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REVIEWS 294 onstrate a more “businesslike” approach in which the testator hopes to secure his / her salvation by donating smaller sums of money to many different institutions as well as leaving the considerable portion to his / her family. Chapter 3 explores “the legal codes of inheritance rights and property transfers” (9). Ruiz specifically discusses legal codes including the Fueros, the Fuero juzgo, the Fuero real, and the Siete partidas. In Chapter 4, Ruiz looks at the changes in perception of property in northern Castile. He explains, “Castilians began to think of property as physical space and set out to map and itemize by installing landmarks, initiating litigation over boundaries, and commissioning carefully drawn inventories. This new awareness of the physical (as opposed to the jurisdictional ) attributes of property transformed the mental landscape of Castilians in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries” (9). The following chapter, entitled “Family and Property: Lineages and Primogeniture ,” creates a link between property and the family. This chapter focuses on the use of “new strategies ... to secure the preservation and transmission of [a person’s] property [and] to advance ... individual and collective political and social power” (87). As Ruiz explains, this chapter examines three specific topics : “(1) the formation of bourgeois lineages and familial clans; (2) the emergence of great noble lineages; (3) the development of primogeniture (royal as well as noble) and the establishment of undivided and unalienable inheritances” (87). Chapters 6 and 7, “Heavenly Concerns: Charity and Salvation,” and “Toward a New Concept of Power: Unsacred Monarchy,” respectively, as Ruiz explains, “take … us from concerns with the here and now to more cultural and politically bound affairs” (9). Chapter 6 examines how wills were used to benefit the social and spiritual status of the family of the testator. The last chapter in the book examines the changing concept of power and draws from some of Ruiz’s earlier studies on the establishment of a nonsacral kingship and the new forms of power that derived from this model. He explains that “the use of the vernacular, the implementation of a new Roman-based law, and the advent of institutional reforms led to the laicization of the bureaucracy, which proved an additional incentive in changing the way Castilians thought of power” (9). The Conclusion revisits the most important arguments presented in the study. The book also contains an appendix in which three wills that Ruiz studied are summarized. The notes, bibliography, and general index occupy the remaining fifty-eight pages of the book. From Heaven to Earth is a book of paramount importance in the study of the Castilian experience in late Middle Ages. It fills in several important gaps in the literature dedicated to the study of this time period in the Iberian Peninsula and it elucidates the incredible spiritual, economic and cultural transformations taking place. The author’s use of first hand sources to tell the story as well as his flawless scholarship make this book insightful and entertaining. ¡Enhorabuena , Professor Ruiz! ERIN M. REBHAN, Spanish and Portuguese, UC Santa Barbera Maria Ruvoldt, The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep, and Dreams (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2004) 244 pp., 72 ill. REVIEWS 295 Sleep and dreams may be the focus of Maria Ruvoldt’s The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration, but this dense text requires a reader’s full alertness. Working with an impressive breadth of media and material that ranges from portrait medals, allegorical prints, paintings, and drawings to philosophical texts, poetry, and letters, Ruvoldt explores the pictorial vocabulary of divine inspiration as constructed by philosophers, poets, and artists with metaphors of sleep and dreams. While the book concentrates on philosophers and poets in the first half, the second half focuses on Renaissance artists and their appropriation of these themes of inspiration from the religious, philosophical, and literary precedent. This shift culminates in representations of an artist’s dreams as the idealized manifestation of inspiration, a model which holds fast to this day. Ruvoldt’s refreshing approach neatly inserts a traditional iconographic study into the discourses of semiotics and gender. She writes with a lucid and concise style and adeptly handles heavily debated material without becoming...

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