Elizabeth Sears

The article discusses letters between art historians Gertrud Bing and Kenneth Clark on Clark's book “The Nude. A Study in Ideal Form.” Topics addressed include Clark's association with the Warburg Institute, an art historical research institution, and its staff, Clark's relationship with Bing, who acted as director of the Warburg Institute, and Bing's observations on Clark's book.

Parergon 21.1 (2004) essays are very valuable in the examination of legal concepts of domestic violence in England, and it will be interesting to see how their conclusions work when tested in other medieval societies with different legal frameworks. The rest of the collection essentially deals with literary texts, apart from Anne Laskaya’s essay on illuminations of the apocalypse. As well as acknowledging that domestic violence was not a defined category as such in medieval societies, the articles on literary interpretations are interested in how we are modern readers interpret texts which we find highly problematic. How can episodes of rape, murder, dismemberment and abandonment be read in ways that allow the voices of medieval authors and readers to emerge while still recognising the abhorrent nature of some of the textual images? This is a point which is often challenging when teaching medieval texts to undergraduates and, although these essays are not aimed at undergraduates, some of the readings of violent episodes will be useful to those trying to deepen their students’ responses beyond initial abhorrence at the alienating images. In many ways this book works better than many collections of essays as a coherent response to a complex problem and does benefit from being read in its entirety. All the thought provoking essays will deepen our understanding of medieval violence, and also raise intriguing questions for others to explore in different societies and time periods. Understanding that violence is not static and has different meanings depending on chronological and geographical contexts is essential to our knowledge of past societies. This book is an important part of developing that understanding. Dianne Hall Department of History University of Melbourne

The archive is housed on the fourth floor in a suite of rooms once occupied by the book bindery.1 A reading room faces out onto the courtyard. Shelved on its end wall, picturesque, are Aby Warburg’s Zettelkästen — the decorated boxes of standard size in which the founder of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW) filed notes, references, and reflections, written out in a distinc-tive hand notoriously difficult to decipher. Framed photographs of Warburg and of Fritz Saxl, his successor, hang on the back wall, recalling institutional origins. In an adjacent room, in rows of locked metal cabinets, library gray, the greater part of the archival holdings is preserved (figs. 1–2). Any archive reveals its potentials but slowly. The Warburg Institute Archive (WIA) is dauntingly rich. Each of my visits has yielded unexpected finds, new caches of documents that have generated further questions, necessitated visits

Rarely does a research library travel. In 1933, the year the Nazis came to power, the Warburg family in Hamburg negotiated with British sponsors to enable the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg Library for Cultural Study) to find safe haven in London. An initial three-year agreement was followed by a seven-year arrangement and, at the end of 1944, with Europe still at war, the Warburg Institute was incorporated into the University of London. The story of the first eleven years in London – highly productive years in which the staff sought to pursue their original mission while assimilating into British academe – reveals the working of complex politics and shows the degree to which, early on, the fate of the Warburg Institute was linked to that of the newly founded Courtauld Institute of Art.

In Washington, DC, in 1945, the German émigré art historian Edgar Breitenbach (1903–1977), a recently naturalized American citizen, was witness to and participant in a bold experiment in the ordering of visual documents. The vast assemblage of photographs recording American ways of life that had been generated during the Great Depression and war era under the guidance of Roy E. Stryker (1893–1975), working for a succession of government agencies, including the Farm Security Administration, was soon to be deposited in the Library of Congress. Stryker had appointed the visionary classifier Paul Vanderbilt (1905–1992) to give shape to the archive. Vanderbilt hired Breitenbach to help, and thus a European “iconographer,” trained in Hamburg by Aby Warburg (1866–1929), Fritz Saxl (1890–1948), and Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), found himself applying his skills to contemporary American cultural documents. Eight small exhibits mounted by the staff January–July 1945, three by Breitenbach, give insight into the thoughts and aspirations of the classifiers.

... Goethe and Weimar,< An Ad-dress at the University of New Hampshire, 16 February I96I, Durham, NH I962, 8; A & L, 196); and ob-served the appearance of the Stoic name >Tranquillus< in antiquity and in the Renaissance, but not in the Mid-dle Ages (-Reflections on Seeing ...

The protagonists in this study are the sworn wardens-the jurés-of the Parisian trades, as they are encountered in the earliest guild regulations of the city, the Livre des métiers (Book of Trades), compiled ca. 1268 by the prévôt de Paris, Etienne Boileau. Appointed or elected for a term of office, in Paris as elsewhere, the jurés were masters of the trades, professionals of good character charged to draw upon specialist knowledge and a discriminating eye to police the trade to which they belonged. Part of their mandate was to make tours of inspection: those in the craft guilds were specifically on the watch for false works (fausses oeuvres)-items ineptly or deceitfully made, falling beneath trade standards. Through consideration of the system of controls placed on craft production and examination of individual proscriptions contained in the statutes ("No one in the trade can or should..."), we gain access to a kind of critical seeing that was given credence in the thirteenth century in a situation where expert knowledge was valued.

In this introduction to a Common Knowledge special issue on the Warburg Institute, the authors argue that the Institute remains today — as it has been, in different forms, for almost a century — one of Europe's central institutions for the study of cultural history. At once a rich and uniquely organized library, a center for doctoral and postdoctoral research, and a teaching faculty, the Institute was first envisioned by Aby Warburg, a pioneering historian of art and culture from a wealthy Jewish family in Hamburg. Warburg rejected the traditional view that the classical tradition was a simple, purely rational Greek creation, inherited by modern Europe. He argued that it was as much Mesopotamian as Greek in origin, as at home in the Islamic as in the European world, and as often irrational as rational in its content — and on the basis of this rich vision he devised brilliant new interpretations of medieval and Renaissance symbols and ideas. Warburg's chosen associate Fritz S...

Le bioéthanol de seconde génération. La production d'éthanol à partir de biomasse lignocellulosique Les agrocarburants, aussi appelés biocarburants, sont destinés à résoudre, du moins partiellement, les problèmes de la disparition annoncée des énergies fossiles et à réduire ...

Jean Seznec (1905–1984) came to Oxford in 1950 as Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature and  occupied this position until his retirement in 1972. In 1989 Alain Seznec deposited a selection from among his father’s papers in the Taylor Institution (MS Fol. F. 21–28). The holdings include biographical documents, letters, reviews, and miscellaneous working notes on French authors and painters from Balzac to Voltaire – as well as a number of  polished lecture texts, never published. Especially worth recovering are the six Messenger Lectures, slide lectures that Seznec delivered at Cornell University in the Spring of 1978 on the theme ‘Revival and Metamorphoses of the Gods in Nineteenth Century Art and Literature’. These six talks are here made available for perusal for the first time.
Lecture 1 – The Passing of the Gods
Lecture 2 – After Strange Gods
Lecture 3 – The Awakening of the Centaur
Lecture 4 – The Resurrection of Isis
Lecture 5 – Olympus Parodied and the Jewelled Gods
Lecture 6 – The Cave at Ithaca

The entry appeared in the volume:
in Gesammeltes Gedächtnis: Konrad Peutinger und die kulturelle Überlieferung im 16. Jahrhundert, Begleitpublikation zur Ausstellung der Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg anlässlich des 550. Geburtstags Konrad Peutingers, ed. Reinhard Laube und Helmut Zäh (Lucern: Quaternio Verlag, 2016), 138-43.