original meanings of which were often confused. It therefore becomes necessary to re-examine on a larger scale the vocabulary related to metallurgy in the Bantu languages.
Documentary Research on Sub-Saharan Africa in Belgium
Authors: d'Hertefelt Marcel
Published: May 2006

Belgian bibliographical research on Africa dates back to 1887 when G. Kayser published in Brussels a compilation of 2276 notices relating to works on the exploration and civilization of the continent which had appeared since the beginning of printing. With the publication in 1895 of the Bibliographie du Congo, 1880-1895 of A-J Wauters and A. Buyl--a catalog of 3800 works, brochures, notices, and maps relating to the history, geography, and European occupation of the Congo Free State--documentary works took a direction which, with only a few exceptions, would not be broadened until after 1960: Congo (Zaire), Rwanda, and Burundi were clearly privileged.

In a series of articles and pamphlets Théodore Heyse described the development of Belgian colonial bibliography during different periods, followed by a synthetic overview of the whole. Each of these contributions outlined in an introduction of a few pages the most significant moments of the period under review and was comprised of a list of references classified by topic as well as an onomastic index.

Historian and chronicler of Belgian colonial documentation, Heyse was also one of the most productive bibliographers of his time. A jurist by training, with additional diplomas in politics and in social sciences, he became an official in the Ministry of Colonies in 1910, retiring in 1947 with the rank of Director General. Assigned to the Direction des Concessions, he became a renowned specialist in colonial law, especially property law. To his numerous historical and juridical publications he combined intensive activity in the field of bibliography.
The Falls of Félou: A Bibliographical Exploration
Authors: Hair P. E. H.
Published: May 2006

As is well known, in his Nouvelle Relation de l'Afrique Occidentale of 1728 Père Jean-Baptiste Labat published material which led many later historians to suppose that the first exploration by Frenchmen of the furthest navigable point of the Senegal River, the Falls of Félou, was that conducted in 1698 by André Brue, chief agent of the Compagnie du Sénégal and governor of the post at St. Louis, following an abortive mission towards the falls despatched by Brue in 1697. However, in 1893 Henri Froidevaux published documents which showed that an earlier governor of St. Louis, Louis Moreau de Chambonneau, after a visit in 1686 to Galam, the “kingdom” containing the falls, sent two boats upriver in 1687 which reached the falls; and that after his return to France in July 1688, Chambonneau presented his superiors with a crude map of the falls. In 1913 Prosper Cultru published an account by a contemporary of Chambonneau, Michel Jajolet de la Courbe, a visitor to St. Louis in 1685–86. This account stated that Chambonneau had made an unsuccessful attempt to visit Galam in 1685, and that La Courbe himself, at a later date, (unstated but almost certainly 1690), during his second period in Africa, visited “the highest point in the river that can be reached.” Furthermore, La Courbe's account proved that Labat had misleadingly ascribed to Brue ca.1700 a whole series of journeys through Senegambia in fact undertaken by La Courbe ca.1685. Although the alleged achievements of Brue thus decisively invalidated do not include the 1698 visit to Galam, Brue's responsibility for the 1697 venture towards the falls is thrown into doubt; and other evidence cited by Cultru makes it less than certain that in 1698 Brue actually visited the Falls himself. In 1958 Abdoulaye Ly republished the Chambonneau manuscript map of the falls, and accepted that they had first been explored by the 1687 mission. Finally, in 1968 Carson Ritchie published two accounts by Chambonneau, written in 1677, during an earlier period of service at St. Louis, which, though not claiming that the author had yet visited Galam, stated that it had already been visited by other whites, presumably French colleagues. This indicated more gradual French exploration of the region leading up the falls than was once supposed, for even La Courbe, in a document of 1963 cited by Froidevaux, had spoken of Galam being “discovered only 7–8 years previously.”
One Tribe, One Style? Paradigms in the Historiography of African Art
Authors: Kasfir Sidney Littlefield
Published: May 2006

While the historiography of art as an academic discipline can hardly be construed as a science, it is nevertheless governed by certain dominant paradigms in both of the senses that Thomas Kuhn intended. First, at any point in time there is a constellation of beliefs, values, and techniques shared by the community of scholars who comprise the discipline known as art history. This can be further broken down, altered, and refined for the various sub-fields, but taken together, the separate facets constitute a “way of seeing” art history which differs substantially from the “way of seeing,” say, political history.

Applying Kuhn's second and more rigorous sense, the historiography of art is dominated by certain paradigms which serve as exemplars or models of puzzle-solutions. While these change over time (it is no longer permissible to ascribe German expressionism to “national character,” for example), they are so powerful that they function as unquestioned assumptions when in force. Even more importantly, they are frequently invisible because they are rarely made explicit. In European art history, the dominant paradigms have coalesced into entities such as “The Baroque” or “Mannerism” which are largely ontological models used to simplify the otherwise intractable complexity of European art styles and movements.
Oral Historiography and the Shirazi of the East African Coast
Authors: Pouwels Randall L.
Published: May 2006

“Settlements of foreign, predominantly Semitic, peoples”

Strandes' gambit concerning ‘Muslim Civilization’ of the east coast of Africa is a familiar one to many Africanists. Persians and Arabs, so the stories go, settled coastal sites as part of the Islamic diaspora; they vanquished less virile African societies; they built cities which were reflections of Middle Eastern prototypes; they imposed their religion; and, they ‘founded’ coastal civilization, a civilization, therefore, which was characteristically Middle Eastern. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians cannot be entirely blamed for holding such simplistic views. After all, the traditions themselves at least imply some of these things. And, given the literalist and diffusionist nature of past anthropological and historical theory, simple and biased interpretations of these traditions are not surprising.

What is perhaps remarkable, given the developments in anthropological theory since the 1940s, is the persistence of such views in some quarters. Examples include portions of two recently published papers by Saad and Wilkinson. Both deal wholly or in part with the most intriguing of the coastal origin traditions, the stories which tell how many coastal towns were originally settled by immigrants who came from Shiraz or Persia (see appendix). Their interpretations are so literal as to link the Shirazi name not merely with a particular dynasty, but with a specific family or kin group which ruled in pre-fourteenth-century Kilwa.