Ein Katalog chinesischer Bücher aus dem Jahre 1804, zum Verkauf angeboten durch Antonio Montucci

In this bibliographical note, the author presents the first European, i.e., 1804 sales catalogue of Chinese books, provided that we do not count the booksellers catalogues of scholars’ private libraries in which Chinese language material consisted of few items only. The owner remained anonymous, but the agent was Antonio Montucci (1762–1829) – an early Sinologist who described the collection in a letter to the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1804. The books were acquired by the Duke of Devonshire. Their present location, however, has not been established. Montucci, who planned on editing a major Chinese dictionary for Europeans and had thousands of wooden types cut for this purpose at his own cost, was not given a chance neither in Paris nor in St. Petersburg where such projects were in preparation. His own Chinese library was sold to the Holy See before his death.     

The Indo‐European mirror: Monotheism and polytheism (J.G. Herder,E. Renan,A. Pictet,F.M. Müller and R.F. Grau)

Some authors assigned the Indo‐Europeans a mirror‐like role which allowed them to understand their own position with respect to contemporary Christian values. After dealing briefly with the writings of J.G. Herder, I shall evoke a certain number of questions which oriented the research of E. Renan, F.M. Müller, A. Pictet and R.F. Grau. The works of the latter authors expounded fabulous genealogies, organizing them into explanatory systems that radically opposed Hebrew monotheists to Indo‐European polytheists. Thus, depending on whether they had used the Semites or the Indo‐Europeans as their starting‐point, they concluded that monotheism or polytheism, respectively, was the archaic source of human thought. The goal on their horizon was a ressuscitated West, forever in the forefront of progress, often simultaneously Christian and scientific. If this type of historiographic analysis is urgently needed at the present time, its purpose is not to provide a grid for distinguishing “truth”; from “falsehood,”; but rather to grasp a set of scholarly traditions within its own channels of transmission.     

Die sektion Iran,Kaukasien und nachbargebiete auf dem bevorstehenden 24. Internationalen orientalistenkongress München, 28. August bis 4. September 1957

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Norfolk Island: history,people, environment,language. By Peter Mühlhäusler and Joshua Nash

The Apotheosis of Captain Cook. European Mythmaking in the Pacific. By Gananath Obeyesekere. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992. xvi, 251 pp. ISBN 0–691–05680–3 How ‘Natives’ Think. About Captain Cook For Example. By Marshall Sahlins. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1995. 318 pp. ISBN 0–226–73368–8     

Alvis,J. David,Jeremy D. Bailey,and F. Flagg Taylor,IV. The Contested Removal Power, 1789–2010.

Abstract

In this article, we use legislative correspondence to determine who gains access to key staffers in a congressional office. To evaluate our theory of the office power hierarchy, we test hypotheses using an original dataset of more than 3,000 correspondence records from the office of former member of Congress James R. Jones. Our empirical analysis is supplemented by an e-mail interview with Representative Jones. We find that key senior staffers are more likely to pay attention to powerful individuals and nonroutine matters. Letters from women and families and those dealing with routine legislation are more likely to be answered by lower-ranked staffers. These results are important because they reveal that even something as simple as constituent correspondence enters a type of power hierarchy within the legislative branch where some individuals are advantaged over others.