Books Received

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Alff, David. The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture, 1660–1730. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2017. 239p., bibl., ill., index, $65. For-profit schemes and failed enterprises as imagined futures advertised in printed tracts and pamphlets.

Anderson, Benjamin and Felipe Rojas, eds. Antiquarianisms: Contact, Conflict, Comparison. Havertown, Pa.: Oxbow, 2017. xiii, 226p., ill., index, $45. Ten essays on “indigenous” and “colonial” archaeologies in the Mediterranean, Spanish America, and the Ottoman Empire.

Baggoni, Laurent. La forteresse de la raison: Lectures de l’humanisme politique florentin d’après l’oeuvre de Coluccio Salutati. Geneva: Droz, 2015. 411p., bibl., index. Civic humanism as a twentieth-century myth and what Salutati really said about civic wisdom, political disruption, and the divided city.

Bandoch, Joshua. The Politics of Place: Montesquieu, Particularism, and the Pursuit of Liberty. Rochester, N.Y.: U of Rochester P, 2017. xi, 253p., bibl., index. Political and subpolitical variables articulated in The Spirit of the Laws.

Botero, Giovanni. The Reason of State. Ed. Robert Bireley. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. New York: Cambridge UP, 2017. xxxvi, 230p., index, $32.99. A 1589 retort to Machiavelli arguing how a state can be maintained and expanded while remaining moral in character.

Botting, Eileen Hunt. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in Frankenstein. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2018. xi, 220p., index, $39.95. Social contract theory of Locke and Rousseau meets the radicalism of Wollstonecraft and Godwin in Frankenstein’s Creature, a stateless orphan abandoned by family, abused by society, and ignored by law.

Boulter, Michael. Bloomsbury Scientists: Science and Art in the Wake of Darwin. London: U College London P, 2017. xxii, 175p., bibl., ill., index, £15. Creativity and freedom as the driving forces behind nature for a new class of scientists and artists living in a square-mile district of London, 1880s to 1930s.

Brückner, Martin. The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2017. xvii, 350p., bibl., ill., index, $94.95. The production and use of maps in industry, as decorative objects in the home, in schools, and as pocket guides for travelers.

Burney, Ian and Neil Pemberton. Murder and the Making of English CSI. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2016. 235p., ill., index, $24.95. Forensic science and the handling of material evidence in the first half of the twentieth century.

Calma, Dragos, ed. Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages: I., New Commentaries on the Liber de causis (ca. 1250–1350) and II., New Commentaries on the Liber de causis and Elementatio theologica (ca. 1350–1500). Vol. 42.1 and 42.2 of Studia Artistarum: Etudes sur la Faculté des arts dans les Universités mediévales. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016. 562p. and 417p., indices, 100. Fourteen editions of some seventy recently discovered Latin commentaries on the Arabic translations of Proclus’s Elements of Theology.

Carty, Jarrett A. God and Government: Martin Luther’s Political Thought. Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2017. xv, 191p., bibl., index, $34.95. Temporal authority as a divine gift that brings law and order to the world.

Chaney, Anthony. Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2017. 304p., bibl., ill., index, $32.95. A discipline-hopping anthropologist warns the 1967 London Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation of “the green-house effect” and environmental apocalypse.

Codr, Dwight. Raving at Usurers: Anti-Finance and the Ethics of Uncertainty in England, 1690–1750. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2016. xii, 242p., bibl., index, $39.50. The religious debate about risk and the uncertain future during the financial revolution.

Cogan, John F. The High Cost of Good Intentions: A History of U. S. Federal Entitlement Programs. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford UP, 2017. xii, 500p., bibl., index. An argument against social democracy and the welfare state.

Cohen, Mitchell. The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2017. xxxii, 477p., bibl., ill., index, $39.95. The theater of absolutism in Medici Florence, the age of Louis XIV, and Vienna before and during the French Revolution.

Craiutu, Aurelian. Faces of Moderation: The...