Published this week

J = Review forthcoming

ART HISTORY

-The Moral Mirror of Roman Art

By Rabun Taylor, assistant professor of the history of art and architecture, Harvard University

Cambridge University Press, £50.00

ISBN 9780521866125

Focusing on examples found in mythical narrative, religious devotion, social interaction and gender relations, Taylor demonstrates that reflections in Roman art served as powerful symbols of personal change.

BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

- Analyzing Animal Societies: Quantitative Methods for Vertebrate Social Analysis

By Hal Whitehead, professor of biology, Dalhousie University

University of Chicago Press, £39.00 and £15.00

ISBN 9780226895215 and 5239

Whitehead presents a conceptual framework for analysing social behaviour and demonstrates how to put this framework into practice by collecting suitable data on the interactions and associations of individuals so that relationships can be described and models can be derived.

GEOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

- The Power of Place

By Harm De Blij, distinguished professor of geography, Michigan State University

Oxford University Press, £14.99

ISBN 9780195367706

De Blij contends that geography continues to hold billions of people in an unrelenting grip, with natural and cultural environments shaping what people become, individually and collectively.

HISTORY

- Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America

By Elisa Tamarkin, associate professor of English, University of California, Irvine

University of Chicago, £18.00

ISBN 9780226789446

Elisa Tamarkin charts the Anglophilia that emerged after the American Revolution and remains in the character of US society and class, the style of academic life, and the idea of American intellectualism.

-Visions of the Industrial Age, 1830–1914: Modernity and the Anxiety of Representation in Europe

Edited by Minsoo Kang, assistant professor in European history, University of Missouri – St Louis and Amy Woodson-Boulton, assistant professor of modern British and Irish history,

Loyola Marymount University Ashgate, £60.00

ISBN 9780754664888

The essays in this collection examine 19th-century visual culture as European culture redefined itself, embracing political and social change yet expressing tensions and anxieties about modernity.

LAW

- Women, Crime and Character

By Nicola Lacey, professor of law, London School of Economics

Oxford University Press, £19.99

ISBN 9780199544633

This book draws on law, literature, philosophy and social history to explore changes in ideas of selfhood, gender and social order in 18th and 19th-century England, arguing that they underpinned a radical shift in mechanisms of responsibility-attribution, with decisive implications for the criminalisation of women.

LITERATURE

- Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade

Elizabeth Evenden, lecturer in English, Brunel University

Ashgate, £55.00

ISBN 9780754654803

The study sets the printer John Day in the context of the 16th-century printing industry, examines his disputed origins and establishment as a London printer and discusses his career together with the most significant works he printed.

G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press

Edited by Anne Humpherys, professor of English, Lehman College, City University of New York and Louis James, professor of English, University of Kent

Ashgate, £55.00 ISBN 9780754658542

These essays address the journalist, editor, and prolific fiction writer G. W. M. Reynolds and his involvement with Chartism, serial publication, the mass market periodical, commodity culture, and Reynolds’s long-running serial, The Mysteries of London.

MUSIC

- A Woman's Voice in Baroque Music: Mariane von Ziegler and J.S. Bach

By Mark A. Peters, associate professor of music, Trinity Christian College

Ashgate, £55.00

ISBN 9780754658108

Peters presents an account of the nine sacred cantatas written by J.S. Bach to texts by poet Mariana von Ziegler, providing a new perspective on Ziegler as poet and cantata librettist and Bach as cantata composer.

Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform

By Martin J. S. Rudwick, emeritus professor of history, University of California, San Diego and affiliated research scholar in the department of history and philosophy of science,

University of Cambridge University of Chicago Press, £25.50

ISBN 9780226731285

This account of the reconstruction of prehuman geohistory, this book takes readers from the post-Napoleonic Restoration in Europe to the early years of Britain’s Victorian age, chronicling the discoveries geologists made during the period: the unearthing of the first dinosaur fossils, the glacial theory of the last ice age and the meaning of igneous rocks, among others.

Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851

Edited by Jeffrey A. Auerbach, associate professor of history, California State University, Northridge and Peter H. Hoffenberg, associate professor of history, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

Ashgate, £55.00

ISBN 9780754662419

This collection of essays discusses the significance of colonial and foreign participation at the Great Exhibition in 1851, including the exhibits, publications, officials and visitors, before, during, and after the event in London’s Crystal Palace.

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

- The Fragmenting Family

By Brenda Almond, emeritus professor of moral and social philosophy, University of Hull

Oxford University Press, £8.99

ISBN 9780199548705

Almond argues that the traditional family is fragmenting in Western societies, causing serious social problems, and urges us to reconsider our attitudes to sex and reproduction in order to strengthen our most important social institution, the family.

Politics and Philosophy

Theology without Words: Theology in the Deaf Community

By Wayne Morris, senior lecturer in theology and religious studies, University of Chester

Ashgate, £55.00 and 17.99

ISBN 9780754662228 and 23

This book is a study of a Christian theology without words, focusing on theology in the deaf community, presenting and examining some of that theology from the deaf community and argues that written texts are not necessary for creative theological debate, a deep spirituality or for ideas about God to develop.

Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics

By Ronna Burger, professor of philosophy, Tulane University

University of Chicago Press, £18.00

ISBN 9780226080505

Adopting a new point of view, Burger aims to decipher some of the most perplexing conundrums of the influential treatise the Nicomachean Ethics by approaching it as Aristotle’s dialogue with the Platonic Socrates.

All the Names of the Lord: Lists, Mysticism, and Magic

By Valentina Izmirlieva, associate professor of Slavic languages, Columbia University

University of Chicago Press, £23.50

ISBN 9780226388700

To explore whether God can be called by no names or all names, Izmirlieva examines two lists of God’s names: one from The Divine Names, the classic treatise by Pseudo-Dionysius, and the other from The 72 Names of the Lord, an amulet whose history binds together Kabbalah and Christianity, Jews and Slavs, Palestine, Provence and the Balkans.

SOCIAL SCIENCES

- Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen: Men in Community Queering the Masculine

By Peter Hennen, assistant professor of sociology, Ohio State University

University of Chicago Press, £26.00 and £10.50

ISBN 978022633 and 7280

Through a comparative ethnographic analysis of three communities, Hennen explores the surprising ways in which conventional masculinity is being challenged, subverted or perpetuated in contemporary gay male culture.

Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison

By Megan Comfort, assistant professor of medicine, University of California, San Francisco

University of Chicago Press, £55.00 and £11.50

SBN 9780226114620 and 4637

An illuminating analysis of women caught in the shadow of America’s massive prison system, this book details the ways that prisons shape and infiltrate the lives of women with husbands, fiancés, and boyfriends on the inside.

Collections of Nothing

By William Davies King, professor of theatre, University of California, Santa Barbara

University of Chicago Press, £10.50

ISBN 9780226437002

Part memoir, part reflection on the mania of acquisition, William Davies King takes a hard look at his own habitual hoarding to see what truths it can reveal about the impulse to accumulate.