A woman of letters and the first woman member of the American Philosophical Society, Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova (née Vorontsova) was also the first modern stateswoman in Russia. Early in her life she dressed in an officer’s uniform and boldly stepped forward to play an active role in the political arena, where she participated in the palace revolution of 1762. Subsequently, Dashkova was appointed director of the Academy of Sciences by Catherine II and she founded and became president of the Russian Academy. For close to twelve years, she headed both these prestigious academic institutions. She was a leading figure in eighteenth-century Russian culture as she strove to institute reforms, to adapt and apply the ideas of the Enlightenment, and to establish new approaches to the education of Russia’s youth. Sadly, her relationship with her own children was deeply tragic, and later in life she was exiled to the north of Russia. This biography focuses on Dashkova’s efforts in her life and works to isolate, clarify, and define patterns of action, identity, and gender for herself as well as for other women.

Alexander Woronzoff-Dashkoff is Professor of Russian language and literature at Smith College in Massachusetts. Born in Renon, Italy, he received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. For many years he worked in the Russian School at Middlebury College, the last nine years as Director of the School. His scholarship has been devoted to the life and works of Ekaterina Dashkova, of whom he is a descendent. He has compiled and annotated the French edition of Dashkova’s autobiography, Mon Histoire: Mémoires d’une Femmes de Lettres Russe àl’Epoque des Lumières, including the letters of Catherine II (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999).

Vincent Bourne (1694-1747) was one of the most, if not the most, popular Latin poets of his day. In its depiction of homely urban scenes and in its sensitive portrayal of animal and civic behavior (and the reciprocity between such behavior) his Latin verse appealed to early eighteenth-century and Romantic sensibilities. The present study examines a broad range of that Latin verse in its classical, neo-Latin, and vernacular contexts with particular attention to the theme of identity (and differing forms of identity). It surveys the quest for identity, reciprocal identities, metropolitan identities, the recreation of identity, and assesses ways in which Bourne's fusion of the classical and the Romantic gave him a unique neo-Latin voice which enabled him to stand out from his predecessors and contemporaries. Appended to the study are the texts (with Haan's translations) of the Latin poetry discussed therein.

Estelle Haan (Sheehan) is Professor of Renaissance and Anglo-Latin Literature at Queen's University Belfast. Previous publications with the American Philosophical Society include From Academia to Amicitia: Milton's Latin Writings and the Italian Academies (Transactions volume 88, part 6) and Vergilius Redivivus: Studies in Joseph Addison's Latin Poetry (Transactions volume 95, part 2).

Since antiquity, time in the West has been represented in circular form, the gear wheels of time churning out duration in endless years. At the time of the Spanish conquest dials on round clock faces looked down from facades of cathedrals and town halls, their sonorous tones chiming out the hours that directed people’s religious and workaday lives. Since the Gregorian Calendar Reform coincided with the proliferation of the clock, the subject of time was very much on the minds of sixteenth-century scholars. To judge from the way Spanish chroniclers describe it, the circle was also the principle mode of temporal expression among the New World natives they sought to Catholicize. Anthony Aveni demonstrates that this was decidedly not the case. Rather, the indigenous quadripartite way of perceiving space rendered the expression of time to have been decidedly square.

Circling the Square: How the Conquest Altered the Shape of Time in Mesoamerica examines an array of calendar circles appearing in manuscripts from Central Mexico and the Maya area of Yucatan from the time of sixteenth-century contact up to the eighteenth century.

Dr. Aveni follows the gradual intrusion of Western calendrical particulars into the native format, such as the correspondence between the months and the phases of the moon, the base-twelve format of the divisions of the year and the zodiac, the wind compass, the Olympiad, the concept of the Jubilee, and the leap year. He offers insight into the tension in the first generation of native scribes after the conquest, who were working with radically different ways of knowing, between the imposed requirement to change the way they thought about time and the innate desire to preserve their heritage and their identity.

Anthony F. Aveni is the Robert B. Colgate Professor of Astronomy, Anthropology, and Native American Studies, serving appointments both in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Colgate University. He helped develop the field of archaeoastronomy. Dr. Aveni has taught at Colgate since 1963, and has served in visiting appointments at the University of South Florida, the University of Colorado, Tulane University, and the University of Padua (Italy).

Flora Kimmich has translated J. G. Droysen's classic History of Alexander the Great into English for the first time. Through her masterly rendering, she brings this foundational work of modern historiography of the ancient world to a new audience. Based entirely on ancient sources, this is an exhaustive, beautifully narrated account of Alexander, from the origins of the ancient Macedonian kingdom to Alexander's death in Babylon in 323 B.C.

Droysen's interpretation of Alexander, first published in 1833 by a 25-year-old Privatdozent, is colored both by the idealistic exuberance of German romanticism and the wars of liberation and, in a substantially revised second edition published in 1877, by the imperial optimism of a newly consolidated Germany.

This translation of the 1877 edition, with complete notes, does full justice to Droysen's celebrated prose style.

The monograph is enhanced with special introductory selections by Glen W. Bowersock (Professor Emeritus, Institute for Advanced Study) and Brian Bosworth (Senior Honorary Research Fellow, University of Western Australia.

Flora Kimmich translates from German and from French.