Mongol inhospitality, or how to do more with less? Gift giving in William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium

This article examines the journey to the Mongol court by the Franciscan William of Rubruck and his unsuccessful attempts to negotiate his way through the Mongol hierarchy with gifts of food. Using William of Rubruck’s account of his journey, the Itinerarium, this article analyses the utility of gifts of food across different cultural contexts. Rubruck ultimately gained status among the Mongols through his ‘gift of self’, demonstrating how social standing can be negotiated through finding the appropriate cultural grammar for gift giving. Pervasive western medieval views on gift giving were not uncontested: alternate views of what constituted a gift existed within the broader thirteenth-century world.     

Millenarism and agricultural settlement in the Holy Land in the nineteenth century

The pioneers of modern agricultural settlement in the Holy Land were Christians. Foremost among these were several Americans who came in the 1850s and 1860s to settle—ignoring warnings from local experts and from representatives of the United States government. The leaders of the settlers were inspired by millenarist ideas and by faith in the Return to Zion—rife among fundamental Protestant sects in the early nineteenth century. The personal accounts of these visionaries provide insights into what drove them to attempt to migrate to remote and backward Palestine and also throw light on the economic concepts and practical plans for implementing their schemes. Despite their failure, these attempts were very important in the history of agricultural settlement in nineteenth-century Palestine. The settlers maintained a wide range of international contacts through letters, pamphlets, sermons and publicity in the press in America, England, Germany and Palestine. In addition, many people who heard indirectly about these ventures, took an interest in their ideology and practice. Millenarist schemes influenced early preachers and founders of Jewish societies for agricultural settlement in Palestine. The Jewish forerunners of the Hovevi Zion and Zionist movements promoted remarkably similar ideas. Millenarist and Jewish visionaries alike spoke of the hour being propitious for the coming of the Messiah and favourable for settlement in the land of Israel. Both groups established schools to teach the lore of the land and to educate youth in agricultural pursuits. Many years after the disappearance of American settlers from Palestine, their story reverberated in Jewish polemic literature.     

Nuutauniq (Moves in Inuit Life): Arctic Transformations and the Politics of Urban Inuit Mobility

ABSTRACT

Today, one in four Inuit live outside of Inuit Nunangat, the Arctic territory incorporating the four northern Inuit land claims regions. With the majority of those Inuit living in cities, the issue of urban Inuit populations is becoming a more prominent focus for policy debate. In this article, I argue that urban Inuit mobility is a historically complex and multilayered phenomenon embedded in, not detached from, the major processes of social transformation affecting Inuit across the Canadian Arctic from the mid-twentieth century on. I use this analysis to explore the diverse formulation of Inuit-specific policy initiatives in Montreal, a task that, I show, is made easier by the Montreal Inuit radio show called Nipivut.     

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.     

Variable nucleotide tandem repeat (VNTR) typing of two palaeopathological cases of lepromatous leprosy from Mediaeval England

Using ancient DNA methods, we have examined in detail two archaeological cases of leprosy from Mediaeval England. The first was a child skeleton with rhino-maxillary changes typical of lepromatous leprosy (LL). The second case was the skeleton of a male adult who showed both typical rhino-maxillary changes and osteitis/periostitis on the leg and foot bones. Bone powder was sampled from both cases and DNA extracts were prepared. These were subjected to a series of polymerase chain reactions (PCRs) specific for regions on the Mycobacterium leprae genome. The repetitive element RLEP was used for confirmation of M. leprae DNA and then three polymorphic regions were successfully amplified and sequenced to determine the number of variable nucleotide tandem repeats (vntr) at these loci. These were the microsatellite regions ML2344 and ML2172 and the minisatellite region ML0058. Genotyping data from the strains preserved within the skeletal remains were compared with those obtained for a reference strain of M. leprae. Variation at these three loci was found between both burials and the reference strain, indicating that vntr typing of LL cases from the archaeological record is a useful way of confirming disease and an additional means of authenticating aDNA data. This demonstrates the feasibility of targeting multiple loci for phylogenetic studies of leprosy strains from archival sources.     

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.