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190 letters in canada 2002 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 seventeenth centuries (Kathleen M. Comerford), and the new clerks regular of the sixteenth century (Mark J. Lewis). Jesuit activity is studied in papers on confraternities as modes of spiritual community (Nicholas Terpstra), on the non-Spanish contribution to South American colonial architecture (Gauvin Alexander Bailey), on the catechism as a musical event (T. Frank Kennedy), and on the adaptation of the composition of place from the Exercises to a Chinese setting ( Xiaoping Lin). The importance of Erasmus for O=Malley is recognized in Hilmar M. Pabel=s essay on the Ars Moriendi, his concern with rhetoric and preaching in Corrie E. Norman=s study of preaching and ritual on Holy Thursday in the court of Paul V. Before O=Malley=s study it was often thought that preaching was badly neglected. In her paper on the Daughters of Charity, Susan E. Dinan begins by observing that the subject of gender finds its place more easily in O=Malley=s new terminology, as does D. Jonathan Grieser=s concern with Catholics and Anabaptists. These wider spaces allow for some revaluation, shown in particular by Wietse de Boer=s paper on Calvin and Borromeo and the analogies between the notions of discipline, in two figures not often linked. This paper works with cross-confessionalism, but it points up a particular strength of the volume, past its range and the bibliographical materials accompanying each essay. The broader description for the phenomenon as a whole, as early modern Catholicism, opens new explorations, new parallels, new ways of looking at what looks like familiar material, already judged, classified. While the papers themselves are finished, they everywhere suggest work in progress, based on intensive study of the particular with an openness designed to reveal rather than to confront or to confute. This has been John O=Malley=s own habit, made manifest by the only subject in the last session of the second four-day conference on Jesuit culture in Boston last June: >What have we learned?= This was a preamble to an invitation to the audience to suggest, on the basis of that learning, particular and general directions in which we might, tentatively, go next. O=Malley=s >way of proceeding= has produced not only his own studies, but a generation of students carrying on his tradition and his style. (PATRICIA BRÜCKMANN) Nasrin Rahimieh. Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural History Syracuse University Press 2001. xiii, 191. US $34.95, $17.95 A statement that occurs near the end of this study seems to indicate its crux: >Despite their appearances, the [first and last] narrators convey a deeprooted psychological resistance to cultural makeover they go to great lengths to embrace.= The interplay of acceptance and rejection of >the West= permeates, to a greater or lesser extent, all the writings featured in this text. The notion of alterity, understood to >evoke a sense of awareness of linguistic, cultural, and psychological differences from others that con- humanities 191 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 stitutes the notion of the self,= underscores the selections of quotations and interpretations. The five writings examined in this book are >read as instances of lives written into Persian cultural history= and should be considered part of >our collective cultural imagination.= Since Persian cultural conventions preclude the full revelation of the self outside a communal and political context, the study characterizes the environment for the revelation of the self, as it occurs in each of the writings. Theories of cross-cultural encounters are used to unravel textual subtleties. The first >missing Persian= is Uruch Beg, a secretary attached to a delegation sent by the Persian Shah =Abbas I to Europe in 1599. He converted to Catholicism in Spain and did not return to Persia; his Persian diary was originally translated into Castilian. This study makes use of a Spanish translation published in 1946, because there is >merit in uncovering the ambiguities of a text that claims to speak for the Persian whose own voice has long been lost.= The study probes the diary of this sixteenthcentury Persian for its sense...

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