Beginnings: women and geography at Northwestern in the 1960s

This brief article attempts to paint a picture of the social and intellectual atmosphere in which Susan Hanson's postgraduate education took place and then discusses her particular experiences in the Geography Department at Northwestern University. It describes the sexist characteristics of American geographical university education in the 1960s and the competitive and male-dominated environment of Northwestern. It suggests that Susan's experiences at Northwestern were an important influence on her subsequent values, skills and interests as a feminist academic.     

‘Wearing three or four handkerchiefs around his collar,and elsewhere about him’: Slaves' Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans

Drawing on slave testimony from criminal trials, this article suggests that slaves in French Colonial Louisiana articulated a nuanced relationship to material goods premised less on a static vision of West African culture, than on variable notions of gender and ethnicity. Here, articles of dress could be used by slaves to distinguish among themselves, as revealed in the 1766 investigation against one runaway marginalised in spite of his self‐conscious sartorial identification as a slave and as an ‘African’. This paper thus offers an example of slaves engineering social control within black spaces by manipulating the legal apparatus of the white hegemony. Sartorial performances of ethnicity and masculinity were key to this process.     

Rewriting the end of the Early Bronze Age in the United Arab Emirates through the anthropological and artefactual evaluation of two collective Umm an-Nar graves at Hili (eastern region of Abu Dhabi)

The Hili archaeological complex in Al Ain (U.A.E.) is important for its wealth of third-millennium BC Umm an-Nar burial and settlement sites. Two of the most significant burial sites are Tomb N at Hili and Tomb A Hili North. The latter is a classic circular Umm an-Nar monumental grave, while Hili N is a pit-grave, one of only two Umm an-Nar period pit-graves discovered so far in the U.A.E. Both of these tombs contained the remains of hundreds of individuals, in the case of Tomb A Hili North, more than 300, while around 600 people had been deposited in Hili N. Both population groups have been the subject of anthropological and artefactual analyses and a comparison of the findings help to shed light on the chronology of the end of the Umm an-Nar period.     

Book reviews

Environmental Management: New Directions for the Twenty‐First Century. Geoff A. Wilson and Raymond L. Bryant. UCL Press (Taylor & Francis), London; 1997, 224 pp., £14.95, ISBN 1–857284–631 (pb)

Sustainable Development in Western Europe: Coming to Terms with Agenda 21. Tim O'Riordan and Heather Voisey (Eds). Cass, Ilford, Essex, 1997, 190 pp., £25.00 (hb) ISBN 0–7146–4830–2, £13.50 (pb) ISBN 0–7146–4376–9

Industrial Policies and Economic Integration. Patrizio Bianchi. Routledge, London; 1998, 228 pp., £45.00 (hb), ISBN 0–415–14910‐X

Economia, Espacio e Globalizacio. Georges Benko. Hucitec, São Paulo, 1996, 266 pp., ISBN 85–271 0348–6     

Catholic resistance theory: William Barclay versus Jean Boucher

ABSTRACT

This article examines William Barclay's response to Jean Boucher's De Justa Abdicatione Henrici Tertii (1589) in view of the complexities of Catholic political thought in this post-Tridentine period. It argues that Barclay's famous category of ‘monarchomach’ is problematic for its avoidance of the issue of confessional difference, and that on questions of the relationship between the respublica and the ecclesia Barclay struggled to find an adequate response to Boucher in his De Regno et Regali Potestate (1600). His De Potestate Papae (1609) is treated as the intellectual extension of his battle with Boucher, and more broadly his confrontation with the position of the Catholic League and Jesuits on indirect papal power. By considering Barclay's works in the context of French Gallicanism and the Catholic League in the French Wars of Religion, this discussion aims to reposition Barclay in relation to other Catholic political theorists and thereby re-evaluate the category of Catholic resistance theory.     

Le scepticisme et les hypothèses de la physique

The History of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza is often called upon to support three theses: first, that Descartes had a dogmatic notion of systematic knowledge, and therefore of physics; second, that the hypothetical epistemology of physics which spread during the xviith century was the result of a general sceptical crisis; third, that this epistemology was more successful in England than in France. I reject these three theses: I point first to the tension in Descartes’ works between the ideal of a completely certain science and a physics replete with hypotheses; further, I argue that the use of hypotheses by mechanical philosophers cannot be separated from their conception of physics; finally I show that, at the end of the xviith century, physicists in France as well as in England spoke through hypotheses and I examine different ways of explaining this shared practice. Richard H. Popkin’s book serves therefore as a starting point for insights into the general problem: to what extent and for what reasons some propositions in physics have been presented as hypotheses in the xviith century?     

« <Emphasis Type="Italic">What is the best theory of generation</Emphasis>? » : Argumentation et débats d’étudiants en médecine à La Société Royale de médecine d’Édimbourg au dix-huitième siècle

This article proposes a different approach to the long generation controversy that divided naturalists in eighteenth-century Europe between those in favour of preformationism, on the one hand, and supporters of the theory of epigenesis on the other. This controversy has mostly been studied through the publications of the intellectual elite, that was constituted of medical doctors, natural historians, philosophers, and theologians. Rather than reviewing the ideas and antagonisms of the direct agents of the controversy, I will attempt to approach it from the margins. What is the legacy of a long-term controversy when it seems to be over? How was such an extended controversy perceived by contemporaries that would only have a fragmented access to quarrel? What is the role of scientific disputes in the education of doctors? I will address these questions by analyzing four essays written by medical students of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh.