Rapid phytolith extraction for analysis of phytolith concentrations and assemblages during an excavation: an application at Tell es-Safi/Gath,Israel

A rapid phytolith extraction procedure is described, that allows phytolith concentrations and morphotype assemblages to be analyzed within hours. This procedure enables the results of these analyses to be used during an archaeological excavation, in order to better understand how plants were used. The new procedure was tested using a standard phytolith extract and two experimental phytolith-sediment blends and found to be both accurate and precise. The reliability of partial slide counting was evaluated and found to be as accurate and precise as existing phytolith quantification methods. The new extraction and counting procedures were applied to an archaeological site, Tell es-Safi/Gath, Israel. The results demonstrate how information on phytolith concentrations in sediments that are available from one day to the next, can be used during an excavation to more effectively document the local features of interest and obtain better information.     

Characterization of bricks and tiles from the 17th-century brick Chapel,St. Mary's City,Maryland

The brick Chapel at St. Mary's City, Maryland, built around 1667, would have been an impressive structure on a colonial frontier where all the other buildings were built only of wood. While the building is no longer extant, the bricks remaining in the buried foundations hold information about the technologies and materials used by brickmakers in the 17th-century Chesapeake region. Instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) and petrographic analysis of thin sections were used to compare the Chapel bricks and other 17th-century bricks and tiles from several Chesapeake contexts to locally available clay sources. While the composition of the Chapel bricks is generally consistent with that of clays available in southern Maryland, these historic materials could not be linked to any one deposit, and may reflect the mixing of clays from multiple sources. In contrast, building materials from other 17th-century buildings at St. Mary's City could be more precisely “matched” to specific local clay deposits. This paper reports on our initial investigations toward understanding the technology of the Chapel bricks and their relationship to other bricks from St. Mary's City.     

The history of marriage and the myth of Friedelehe

The idea that Friedelehe and Muntehe constituted two distinct forms of Germanic marriage was based upon an attempt to reconstruct common Germanic culture with scraps of evidence from widely different times and places. A thorough re-examination of the sources for the institutions that were posited, based on this now outmoded methodology, reveals no evidence that transfer of Munt, or guardianship, distinguished between two different types of marriage, except perhaps in Lombard Italy, under the influence of Roman law. The idea that marriage with a dos is a different institution from marriage without one is not attested until the Carolingian period.     

Book reviews

Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy. By Pierre Manent. Foreword by Harvey C. Mansfield; translated by John Waggoner.(Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 1996) xviii + 148 pp. $15.50 paper.

The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600. By Alfred W Crosby. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) xii + 245 pp. £19.95, $24.95 cloth.

Runaway Religions in Medieval England, c. 1240–1540. By F. Donald Logan, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996). Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 32, 301 pp., £35.00 cloth.

Fairy Tales and Fables from Weimar Days. Edited, translated, and introduced by Jack Zipes (1989; Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997) ix + 211 pp. £13.50 paper.

Children, Childhood and English Society 1880–1990. By Harry Hendrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) New Studies in Economic and Social History, vi + 114 pp. $44.95, £19.95 cloth/$12.95, £6.95 paper.

Political Parties and the European Union. Edited by John Gaffney (New York: Routledge, 1996) xvii + 340 pp. $18.95 paper.

Les Mots de Autres: Flaubert, Sarraute, Pinget. By Laurent Adert (Villeneuve d'Ascq, France: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1996) 301 pp. 130FF paper.

La Citation et l'art de citer dans les Essais de Montaigne. By Michael Metschies, translated by Jules Brody. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997) 163 pp. n.p.g.

Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformations of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity. By Jás Eisner (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995) xxvi + 375 pp. $69.95 cloth $24.95 paper.

Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness. By Ruth Padel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) xviii + 276 pp. $42.50, £30.50 cloth/$14.95, £9.95 paper.

Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth‐Century England. By Philip Ayres (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997) xix + 245 pp. £35.00, $54.95 cloth.

Revolutions in writing: Readings in nineteenth‐century French prose. Selected and translated by Rosemary Lloyd (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996) 448 pp. $49.95 cloth $18.95 paper.

Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. By Froma I. Zeitlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) xx + 474 pp. $60.00, £47.95 cloth/$19.95, £15.95 paper.

The Racial Contract. By Charles W. Mills. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), xii + 171 pp. $19.95, £15.95 cloth.

Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth‐Century France. By Richard Rand et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) xii + 220 pp., $65.00, £50.00 cloth/$35.00, £25.00 paper.

William of Ockham: A Letter to the Friars Minor and Other Writings. Edited by Arthur Stephen McGrade and John Kilcullen, translated by John Kilcullen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, xl + 390 pp. $64.95, £45.00 cloth/$24.95, £16.95 paper.

Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution: Revisited. By Christopher Hill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997) xv + 422 pp. £25.00.

The Problem of Humanity: The Blacks in the European Enlightenment. By Kaija Tiainen‐Anttila (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1994) Studia Historica 50, xii + 367 pp. n.p.g. paper.

Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870–1940. By Lenore Manderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) xix + 315 pp. $64.95, £40.00 cloth.

Charles Follen's Search for Nationality and Freedom. Germany and America, 1796–1840. By Edmund Spevack (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) viii + 312 pp. $39.95 cloth.

American Space, Jewish Time: Essays in Modern Culture and Politics. By Stephen J. Whitfield (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1996) xi + 226 pp. $16.50 paper.

Shingwauk's Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. By J. R. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) xii + 582 pp. $70.00, £52.00 cloth, $29.95, £22.00 paper.

Shakespeare and National Culture. Edited by John J. Joughin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) ix + 351 £40.00 cloth £14.99 paper.

Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997) xii + 470 pp. n.p.g.

Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire. By Katie Trumpener (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), xv + 426 pp. $55.00, £50.00 cloth, $ 19.95, £17.50 paper.

The Politics of Irish Education, 1920–1965. By Sean Farren. (Belfast: Queen's University of Belfast, Institute of Irish Studies, 1995), xii + 296 pp. £16.50 cloth.

British Idealism and Social Explanation: A Study in Late Victorian Thought. By Sandra M. den Otter, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). x + 250 pp. n.p.g.

Disruption. By David Appelbaum (New York: SUNY Press, 1996) xiv + 186 pp. $ 19.95 paper.

Carved in Stone: Holocaust Years—A Boy's Tale. By Manny Drukier (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) 254 pp. $35.00 £26.00 cloth.

The Origins and Development of the European Union, 1945–95: A History of European Integration. By Martin J. Dedman (London: Routledge, 1996) xii + 145 pp. £6.99 paper.

Building European Union: A Documentary History and Analysis. Edited by Trevor Salmon and Sir William Nicoll (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997) xiv + 297 pp. £45.00 cloth, £14.99 paper.

Narrative and Meaning in Early Modern England: Browne's Skull and Other Histories. By Howard Marchitello (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xiv + 229 pp. £37.50, $59.95 cloth.

Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism. By J. C. D. Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) xiv + 270 pp. £30.00, $49.95 cloth/£12.95, $17.95 paper.

The Private Science of Louis Pasteur. By Gerald L. Geison (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, 1997) 378 pp. $16.95, £14.95 paper.

The Economics of Post‐Communist Transition. By Olivier Blanchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) xiii + 149 pp. £18.99.

Latifundium: Moral Economy and Material Life in a European Periphery. By Marta Petrusewicz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) xvii + 289 pp. $52.50 cloth.

Russian Society and the Greek Revolution. By Theophilus C. Prousis (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994) xi + 259 pp. n.p.g.

Three Eras of Political Change in Eastern Europe. By Gale Stokes, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 240 pp. + xiii £13.99 paper.

Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology. By Eric Naiman (Princeton: Princteon University Press, 1997) 307 pp. £27.50, $39.50 cloth.

Stillborn Crusade: The Tragic Failure of Western Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1918–1920. By Ilya Somin (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1996) 244 pp. $32.95 cloth.     

The wives of the ‘first troubadour’, Duke William IX of Aquitaine

The sources which offer insights into the life of Duke William IX of Aquitaine, the ‘first troubadour’, are few and disparate in nature. This study focuses on the conclusions which have been drawn from Anglo-Norman chroniclers' accounts of his clashes with the Church, reportedly over the issue of his adultery, and on Latin poems in praise of the bishop who excommunicated William and whom the duke persecuted.While it is generally believed that the duke married twice, close investigation shows this to be based largely on an error in a nineteenth-century secondary source: it is probable that Philippa of Toulouse was William's only wife. A new reading is proposed of the major Latin verse-compositions referring to the duke's excommunication (1114-17) and it is suggested that the historical evidence concerning the Poitevin claim to the country of Toulouse does not match well with the notion that William attempted to repudiate his wife Philippa, on whom this claim depended.