Reception,wit, and the unity of Virgil's Georgics 1

This essay considers the ways in which the reception of Virgil's Georgics in eighteenth-century English verse may inform, enrich and complicate present-day readings of Virgil, focusing on questions raised by readers’ detection of wit or humorousness in Virgil and by the critical aim of discovering poetic unity in the Georgics.     

The Eleventh- and Twelfth-century Waterfront and Settlement at Queenhithe: Excavations at Bull Wharf,City of London

Evidence for the development of London’s riverside settlement c. AD 1000–1200 was found on the east edge of an important dock known successively as Æthelred’s hithe and Queenhithe. A sequence of embankments and tree-ring dated revetments advanced the waterfront nearly 40 m into the Thames and small inlets provided access to the foreshore. Building and rebuilding took place on a row of properties, with up to a dozen buildings identified; after c. 1150, passages were created for two narrow lanes connecting Thames Street with the quays and foreshore. Important reused building and ships’ timbers and dated groups of metalwork and other artefacts were recovered from the waterfronts.     

In and Out of the Classroom: The Promise of Material Culture

Amish women have contributed to the preservation of their sect's material culture by making distinctive quilts. Their quilts created from 1870 to 1935 epitomize the uniqueness of the Amish lifestyle and can be distinguished from the body of American patchwork quilts of the same time period. While Amish quilts may be distinguished from other quilts by the use of solid colors, dark material and unique patterns, regional differences between Amish quilts are also apparent. The quilts of the Amish communities of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and Holmes County, Ohio have characteristics that define them as Amish, but also as unique to each region. Pennsylvania quilts are distinguished by a square shape, central design, wide borders and intricate quilting stitches. Ohio quilts show greater use of color, repeated patterns and rectangular shapes. Major variations in Amish quilts developed between geographic areas rather than over time.     

Historical Note

La télévision a joué un rôle essentiel dans la définition de l'intellectuel pour le grand public. L'article s'interroge sur l'évolution de l'exposition médiatique de l'intellectuel, son adaptation aux contraintes de l'outil télévisuel et le statut que lui accorde la télévision, de ses origines à nos jours. Quatre grandes phases se dégagent. La première (années 1950–1960), marquée par l'emprise du pouvoir mais aussi l'ambition culturelle du petit écran, oppose le «savant-professeur» médiatisé à l'intellectuel engagé, absent de la télévision. La deuxième (l'après-68), correspond au moment où même les intellectuels les plus engagés acceptent de se montrer à la télévision. Elle prépare la troisième (fin années 1970-années 1990), celle de l'«intellectuel médiatique» qui se prête volontiers au jeu du spectacle télévisuel. Enfin, depuis les années 1990, s'impose l'intellectuel-expert, choisi par la télévision pour ses talents de communication, et en dehors de tout engagement politique.     

Henry Head in Ewald Hering’s Laboratory in Prague 1884–1886: An Early Study on the Nervous Control of Breathing

Henry Head, the English neurologist, received the main parts of his academic education in Cambridge and in London. In addition, he spent two years in Prague where he worked in the physiology department of the German university under the guidance of Ewald Hering. He was interested in the nervous control of breathing and worked out a new method of recording the tension and the contractions of the diaphragm in anaesthetised animals. His results substantiated the experimental basis of the Hering-Breuer reflexes and included the discovery of a new reflex now named Head’s paradoxical reflex. Head not only wrote an extensive paper about his scientific work, the recollections of his time in Prague also formed a considerable part of his autobiographical notes. These were written some forty years later and still expressed a deep affection for his teacher and mentor.     

AIDS as Occupational Hazard: Racial Mixing and Historical Space in Malaysia's Multinationals

In Malaysia, bangsa, a term blending race and ethnicity, structures modes of social and political‐economic organization that reflexively challenge and reinforce the significance of race, not just to the country's three main groups but to the construction of risk as well. Tracing this reflexivity, the author bridges a historical rendering of Malaysia's colonial‐capitalist incorporation with an ethnographic unpacking of its social artifacts: notions of space, place and race that confer on factories a high‐risk label for HIV/AIDS. It traces how multinational corporations, as landscapes of multiracial modernity, are both the quixotic trophies of Malaysia's global integration and a source of social dread. Risk is ethnographically shown to be more a sociohistoric dynamic than a statistical probability, reflecting ideas of racial individuation and ideals of social stability and cultural immiscibility anchored in colonial governance structures of nineteenth‐century Malaya and operative in contemporary Malaysia.