Why praise Jews: satire and history in the middle ages

Modern readers, including highly sophisticated, professional historians, have not always understood that medieval praise of jews, in its rare occurrences, never signifies categorical approval of Israelites. Instead, such praise functions as a condemnation, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, of Christians whose behavior is not even equal to that of the lowest members of society. The elaborate story told by Richard of Devizes about the murder, towards the end of the twelfth century, of a young Christian by a Jew at Winchester provides a clear illustration of the problem.     

Commoner Power: A Case Study from the Classic Period Collapse on the Oaxaca Coast

This article argues that the agency of commoners has not been adequately theorized in archaeological studies of the political dynamics of complex societies. Recent developments in social theory emphasize that political relations are produced through social negotiations involving commoners as well as elites. This paper considers the role of commoners in the Classic period collapse in the lower Río Verde Valley, Oaxaca, Mexico. Regional survey and excavation data demonstrate that the Classic-to-Postclassic transition was marked by dramatic changes in settlement patterns and sociopolitical organization, including the decline of the Late Classic regional center of Río Viejo. The research indicates that rather than passively reacting to the sociopolitical developments of the Classic-to-Postclassic transition, commoners actively rejected many of the ruling institutions and symbols that were central to the dominant ideology of the Late Classic state. Early Postclassic people reused and reinterpreted the sacred spaces and objects of the Río Viejo state such as carved stone monuments and public buildings. The evidence from the lower Verde is examined in the context of an emerging theoretical perspective in archaeology that considers commoner power. We argue that commoners contribute to the social negotiation of dominant discourses through three overlapping forms of social interaction: engagement, avoidance, and resistance.     

Broca and Charcot’s Research on Jacques Inaudi:The Psychological and Anthropological Study of a Mental Calculator

In the nineteenth century, French scientific institutions became interested in young “mental calculators,” arithmetical prodigies able to quickly and accurately perform complex mental calculations. The first scientists to study mental calculators were phrenologists who sought to prove the existence of a calculating organ in the frontal lobe. Paul Broca introduced one such mental calculator, Jacques Inaudi, to the Anthropological Society of Paris in 1880. Broca attributed extraordinary faculty for mental calculation to memory functioning (the psychological hypothesis) rather than physiological difference (the phrenological hypothesis). In 1892, prominent French Academy of Sciences member Jean-Martin Charcot produced a noteworthy study of Inaudi on the organization’s behalf. Charcot observed that Inaudi called upon auditory memory rather than visual memory in his mental calculations, unlike most mental calculators who preceded him. Like Broca, Charcot was skeptical of the phrenological hypothesis, though he noted that Inaudi’s skull was markedly plagiocephalic. Interestingly, anthropological examination of Inaudi is consistent with the themes of modern cognitive neuroscience. Thus, Charcot seems to have anticipated present research on the localization of mental calculation and memory for numbers.     

Family dynamics in cross‐disciplinary perspective

Medick, Hans, and David Warren Sabean, eds. Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. xi + 417 pp. including index. $59.50 cloth.