Book reviews

The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume I, The Land of Iran. Edited by W. B. Fisher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. xix + 784 pp., maps, bibliogr., index. $12.50.

The Cambridge History of Iran. Volume V, The Saljug and Mongol Periods. Edited by J. A. Boyle, Cambirdge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. xiii + 763 pp., maps, tables, bibliog., index. $12.50.

Planning and Development in Iran. By George B. Baldwin. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. xv + 212. $6.95.     

Book reviews

History of Iranian Literature. By JAN RYPKA. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1967. 928 pages. $35.00

The Sociology of Development: Iran as an Asian Case Study. By NORMAN JACOBS. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966. 541 pages. $17.50.     

The Poverty–Purdah Trap in Rural Bangladesh: Implications for Women's Roles in the Family

Trends in poverty, working through changing roles of women in income generation, have been advanced as one explanation of changing fertility in Bangladesh. This paper examines women's work patterns in two rural villages in northern Bangladesh and finds little evidence of increasing workforce participation, despite high contraceptive use rates. Observation of women's work patterns suggests that purdah, the practice of female seclusion, influences and conditions women's decisions regarding roles they assume, and remains a dominant influence in women's lives, showing little evidence of responsiveness to poverty.     

High justice in fifteenth-century Normandy: the prosecution of Sandrin Bourel

By the fifteenth century the seigneurial exercise of high justice had become less common because of the growth of royal jurisdiction. The ancient and wealthy Benedictine nunnery of Montivilliers retained the right to high justice only during the octave of the Holy Cross. In 1493 Sandrin Bourel, a young man who had twice before been imprisoned for theft, was apprehended in the act of stealing from a bourgeois of Montivilliers. As the crime occurred during the octave of the Holy Cross the abbey claimed jurisdiction. A special tribunal was created to prosecute him. After having been tortured, Bourel was found guilty and hanged. The documents generated by this event provide the basis for a case study of the application of criminal procedure at the close of the middle ages. The condemned man's confession, rich in biographical detail, gives us a profile of a petty thief and vagabond on the margin of society. The financial account of the abbey's receiver-general documents in detail the total cost of the prosecution of a single medieval criminal.     

LOCALIZATION AND INDUSTRY CLUSTERING ECONOMETRICS: AN ASSESSMENT OF GIBBS MODELS FOR SPATIAL POINT PROCESSES

The objective of this paper is to assess an approach to statistical modeling of point referenced establishment data that permit inclusion of “environmental” or establishment‐specific covariates and specific forms of interestablishment interaction. Gibbs models are used to decompose the conditional intensity of the spatial point process into trend and interaction components. The trend is composed of access measures (primarily different classes of roads) and three different interaction processes are tested: Geyer, area interaction, and Strauss hard core. While the models used have proved to be useful in ecology, we are unaware of any applications to establishment or firm data. In empirical application, the models yield intuitively appealing results for the trend component, and the ability to specify the interaction component gives deeper insights into interestablishment spatial dynamics than any previously published methods.