bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Interchapter II The Dialectics of Ownership
Authors: Newton Adam Zachary
Published: January 2020

“Your Jewish Studies is not our Jewish Studies.” Unpacking my academic library in some humbler version of Walter Benjamin’s famous self-accounting, thus was I welcomed to a private college by a standard-bearing member of its academic Jewish Studies faculty. “Guilds and their vicissitudes,” I’m sure I reflected to myself, softening the edginess with obliging humor. As the great Jewish satirist Victor Borge used to say, “It’s your language; I’m just trying to use it.” Promptly filed away as a mordant piece of ...
Ventilating the Tradition: Rashbam and the Coen Brothers
Authors: Newton Adam Zachary
Published: January 2020

With a performative and unlikely coupling of rabbinic commentary and postmodern filmmaking that pivots around the vagaries of storytelling, this chapter aims to circulate air not only within the crowded spaces it has explored in the previous four chapters but also inside the classical textual precincts that JS has traditionally made its own. If this book had been authored by a different category of disciplinarian—historian, social scientist, or theologian—this final chapter would most likely not be juxtaposing an eleventh-century Northern-French Torah commentator and twenty-first-century American filmmakers or the contrasting narrative strategies of renarration and denarration in Genesis 24 and A Serious Man, respectively. By performing just that sort of interreading, Jewish Studies as Counterlife concludes on the note on which it began, picking up the thread of a Jewish Studies story that hasn’t quite materialized or been recounted with a level of invention that matches its own unfolding.
Aim and Scope of the Study
Authors: Plessner Helmuth , Bernstein J. M.
Published: January 2020

By the end of the nineteenth century, both materialist-empiricist and idealist-apriorist efforts to interpret the relation between nature and spirit (including physical and mental existence and nature and culture) had been exhausted. This was the context for the emergence of Lebensphilosophie (life-philosophy). Bergson’s life-philosophy resolved contradictions in empiricist approaches such as Spencer’s. Yet Bergson’s view rested on an intuitionism that couldn’t adequately evaluate rationality and structured cultural phenomena. The same was true for Spengler’s approach to history. The neo-Kantians attempted to resolve the split between nature and spirit through expansion of the resources of logic to cover the humanities. Dilthey, however, saw that logic was insufficient as a paradigm for the humanities, which led to his own version of hermeneutics. Dilthey recognized the relevance of a theory of the human to hermeneutics, as well as the backdrop in nature that this implied, but wasn’t able to carry his inquiries far in these domains. This book attempts to complete this task: to lay out a philosophy of nature supporting a philosophical anthropology, in turn supporting a hermeneutics.
The Organizational Modes of Living Being: Plants and Animals
Authors: Plessner Helmuth , Bernstein J. M.
Published: January 2020

This chapter derives and elucidates certain fundamental features of life (the “organic modals”) from the structure of “positionality” (basically, the phenomenological form of organism-environment relations). The derived features include the circuit of matter and energy exchanges with an environment (the “circle of life”); the processes of assimilation and dissimilation in metabolism; the phenomenon of adaptation and adaptedness; and processes of reproduction, heredity, and selection. An analysis of positionality further supports a series of distinctions between types of forms of life, such as between plants and animals. The “open form” of organization characteristic of plants involves a more direct and unreflective relation between body and environments than the “closed form” characteristic of animals. The chapter integrates phenomenology and biology in a study of living things.
The Sphere of the Human
Authors: Plessner Helmuth , Bernstein J. M.
Published: January 2020

“Centric positionality” is a form of organism-environment relation exhibited by animal forms of life. Human life is characterized not only by centric but also by excentric positionality—that is, the ability to take a position beyond the boundary of one’s own body. Excentric positionality is manifest in: the inner, psychological experience of human beings; the outer, physical being of their bodies and behavior; and the shared, intersubjective world that includes other human beings and is the basis of culture. In each of these three worlds, there is a duality symptomatic of excentric positionality. Three laws characterize excentric positionality: natural artificiality, or the natural need of humans for artificial supplements; mediated immediacy, or the way that contact with the world in human activity, experience, and expression is both transcendent and immanent, both putting humans directly in touch with things and keeping them at a distance; and the utopian standpoint, according to which humans can always take a critical or “negative” position regarding the contents of their experience or their life.
Introduction
Authors: Richter Gerhard
Published: January 2020

The introduction situates the main concerns of the book, especially Adorno’s concept of the “uncoercive gaze,” in relation to his work as a whole. It also analyzes Adorno’s “art of reading” and articulates some of the stakes of reading Adorno’s challenging texts. Adorno emerges both as a thinker who invites us to learn to think with him and as a thinker who himself thinks with others (such as Kant, Hegel, Benjamin, Arendt, Kafka, Derrida, and Agamben) and thus always is a thinker in dialogue.
False Life, Living on
Authors: Richter Gerhard
Published: January 2020

This chapter casts an uncoercive gaze at the relation between Adorno and Derrida, with special emphasis on the problem of desiring to live a right life inside of a wrong one. Tracing a set of uneasy couplets—including thinking and thanking, the prize and the price, and false life in relation to living on—this chapter augments, with the strategic help of suggestive Derridean concepts such as sur-vivance as well as remarks delivered by Derrida on the occasion of being awarded the Adorno Prize, our understanding of the stakes of Adorno’s uncoercive gaze by returning to a vexing statement from Minima Moralia: “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”—meaning “there is no right (or correct) life within (or inside of) a wrong (or false) one”—which in the standard English translation is rendered as “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” How precisely one chooses to translate Adorno’s apodictic sentence has far-reaching implications. What emerges here is an engagement with the very forms of survival that promise, ever so fleetingly and intermittently, the experience of life as lived, fragile life.
Apophatic Theology and Its Vicissitudes
Authors: Rose Marika
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores Derrida’s work in relation to apophatic theology, examining the ways in which the Dionysian inheritance is transformed in his writings so as to repeat differently the four themes of freedom, materiality, hierarchy, and universalism according to a new configuration of eros and ontology. This new configuration in turn becomes a problem for theology. These responses to the apophatic elements of Dionysius’s work are perhaps best captured by the twin poles of radical orthodoxy and deconstructionist Christianity. Although these two appear initially to be dramatically divergent responses to Derrida, I will show that both ultimately retain the same colonizing universalism of systematic theology.
Mystical Theology and the Four Discourses
Authors: Rose Marika
Published: January 2020

In this chapter I suggest that a rereading of Dionysius’s Mystical Theology through Jacques Lacan’s four discourses illustrates how a Žižekian ontology makes possible a materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity. Slavoj Žižek’s work offers the possibility of repeating Dionysius differently, under the aegis of a Žižekian materialism within which apophatic theology is the condition of both the possibility and the impossibility of cataphatic theology. In such a materialist theology, Christian identity can be understood according to the logic of drive: that is, not as a commitment to a particular set of answers or a particular vision of harmony, but precisely as the commitment to a particular problem, the problem of what it means to be faithful to Christ.
Cruelty and Its Vicissitudes
Authors: Rottenberg Elizabeth
Published: January 2020

This chapter tracks the history of cruelty in the administration of the death penalty. It moves from the history of blood (cruor) and bloody cruelty (e.g., the guillotine) to a history that involves the disappearance of blood and the non-bloody process of interiorization. It argues that psychical cruelty makes cruelty not only difficult to determine but also, as Jacques Derrida insists, one of the horizons most proper to psychoanalysis. This chapter begins by following the signs of the mutation of the death-dealing discourse in the Christian, European West; it ends by reading the Jewish joke as the sign of a psychoanalytico-philosophical alliance that is explosively out of tune with the political theology of the death penalty.
The Infantazgo in the Reign of Alfonso VIII
Authors: Bianchini Janna
Published: January 2020

This chapter looks at the Infantazgo during the reign of Alfonso VIII. Beginning as early as the tenth century, the royal women of León-Castile laid claim to a little-understood share of the crown's patrimony, known as the Infantazgo. These Infantazgo properties were usually a significant source of power and income; their possession appears to be a major factor in the unusual prominence of certain women in the Leonese-Castilian monarchy. Contrary to previous assumptions, the Infantazgo did not disappear in the mid-twelfth century. It was altered, certainly, by the upheavals that attended the partition of León and Castile in 1157. But it endured, to last through the reign of Alfonso VIII and well into the reign of his grandson, Ferdinand III. Eventually, of course, the Infantazgo's significance did fade, due to the changes of the mid-thirteenth century. Ferdinand III's unification of León and Castile radically altered the kingdom's axes of power. The old domains of the Infantazgo, especially those on the Leonese-Castilian border, lost some of their strategic and economic value as a result.
“Happier in Daughters than in Sons”: The Children of Alfonso VIII of Castile and Leonor Plantagenet
Authors: Shadis Miriam
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues that understanding the long-term significance of Alfonso VIII and Leonor of England's political, religious, and dynastic strategies requires considering the lives and careers of their daughters, rather than their sons. Out of this family, it was their daughters who most successfully fulfilled their parents' ambitions. Even as their preference was for a son, Alfonso VIII and Leonor approached the education and rearing of their daughters with care—and obvious success. In particular, the fact that for the first eight years of her life, Berenguela was the acknowledged heir—and then the “mechanism” by which peace was sought with León—established her both in the record and in practice as a viable ruler who would legitimately carry on the dynasty. Ultimately, the web of relations created between Berenguela, Blanca, Urraca, and especially Leonor, with Constanza at Las Huelgas representing a sort of spiritual and domestic focal point, served to strengthen the family, as well as their individual reputations, and provided great resources to the next generation.
Holy War and Crusade during the Reign of Alfonso VIII
Authors: de Ayala Martínez Carlos
Published: January 2020

This chapter analyzes the crusading dimension of Alfonso VIII's reign and contextualizes it within the framework of relations with the whole of Christendom. Never before had a Spanish king demonstrated such a clear crusading policy as that of Alfonso VIII. The crusade sealed connections and established commitments that would turn the kingdom of Castile into a model frontier region for the rest of Christendom. The chapter then considers three significant periods during Alfonso VIII's reign, divided by three events marking the confrontation with Islam: the conquest of Cuenca in 1177, the defeat at Alarcos in 1195, and the victory of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. The victory of Las Navas represented the triumph of the papal idea of crusade, which had been fully integrated into the political discourse of the Castilian monarchy.
“Si Possides Amicum, In Temptatione Posside Illum”: Alfonso VIII and Peter the Catholic
Authors: Cabrer Martín Alvira
Published: January 2020

This chapter studies the relationship between Alfonso VIII of Castile and Peter the Catholic, the king of Aragon and count of Barcelona. From the time he ascended the throne in April 1196, Peter the Catholic was a faithful ally of Alfonso VIII. One can say that the alliance between the kingdom of Castile and the Crown of Aragon between 1196 and 1213 demonstrates continuity rather than change. The change is, perhaps, the extent of the stability and the strength of the alliance between Alfonso VIII and Peter the Catholic during almost twenty years. The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa was the highlight of the reigns of Alfonso VIII and Peter the Catholic. Alfonso VIII needed the victory in order to extend the Castilian borders at the expense of the Almohad Caliphate. Meanwhile, Peter the Catholic used his collaboration in the victory to legitimize his intervention in the Albigensian conflict.
A Prosopography of the Castilian Episcopate in the Reign of Alfonso VIII
Authors: Lincoln Kyle C.
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines the role of the Castilian episcopate during the reign of Alfonso VIII. The bishops of Castile during Alfonso VIII's reign were as vibrant a class as any in Europe in the long twelfth century. During that span, prelates were promoted more frequently based on merit and connections to aristocratic power centers than based solely on direct royal appointment. The composition of the clergy in the period, as a result, represents the increasing connectivity of local potentates and their networks to the multiple levels of the Castilian monarchy. That bishops were important functionaries in medieval kingdoms, and especially in Castile-León, hardly constitutes news, but perhaps more important is the collective picture. The chapter then looks at the background of each of the bishops to better understand both the makeup of the class of some of the king's most powerful vassals and the monarchy as well.
Via impugnandi in the Age of Alfonso VIII: Iberian-Christian Kalām and a Latin Triad Revisited
Authors: Burman Thomas
Published: January 2020

This concluding chapter argues that not only were there such practitioners of Christian kalām in the lifetime of Alfonso VIII—and most likely in Toledo—but that their works were, moreover, the fruit of such interaction between the Latin-Christian and Arab-Christian intellectual traditions. The rationalist arguments for the Trinity advanced in two Arabic works that survive only fragmentarily both continued a long tradition of Middle-Eastern Trinitarian argumentation rooted in kalām, and incorporated at the same time emerging Latin-Christian Trinitarian theology devised by Peter Abelard and Hugh of St. Victor. As such, they were evidence of an intellectually vital Arab-Christian community that was actively cultivating Arab-Christian and Latin-Christian thought in the twelfth century. However, important scholarly work has appeared on a handful of issues surrounding these texts and their Trinitarian arguments. The chapter then revisits the texts, considering the via impugnandi advanced by these tracts.
The Art of Losing
Authors: Swann Karen
Published: January 2020

Reviving pastoral elegiac form in Adonais, his elegy on the death of Keats, Shelley engages Keats’s allegorical style, which revives antique figures in order to show them passing on. This chapter dwells on Shelley’s figural strategies, especially his treatment of the Mother/Muse Urania, to argue that the poem’s efforts to consolidate the legacies of Keats and second-generation romanticism are shadowed by a story of catastrophe, that of the child who dies before its parental generation. Adonais at once participates in fashioning a romantic movement, corpus, and legacy and simultaneously suggests that lining this aggrandizing project is that which was cut off, aborted, did not come to pass. It thus dramatizes a modernity that is necessarily bound to that which it has failed to succor.
Coleridge the Talker
Authors: Swann Karen
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores Coleridge’s late career as a prodigious talker. An insistent strain in contemporary accounts of Coleridge’s talk suggests that his auditors recognized in his talking the dynamics of thinking itself: not a content that could be transported back from one’s encounter with him, but the rhythms of a mind in a state of radical non-relation to a social world with which it nonetheless “colludes,” in Thomas De Quincey’s words. Both Hannah Arendt, in The Life of the Mind, and William Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age, hold up this sort of thinking as a slender, rear-guard resistance that the purposelessness of thought can offer to an unthinking instrumentalism that functions to “reduce law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine,” in Hazlitt’s words. In his time, Coleridge became the figure of a thinking without limits, the bearer of a frail resistance to the modern social and political arrangements from which this thinking withdraws.
Terre's Brilliant Mines
Authors: Usher Phillip John
Published: January 2020

This chapter turns to a mid-sixteenth-century poetic text, the “Hymne de l’or” (Hymn to Gold) by French author Pierre de Ronsard. The poem is read here—recuperating in particular its “vision” of Terre that generations of critics have written off as a mere aside—as a poem ever conscious about gold’s exterranean origins and as a kind of poetic counterpart to nonpoetic texts about mining such as Georgius Agricola’s Bermannus (1500) and Vannoccio Biringuccio’s metallurgical treatise De la Pirotechnia (1540). After analyzing the “vision” of Terre in some detail, especially the way that Terre is described as always already containing not just gold, but mines, the chapter explores how Ronsard juxtaposes (in somewhat problematic ways) specific sites of extraction.
Sickly Mountain sides
Authors: Usher Phillip John
Published: January 2020

This chapter offers a counter-reading of Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica (On Mining) (1556), the first major printed book about mining. Usually understood within a teleological narrative of technological progress, it is here argued that Agricola’s work also, and despite itself, gives a voice to the extraction sites from which matter is extracted.
Last Acts
Authors: Vinter Maggie
Published: January 2020

Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grieving than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie the narratives of helplessness and loss most often used to analyze representations of mortality and instead suggest ways that marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some of these strategies for dying resonate with ecclesiastical forms or with descriptions of biopolitics within the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by writers including Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson alongside both devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.
A Brief History of the Sociology of Parishes in the United States
Authors: Bruce Tricia C.
Published: January 2020

Exploring sociological literature across almost three-quarters of a century, this chapter maps the origins and trajectory of sociologists’ exploration of the parish from the 1950s to today. From its contentious start to its largely applied orientation today, the chapter highlights several eras of parish research and argues that our current lack of sociological research on Catholic parishes can be traced to the tenuous relationship between the academy and the institutional Catholic Church. The chapter concludes by asserting that parish studies can be simultaneously good for the academy and good for the church. The future of sociological studies of the parish rest upon the willingness of both the academy and the church to accept this proposition.
Power in the Parish
Authors: Hoover Brett C.
Published: January 2020

Catholic parishes in the United States are complex organizations (where multiple communities coexist and interact). Relying on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and a case study approach, this chapter explores three parishes in Southern California that showcase the complexity of interactions among different racial and ethnic communities. These parishes are shared in various configurations by white, Latino, Black, and Asian parishioners, and this chapter illuminates the power dynamics of race and ethnicity as they work themselves out in American life. In shared parishes, the cultural work of constructing Catholic identity necessarily involves deploying distinct cultural expressions of Catholicism shaped by broader power dynamics of race, ethnicity, and language. This chapter lays bare this process as parishes illustrate power-in-action, with parish interactions variously producing, perpetuating, and challenging existing power dynamics and race relations.
A Sociologist Looks at His Own Parish
Authors: Coleman John A. , Adler Jr. Gary J. , Bruce Tricia C. , Starks Brian
Published: January 2020

This chapter is a dialogue with and reflection by John A. Coleman, S.J., a trained, well-published sociologist and Jesuit pastor in Northern California. In describing and exploring his own experience as a sociologist and pastor, he models the kind of inquiry raised by previous chapters, applying them in a practical way to a single parish to which the author belongs. Through lived experience and his bipartite role as sociologist and parish priest, Fr. Coleman shares in a personal way his own approach to the study of Catholic parishes. The chapter contains numerous questions and tools for applied sociological parish studies.
Whom We Shall Welcome
Authors: Battisti Danielle
Published: January 2020

This book looks at Italian American campaigns to reform American immigration laws from 1945 to 1965. It argues that even while Italian Americans were members of a coalition that pushed for liberal immigration reforms, their campaigns reflected a mix of liberalism and conservatism. Italian American immigration reformers invoked both secular principles of democratic liberalism and arguments based on Catholic social thought to call for a more humane and equal system of regulating immigration than the one in place based on a system of National Origins quotas. Yet in practice, Italian American campaign rhetoric and legislative strategies often reflected a socially and racially conservative vision of Americanism. Through displays of anti-communism, household mass consumption, assimilation, and advancing narratives of immigrant contributions to the nation, Italian Americans largely asserted their group’s fitness for immigration and citizenship rights in the United States. Each of those displays was highly racialized and hardly contested accepted political and social boundaries, but rather reaffirmed them. Those actions demonstrated that Italian Americans were just as concerned with their group’s political and social equality with older-stock whites as they were with liberalizing American immigration laws.
Boundaries of Inclusion and Exclusion in Postwar America
Authors: Battisti Danielle
Published: January 2020

The introduction comments on the nature of campaigns to reform American immigration laws after World War II, Italian American identity, and the political and social position of white ethnic groups.
Italian American Identity and Politics: World War II To the Cold War
Authors: Battisti Danielle
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines Italian American loyalty campaigns during World War II as well as postwar campaigns to promote the democratic reconstruction of Italy. It argues that even though Italian Americans had made great strides toward political and social inclusion in the United States, they were still deeply concerned with their group’s public identity at mid-century. This chapter also demonstrates that in the course of their increased involvement with their homeland politics in the postwar period, Italian Americans gradually came to believe that the successful democratization of Italy (and therefore their own standing in the United States) was dependent upon relieving population pressures that they believed threatened the political and economic reconstruction of Italy. That belief played an important role in stirring Italian Americans to action on issues of immigration reform.
The Italian American Immigration Reform Lobby
Authors: Battisti Danielle
Published: January 2020

At the same time that Italian Americans began to promote increasing Italian immigration to the country, Americans largely reaffirmed a policy of limited and restricted immigration with the passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. In order to more effectively organize against immigration policies that continued to be based on National Origins System quotas, and to meet the needs of Italian Americans who wanted to expand access to immigration opportunities for Italians, Italian Americans formed the American Committee for Italian Migration (ACIM). ACIM became the leading organization that helped to bring together a number of Italian American individuals and groups who were concerned about immigration reform in the postwar period. This chapter therefore explores the Italian American immigration reform lobby’s origins, scope, and ideological foundations.
Refugees and Relatives: Italian Americans and the Refugee Relief Act
Authors: Battisti Danielle
Published: January 2020

This chapter argues that a network of Italian American organizations was influential in helping to secure the passage of the Refugee Relief Act in 1953. The organizations exploited American anxieties regarding the stability of Italy’s democratic government to support its passage. The resulting Refugee Relief Program allowed for 60,000 Italian refugees and relatives of American citizens to immigrate to the U.S. outside of regular quota allocations. This chapter explores the variety of ways Italian American organizations worked to optimize Italian immigration under the program. Among other activities, ACIM and its affiliate organizations provided community education and administrative assistance, coordinated with Italian government officials, and worked with sponsors and applicants to ensure the utilization of all 60,000 Italian quotas. It also successfully secured an amendment to the terms of the law to benefit nonrefugee Italian immigrants who faced long waiting periods under the National Origins System. This chapter asserts that those efforts combined were intended to demonstrate the illegitimacy of the National Origins System itself and the need for more Italian immigration opportunities.
The End of the National Origins System and the Limits of White Ethnic Liberalism
Authors: Battisti Danielle
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores the ideological foundations of Italian American attacks on the National Origins System and their corresponding defense of a regulatory system based primarily on the principle of family reunification in the 1960s. Italian Americans articulated both a secular liberal critique of the National Origins System and one based on Catholic social thought. However, there were limits to their particular brand of liberalism. Italian Americans also continued to employ the rhetoric of immigrant “contributionism” to make their case. In doing so, they continued to argue that certain immigrant or ethnic groups were worthy of immigration and citizenship opportunities not because all individuals deserved the same basic legal and political rights but because those groups had somehow earned those rights through past demonstrations of “good” or accepted behaviors.
Introduction
Authors: Demacopoulos George E.
Published: January 2020

This introductory chapter begins with a brief history of the Fourth Crusade. When Pope Innocent III ascended Peter's throne in 1198, he almost immediately began planning for what was supposed to be the largest crusade to date. What is important to the present study is the fact that the crusaders transformed the very structure of Byzantine society by seizing control of both church and state and by often imposing a Western feudal structure throughout the Balkans that would serve as a beachhead for further Frankish and papal aspirations in the Christian East. By framing the events of the Fourth Crusade as a kind of colonial encounter, this book draws from some of the basic insights of postcolonial critique to look in new ways at the discourse of Orthodox/Roman Catholic difference that took its mature form in the thirteenth century. As such, one of the most important conclusions of this study is that the development of the most vitriolic statements of Orthodox/Catholic religious polemic in the Middle Ages were based in political and cultural alienation, not theological development.
Gunther of Pairis’s Hystoria Constantinopolitana
Authors: Demacopoulos George E.
Published: January 2020

This chapter looks at Gunther of Pairis's Hystoria Constantinopolitana, which is a hagiography celebrating the theft of Constantinopolitan religious treasure. Indeed, its primary source is to explain and justify the means by which an otherwise undistinguished monastery in the Rhineland came to acquire religious treasure that had been looted during the early days of the pillage of Constantinople in 1204. A careful analysis of the Hystoria Constantinopolitana demonstrates that the implementation of its hagiographic topoi is overlaid with what can be best described as colonial or protocolonial discursive features. Following a brief summary of the text, the chapter then considers these elements of the work in order to gain greater access to the epistemic horizon within which Gunther and his monastic community made sense of the theft of religious treasures from the largest Christian city in the world. Specifically, it will examine the ways in which Gunther justifies the violence enabling colonial settlement as a moral good; defends the extraction of Eastern Christian religious treasure; employs effeminacy and homoerotic sexual fantasy as rhetorical instruments; and describes Eastern topography according to exotic and erotic registers.
Innocent’s Ambivalence
Authors: Demacopoulos George E.
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on the correspondence of Pope Innocent III, his interlocutors, and his successors in order to understand more fully the conditions that gave rise to the first papal pronouncements asserting that Greek theological error was so egregious that it warranted violence, occupation, and larceny. The subjugation of the schismatic Greeks may have provided certain opportunities for those eager to assert the supremacy of the papacy as the governing body of the Church, but the use of military force to achieve and sustain Greek subjugation also called into question the integrity of the crusading endeavor and, more importantly, it upended previous assumptions regarding the boundaries of the Christian community. The events surrounding the Fourth Crusade and the subsequent maintenance of the Latin territory in the Greek East triggered a striking ambivalence in papal articulations of whether and to what extent the Greeks were “Christian” in the proper sense. As papal rhetoric gradually moved toward a more hostile characterization, the papacy became more willing to authorize a number of colonial enterprises previously inconceivable. These include violence against Greek Christians, the permanent settlement of Byzantine territory, and the extraction of Byzantine treasure.
Conclusion
Authors: Demacopoulos George E.
Published: January 2020

This concluding chapter argues that interpreting the Fourth Crusade as a colonial encounter usefully recalibrates one's understanding of the rapid escalation of Orthodox/Catholic animus that occurred during the thirteenth century. The Fourth Crusade was not simply an episode of medieval warfare; it was not simply an event of political opportunism; nor was it simply an example of conquest and plunder. To be sure, it was all of these things; but from the perspective of Christian history it was also much more. The siege of Constantinople and the formation of the Latin Empire of Byzantium, which followed from it, completely transformed the way that the papacy and many elite Western churchmen viewed the possibility of Greek/Latin unity. From a Western Christian perspective, the goal of Christian unity was now to be pursued and maintained through the military and political occupation of Byzantium. Thus, by situating the Latin Empire of Byzantium within the context of premodern colonialism, one better understands the transformation of Western Christian approaches to Christian unification in the wake of 1204.
Introduction
Authors: Drummond John J. , Höffe Otfried
Published: January 2020

Edmund Husserl, generally regarded as the founding figure of the philosophical movement of phenomenology—or, more precisely, transcendental phenomenology—exerted an enormous influence on the course of twentieth-and twenty-first-century philosophy. This influence was both positive and negative. The subsequent developments of, for example, existentialism, hermeneutics, and deconstruction were defined in part by how they both assimilated and departed from Husserlian views. The course of what has come to be called “continental philosophy” cannot be described without reference to this assimilation and departure and, among the many successor approaches, phenomenology remains a viable alternative. In addition, problems addressed by Husserl—most notably, intentionality, consciousness, the emotions, and ethics—are of central concern in so-called analytic philosophy. So, Husserl’s views remain central to many contemporary philosophical discussions....
What Is Phenomenology?
Authors: Patočka Jan
Published: January 2020

This chapter considers the relation between Husserl and Heidegger. The discussion is rooted in Husserl’s later discussions of intersubjectivity in Cartesian Meditations and The Crisis. Its aim is not primarily to disclose the differences between Husserl and Heidegger—although it does do that—but to find the point of unity between them such that both philosophies can be called “phenomenology.” This unity is found in phenomenology’s radical reflection on the crisis of humanity by way of a methodology that in its consideration of the human strives for an impartiality that annuls the presuppositions of the positive sciences.
The Significance of Objectifying Acts in Husserl’s Fifth Investigation
Authors: Mayer Verena , Erhard Christopher
Published: January 2020

This chapter details Husserl’s reconstruction of the concept of presentation (Vorstellung) and his transformation of Brentano’s thesis that all acts are either presentations or founded on presentations into the thesis that all acts are either objectifying or based on objectifications. The study reveals that, for Husserl, the intentionality-characteristic of any particular experience depends upon objectivating acts. Since all other kinds of experiences beyond the objectifications in perception (of things) and judgments (of states of affairs pertaining to things) depend on these underlying objectifications, the intentionality of these other kinds of experience—their directedness to an object—can be properly understood only in the light of the notion of objectifying acts. Carefully noted, however, is the fact that although non-objectifying acts are grounded in objectifications, they cannot be reduced to the objectifying acts.
Philosophy of Culture and Cultural Anthropology as Transcendental Phenomenology
Authors: Orth Ernst Wolfgang
Published: January 2020

This chapter considers the relations among the philosophy of culture, cultural anthropology, and transcendental phenomenology. Husserl’s concern was to focus on the nature of rational subjectivity, rather than the human as such, in order to ground the sciences and develop a philosophical science. To the extent that humans are rational beings, Husserl’s philosophy was concerned with humans only as instances of rationality rather than in their existential reality. However, Husserl began his philosophizing with anthropological motives, and his later philosophy realizes an expanded philosophical anthropology or, better, an “anthropological philosophy” that integrates philosophy and anthropology in a manner rising above particular anthropological orientations and thereby clarifying the very notion of orientation itself.
Introduction
Authors: Escolar Marisa
Published: January 2020

World War II Italy eludes easy definition. After fighting on the side of the Axis for over three years, the birthplace of European fascism experienced a series of watershed events whose political and cultural legacy is still being debated.1 On July 10, 1943, “Operation Husky” brought Anglo-American troops to Sicily’s shores, making Italy the site of the Allies’ first European occupation. In Sicily, the Allies were unquestionably occupiers; the name Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory spells out as much. Yet Italy’s status started shifting after Mussolini was deposed on July 25, a shift that accelerated following the unconditional surrender to the Allies with the September 8 armistice....
Happily Ever after Redemption
Authors: Escolar Marisa
Published: January 2020

This chapter introduces two popular romance novels (romanzi rosa) by Luciana Peverelli. Published while the occupation of Rome was unfolding, La lunga notte (1944; The Long Night) and its sequel Sposare lo straniero (1946; Marry the Foreigner) treat those traumas using a hybrid form that results in arguably the earliest Italian fictional Holocaust narrative that represents the deportation of the Jews to camps and the Fosse Ardeatine massacre; unconscious of how its own anti-Semitic logic facilitates the deportation that it condemns, La lunga notte’s paradoxical treatment of Judaism aligns with dominant postwar Italian attitudes. Set during the Allied occupation, the sequel argues for the hybrid genre’s privileged position in narrating the transition back to “reality,” when the heroines become war brides, an often-vilified figure who proves an adept intercultural intermediary. Challenging preconceptions of the romance, La lunga notte and Sposare lo straniero alter the requisite happy ending for those “redeemed” by marriage.
The Redemption of Saint Paul
Authors: Escolar Marisa
Published: January 2020

This chapter analyzes Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 (1978), the text that most widely perpetuated the gendered redemption paradigm traced in this book. As a British “wedding officer” in Naples, Lewis judges Neapolitan women, distinguishing war brides and rape victims among a sea of prostitutes. This work is not about determining the women’s status but about staging his redemption: starting as a hard-nosed officer, Lewis’s character “dies” and is reborn as the Dantean narrator, making his supposedly anti-fictional diary a conversion narrative, much like John Horne Burns’s The Gallery. As the chapter charts Officer Lewis’s conversion, it puts his diary-novel in dialog with The Gallery and Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle (The Skin), whose spectacles Naples ’44 rewrites in more direct prose. Treated as anti-fictional by historians, Naples ’44 has arbitrated the sexuality of Neapolitan women and the men who love, purchase, or violate them. Lewis represents all Neapolitans as whores and all goumiers “as sexual psychopaths” and yet still emerges as the authoritative narrator. The chapter ends with a reflection on the contemporary cinematic adaption, Naples’44, directed by Francesco Patierno.
Epilogue
Authors: Escolar Marisa
Published: January 2020

The epilogue suggests the possibility for a revision of redemption in reading Quel giorno trent’anni fa (1975; That Day Thirty Years Ago), an unknown diary by Neapolitan aristocrat Maria Luisa D’Aquino. The diary makes a proleptic rejoinder to Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44. Published in the same years and set in the Campana countryside, Quel giorno trent’anni fa is also a wartime conversion narrative that tracks the transformation of the narrator from her descent into hell as a newly widowed mother of five into a contemporary Dante. However, whereas Lewis constructs his diary with an eye to establishing his authority over the events, D’Aquino does so in order to inscribe herself within them, making herself a gendered, sexualized symbol for the Italian nation and the author of her own redemption.
Waiting for the Perfect Moment
Authors: Cirillo Frank J.
Published: January 2020

Unlike most abolitionists, Abby Kelley Foster and Stephen Foster refused to support the Union war. This chapter locates their antiwar motivations in their idiosyncratic brand of nationalism. The Fosters, like all abolitionists, desired to create a more perfect Union bereft of slavery and moral prejudice. The couple, however, led a hard-line faction that also emphasized moral rigidity—the need for reformers to avoid compromise, lest they corrupt the antislavery mission. This radical vision led the Fosters to oppose the Union war as an imperfect—and therefore unacceptable—vehicle for antislavery reform. Abraham Lincoln, in their view, would never fulfill abolitionists’ desires for total emancipation and black rights. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, the pair continued to oppose the Lincoln administration as an obstacle to true reform. This chapter thus opens a window onto the meanings of the Union war for those Northerners who never saw wartime emancipationist progress as inevitable.
Elizabeth Keckly’s Union War
Authors: Nunley Tamika Y.
Published: January 2020

This essay shows what the Union meant from the perspective of an African American woman. Elizabeth Keckly is most famous as Mary Lincoln’s seamstress and confidant, as a memoirist, and as a leader in Washington’s African American community. The essay places Keckly’s life and words into a broader historiographic context and argues that Keckly envisioned a Union of politicized African American men and women.
To Save the Union “in Behalf of Conservative Men”
Authors: Furniss Jack
Published: January 2020

Horatio Seymour was the Civil War’s most successful Democrat, securing the governorship of New York in 1862. This chapter analyses his election as a means to reconsider the record of the Democratic Party during the Civil War. Republicans at the time constantly questioned the loyalty of their partisan opponents. Scholarly discussion ever since has tended to reflect this, with historians explaining Democratic victories as the result of people voting against Republicans rather than for Democrats, who supposedly relied on race prejudice and antiwar sentiment to secure votes. I argue that Seymour offered an alternative vision of the Union war that Democrats and many swing voters deliberately endorsed. Reevaluating Seymour’s campaign on its own terms provides a clearer explanation of what the Union war meant for Democrats and why their party continued to receive support from upwards of 45 percent of the northern electorate during the conflict.
The Union as It Was
Authors: Kurtz William B.
Published: January 2020

When the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter, Catholic northerners rallied to save the Union from its greatest threat. Some hoped that immigrant and Catholic bravery and sacrifice on the battlefield would forever end anti-Catholic nativism in America. As conservatives and Democrats, they also strongly resisted attempts to enlarge the purpose of the war, especially on the issue of emancipating southern slaves. Remembering the connections between antislavery politics and anti-Catholic nativism in the antebellum North, they feared Republicans’ attacks on slavery might be followed by assaults on their rights as naturalized citizens and Catholics. The most prominent pro-Union leaders in the North were the Irish Americans Archbishop John Hughes (1797–1864) of New York and the Bostonian Patrick Donahoe (1811–1901), owner of the widely published newspaper the Boston Pilot. Together these two men led Catholic conservatives’ fight to restore the Union as it was before the outbreak of war.
“Certain Ill-Considered Phrases”
Authors: George-Nichol Jesse
Published: January 2020

Edward Bates joined Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet hoping to act as a bulwark against radicalism in the administration. Though Bates believed that Lincoln was fundamentally conservative, he also feared that Lincoln was susceptible to radical antislavery arguments. Lincoln sometimes indulged in the rhetorical excesses that Bates associated with abolitionist political culture, and Bates worried that such radical words might eventually lead Lincoln to more radical action. Bates thus sought to steer Lincoln and his administration toward a more pragmatic and conciliatory policy toward the South—one more closely aligned with Bates’s own border state centrism and understanding of the dictates of restrained manhood. Though Bates would conclude that he had failed in his task by the time he resigned in late 1864, the triumph of immediate emancipation and—as Bates saw it—of radicalism seemed far from inevitable in 1860.
Building a Union of Banks
Authors: Caires Michael T.
Published: January 2020

This essay discusses the relationship between the Republicans’ antebellum economic agenda and the events of the Civil War. The essay appears to begin aligned with the big argument that the Republicans were intent on changing the national economy, and the war provided a useful opportunity to do so.
“To Transmit and Perpetuate the Fruits of This Victory”
Authors: Luebke Peter C.
Published: January 2020

Taken as a genre, the regimental histories that appeared in immediate retrospect of the Civil War revealed much about how soldiers thought of themselves and the broader meaning of the conflict. Regimental histories served as a form of collaborative commemoration in literature that sought to convey the service and sacrifices of the soldiers to their home communities and thereby knit the two back together again. Overwhelmingly, regimental histories portrayed the soldiers' interpretation of the Civil War as an untroubled exhibition of patriotic duty and a mission accomplished. Insofar as the works touched upon the causes and outcomes of the Civil War, they pointed to a nefarious slave power as bringing the cataclysm upon the Union and emancipation as a wartime necessity as a way to carve the oligarchic cancer from the body politic.