bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dance, Myth and Ritual in Time and Space
Authors: Kealiinohomoku Joann W.
Published: May 2006

A recent, inconspicuous story in the newspaper, one of our most revered keepers and transmitters of traditions, added to our cosmology. It reported “galaxies formed at high rates when the universe was half to one-fourth its current age—earlier than thought. If one assumes the universe is 15 billion years old … this discovery would put the galactic baby boom at about 8 billion—11 billion years ago…. Astronomers are able to witness galactic births because light takes so long to reach Earth, but they've not seen them on the scale reported in the new findings—namely, 40 cosmic infants” (Anonymous 1995).

This carrier of tales, the newspaper, also reports “America Online has been offering Road Trips since June, with customized interactive trips through its own areas and sites on the World Wide Web. The service allows users to designate favorite places while being able to chat in real-time with friends about the experience…. The Internet is a kind of strange, scary place and [Road Trips] can make it more friendly” (Haring 1995 ).

Theoretical physicist Stephen W. Hawking writes that “life, at least as we know it, can exist only in regions of space-time in which [there are] one time and three space dimensions” (1988:165) (1). Space-time is ever fascinating to us humans because it is where we live, and its dimensions continue to expand.
Dance and Technology: A Pas de Deux for Post-humans
Authors: De Spain Kent
Published: May 2006

Encounter #1 Hand-drawn Spaces: I step around the corner and into a small room, pitch black except for the dull glow of three projection screens; the center one flat in front of me, the other two angling out like welcoming arms reaching to the edges of the darkness. I stay back, keeping what distance is allowed me, so I can take it all in. With little fanfare, a figure moves into view. The figure is clearly a representation of a human, a biped whose movement quality is instinctually recognizable, yet it lacks all of the features by which we categorize and contextualize in that instant of perceiving an “other.” (Check the order of your personal list and see how you were socialized—Gender? Age? Race? Ability?) Instead, this figure is formed, or perhaps I should say indicated, by lines: a chest cavity of swirling blue; a kinked, mustard-yellow appendage extending out from what seem like perpetually hunched shoulders.

From even a few feet away I feel a bit detached from this “dancer.” Lacking individuality in the way I am used to experiencing it, I don't feel compelled to attend to its dancing. So I step closer. Here, almost surrounded by the screens, my customary fourth wall protection is lost. As if on stage, I finally join this dance, beginning to feel some of that sense, that connection—my body to your body, your moving to my moving—that has kept me in this field through many lean years. Yet who am I connecting with?

More figures begin to appear and disappear: some retreat out of sight; some seem to step off into the darkness only to emerge on a different screen; and some eerily advance at me, growing into looming giants just moments before fading into darkness. It's as if they are attempting to leave their screened-in world, but disappointed to find themselves no more than projected pixels of light.
Athena Meets Venus: Visions of Women in Social Dance in the Teens and Early 1920s
Authors: Malnig Julie
Published: May 2006

In a 1915 editorial of The Ladies Home Journal, social commentator Dorothy Mills pondered the issue of the “woman question,” and in a few vivid sentences summed up much of the public's reaction to women's readjusted place in society during the Progressive era. What was one to make of the fact that women were declaring the right to vote, divorcing their husbands at a greater pace than ever and demanding fulfilling work outside of marriage? Said Mills:

The “New Girl” that some of us proclaim, and many of us don't believe in at all and more of us dread, is not a fantastic creature, a third sex, a superwoman. She is the eternal woman, with her love for man and child her eternal necessity, plus perhaps only one thing: a certain awkward realization of herself as more of a personality, a unit. Do you see how that can be the starting point of an infinite variety of developments, of activities, of theories? (Mills 1915, 3)
Somatic Authority and the Myth of the Ideal Body in Dance Education
Authors: Green Jill
Published: May 2006

Recently, the field of somatics has provided dance scholarship with a growing body of literature. Research has been conducted in the areas of dance science and education. Dance medicine and somatic education scholars have been able to help dance teachers find ways of using the body effectively in technique classes. For example, Glenna Batson (1990, 1993) and Sylvie Fortin (1993, 1995) have investigated the role of somatics in the improvement of technical dance skills. Further, Fortin (1995) has investigated learning and teaching theory as applied to somatics and dance pedagogy.

As a somaticist and educator, I acknowledge and appreciate the impressive work conducted by these researchers and educators. However, my current work moves somatics into another direction. I am interested in looking at somatic theory and practice through a socio-cultural lens. I am particularly interested in investigating how the body is shaped by society and the dance world, in which performers constantly strive for perfection.
The Yearbook of the Imperial Theaters
Authors: Wiley Roland John
Published: May 2006

As Russian ballet has become more important as a subject of historical inquiry, western scholars have become increasingly aware of the need to consult the rich bibliography of appropriate source material in the Russian language. Of all the eras addressed in this extensive literature, the late imperial period has quite understandably cast the most powerful spell over us. It was then, of course, that Tchaikovsky's music, Petipa's choreography, and the artistry of many still-remembered ballerinas first graced the stage. Like ourselves, the contemporaries of that period were conscious of the wealth of talent around them and sought to record their impressions of it. As witness to this we have the histories of Konstantin Skalkovsky, Alexander Pleshchejev and Sergei Khudekov, to name but three. More impressive than any of these works and a reference that their authors used, is the monumental Yearbook of the Imperial Theaters [Ezhegodnik Imperatorskikh Teatrov] —unquestionably the richest single source of information concerning the late imperial stage. In the following pages I shall describe this periodical and point out its value to ballet historians.
Three Historians of the Imperial Russian Ballet
Authors: Wiley Roland John
Published: May 2006

As interest in the history of Russian ballet grows, it is logical – inevitable, one hopes – that Russian writers of a century ago who specialized in ballet be scrutinized ever more closely. Who were the ballet historians of the time? What were their credentials? their points of view? To consider just three – Alexander Pleshcheyev, Konstantin Skalkovsky and Sergei Khudekov – formidable names with reputations to match, is not to deny the importance of yet others who in many ways also deserve our attention. But there are good reasons to start with these three.

All were publitsisty or “publicists”, a useful if not precisely translatable term that connotes writers on current affairs, who went beyond regular journalism to compile histories of Russian ballet based in part on their long firsthand experience. None was a dancer or a historian by profession, so all came to ballet with a larger vision: ballet was a beloved avocation. This left them open to certain biases, but these do not detract substantially from their value as commentators on the scene. Indeed, their broader outlook is precisely what lends significance and credibility to their work. All were Petersburgers; their writings tell us little about the second imperial company in Moscow. All present to the modern scholar difficulties of access: the works of Pleshcheyev and Skalkovsky are preserved only in major western collections, and much of Khudekov's work is virtually unavailable outside the USSR.
Pushkin and Istomina: Ballet in Nineteenth-Century Russia
Authors: Schmidt Paul
Published: May 2006

Where is the point from which we say “I see”? We begin with our eyes (“all eyes,” we say), and we watch. We become spectators, those who watch, and who are defined by that act alone. The act is old, but each perception is new, and each is individual: “I see,” I say, not someone else. Do others see indeed? What do they see? Turn to your left, to your right; enquire, and arguments abound. Believe your eyes, we say: I do, of course, but do I believe yours? There's the rub — and I rub my eyes; the problem vexes. No spectacle provides its spectators with an identical experience. I close my eyes; the spectacle dissolves, yet a vision persists: persistence of vision, we say. Yet how can I see what someone else has seen, if the eyes that saw are gone, if the spectacle they saw is gone? Your eyes, his eyes, those eyes long dead and gone — can I believe them? How does the vision persist?
The Making of Ballet Modernism
Authors: Garafola Lynn
Published: May 2006

In 1914, as Europe went to war, Serge Diaghilev launched an artistic revolution that profoundly altered the identity of the Ballets Russes. By and large, historians have dated this artistic shift to Parade. Unveiled in Paris in 1917, three years after Diaghilev's last full-scale season in the French capital, the work served public notice of the switch in his allegiance to the avant-garde. Parade came with impeccable modernist credentials: designs by Pablo Picasso, music by Erik Satie, a libretto by Jean Cocteau, program notes by Guillaume Apollinaire. Only Léonide Massine, the ballet's choreographer, was an unknown quantity, although by the early 1920s, his name, too, would be synonymous with modernism. It is not difficult to understand why historians have identified this work as the cradle of Ballets Russes modernism.
I. A Dance Director's Investigation into Selected Constitutive Properties of Antony Tudor's Dark Elegies
Authors: Giffin John
Published: May 2006

The question of what constitutes the essential elements of a choreographer's work is an important one for the dance director. This study concentrates on identifying some of the constitutive properties of Antony Tudor's 1937 masterpiece Dark Elegies. I will present some aspects of the work's compositional form and some details of its movement vocabulary. I will also compare these with traditional classical ballet usages of these elements.

The Labanotation score of Dark Elegies was written by Airi Hynninen in 1980 during a revival of the ballet under Tudor's personal supervision. I believe it provides a complete and detailed record of the work's essential structural and stylistic properties. This score is the primary source for my choreographic investigation.
III. Dark Elegies and Gender
Authors: Dils Ann
Published: May 2006

One of Antony Tudor's choreographic concerns is the emotional life and societal role of women. His best known early works, Lilac Garden (1936), Dark Elegies (1937), and Pillar of Fire (1942) explore the feminine realm and the differences in power between men and women that relegate women to their particular place in society. In both Lilac Garden and Pillar of Fire the central issue is the difficulty women face in finding romantic love in polite society. In both pieces women face uncertainty and confusion until the right man steps in to fulfill their destiny. In Dark Elegies, gender is not the central issue, but the scenario is the same: underneath the explorations of personal and communal grief, the struggle to cope with the loss of young children, is a clear and critical thread of gender differentiation.

Tudor connects gender with the ways people handle grief—women get lost in grief, men cope with it—and with the leadership roles in the Dark Elegies community. Men are the driving forces in the community. They are the comforters and have the capacity to lead the group through the stages of the grieving process into resignation. Women are the passive members of the community. They can neither help themselves nor each other, but must depend on their men for solace and salvation.
The Philadelphia Dancing Assembly in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Brooks Lynn Matluck
Published: May 2006

In eighteenth century Philadelphia the evolution of cultivated society closely followed-or rather kept step with-developments among the English elite. Colonists considered Bath, England to be “the centre of refined Colonial Society”, and those who could afford the time and expense visited there in order to attend plays, participate in assemblies, and absorb the latest trends in fashion and culture. Following the British model, one important attainment of any colonial gentleman or lady was grace of physical manner, evidenced in good part by skill in dancing. These manners and skills could best be appreciated in assemblies of polite society, assemblies where refined conversation, dancing, card-playing, and supping frequently provided the forum for social mingling.

Philadelphia was among the first of American cities to formalize such gatherings when, in 1749, a group of gentlemen who led the city's political, professional and mercantile life joined together in establishing the Philadelphia Assembly, sometimes also called the Dancing Assembly. As early as 1753 the fame and gentility of this assembly had spread to England, for Walter Ewer, Jr. wrote from London to his cousin William Sword in Philadelphia to ask if the latter had ever attended the city's Assembly, which Ewer wrote was reported to be “a fine one”. Another source recalled that “the dancing assembly among the gentry had high vogue, partaking, before the Revolution, of the aristocratic feelings of a monarchial government”.
Swinging at the Savoy
Authors: Engelbrecht Barbara
Published: May 2006

With the passing of the Savoy Ballroom, a part of the show business is gone. I feel about the same way I did when someone told me the news that Bill (Bojangles) Robinson died.

—Count Basie, 1958. The demolition of Harlem's Savoy Ballroom.

Like Bojangles, by 1958 the Savoy had become an institution in the world of entertainment, and like Bojangles, it caught the imagination of thousands upon thousands of people during its 32-year history. The Savoy was a building, a geographic place, a ballroom, and the “soul” of a neighborhood. It personified a community and an era, and became a monument to the music and dance of “swing.” On its huge and shiny mahogany floor, the Lindy Hop was born, a dance that took the world by storm and would become as seminal as the waltz in the history of social dance. The Lindy Hop, together with countless other dances like the Flying Charleston, the Stomp, the Shim Sham Shimmy, Rhumboogie, Suzie-Q, Big Apple, Black Bottom and the Scrontch, were taken to an extraordinary level of performing perfection at the Savoy. Within its inner circle, great dancers and musicians set trends and styles in dance and music that ricocheted throughout the world. There were other ballrooms and clubs—Connie's Inn, Small's Paradise, The Cotton Club, The Lenox Club, The Kentucky Club, and the downtown clubs on 52nd Street—but there was only one Savoy.
Between Two Eras: “Norton and Margot” in the Afro-American Entertainment World
Authors: Dixon-Stowell Brenda
Published: May 2006

From 1933 until 1946-47 Margot Webb and Harold Norton performed on the Afro-American vaudeville circuits of night clubs and theatres in the Northeast and the Midwest. Known professionally as “Norton and Margot,” they were one of the few Afro-American ballroom teams in history. Their career was emblematic of the frustrations, paradoxes, and double standards which existed for Afro-American artists in the United States. As a ballroom team, they faced the same obstacles as a Dean Dixon or a Marian Anderson: they were traveling on a white road posted with “No Trespassing” signs for the Afro-American. They followed on the heels of the 1920s, which was the golden era of Afro-American vaudeville, of the Cotton-Club-type, posh nightclub, and of “Black Broadway.” They preceded by two decades the civil rights era of the 1960s, when more opportunities became available to Afro-Americans in mainstream (or white) show business. Norton and Webb belonged to the swing era of the 1930s and the 1940s. However, due to the nature of their performance style and the racial tenor of their times, they were either too early or too late for success. It is in this sense that they existed between two eras.
The Preferred Pas de Menuet
Authors: Cobau Judith
Published: May 2006

The recurrence of an uncomplicated step pattern made it possible for 18th-century ladies and gentlemen of varying abilities to perform the Minuet. In 1762, Giovanni-Andrea Gallini, director of dances at the Royal Theatre in the Haymarket, London, said that the success of the Minuet stemmed in part from “the possibility of dancing it to so many different airs, though the steps are invariable.” Thirty-seven years earlier the dancing master Pierre Rameau describes the emergence of a simplified version of the pas de Menuet that replaced a more demanding step. Eighteen-century European dancing masters, such as Charles Pauli, repeatedly describe the Minuet step as natural, plain and unaffected—a step that is “perfect” for performance. Because the Minuet steps were successful and widely performed, dancing masters taught its established steps, not steps based on their own whims or creations. An analysis of a wide range of 18th-century manuals reveals that a preferred version of the Minuet step emerged in the literature and remained relatively unchanged to near the end of the century.
Tamiris and the Federal Dance Theatre 1936–1939: Socially Relevant Dance Amidst the Policies and Politics of the New Deal Era
Authors: Cooper Elizabeth
Published: May 2006

Credit is due a great many individuals for sustained, serious and heartbreaking efforts to achieve successful dance productions within the organization of the Federal Theatre Project in New York, but there is one person who has practically given all her life to it for the past three years and has repeatedly and consistently identified her own career with it. She has been responsible for four productions and has done more than any other one person to hold the whole project together and keep it going. Without her tremendous creative enthusiasm and energy, her personal and artistic integrity, her sense of social responsibility, I doubt if this project could ever have endured. I doubt it could have been organized in the first place.… I am speaking of Tamiris.

The history of the Works Progress Administration's short-lived Federal Dance Theatre embodies many of the aspirations, achievements, ambiguities, handicaps and frustrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Like the other Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief programs, the Federal Dance Theatre (FDT) was created with federal funds to help alleviate the hardships brought on by the Great Depression. The FDT was established in January 1936 as a distinct artistic entity within the WPA relief organization. It employed professional dancers, choreographers, musicians, designers, and technicians, and set before them the task of producing socially relevant dance pieces for the American people, in particular, audiences that had not previously had access to the theatre. That the Federal Dance Theatre came into existence at all and managed to stay afloat and produce a few critically acclaimed productions of social portent and artistic merit was largely due to the perseverance of modern dance maverick, Helen Tamiris (1905–1966).
Dance Exchange In Western Equatorial Africa
Authors: Fernandez James W.
Published: May 2006

In a now classic study Mitchell demonstrated that dances quite beside their aesthetic interest offer important insight into social structural processes. Dances characteristic of the transitional period in Africa frequently offer valuable insights into patterns of changing social organization and into the cultural perspectives of the participants. I am going to scrutinize here some features of dances now being exchanged in Western Equatorial Africa—in particular among the Pahouin peoples or Yaounde-Fang speakers of northern Gabon, Southern Cameroons and Equatorial Guinea. These peoples traditionally had simple non-market economies. In recent years they have been brought rapidly into a modern economy through the introduction of cash crops and migrant labor. The question arises: what is being exchanged in the distribution of these dances and what is the consequence of this exchange? In a transitional economy there are almost surely other values in transaction than those measurable in modern currency.
Eskimo Dance and Cultural Values in an Alaskan Village
Authors: Ager Lynn Price
Published: May 2006

Although expressive aspects of a culture are generally believed to be related to the values and sentiments which prevade that culture, few studies to demonstrate the relationship have been carried out on nonverbal, more accurately non-vocal, aspects of culture. This paper is a result of my attempt to view traditional Eskimo dance as an expression of Eskimo values, sentiments, and cultural foci.

Eskimo values and cultural foci are described as I perceived them during eight months of ethnological field research (1973–74) among a group of coastal Eskimos in southwestern Alaska. I cannot vouch for the universality of these values in Eskimo groups throughout the arctic, but my impression from the literature is that they are widely held. The dances I describe, however, are not universal, as dance varies from one region to another and even from village to village within some regions (Theresa Tomczak, personal communication 1972). The community I am reporting on is Tununak, on Nelson Island, Alaska.
A Recollection of Margaret H'Doubler's Class Procedure: An Environment for the Learning of Dance
Authors: Moore Ellen A.
Published: May 2006

In 1917 Margaret H'Doubler, on a year's leave from the University of Wisconsin, had been given a difficult assignment. Blanche Trilling, her chairman, had asked if she would search the dance studios in New York City for a kind of dance activity “worth a college woman's time.” Studying philosophy that year at Columbia University, Margaret H'Doubler had complied with pronounced lack of enthusiasm, her predominant interest being in teaching basketball. Her time nearly expired, she found herself, however, suddenly excited when, at the music school of Alys Bentley, she saw children on the floor moving in their own ways to a stimulus provided by the teacher.

“Of course,” she recounted later, “Get on the floor where you are relieved from the pull of gravity … and see what the natural, structural movements are.” She continued to visit Miss Bentley's studio during the short time that remained and began to organize a course in “new dancing” to be offered almost immediately in summer school in Madison.
Nineteenth Century Performing Indians: An Annotated Bibliography
Authors: Shifrin Ellen
Published: May 2006

This bibliography grew out of a seminar entitled “Dance in the Popular Theatre in the Nineteenth Century.” A prior unfulfilled interest in the North American Indian led me to focus my search in that direction. Although a considerable amount of class time was spent in discussing the notion of “popular” art as opposed to “high” or “elite” art, this potentially problematic question did not become an issue in this search. The North American Indian's contribution to the stage definitely had the widest possible audience appeal, which may be used as a criterion for part of the definition of “popular.”

Part of the seminar experience was to introduce us to unusual sources, to encourage us to probe materials which were not generally considered the dance historian's domain. As well, we were to attempt to discover as much as possible in the Toronto area libraries, and with the aid of the interlibrary loan services, to actually handle as many potentially relevant sources as possible. An unforeseen trip to New York in mid-year extended the search and admitted the inclusion of certain documents which otherwise might have been left out.
The Teachings of Classical Puritanism on Conjugal Love
Authors: Frye Roland Mushat
Published: May 2006

Many of the old clichés about Puritanism have been dispelled by the researches of such eminent modern scholars as Haller, Knappen, and Miller, so that we are now more likely to understand the Puritans than were our less well-informed predecessors. Certain areas of misconception and uncertainty still remain, however, and the function of this paper is to explore one of these areas, namely, the teachings of classical Puritanism on physical love in marriage. Although judgments have already been pronounced by scholars on this subject—judgments which are both varied and conflicting—there has, as yet, been available no study which provides detailed and conclusive documentation of the Puritan teaching on the physical relations of marriage, for even the most useful studies usually skirt the sexual aspects of marriage, or dismiss these aspects with a sentence or two, and but little documentation.
Marino and the English Metaphysicals
Authors: Warnke Frank J.
Published: May 2006

In their attempts to define the poetic style of John Donne and his followers, twentieth-century critics have often considered its relationship to analogous movements in the continental literatures. They have seen in the common love of paradox and in the common use of far-fetched metaphors, or conceits, links which unite Donne and the other English metaphysical poets to Marino and his followers in Italy and to Góngora and his followers in Spain. Credit for the original insight connecting Donne and Marino, as is so often the case with original insights, must go to Dr. Johnson, who in the famous passage on the metaphysical poets in his “Life of Cowley” suggested that the metaphysical style was “borrowed from Marino and his followers”.
The Antiparadoxon of Marcantonius Majoragius or, A Humanist Becomes a Critic of Cicero as a Philosopher
Authors: Breen Quirinus
Published: May 2006

It was the opinion of Sabbadini that the year 1528 was the year of decision with respect to the controversy over the imitation of Cicero as a writer. In that year Erasmus published his Ciceronianus. In this book the extreme Ciceronian is burlesqued in the person of Nosoponus. Scholars like Scaliger sputtered answers, but so great was Erasmus’ reputation as arbiter of letters and so laughable was Nosoponus that thenceforth there was a relaxation in the anxious imitation of Cicero's style. No major Ciceronian work was published subsequently, saving the Cicero-lexicon (1535) of Marius Nizolius, and even he became a moderate.
Philalgia in Warwickshire: F. M. Van Helmont's Anatomy of Pain Applied to Lady Anne Conway
Authors: Sherrer Grace B.
Published: May 2006

Among the anomalies of the mind of Francis Mercury Van Helmont none is more striking than the deviation from contemporary medical theory which led him to formulate his ‘anatomy of pain’. Van Helmont's theory of the nature of pain is outlined in the British Museum MS. Sloane 530, variously referred to as ‘Observations’ and ‘Autobiographical Memoires'. A fuller statement and application of his theory appears in a Latin poem found among the papers of John Locke, a poem of special interest to students of the Cambridge Platonists because of its dedication to Lady Anne, Viscountess Conway, friend and correspondent of Henry More. The manuscript, now in the Bodleian Library, hsted as MS. Locke c. 32, fol. 47, contains 135 lines which are clearly legible, seven lines being illegible because of abrasion of the paper.
Erasmus and France: the Propaganda for Peace
Authors: Hutton James
Published: May 2006

The reputation of Erasmus in the period after his death has been the object of considerable interest in recent years following the impression made by Marcel Bataillon's Érasme et l'Espagne (Paris, 1937) and, more recently, by Andreas Flitner's essay Erasmus im Urteil seiner Nachwelt (Tübingen, 1952). The vicissitudes of an influence felt to be important, yet at the same time widely suspect, is something of a critical index to European moral sentiment. It is clear also that the reception of this influence has differed with the climate of opinion from country to country as well as from time to time, and it would seem desirable to fill up the outline, so admirably sketched by Flitner, at points where our present information is relatively thin. One such point is to be found in France in the latter part of the sixteenth century.
The Thought of Louis Le Roy according to his Early Pamphlets
Authors: Richter Bodo L. O.
Published: May 2006

Among the authors of pamphlets in the sixteenth century there are many who achieved their reputation through works of larger dimensions but who nevertheless reveal interesting facets of their thought in their less ambitious writings. In most instances these tracts were the medium for news or for partisan comment upon die issues of the day. On other occasions these little books contained a rough draft of ideas which subsequently were given a modified or fuller expression. In either case the writer was likely to be spontaneous and rather casual about the manner of presentation, thus affording us an opportunity to witness the germination of his ideas.
Venetian History and Political Thought after 1509
Authors: Libby Lester J.
Published: May 2006

Around the year 1500, the ancient maritime republic of Venice surpassed all the other states of renais-r sance Italy in wealth and power. For nearly a thousand years, the Venetians had enjoyed continual economic and political success, transforming their original scattered settlements on the lagoon islands into the splendid capital of an empire extending from the Greek islands to the rich cities of Lombardy. The patrician ruling caste of the republic consequently thought of itself as invincible and so was completely unprepared for the disastrous events of the war of the League of Cambrai.
Irish Scholarship and the Renaissance, 1580-1673
Authors: Silke John J.
Published: May 2006

The diffusion of the Renaissance in Ireland was in fact late. But to say of Ireland that ‘She was practically untouched by the renaissance’, as one authority of fifteenth-century Ireland has, is an overstatement. It will be the thesis sustained here that when it reached what Tasso called divisa dal mundo ultima Irlanda it had a powerful impact, both culturally and politically. It came principally as an adjunct of the new religious ferment. In Europe the Reformation preceded the Counter-Reformation; in England they synchronized, but in Ireland the Counter-Reformation was established before the Reformation had made any real headway. Religious issues were strongly colored by the new learning, so that the religio-cultural conflicts in Ireland were sharper than anywhere else in the British islands.
Humanist Treatises on the Status of the Religious: Petrarch, Salutati, Valla
Authors: Trinkaus Charles
Published: May 2006

Due attention has long been given to philosophia moralis , claimed as the fifth studia humanitatis by Italian humanists from the early fifteenth century, and as such subject properly theirs. Scholars have been interested in 'The Moral Thought of Renaissance Humanism' (as Professor Kristeller entitled his recent survey) primarily for the special attitudes of humanists toward ‘man', toward 'nobility', toward ‘wisdom', toward ‘happiness', toward ‘civic' activity and good citizenship. They have paid attention to attempts the humanists made to reconcile ancient philosophies with Christianity, principally those stemming from Florentine Neoplatonism.
Sorcery in Early Renaissance Florence
Authors: Brucker Gene A.
Published: May 2006

In the published studies of European witchcraft ajid sorcery, Italy does not stand out as a fertile field for the practice of the diabolical arts. Both Hansen and Lea noted the higher incidence of sorcery cases in northern Europe, and particularly in the Alpine regions, where powerful and uncontrolled manifestations of natural phenomena strengthened belief in demons and devils and thus contributed to the practice of sorcery. From the printed evidence, it might be concluded that, in the more rational and skeptical milieu of Renaissance Italy, sorcery was neither practised extensively nor taken seriously by the authorities.It is true that Italy did not experience the extremes of fanaticism and terror which occurred in Germany and the Low Countries from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century.
A Manuscript of Landino's Xandra in South Africa1
Authors: Casson L. F.
Published: May 2006

S. Grey 3 c 12 is a miscellany of Latin poems in the South African Library, Cape Town. It is one item in a collection of manuscripts, and a much larger number of printed books, given to the library in 1861 by Sir George Grey, governor of the Cape. At the time of the gift, he had relinquished his office for a similar post in New Zealand, where he had been governor also before coming to South Africa. While in New Zealand for the second time, he formed another but smaller collection of manuscripts, now in the Public Library at Auckland. Both collections are the work of an amateur bibliophile, a gentleman of private means, who assembled with intelligence and good taste.
The Left Hand of God: Despair in Medieval and Renaissance Tradition
Authors: Snyder Susan
Published: May 2006

A man of hell, that cals himselfe Despaire

(Faerie Queene, I, ix, 28)

Penser's moving description of the Redcrosse Knight's encounter with Despaire in Book One of The Faerie Queene is the culmination of a long and rich movement of thought and imagery. Here, as so often in his great Renaissance epic, Spenser looks back to the middle ages, drawing on a still-vital tradition to present the ugly, sinister figure with its knives and ropes and its soulpiercing arguments.

In spite of the tides of secularism, despair in its theological sense—loss of hope of salvation—figures significantly in Renaissance literature. Examining England alone, one notes its place in the traditional morality play pattern as the turning point of the hero's downward movement: Skelton's Magnyfycence is a prominent example. Despair episodes have a somewhat similar place in the prodigal son dramas which were popular during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, such plays as Lusty Juventus, Misogonus, and Nice Wanton.
The Trojan Franks and their Critics
Authors: Huppert George
Published: May 2006

The heroes of the Trojan war who figured so prominently in the pedigrees of ancient nations continued to perform the function of mythical sires for the new nations of medieval Europe. The Franks especially, from the time of the Merovingian kings, filled the darkest recesses of their forgotten past with elaborate fictions of ancient Trojan splendor. In a seventh-century chronicle, Priam appears as the first king of the Franks. After the fall of Troy, according to the Merovingian chronicler, some Trojans escaped the disaster and elected a man named Francio king. Francio's people, after a long and warlike exodus, eventually materialized over the Rhine as the Franks who invaded Gaul.
A Lament on the Death of John of Legnano
Authors: Schork R. Joseph , McCall John P.
Published: May 2006

When John of Legnano died in Bologna on 16 February 1383, the University lost an esteemed professor and the city one of its best loved leaders. Born in Milan and educated at Bologna, Legnano became well known as a professor of canon law at the University and a man of wide learning, loyal both to the Church and to the city which adopted him. His writings were numerous, ranging from standard legal commentaries and tracts to treatises on theology, moral and political philosophy, astronomy, and optics. His broadest reputation, however, came from the authorship of De Fletu Ecclesiae (1378-1380), a series of arguments defending the validity of Urban VI's election at the outbreak of the Great Western Schism. Through this work he became the chief spokesman for the Italian Pope on a politicalecclesiastical question which concerned every state in Europe.
Recent Trends in the Economic Historiography of the Renaissance
Authors: Ferguson Wallace K.
Published: May 2006

First of all, may I express my pleasure at having been invited to participate in this twentieth anniversary of the New England Renaissance Conference. I would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate Professor Bradner and his colleagues on the part they played in originating the idea of a regional conference on the Renaissance—an idea that has since spread from coast to coast and has in no small degree been responsible for the growing interest in Renaissance studies in this country during the past two decades. Few of us who took part in the first conference here could have realized that we were assisting at the birth of a movement with such a brilliant future.
The Medieval ‘Cycle’ as History Play: an Approach to the Wakefield Plays
Authors: Catherine Dunn E.
Published: May 2006

One of the most vital questions in present studies of English drama is the nature and provenance of the Elizabethan chronicle play. At the mid-century of our era, it was quite clear that Felix Schelling's survey of the history play, now fifty years old, should be rewritten to include the discoveries of a half-century's scholarship. Such was the announced purpose of Professor Irving Ribner's book, which appeared in 1957 asThe English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare.The origins of this distinct kind of Elizabethan drama underwent a close scrutiny in the new book, especially in relationship to Renaissance nondramatic historiography and to the medieval morality play. I still think, however, that the problem of origins has not been settled.
New Forms of Neo-Latin Pastoral
Authors: Leonard Grant W.
Published: May 2006

In three earlier essays I examined the Latin epistolary and cryptic eclogues of fourteenth-century Italy and then (in more detail) a considerable number of the derivative and literary eclogues produced in various countries during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the present essay we shall be concerned with (A) new developments in literary pastoral, especially in Italy, and (B) the use of pastoral as a vehicle, both during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In A there are at least a dozen forms: piscatory eclogues, holitory, vinitory, domestic, mythological, rhetorical, Hebraistic, and humorous eclogues, the hunting-eclogue, the pastoral epyllion, the dream-eclogue, and the quasi-dramatic masque-pastoral.
G. B. Gelli and the Rebellion Against Latin
Authors: De Gaetano Armand L.
Published: May 2006

Modern European languages reached full development in their spoken and written forms during the middle ages, but it took centuries before the languages of the people became the languages of ‘the books'— those books which are indispensable to serious learning and intellectual progress. Today an intelligent person who can read and write can get a liberal education either in schools or on his own. Yet during the late Renaissance, in Italy and elsewhere, a thorough knowledge of one's mother tongue was hardly enough for one to become literate. There were love lyrics, epic poems, legends, fables, but aside from some legal documents and a few compilations, very little recorded knowledge was available in the vernacular.
Lefèvre d'Étaples and the Magdalen
Authors: Hufstader Anselm
Published: May 2006

What did sixteenth-century Christians disagree about before they disagreed about Luther? We turn to pre-Reformation controversies expecting to find a theological vocabulary very different from what was soon to come, but at the same time a statement of some of the problems within Christianity which the Reformation set out to solve.

Is it important to know whether the Saint Mary Magdalen whom the liturgy celebrates was really one person or a composite of several women, mentioned at different places in the gospels? The question would raise little debate today, but in 1518 and 1519 it inspired more than a dozen tracts, most of them by competent scholars, and in the early 1520s another four.
Francesco Sansovino and Italian Popular History 1560 - 1600*
Authors: Grendler Paul F.
Published: May 2006

Popularizations attempt to present a body of information in an intelligible form to the non-specialist. Sometimes their goal is simply to enable the reader to pass the time in an interesting way. In this case, the popularizer has no other goal than entertainment. Other popularizations have the serious purpose of being of some utility to their audience. Today in North America, serious popularizations attempt to bring the work of experts to the attention of the general public. At times the author's purpose is not only to disseminate information but to stimulate public policy along certain lines. When such books are well-written and convey the enthusiasm or outrage of the author, they can have great influence.
Mpongwe Origins: Historiographical Perspectives
Authors: Bucher Henry H.
Published: May 2006

The Mpongwe people of the Gabon estuary live today in the immediate area of Libreville, the capital city of the Gabon Republic. Libreville is built on Mpongwe ancestral lands, and its history is only a small and comparatively recent chapter in the longer story of the Mpongwe and their neighbors. In the nineteenth century the expression “les Gabonais” or “the Gaboon people” had only one meaning—the Mpongwe of the estuary who were the coastal trading aristocracy.

The Mpongwe are only one of the six peoples belonging to the Myèné-speaking group of Gabon. The other five are the Orungu, Nkomi, Galoa, Adyumba, and Enenga. Only the Mpongwe are patrilineal. Myèné is purely a linguistic classification, a subdivision of the Bantu language. All six of these societies fit into a circle whose circumference includes the three largest cities in Gabon today—Libreville, Port Gentil (formerly Cape Lopez), and Lambaréné (Map 1). From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Myèné was the coastal lingua franca between the southern Cameroun and Cabinda. The Myèné societies in general, and the Mpongwe in particular, have played a key role in Gabon's past, and continue to be an influential minority in modern Gabon. In the early nineteenth century, and for an unknown previous period, the closest non-Myèné neighbors of the Mpongwe were the Benga and the related societies to the north, and the Shekiani and Bakélé to the east. The Shekiani were the couriers in the Mpongwe trade with the Bakélé and other interior societies.
The Tsoede Myth and the Nupe Kinglists: More Political Propaganda?
Authors: Mason Michael
Published: May 2006

“History is always written by the conquerors.”

It is a convention in the writing of Nupe political history to begin with the name ‘Tsoede.’ This convention has been current at least since the early years of colonial rule, when we find ‘Tsoede,’ or ‘Edegi,’ as he is also called, being credited with the founding of the kingdom whose successive rulers can be traced up to the present. The clearest expression of the place of both ‘Tsoede’ and the kinglists which his name heads comes from the standard study of Nupe society by S.F. Nadel, who explains that

the earliest history of Nupe centres around the figure of Tsoede or Edegi, the culture hero and mythical founder of the Nupe kingdom. The genealogies of Nupe kings which are preserved in many places in Nupe country and which have also found their way into the earliest written records of Nupe history which were compiled by Mohammedan scholars and court historians, place his birth in the middle of the fifteenth century.

It will be our purpose in this paper to explore the evolution of the Tsoede story and to inspect the authority of its authorship. First, let us look at the story offered in Nadel's account:

a) At the time of Tsoede's birth Nupe had not been unified under a central government.

b) Whatever political forms existed elsewhere in Nupe, Tsoede's homeland Bini was a confederacy of towns. The leading Bini town was Nku, at the confluence of the Kaduna and Niger rivers.

The Binis as well as some other Nupe were subordinate to the Attah of Igala.
Towards an Early History of the East African Interior
Authors: Twaddle Michael
Published: May 2006

The period between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries is a perplexing one in the history of the east African interior. For the first part of the period archeology is the most reliable indicator of what really happened there. For the second part oral traditions supplement the archeological record. Regarding evidence, therefore, our period is one of transition. Our principal concern in this survey will be to consider how far this transition in evidence reflects actual transitions in history.

This is an intricate problem. Each piece of historical evidence reflects its historical origin. This applies as much to pottery fragments and spear tips as to oral traditions. However, the former are easier to handle historically than the latter; they are products of their own time. On the other hand, oral traditions tend to be products of our time in this particular area of Africa. Before the nineteenth century indigenous literacy was restricted to a very narrow strip of land along the coast, and during our period contacts between coast and interior were extremely limited. Literate outsiders did not penetrate into the interior in any number until the last half of the nineteenth century, and even then earlier history did not receive much attention from these footloose adventurers. Oral traditions relating to the early history of the interior were only reduced to writing in substance during the subsequent colonial period-sometimes by newly-arrived European missionaries and administrators, more frequently by newly-literate African intellectuals. These circumstances create special interpretative problems. Some of these problems are common to all oral traditions relating to early history, while others are peculiar to the particular colonial situations in which the oral traditions were first recorded.
The Earlier Historiography of Colonial Africa
Authors: Roberts A.D.
Published: May 2006

Work on volume 7 of the Cambridge History of Africa, covering the years 1905-1940, has obliged me to reflect on the nature of the literature for this period in African history. The past twenty years or so have of course seen some notable research on the subject, and much of this is now published. A common theme in this work, as in the study of earlier African history, has been an emphasis on African initiative and enterprise, whether among clerks and teachers, cocoa farmers or mineworkers. More recently, there has been a renewal of interest (often related to theories about “underdevelopment”) in the external forces which set limits to the scope and success of African initiatives. It has once again become acceptable in Africanist circles to study white farmers, trading companies, mine corporations, finance houses, administrative hierarchies, legislative councils, or mission headquarters. Thus the Cambridge History should now be able to achieve a more balanced appraisal of both local and alien factors in the colonial order than would have been possible even five years ago.

The question I want to raise here is whether, for the purposes of such a volume, it is enough to think in terms of synthesizing the work of professional historians of Africa over the past two decades, or whether recent shifts of emphasis have exposed topics and questions on which we must still look for guidance to works written when colonial rule was still a living reality and African history, as an academic subject, had not yet been invented.