Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society

this article presents a student’s perspective on Jewish studies in Sweden over the past ten years. By identifying the milestones of her own educational and professional path, the author discusses three questions of particular interest for a student wanting to pursue any kind of Jewish studies in a Nordic country, using Sweden as an example, namely: 1) How to compose a curriculum that leads to doctoral studies? 2) What can be said about the ‘identity’ of Jewish studies in Sweden? 3) Can a degree in the subject field of choice also lead to a career outside the academic framework?

A guide for the perplexed.

COLLINGWOOD'S illness and early death prevented him from saying fully or as effectively as possible all that he had to say. Prof. Knox, the editor, points out that the work now published was written in 1933–34, after the "Essay on Philosophical Method", and was intended as an application of that method. Since the author did not publish anything at the time, we may infer that he was not satisfied with it. In spite of some later revision it must be taken as no more than a substantial fragment. It suffers more than most of Collingwood's work from a tendency to rash statements and occasional labouring of small points. Nevertheless, the book is a valuable contribution to philosophy, and supplements what we have already of Collingwood's highly original and distinctive way of thought. The Idea of Nature By R. G. Collingwood. Pp. viii + 184. (Oxford: Clarendon Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1945.) 15s. net.

The Idea of Nature

Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944

The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys

Henri de Lubac argues that, in early modern times, a pernicious concept began to become commonplace in Roman Catholic theology: this concept is 'pure nature.' Pure nature is human nature, considered without reference to grace or to the supernatural destiny of personal union with God. Further, de Lubac argues that Catholic theology, in assimilating this idea, has departed from the sound tradition represented by St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. He holds that the notion of pure nature leads inevitably to the self-exclusion of Christianity from the affairs of the world-when, in fact, the light of the Gospel ought to be shed on all aspects of human existence. This dissertation tests de Lubac's thesis concerning the history of the idea of pure nature, showing that this notion is not, in fact, a modern novelty. This study examines the role of the idea of pure nature in the Bible and early Church, in the theology of Thomas Aquinas, in the early modern Jansenist controversy, in the theology of Henri de Lubac, and in the theology of the contemporary Radical Orthodoxy movement, paying particular attention to the historical circumstances which made the repudiation of 'pure nature' attractive. Today, some theologians follow de Lubac in contending that Catholic doctrine must eschew the idea of pure nature in order to resist secularism and maintain Christianity's relevance to all aspects of human life. This dissertation contends that the idea of pure nature is not only traditional, but necessary for Christian theology. It argues that a Christian 'integralism' which refuses to prescind from grace when considering nature can do justice neither to nature nor to grace.

Not everything is grace: Aquinas's notion of 'pure nature' and the Christian integralism of Henri De Lubac and of radical orthodoxy


 Sea and Land provides an in-depth environmental history of the Caribbean to ca. 1850, comprising a close examination of some of the central forces and characteristics that defined the region, with a coda that takes the story into the modern era. It explores the mixing, movement, and displacement of peoples and the parallel ecological mixing of animals, plants, microbes from Africa, Europe, elsewhere in the Americas, and indeed Asia. It examines first the arrival of Native American to the region and the environmental transformations that followed. It then turns to the even more dramatic changes that accompanied the arrival of Europeans and Africans in the fifteenth century. Throughout it argues that the constant arrival, dispersal, and mingling of new plants and animals gave rise to a creole ecology. Particular attention is given to the emergence of black slavery, sugarcane, and the plantation system, an unholy trinity that thoroughly transformed the region’s demographic and physical landscapes and made the Caribbean a vital site in the creation of the modern western world. This volume integrates research concerning natural resources, conservation, epidemiology, and climate in a new general environmental history of the region. It makes environmental perspectives more accessible and more indispensable, to scholars and students alike, to foster both a fuller appreciation of the extent to which environmental factors shaped historical developments in the Caribbean and the extent to which human actions have transformed the biophysical environment of the region over time.

Sea and Land

Reviewed by: Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early Americaby Jonathan Todd Hancock Matthew Mulcahy (bio) Earthquakes, New Madrid earthquakes, Tenskwatawa, Ohio Valley, Creek, Shawnee, Cherokee, Religion Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America. By Jonathan Todd Hancock. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 186. Cloth, $95.00, paper, $27.50, e-book $22.99.) In the winter of 1807-08 the Shawnee leader Tenskwatawa predicted that the Great Spirit would "change the course of nature" in four years if Native people did not fight back against Euro American expansion. Tenskwatawa lost his military efforts to halt that expansion at the battle of Tippecanoe in early November 1811, but he regained some influence and standing just a few weeks later when the earth began to rattle violently across much of the eastern half of North America and the Mississippi River ran backwards in some places, his prediction seemingly fulfilled. Religion and prophecy are at the center of Jonathan Todd Hancock's engaging and well-written analysis of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-12. The specific focus makes the book a nice complement to Con-every Bolton Valencius's larger study of the earthquakes that appeared in 2013. Hancock is less concerned with the physical effects of the earthquakes or scientific investigations about them (past and present), although he touches briefly on those topics. Instead, he is focused on how people made sense of the earthquakes and employed those interpretations as means to various political ends. Hancock's central thesis is that responses to earthquakes formed part of larger process of state-building among both Euro Americans and Native Americans across the trans Appalachian west. More specifically, he argues the earthquakes "stoked disputes about the relationship between religious authority and political authority" (2) in an era when political boundaries remained in flux and during a year in which an array of unusual events coincided, including the appearance of a comet, a major hurricane in the Southeast, a disastrous fire in Richmond, the threat of war with Britain, and then the earthquakes. In Massachusetts and Virginia, Prophetstown and Tuckabatchee, the earthquakes raised questions about the natural world and who had the authority to interpret such events. While all groups saw some sort of divine power at work, the boundaries and meanings of that power remained contested, and answers about the meaning and significance of the tremors varied, reflecting an array of complex social, political, and religious factors among different groups. As scholars of disasters have long [End Page 138]noted, attention to earthquakes and other such events can reveal underlying social structures, institutions, and relationships. Hancock clearly shows that to be in the case in the early 1810s. The book is divided into five chapters, each of which is divided into subsections that explore the earthquakes in three general regions: the new United States, Creek and Cherokee territories in the South, and the Ohio Valley. Doing so allows Hancock to compare and contrast how different groups responded to the earthquake. He notes, for example, that leaders of the Red Sticks resistance movement used the earthquakes to bolster their claims about divine displeasure with "impurities" in Creek communities and to challenge existing authorities. In part their claims to political authority rested on their spiritual power to control natural forces. Prophets decrying cultural loss existed among the Cherokee as well, but the earthquakes caused less intense internal divisions in part because spiritual and political power was more clearly differentiated. So too "a nationalized system of kinship" (92) provided the Cherokee a means of countering breakaway individuals or groups. In the Ohio Valley, the Shawnee leaders Tenskwatawa and his brother Tecumseh employed earthquake prophecy to rally others to their call for an "intertribal nationhood" (95) to resist Euro American expansion, but with only limited success. Instead, diverse groups in the region, including the Delaware and other Shawnees, "confronted the tremors . . . with established rituals rather than radical reform" (84). Religious revivals and calls for reform also shaped Euro American interpretations of the earthquake. Hancock provides terrific detail on the earthquakes' impact on church membership in western territories, the growth of which he argues was even more... 

Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America by Jonathan Todd Hancock (review)

Historian Dale Tomich coined the term “the second slavery” to address a new phase of plantation slavery that emerged especially in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil during the nineteenth century. The combination of technological innovations and slave labor increased the production of cotton, sugar, and coffee by ultimately supporting the rise of industrial capitalism in the Americas and Europe. Historians who embrace the second slavery as a framework argue that industrial capitalism and plantation slavery were not incompatible but rather fueled each other during the nineteenth century. In Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery, Dale W. Tomich, Rafael de Bivar Marquese, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, and Carlos Venegas Fornias propose a visual history of how the organization of plantation and production zones was dramatically transformed in the nineteenth century.Organized in two parts of three chapters each, the book provides an overview of the second slavery in cotton, sugar, and coffee plantations in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil. This panorama relies on the existing literature, written primary sources, numerous maps, and dozens of full-color and black-and-white reproductions of paintings, engravings, and photographs. The authors build their argument by reminding readers that plantation landscapes are not natural but historically, socially, and culturally constructed. Yet, they do not clearly address what a visual history is, why this kind of history of the second slavery is necessary, or why a visual approach provides a privileged framework to understand slavery's transformations in the nineteenth century. Admittedly, the book's visual materials evidently evoke a new organization and division of labor of Cuban, US, and Brazilian plantations and mills. But a visual history of the second slavery should also compare these images with depictions from previous centuries to show how slavery's landscapes were altered and how the visual representations of these landscapes also changed. Yet I recognize that doing so would require a much longer study beyond the book's proposed scope.The authors masterfully tell the history of the second slavery in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil, supported with a rich array of visual images. Most are maps and panoramas of plantations of cotton, sugar, and coffee. Some depict the harbors and plantation mansions. Several others show interior views of mills and warehouses, especially those produced by French artist Eduardo Laplante to illustrate Los ingenios: Colección de vistas de los principales ingenios de azúcar de la isla de Cuba (1857). Nonetheless, very often visual images merely illustrate the text. Moreover, the authors rarely compare the pictures representing the second slavery in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil. They also hardly discuss why artists, travelers, and scientists produced these images, who commissioned them and why, and their intended audiences. Scholars who systematically work with visual sources will miss not only a deeper analysis of the images but also a greater engagement with existing works by historians and art historians such as Charmaine Nelson, whose 2016 book showed how depictions of plantation slavery are racialized.Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery also uses mapping as a visual tool to tell the second slavery's history. Some maps, for example, illustrate how growing sugar production propelled the railroad system's expansion in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba by connecting the seaports to the interior and prolonging the country's sugar frontier. However, the authors do not clearly explain the connections between mapping and landscape painting, as these connections predate the nineteenth century. In some welcome passages, the authors change the scale of observation by moving from analyzing maps to discussing illustrations of a cotton plant, the different sections of a sugarcane, or a branch of a coffee tree. These shifts allow the authors to cover different, and usually neglected, dimensions of these crops' production.Recognizing that, like any other primary source, visual images are biased, the authors also admit that the examined visual representations clearly provide the slaveholding elites' point of view. But despite this acknowledgment, the authors could have emphasized further the human dimensions of the examined landscapes and centered their analysis on bondspeople. The use of the passive voice to refer to enslaved people's work reinforces this invisibility. Only in chapter 6, examining the nineteenth-century Brazilian coffee industry, does this trend of presenting the landscapes of plantation slavery as natural settings change. Because the second slavery emerged alongside photography, a corpus of staged photographs features enslaved men, women, and children laboring in nineteenth-century Brazilian coffee plantations.Despite these reservations, this is an innovative book that opens multiple paths for historians to start seriously engaging visual sources in writing histories of slavery. The authors must be praised for taking on this difficult challenge and for covering in so much detail how sugar, cotton, and coffee were planted, transformed, and distributed across the Atlantic world. The book also makes the history of the second slavery very accessible to students and general readers; this makes it excellent for adoption in a large array of graduate and undergraduate history courses addressing slavery in Cuba, the United States, and Brazil. 

Matthew Bernard Mulcahy

Papers

Not everything is grace: Aquinas's notion of 'pure nature' and the Christian integralism of Henri De Lubac and of radical orthodoxy

Sea and Land

Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America by Jonathan Todd Hancock (review)

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World