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Short notices Brown, Peter, The body and society: men, women and sexual renunciation in early Christianity, rpt London and Boston, Faber and Faber, 1990; paper; pp. xx, 504; 1 map, chronological figure; R.R.P. AUS$29.95 [Distributed in Australia by Penguin]. Peter Brown is at his best in catching the dust of history in a coruscating sunbeam that reflects links between ideological and sociological elements in society. Here the beam is the ethic of sexual renunciation, the wider issue is the nexus between Christian notions of the body and the body politic from Paul to Augustine. The Brown revolution in the historiography of late antiquity set impossibly high expectations for this long awaited book, soon followed by the paperback edition. Reviews reflect those expectations. The familiar charms are all on stage: the masterful and open-ended learning, the evocative image, the lateral insight above all the inimitable magic with which he conjures from webbed texts the untamed thought and action of those who were all so unimaginably different and all so long ago. The idiom of sexual renunciation is beautifully exposed, though some will be sad that the books of the ancients lie more heavily on his shelves than the records of material culture and some will feel cheated that no strategy is devised to deliver from maleauthoredtextsthe equality of women so seductively advanced in the title. The book is meant however, as more than mere description and doubts have been voiced about the power of his explanations in any wider vision of the history of early Christianity and late antiquity (the two are inseparable). His texts chart the destinies of a small, vociferous, divided and often peripheral minority at odds with the silent majority of Christians and Christian communities. His correlations between their ethic and social change often seem forced. His analysis privileges, indeed overprivileges, attitudes to sexuality and the body in general and the ethic of sexual renunciation in particular. In the history of its time this seems to be a minor strand, for all its noise, even in the works of his chosen authors, let alone in the contextualising attitudes of other Christians, pagans, and Jews. These notions may, as he says (p. 441), have come to the fore in the latefifthand sixth centuries and marked the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the Middle Ages, but that is another story. In his preface, Brown has preemptively anticipated much of this criticism and invited us all to catch our own dust, or his, in the prism of other sociologies. H e hints at some himself ('doors, left deliberately ajar') and others are outlined in the superb review article by Philip Rousseau in Prudentia 22.2 (1990), 49-70. W e must take up his invitation and place his explanations in the hierarchy of explanations for the development of early Christianity and late antiquity. Even if his study does not form the bedrock of future histories of 174 Short notices early Christianity, or of the Roman and Byzantine worlds, or even of sexuality in Christian cultures, it will surely be one of the shifting sands which form those histories. Peter Brennan Department of History University of Sydney Cook, Ramsay, ed. & trans., The voyages of Jacques Cartier, Toronto/Buffalo/London, University of Toronto Press, 1993; cloth and paper; pp. xli, 177; 8 illustrations; R.R.P. CAN$50.00 (cloth), $16.95 (paper). This is a useful collection of translations taken primarily from Biggar's work. The documents illustrate in various ways the problem of the language barrier—at the time and since. One can study the growth of the stereotype description of the native Americans. O n his first voyage Cartier used the word 'savages' and spoke of wild and savage folk, easy to convert. They were nomadic, the sorriest folk there could be in the world, naked and thieves. O n his second voyage he wrote of their immense numbers, kindliness and peacefulness, their lack of fear, convertability, and friendliness. At the same time he was suspicious of them. He noted that some were not nomadic and gave descriptions of their villages and way of life, near naked and miserably clothed. O n...

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