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Revolution, Republic, and Reform: The Life of a French Enlightenment Statesman in an Age of Upheaval.

After being comparatively neglected for several generations, Joseph Lakanal received many posthumous honors. These memorials of esteem were the tribute of the men of the Third French Republic to an outstanding character of the First Republic, established by the National Convention in 1792.

In numerous towns and cities of France streets and boulevards were named for Lakanal, among them Paris, Tours, Toulouse, and Montpellier. Elementary schools received his name at Perigueux, Cette, Beziers. Secondary schools were named in his honor, such as the Lycee Lakanal at Paris and the College Lakanal at Beziers. At least two monuments were erected to his memory, the more imposing of which was a life-sized statue in bronze at Foix in his native Ariege. The ancient adage that a prophet is not without honor save in his own country was not true of Lakanal.

Lakanal belonged to a group of thinkers at the end of the eighteenth century known as Ideologists, a derogatory term applied to them by First Consul Bonaparte. When, during the period of the Consulate, Bonaparte had signed a Concordat with the Pope where­by Catholicism was restored to France, and when in 1802 he had sought to put into force the terms of the Concordat, he found a stumbling-block to his plans in the membership of the Class of Moral and Political Sciences of the lnstitut de France. In this group were to be found the most influential free-thinkers of the day: Lakanal, Garat, Cabanis, Volney, Ginguene, Mercier, Naigeon, Destutt de Tracy and others who had been consistently hostile to the Church, and who had become hostile to the ambition of Bonaparte.

On the political side, Lakanal was an austere democrat, and remained one all his life. Had he been willing to compromise, he would undoubtedly have gone far under Napoleon. His career is quite in contrast with that of Talleyrand, whose chameleon-like qualities enabled him to occupy high place in the Revolution, the Consulate, the Empire, the Restoration, and the more liberal gov­ernment of Louis Philippe.
 
In his profound belief in democracy and public education, and in the wide variety of his knowledge and interest in the various sciences, Lakanal is to be compared with Thomas Jefferson. The two men were of the same school of thought and possessed much in, common. In his passion for public education Lakanal may also be compared to Horace Mann.
 

    Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic explores the origins and lasting influences of two contesting but intertwined discourses that persist today when we use the words landscape, country, scenery, nature, national. In the first sense, the land is a physical and bounded body of terrain upon which the nation state is constructed (e.g., the purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain, from sea to shining sea). In the second, the country is constituted through its people and established through time and precedence (e.g., land where our fathers died, land of the Pilgrims’ pride). Kenneth Robert Olwig’s extended exploration of these discourses is a masterful work of scholarship both broad and deep, which opens up new avenues of thinking in the areas of geography, literature, theater, history, political science, law, and environmental studies.
    Olwig tracks these ideas though Anglo-American history, starting with seventeenth-century conflicts between the Stuart kings and the English Parliament, and the Stuart dream of uniting Scotland with England and Wales into one nation on the island of Britain. He uses a royal production of a Ben Jonson masque, with stage sets by architect Inigo Jones, as a touchstone for exploring how the notion of "landscape" expands from artful stage scenery to a geopolitical ideal. Olwig pursues these contested concepts of the body politic from Europe to America and to global politics, illuminating a host of topics, from national parks and environmental planning to theories of polity and virulent nationalistic movements.

In a country of disparate parts and of long, unbroken historical experience, there may be one dominant feature, a clue to the character of its regions. In Portugal the vine serves as this clue.

The vine has been an important aspect of the Iberian landscape since prehistoric times, and farmers still use Roman methods of cultivation that have been adapted to regional physical conditions and to socioeconomic structure. Southern Portugal today is almost vineless, but in the north three areas can be distinguished by their vine forms and their products. Dan Stanislawski examines these areas in detail.

High tree-vines surround plots of grain in the Minho Province. The grains and the slightly acid Green Wines provide subsistence and cash for the densely settled area of owner-operated small farms.

In the hanging garden terrace of the Douro, vines grown on tawny, baked schist slopes yield world-famous Port Wine, a product that must conform to strict quantity and quality controls supervised by the central government.

Mature table wines are produced in the Dão, an isolated cul-de-sac where cordons of vines are planted on small, individually owned plots. Control of wine-making is exercised by a central governing group and by producers’ cooperatives.

Various wines originate in central Portugal. The lesser demarcated zones of Setubal, Colares, Carcavelos, and Bucelas yield fine wines. In other parts of the central region several wine types are produced in bulk. Some are used for blending and some for aging into quality table wines, but none is distinguished as a wine whose character is derived from its geographical location.

Dan Stanislawski demonstrates that vine form differences—and differences in the resulting product, wine—mirror the Portuguese historical experience and indicate regional distinctions in Portuguese life styles.

Malaria has existed in Greece since prehistoric times. Its prevalence fluctuated depending on climatic, socioeconomic and political changes. The book focuses on the factors that contributed to the spreading of the disease in the years between independent statehood in 1830 and the elimination of malaria in the 1970s. 

By the nineteenth century, Greece was the most malarious country in Europe and the one most heavily infected with its lethal form, falciparum malaria. Owing to pressures on the environment from economic development, agrarian colonization and heightened mobility, the situation became so serious that malaria became a routine part of everyday life for practically all Greek families, further exacerbated by wars. The country’s highly fragmented geography and its variable rainfall distribution created an environment that was ideal for sustaining and spreading of diseases, which, in turn, affected the tolerance of the population to malaria. In their struggle with physical suffering and death, the Greeks developed a culture of avid quinine consumption and were likewise eager to embrace the DDT spraying campaign of the immediate post WW II years, which, overall, had a positive demographic effect.

The Covid pandemic has put all modern societies to a serious test of resilience. The interdisciplinary research on which this book is based examined how four European governments behaved in these circumstances. During the months of the crisis, the team of experts coordinated by the editors of this volume took a close look at the decision-making processes in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia – the so-called Visegrad Four.

The inquiries focused on experiences from the academic, health, economic and social fields. The methods of comparison included surveys, interviews, discourse analysis, for which the adaptive leadership theory provided the conceptual framework.

The conclusions are both academic and practical. Aside the description of the pandemic responses, the research had a formative dimension: how can an adaptive leadership approach better help societies manage the health and societal impacts of similar challenges? The spectrum of emerging anti-democratic tendencies in the region provided the specific context of the exercise. The four states face varying degrees of democratic backsliding as well as illiberal influences that have affected their response to the pandemic, which gives this research on the Visegrad Four a worldwide resonance.

The first-ever volume to offer a broader European narrative on surgical training and education in the early modern era. 

This volume brings together case studies from the French, Italian, German, and English contexts to reveal diverse modes of surgical teaching and learning that were shaped by local contexts in early modern towns and cities. The chapters reveal the many spaces where practitioners learned and experienced surgery, shedding new light on the practice of early modern surgery.

Bringing forth new perspectives previously unrepresented in Holocaust studies

Lessons and Legacies, Volume XVI: Rethinking Paradigms does the difficult but crucial work of thinking through new methods and modes of representation that speak to where we find ourselves in Holocaust studies today, responding to—and developing new tools to analyze—the shifting shape of Holocaust memory: spatially, temporally, and in and across diverse media. The collection foregrounds the challenges visual sources pose to how we think about the Holocaust, including how it is represented differently in visual media, from photography to graphic novels, and establishes translation as a crucial concept for reframing Holocaust testimony and memory. The contributing authors also model ethical, nuanced ways to conduct comparative, connective work that challenges Eurocentric narratives of the Holocaust. The volume concludes with a section on memory work and activism that approaches the subject of post-1945 memory through different lenses to surface lesser-known aspects of Holocaust history.

No Church is monolithic—this is the preliminary premise of this volume on the public place of religion in a representative number of post-communist countries. The studies confirm that within any religious organization we can expect to find fissures, factions, theological or ideological quarrels, and perhaps even competing interest groups, such as missionary workers, regular clergy versus secular clergy, and sometimes even competing ecclesiastical hierarchies. The main focus of the book rests on the divisions arising within select Christian Churches, as they confront the processes of secularization and atheization. The coverage area includes Russia and the Ukraine, East-Central Europe and South-Eastern Europe. Some chapters focus on individual clergy who challenge the mainstream of their given Church either from a more liberal or from a more conservative perspective, while others deal with the divisive forces impacting the religious organizations.

This festschrift to honor Sabrina Ramet’s seminal contribution to the study of religion in the politics of the communist and post-communist world, brings together several generations of scholars from a variety of countries, both those well established in their fields of study as well as young promising academics.