Both English and Latin examines the interplay of Latin and English in a selection of John Milton’s neo-Latin writings. It argues that this interplay is indicative of an inherent bilingualism that proceeds hand-in-hand with a self-fashioning that is bicultural in essence. Interlingual flexibility ultimately proved central to the poet of Paradise Lost, an epic uniquely characterized by its Latinate vernacular and its vernacular Latinitas.
Estelle Haan is the world’s foremost authority on Milton’s Latin poetry, and probably the most distinguished student of that poetry in the history of critical commentary. This is a work of extraordinary authority written by a scholar at the height of her powers. In short, this is a terrific book, elegant and informative.
Gordon Campbell
University of Leicester
This book succeeds in presenting Milton’s poetry as a single, unified body of work. Its biggest strength is the many close readings of Milton’s Latin verse as engagements with classical Latin literature. In addition to introducing the Latin verse to new readers, it provides a new approach to Paradise Lost, one that accounts for one of the difficulties of Milton’s text – its language – in a novel way.
Anne Mahoney
Tufts University
Estelle Haan (Sheehan) is Professor of English and Neo-Latin Studies at The Queen’s University of Belfast. She is a well-known and well-respected Neo-Latinist, and she has published several volumes with the APS, including From Academia to Amicitia: Milton’s Latin Writings and the Italian Academies (1998), Vergilius Redivivus: Studies in Joseph Addison’s Latin Poetry (2005), Classical Romantic: Identity in the Latin Poetry of Vincent Bourne (2007), and Sporting with the Classics: The Latin Poetry of William Dillingham (2010). She has recently edited Milton’s Latin and Greek poetry for Oxford University Press.
Transactions
Iconographies and texts that appear in some series of magical gems are presented in this fascinating study. Magical gems are still a scarcely explored area of antiquity in which new features of religion can be discovered. This volume presents an intriguing religious complex that concerns the Egyptian Kronos, his relations with Syrian culture, and Platonism. A totally new aspect of the book considers the reflection of Brahmanic thought on the iconography of magical gems. This book gathers five studies on these and other topics.
Attilio Mastrocinque is in the Department of Time, Space, Image, and Society at the University of Verona in Italy. In addition to his work with magical gems, his other primary areas of interest are ancient Mediterranean religions, as well as Roman religion, Roman history, and Hellenistic history. Professor Mastrocinque also is working on another book project: Bona Dea and the Cults of Roman Women.
In the past half-century the writing of history has been the object of much critical scrutiny by literary scholars, philosophers, and historians. History painting has traditionally been an important topic in art history. The illustration of history books, in contrast, has not attracted much attention. This study is a preliminary inquiry into the changing ways in which graphics, ranging from representational images to statistical charts, have been used to enhance or illuminate historical texts.
Included within the text is an eight-page color insert of illustrations. An online portfolio of images is available on the publications section of the American Philosophical Society website.
Lionel Gossman is the M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Romance Languages Emeritus at Princeton University. Additional publications include Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), Augustin Thierry and Liberal Historiography (Wesleyan University Press, 1979), The Empire Unpossess'd: An Essay on Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" (Cambridge University Press, 1981), Towards a Rational Historiography (American Philosophical Society, 1989), Between History and Literature (Harvard University Press, 1990), and Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (University of Chicago Press, 2000), as well as many journal articles on historians and the writing of history.
Peiresc’s “History of Provence” and the Discovery of a Medieval Mediterranean is both a historical detective work—piecing together an utterly innovative research project of the 1620s—and a provocative argument, based on the painstaking reconstruction of Peiresc’s project. Peter Miller tells us that our understanding of the history of historical scholarship needs to be turned upside down. In the “how” and “why” of Peiresc’s scholarly practice and, in the thin but reconstitutable chain of those who understood and remembered him, we learn that far from disappearing, antiquarianism persisted as a major source of historical innovation and renovation, and that this continues up through the present time.
Peter Miller offers a provocative rewriting of the history of historical scholarship since the seventeenth century which is certainly worthy of further debate. His book gives us a novel perspective on Peiresc’s manuscripts and a detailed account of his working methods and influence.
Peregrine Horden
Professor of Medieval History
Royal Holloway, University of London
Miller not only is the preeminent Peiresc scholar in the world, he also is one of the leading intellectual historians—both early modern and modern—of his generation. The work shows these skills in Miller’s grander questions of what an archive is and how research functions. This is a major contribution to the history of scientific, or historically scientific, method.
Jacob Soll
Professor of History
Rutgers University
In the fall of 1778 John Roberts, a prosperous Quaker miller who owned valuable property located about ten miles from Philadelphia, stood trial before a jury that found him guilty of having committed treason. He was charged with having betrayed the patriot cause and the nascent government of Pennsylvania by joining the British when they had earlier occupied Philadelphia. If not entirely innocent, did Roberts nevertheless deserve a trip to the gallows a month after the jury returned its verdict? Relying on two long-neglected contemporary records of this treason trial, David Maxey explores in depth the issue of Roberts’s guilt while capturing the atmosphere of confusion, conflicting loyalties, political bickering, and religious tension that prevailed in and around Philadelphia during that period. This is a study, replete in characters and contradictions, of the American Revolution as a civil war that divided neighbors and neighborhoods and of pardon that came haltingly when it came at all.
Maxey has produced a masterful investigation of the treason trial and hanging of Quaker John Roberts after the British evacuation of Philadelphia in 1778. A key characteristic of Maxey’s presentation is its rock-solid research, based on piecing together small bits of extant evidence that undergird this compelling reconstruction of a tragic story that took place during the turbulent wartime years of the American Revolution.
James Kirby Martin
Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor of History
University of Houston
In the first decades of the nineteenth century the United States and Mexico reached out to one another to initiate diplomacy, trade, and cultural borrowings. Each faced the task of decolonization and nation-building. The United States envisioned opportunities in Mexico for expansion; Mexico looked to the United states to learn how to recover from war, how to come together in peacetime, and how to write a constitution.
The Bookrunner explores the political and cultural history of Mexico at the time of its independence from Spain. At the center of the study are letters written to the Philadelphia book publisher Matthew Carey by Thomas Robeson, a book agent sent to Mexico by Carey in 1822. Nancy Vogeley demonstrates the important role that the inter-American book trade played in the formation of postcolonial national identities in the Americas and casts a new light on the historical interconnnections between print capitalism and nationalism.
I view The Bookrunner as a major contribution to book history, to American literary history in its new hemispheric framing, to the intellectual history of modern politics, and to the history of commerce.
David S. Shields
University of South Carolina
This study clearly reflects a lifetime of research on the role of books, pamphlets, and newspapers in the transformation of political culture in Mexico. It brings Philadelphia book printing and trading into the broader picture of a momentous moment in world history, as the Spanish empire collapsed and its component parts began new relationships with Europe and the United States.
Brian Connaughton
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Mexico City
Nancy Vogeley is Professor Emerita of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of San Francisco.
Johann Schöner’s Globe of 1515 is a transcription, translation, and study of the toponyms and legends on Johann Schöner’s globe of 1515, one of the earliest surviving globes produced following the discovery of America. This important globe has never been the subject of a detailed study. Chet Van Duzer investigates Schöner’s sources and discusses the similarities and differences between Schöner’s globe and contemporary maps and globes, particularly Martin Waldseemüller’s world map of 1507. One of Schöner’s iconographical sources for the sea monsters on his globe was the Hortus sanitatis, an anonymous illustrated encyclopedia first published in 1491. The differences between the two surviving exemplars of the globe are also examined; these differences are surprising, as the globe is printed. Van Duzer demonstrates that the Weimar exemplar of the globe was heavily restored at some point in its history, and thus is a less reliable witness of Schöner’s cartography. This book is an extremely useful tool for anyone investigating the geography and cartography of the early sixteenth century.
Van Duzer’s study of the globes made by the astronomer and mathematician Johannes Schöner is a work of admirable and patient scholarship, not only for the detailed analysis of Schöner’s work, but also for the wider window that it opens on the practice of cartography in the late 15th and early 16th century. This book is required reading for anyone interested in Schöner, Waldseemüller, Renaissance mapmaking, or the production of geographic knowledge after the time of Ptolemy.
John W. Hessler, Senior Cartographic Librarian, Library of Congress
Johannes Schöner is a highly important but long-neglected figure in the early history of globemaking. Chet Van Duzer’s new book provides the first detailed and reliable study of Schöner’s terrestrial globe of 1515. This meticulous work is an opus diu desideratum, and a model of how such research should be done.
Dr. Peter H. Meurer, Map Historian, Heinsberg, Germany
The study is a decidedly significant contribution to knowledge, being inevitably linked to the other globes, maps, and textual material, especially of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Of these, by far the most important is Waldseemüller’s world map of 1507. The research is astonishingly up-to-date and detailed, tracking down a number of valuable, little-known sources. The quotations and translations are excellent. Academics will surely be much indebted to Van Duzer for this; I certainly am.
William A. R. Richardson, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia
Megalonyx is one of the most widely distributed taxa of ground sloths in North America. Numerous Pleistocene sites contain isolated fossil elements. However, most fossils are of late Rancholabrean age, and relatively few Megalonyx fossils have been found in the southeastern United States outside of Florida. This work is unique because it describes more than 250 fossil elements from a single site of Irvingtonian age in South Carolina. It also includes detailed measurements of all teeth and postcranial elements. Morphometrics offers insights into hypsodonty and body mass, and comparisons with other Megalonyx across space and time suggest a need to revisit the current taxonomy.
Steven E. Fields is curator of natural history for the Culture and Heritage Museums of York County, South Carolina, and a lecturer in the Department of Biology at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Dr. Fields earned a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Biology degrees from Winthrop, and a Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from the University of South Carolina.
Alhacen’s treatment of light and sight in the De aspectibus culminates with the analysis of refraction in Book 7. As with the earlier publications in the series, these final volumes give readers a critical edition of the Latin text of Book 7, with translation, notes, and an extensive introduction explaining the contents of the treatise. Mark Smith’s work on Alhacen is one of the great contributions to the history of science of our time and will be of great use to scholars for many years to come.
The completion of the Latin version of Alhacen’s De Aspectibus represents a monumental achievement in the history of optical theory. The influence of this work on the Perspectivist tradition in the West cannot be underestimated. Professor Smith’s edition and translation will take its place alongside other essential texts in the history of optics by Roger Bacon and John Pecham, both of whom were influenced by Alhacen.
Richard Newhauser
Professor of English
Arizona State University
Mark Smith’s publication of the Latin version of Ibn al-Haytham's Optics is one of the great contributions to the history of science of our time. The edition is based upon an exhaustive examination of the manuscripts, the translation of the difficult, and at times obscure, text. It is a model of clarity, and the introduction and commentary are exemplary in placing the work within the history of optics and explaining its technicalities and difficulties. This is a work of scholarship that will endure and be consulted for ages.
Noel Swerdlow
Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Astrophysics and of History
University of Chicago
Visiting Professor, Division of Humanities and Social Sciences
California Institute of Technology
2010 J. F. LEWIS AWARD WINNER
This book is a guide to the basic tools of Renaissance Greek studies and their use in the classrooms of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Paul Botley examines the origins and diffusion of the twenty Greek grammars known to have been composed or used during the period, explores the development of Greek lexicology during the Renaissance and its relationship with surviving ancient and Byzantine Greek lexica, and studies the fortunes of twenty-one Greek authors known to have been used by Renaissance student. The book concludes with two appendices that catalog all Greek grammatical and lexical works printed before 1530.
Paul Botley is a research fellow at The Warburg Institute, London, where he is preparing an edition of the correspondence of Renaissance polymath Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609). Dr. Botley has previously held research positions in the Department of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College, London, and at the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition at the University of Bristol.











