This paper reads the surviving letters written by Augustine during the period between his return to North Africa in 388 and his elevation to the bishopric of Hippo in 395. In doing so, it explores Augustine’s complicated relationship with his native land and his new Christian role there, and with the career and associates that he has left behind; and it reveals some of the pressures inherent in the notion of “coming home.”.

Many of the figures in Thurnauer’s paintings who fix us with their gaze have been borrowed from the work of Manet, the artist who organized so many of his paintings around a face-to-face confrontation of viewer and work. The painting returns the viewer’s gaze with total impartiality, making us see our own motives and investments more than the illusion that the figure in the painting will accommodate them. Issues of language often surface literally in paintings by Thurnauer; written language appears (...) sometimes as part of the material fabric in which human figures move or recline. The textual elements are not superimposed on the figures but appear to exist in the world they inhabit, requiring the painter to relate figure to ground in a process of interlacing. When the viewer’s eye traverses the painting it falls under the magnetic influence of the text to the extent that viewing must succumb in some degree to the operations of reading with its specific rhythms and expectations. In these paintings, visual and verbal languages provide us with different maps of the same territory; and Thurnauer’s hybridized representations argue that the world can only be rendered through a dialogue, an interlocution of different forms, genres, media. We approach her work, not as viewers whose function is predicated through a gaze regulated according to the distorting demands of consumption or control, but as readers engaged in a critical activity seeing around the edges of historically produced versions of the self. (shrink)

To assess the effectiveness of Visual Thinking Strategies in medical education curricula, a pretest–posttest experimental study design was used to evaluate the impact of participating in VTS workshops on first-year medical students. A total of forty-one intervention and sixty comparative students completed the study which included the analysis of clinical images followed by a measurement of word count, length of time analyzing images, and quality of written observations of clinical images. VTS training increased the total number of words used to (...) describe clinical images, the time spent analyzing the images, and the number of clinically relevant observations. (shrink)

Reviewed work: Geoffrey Cantor; Sally Shuttleworth . Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth‐Century Periodicals. 351 pp., illus., index. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. $40 .; Louise Henson; Geoffrey Cantor; Gowan Dawson; Richard Noakes; Sally Shuttleworth; Jonathan R. Topham . Culture and Science in the Nineteenth‐Century Media. xxv + 296 pp., illus., index. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. $84.95 .; Geoffrey Cantor; Gowan Dawson; Graeme Gooday; Richard Noakes; Sally Shuttleworth; Jonathan R. Topham. Science in the Nineteenth‐Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine (...) of Nature. xi + 329 pp., illus., bibl., index. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. $75. (shrink)

Jerry Stannard. Pristina Medicamenta: Ancient and Medieval Medical Botany. Edited by, Katherine E. Stannard and Richard Kay. (Variorum Collected Studies Series.) xxii + 324 pp., frontis., illus., index. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1999. $110.95. Jerry Stannard. Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Edited by, Katherine E. Stannard and Richard Kay. (Variorum Collected Studies Series.) xvi + 342 pp., frontis., illus., tables, index. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1999. $110.95.

The main conclusion of Nigel Hiscock's important but ill‐arranged book is that the ground plans of abbeys and cathedrals of the tenth and eleventh centuries incorporate Platonic wisdom—hence the “wise” in the title catchwords, which come from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians . There Paul likens himself to a sapiens architectus who lays the foundations on which others erect the building. In three of the four translations in The Complete Parallel Bible, however, Paul does not declare himself wise but, (...) rather, “skilled” or “trained.” The discrepancy makes an emblem for Hiscock's investigation: Did the architects deliberately express geometrical ratios significant in Platonic philosophy in their designs or did they proceed by applying their practical skill and training to the lie of the land and the resources available? A subsidiary question is also symbolized in Paul's verse: Was the designer a wise cleric who set the proportions and left the heavy work to someone else?Hiscock builds his answers in two ways. For one, he delivers a chrestomathy of Platonic snippets known in the tenth century and a few telling quotations from wise clerics—the latter concern the expression of significant numbers in the church fabric: a baptistery is octagonal because of an association between creation and the number eight, and a church with a half‐dozen altars is complete because of the perfection of the number six. But, Hiscock emphasizes, numerology does not account for floor plans, and to test the wisdom of the designers he scrutinizes plans of two dozen churches, especially those associated with monastic reformers. He expresses his results in color‐coded lines superposed on the plans, some one hundred of which comprise a valuable appendix.An example will indicate the interest of the findings and the riskiness of the business. The crossing of the transept at St. Michael's Abbey, Hildesheim, makes a square ABCD, proceeding clockwise from A in the northeast corner. AD and BC prolonged give the line of nave piers, AB and DC prolonged that of the arms of the transept. Lines drawn from B at angles of 54° and 60° with BC cut CD extended in E and F, respectively, locating the end piers in the side aisles. Now 60°, as the invariable angle of a three‐sided figure all of whose parts are equal, carries a cornucopia of Platonic and Christian symbolism. Also 54°, because derivable from a pentagon, has the pregnant significance of the figure five, which is the sum of the first male and first female numbers. Repetition of the transept square fixes the nave piers. Then lines between piers, pillars, and pilasters make the special angles with the north‐south and east‐west lines of the grid all over the plan.How much of this construction is mere coincidence? Requiring the intervals between piers in the same line to be equal, we have DE = FE = FD/2. And so it is: / = 0.51. Otherwise put, if angle FBC is 60° and E divides FD equally, angle EBC must be 54° without reference to a pentagon. Against such arguments, Hiscock observes that his analysis has uncovered previously unknown relations between churches confirmed by documents and that his technique, when applied to large nineteenth‐century buildings with repeated bays such as the Crystal Palace, picks out relatively few structurally significant elements.Hiscock is senior lecturer on the design, theory, and history of architecture at Oxford Brookes University and a master craftsman. His scrupulously prepared color‐coded drawings contain much of interest and pleasure for a geometer. Has he definitively answered the old vexed question whether the sapiens architectus intended to express ancient wisdom in his plans? If the architect thus proposed, did his builder faithfully dispose? Paul again may give guidance. “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile”. (shrink)

This volume includes the critical edition of five apologias in which Erasmus defended his New Testament translation and commentary against Diego López de Zúñiga and Sancho Carranza. The edition is partly based on manuscript sources never used before.

Insights into the history of chemistry Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9482-4 Authors Peter J. Ramberg, Truman State University, 100 E. Normal, Kirksville, MO 63501, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.