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82 tal, sweeping, and irreversible change. These slow gender shifts cry out for centennial and millennial historical contexts like this study. Ms. Muri devotes pages 167–225 to her chapter on the present and past of ‘‘The Woman-Machine: Techno-lust and Techno-reproduction.’’ One chapter subhead reads ‘‘Why Do Cyborgs Need Boobs?’’ and is symptomatic of both the strengths and weaknesses of this ambitious book in dealing with a subject of such contemporary magnitude despite sparse previous historical examination. Massive current popular fiction and film on cyborg encourages use of the slang vernacular and, more critically, makes the chapter overall top-heavy with the present. The magnitude of both popular and contemporary scholarly interest places two necessary, but heavy, weights on every chapter from the introductory one to the conclusion. It is the price the author and the reader pay to reach Ms. Muri’s insights. Nevertheless, the en passant pithy commentary and the well balanced conclusions make this seminal book a valuable contribution to both studies on the Enlightenment and systemic change. In concluding the woman-machine chapter , for example, Ms. Muri summarizes ‘‘provocative similarities between the eighteenth-century auto-female mechanism and the female cyborg today.’’ ‘‘In the case of Fanny Hill, her sexual desires are still guided by mechanical response and still in need of male direction , government, and ideally marriage .’’ Ms. Muri rises well to the summing up occasion with her final chapter ‘‘Cyborg Conceptions: Bodies, Texts, and the Future of the Human Spirit.’’ There are beckoning subsections in this conclusion : ‘‘virtually human,’’ ‘‘the electronic page and the book of life,’’ ‘‘of books and spirit,’’ ‘‘the archived body and human identity.’’ But the twelve lines following the ‘‘Know then thyself’’ passage from An Essay on Man are given pride of place in the ultimate concluding remarks. In answering Pope’s imperative, Ms. Muri frames the question as to where our humanity resides in a material world: ‘‘Who gets to pilot or govern the [human] ship? Will the material knowledge of technology and science steer our morality, or will the more ‘spiritual’ knowledge of the humanities and the arts.’’ That quandry forms the counterpoint to the book and to the power dynamics of systemic change. From this reviewer’s perspective, unless we opt for the profound level of integrated interdisciplinary knowledge displayed by Ms. Muri, the humanities will continue to be a scurrying lap dog obedient and affectionate to science and the popular culture. Kenneth Craven The Political Imagination in History: Essays Concerning J. G. A. Pocock, ed. D. N. DeLuna assisted by Perry Anderson and Glenn Burgess. Baltimore: Owlworks , 2006. Pp. x ⫹ 274. $24.95. As a collection of essays this compilation has the appearance of a Festschrift . It is not usual, however, to devote such collections entirely to the work of the scholar being celebrated, let alone to criticize it as many of these authors do. Nor do Festschriften normally contain an essay by the dedicatee, though ‘‘Propriety, Liberty and Valour: Ideology, Rhetoric and Speech in the 1628 Debates in the House of Commons ’’ by J. G. A. Pocock himself, written in 1978 with introductory para- 83 graphs updating it, is published for the first time. As such it adds to his prolific publications. No fewer than nine major titles appear in a list of abbreviations provided to simplify references to Pocockiana in the text. These range from ACFL: The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law which first appeared in print in 1957, to the ongoing multivolume study of Edward Gibbon and his Age, Barbarism and Religion. The jacket quotes a presumably spoof review of the volume by ‘‘Joe Blundo’’ in The Columbus Dispatch. ‘‘This book isn’t something you or I will ever read . . . [it] is a scholarly work that only fans of J. G. A. Pocock, whoever hu [a misprint that curiously occurs several times in the text] is, would appreciate.’’ As a fan I welcome this tribute to his outstanding contributions to the history of political thought in the early modern era. In ‘‘‘Ancient Constitution’ as Necessary Interpretative Trope,’’ Gordon Schochet recalls how ‘‘it was from The Ancient Constitution, more than any other work, that I learned one of the fundamental...

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