Books Received

Attebery, Brian. Stories About Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. vii, 240p., bibl., index, $29.95. Crisis and redemption in the imaginative literature of George MacDonald, William Morris, J. R. R. Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, Alan Gardner, Patricia Wrightson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others.

Balserak, Jon. John Calvin as Sixteenth-Century Prophet. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. xiii, 208p., bibl., index, $85. Not apocalypticism but an expansionist agenda, religious, political, and military, for the reformation of France.

Beiser, Frederick C. Late German Idealism: Tredelenburg & Lotze. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. xi, 333p., bibl., index, $74. Philosophical biographies of two post-Hegelian philosophers.

Carravetta, Peter. The Elusive Hermes: Method, Discourse, Interpreting. Aurora, Colo.: Davies Group, 2012. xviii, 486p., bibl., index. First of four projected volumes on rhetoric, ontology, and language in post-Cartesian philosophers’ readings of the ancient Greeks.

Champion, Michael W. Explaining the Cosmos: Creation and Cultural Interaction in Late-Antique Gaza. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. x, 241p., bibl., index, $74. Case studies of rhetoricians Aeneas, Zacharias Scholasticus, and Procopius illustrate how one set of Christians appropriated much of Neoplatonist cosmology while retaining creatio ex nihilo.

Conybeare, Catherine. The Laughter of Sarah: Biblical Exegesis, Feminist Theory, and the Concept of Delight. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. xi, 117p., bibl., index, $67.50. Three scenes from Genesis as interpreted in the Cena Cypriani, commentaries literal and allegorical, and twentieth-century social philosophy and psychology.

Erickson, Paul et al., eds. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2013. viii, 259p., bibl., ill., index, $35. Behavioral science in the face of mutually assured destruction.

Ferguson, Adam. Essai sur l’histoire de la société civile. Trans. Patrick Vieu. Paris: ENS, 2013. cviv, 610p., bibl., index, 26 euros. Well-annotated translation of the 1767 natural history of man.

Finkelstein, Gabriel. Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2013. xviii, 362p., ill., index, $38. Biography of the discoverer of the electrical transmission of nerve signals.

Gelvin, James L., and Nile Green, eds. Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print. Berkeley: U of California P, 2014. xiii, 285p., ill., index, $34.95. Twelve essays discuss networks of communication, trade, disease, and travel in North Africa, Arabia, Iran, South and Southeast Asia.

Grimshaw, Mark, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. xv, 773p., index, $150. Forty-four essays discuss imagined communities and distant relationships as bridged by electronic communication.

Hayden, Patrick, ed. Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts. Durham: Acumen, 2014. ix, 244p., bibl., index, $24.95. Thirteen essays on natality, labor, totalitarianism, and others.

Huenemann, Charlie. Spinoza’s Radical Theology: The Metaphysics of the Infinite. Durham: Acumen, 2014. xvi, 154p., bibl., index, $22.95. Scripture, God, creation, human finitude, and the republic.

King, Margaret L., ed. and trans. Renaissance Humanism: An Anthology of Sources. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014. xxiii, 352p., index, $19. Thirty-nine readings from Petrarch to Descartes on antiquity, politics, the arts, religion, nature, women, and the New World.

König, Jason, and Greg Woolf, eds. Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013. xv, 601p., bibl., ill., index, $140. Twenty-four essays on ancient quaestiones, Pliny, Justinian, Isidore, medieval compilations of practical knowledge, and humanist innovations.

Kowalewicz, Michel Henri, ed. Spiel: Facetten seiner Ideengeschichte. Münster: Mentis, 2013. 253p., bibl. Fourteen essays on games and play in Continental philosophy, mostly German.

Kuefler, Mathew. The Making and Unmaking of a Saint: Hagiography and Memory in the Cult of Gerald of Aurillac. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2014. ix, 306p., bibl., ill., index, $79.95. The eleventh-century saint’s Life reattributed to Ademar of Chabannes and the career of the cult from obscurity to revival in the nineteenth century.

Leithart, Peter J. Gratitude: An Intellectual History. Waco, Tex.: Baylor UP, 2014. ix, 340p., bibl., index. How the New Testament broke the ancient circle of reciprocal giving, medieval alms and donations, Reformation sola gratia, and the expectations of givers in modern philosophy.

Nachtomy, Ohad, and Justin E. H. Smith, eds. The Life Sciences in Early Modern...