University of Pennsylvania Press

In the decade following World War I, American literature won a large and enthusiastic reading public in Europe. With the exception of such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain, American literature had been virtually unknown before the war, yet, in 1930, Sweden awarded the Nobel Prize in literature to Sinclair Lewis, probably the most dramatic sign of the critical upheaval that had been taking place in European attitudes toward American culture.

The Swedish Acceptance of American Literature is a study of this radical shift in opinion as it occurred in Sweden. It first examines the sources of the conventional prejudices against American Literature in vogue at the end of World War I. It then shows how these prejudices had been strengthened by the reaction of Swedish critics to Jack London and Upton Sinclair and how they became, paradoxically, the basis in the next decade of the enthusiastic reception accorded Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and other American writers. The book concludes by indicating some of the aftereffects in Sweden of the award of the Nobel Prize to Lewis.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

Gertrude Stein wrote almost one hundred plays, many of which were published and performed during her lifetime. In "They Watch Me as They Watch This," the first full-length study of Stein's plays, Jane Palatini Bowers focuses on the author's contributions to the genre and offers individual and clarifying readings of these often difficult texts. In writing about Stein's plays, Bowers employs both semiotic and structuralist concepts but avoids the excessively abstract language and "scientific" approach often associated with this kind of criticism.

When compared with conventional drama, Stein's plays may appear so strange as to hardly seem like plays at all. Their extreme unconventionality arises from the role language takes in them. Conventional plays allow us to look through the language at the dramatic world created by it; Stein's plays force us to concentrate on the drama inherent in language and language-making. They record and reenact the poet's experiments with language and with theatrical conventions; they also preserve the improvisational writing process in the printed and enacted product. Futhermore, Stein's plays embody her critique of and her ideas about the conventional forms of drama. Thus, the plays are metadramatic: dramas about drama. Stein's belief in the theatricality and performability of language, her metatextual explorations of the interplay between poiesis, textuality, and performance, and her violations of the boundaries between literary criticism and practice have influenced postmodernist playwrights and poets such as David Antin, Richard Foreman, Dick Higgins, Jackson MacLow, and Jerome Rothenberg.

They Watch Me as They Watch This provides critical analyses of key plays which illuminate the process of Stein's experimentation during her lifetime of playwriting. Stein's recent critics have eschewed a generic approach to her writing; they overlook her intense interest in genre, and therefore they do not consider the ways in which her texts oppose, subvert, and disrupt generic conventions. Bowers's approach to Stein's work yields rich insights into her writing and into the genre she used. It will be an important contribution to Stein scholarship and to drama criticism as well.

This book is the first sociological study of the large family as a way of life, as a system of child rearing, and as a matrix for personality development. It is an original study based on case histories of one hundred large families (ranging in size from six to sixteen children), members of which have contributed the facts of their family experiences. A total of 879 children were born in these families, and it is chiefly through the eyes of the children that these families are viewed.

Six years of investigation and analysis were devoted to this study by James H. S. Bossard and his research associates, and the results of their work suggest answers to many questions that have perplexed students of human behavior. For example: What are the attitudes of children toward large families? Of the fathers? Of the mothers? Are large families as happy as smaller families? What are the characteristic features of the happy ones? How and by whom are children reared in large families? How do children in these families get along with each other? Do large families make for feelings of security—emotional and/or economic? Do children reared in large families make good husbands and wives? Do they form large families in turn? Are they well-adjusted persons? What are the special hazards of the large family, and how do large families tend to meet their problems? These are only a few of the questions concerning large families that are studied in this volume.

Including fifty-eight tables and a wealth of case-history material, The Large Family System is a pioneering work of urgent interest to students of the family and child development, to social case workers, to parents in general, to research workers in human behavior, to everyone who has been reared in a large family or who aspires to start a large family of his own.

"When I go to sleep at night I try not to think about Berlin," said Dean Rusk; and in this first comprehensive reconstruction of that crucial period, Jack M. Schick demonstrates that Rusk's nightmare did not end for decades. He traces the East-West pattern of impatient negotiation followed by military posturing and pressuring. He sheds new light on Dulles' intellectualized diplomacy, Kennedy's cautiously balanced Berlin strategy, and Ulbricht's urgent gamble on the Berlin Wall. Against a detailed back­ ground of diplomatic verbiage and tension-ridden events he points up the blind convictions and dangerous misunderstandings on both sides that inevitably led to each incident in the continual crisis—and ultimately brought us to the impasse that remained "frozen in splendid ambiguity" for decades.

Berlin's fragile armistice could have been shattered by the merest trifle. And the pattern of the early 1960s repeated itself, with East and West squaring off for new rounds of negotiation-posturing-pressure. The frightening lessons of the past, as Schick presents them, became vital warnings of the present, to a time when our ultimate survival could have depended upon our ability to heed these warnings.

The Future of Democratic Capitalism poses this question: what are the chances of survival for America's present economic and political way of life?

Opposing totalitarian communism proclaimed by the USSR stands the democratic capitalism of the United States, which is being attacked from within as well as from without and is undergoing such serious, rapid changes that its fundamental nature has been altered within a single generation. Between these two extremes stand the democratic and socialist nations of western Europe.

The maintenance of the status quo is a challenge to all concerned, a challenge as difficult and dangerous as it is vital in character. And the best approach to the uncertain future of democratic capitalism would seem to be through a better understanding of the chief institutions of our present economic order. In this volume five distinguished authorities examine some of our most pressing related problems.

Contributors: Thurman W. Arnold, Morris L. Ernst, Adolf A. Berle, Jr., Lloyd K. Garrison, Sir Alfred Zimmern.

The Judeo-Spanish folk literature of the Sephardic Jews of Bosnia, and with it their uncommonly rich balladry, has remained largely unknown to Western scholars. Since their move to Sarajevo in the sixteenth century, Serob-Croatian has displaced their original Spanish, and the entire culture is rapidly approaching extinction.

This book preserved for posterity three fundamentally important groups of these rare ballads: Kalmi Baruch's Spanski romanse; ballads collected from the readers of the Sarajevo newspaper Jevrejski Glas; and five previously unedited eighteenth-century Bosnian ballads from a manuscript in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem.

Notes, abstracts in English, reproductions of the music itself, and other scholarly aids serve to make this colorful and strangely modern literature fully accessible to Hispanists, folklorists, and all students of comparative literature and Judaic culture.

Beginning with a brief account of the troubled historical past of this small country that had long known invasion and the threat of invasion, Carl Berger sets the stage for Korea's catastrophic hour resulting from World War II—the division of a once-united nation into two separate countries. It is this division, he maintains, that holds the key to the Korean tragedy.

The book ranges from the Cairo Pledge to the present, examining the shifts in international diplomacy, Russia's change in attitude after Yalta and the death of Roosevelt, the intransigence of the Communist occupiers of northern Korea after the defeat of Japan. Berger also vividly describes the Communist invasion of South Korea and the conviction of President Truman that led ot the united Nations action to meet the challenge under the leadership of the United States. The bitter warfare of the "police action," the worldwide shock at the Chinese "volunteer" army's sudden entry into North Korea, the recall of General MacArthur, the struggles to work out an armistice, President' Rhee's despairing attempts to force the unification of his country and his final downfall—the entire dramatic story is unfolded in sequence.

Carefully documented, The Korea Knot is an objective and detailed study that makes an important contribution to our understanding of the dilemmas—of war and peace, of freedom and repression—that still face a divided world.

The authors examine both past and current practices and policies influencing black employment in the railroad, airline, trucking, and urban transit industries. Technological unemployment, declining traffic, and discrimination by unions, carriers, and government agencies have reduced both the number and proportion of blacks in the railroad industry, which was once one of the nation's leading employers of blacks.

These, same railroading mores have affected black employment in airlines and urban transit in the past but today other forces are working to improve black representation in the former and leading to a heavily black work force in the latter. In the trucking industry, the Teamsters' Union and government policy are keys to Negro employment, with the union dragging its feet in supporting an increased number of black over-the-road drivers. A final section compares the situations in the four industries and forecasts future Negro employment trends in light of the most recent employment data, occupational needs, governmental policy, and other significant factors.

In this examination of the functions of lordship in a medieval society, Benjamin Arnold seeks answers to some of the most fundamental questions for the period of political and institutional history: How did the lords maintain control over the people, land, and resources? How was their rule sustained and justified?

Arnold chooses to analyze the Eichstätt region, an area on the borders of three major German provinces: Bavaria, Franconia, and Swabia. The region was the geographical and political dimension within which succeeding bishops, with great tenacity and inventiveness, survived the threat of dominion by their secular neighbors, the counts. The bishops of Eichstätt were able to emerge with a durable territorial structure of their own, which they succeeded in recasting, between 1280 and 1320, into a credible and long-lasting principality.

Modern ideas of political progress, Arnold contends, tend to be unfair to medieval institutions that have not left easily recognizable descendants. He argues that it would be more prudent to observe in the territorial fragmentation of Germany not the triumph of chaos but the outcome of a reasonably orderly social and legal process that provided alternative institutions to those of a centralized or national monarchy.

The story of mesmerism in nineteenth-century America is the story of how, for the first time, a psychological theory arose to meet the everyday religious and intellectual needs of Americans. Robert Fuller gives us the first complete history of American mesmerist philosophy. He traces its development from an obscure scientific hypothesis to a powerful spiritual philosophy that deeply influenced many of the period's emerging Protestant religious sects. He investigates in depth the role of mesmerism in the Mind-Cure movement and New Thought and paints for us the cultural land­scape existing at a time when thousands of antebellum Americans turned from their churches to the realm of psychology in search of self-understanding.

In the early part of the century, mesmerism was for the most part the territory of carnival showmen. Itinerant mesmerists during the 1830s placed subjects in trancelike states from which they could divulge the contents of sealed envelopes and describe in detail locales to which they had never traveled. Literary figures such as Poe and Hawthorne seized upon mesmerism, depicting its workings at their most sinister and diabolical extreme. But by midcentury, mesmerism was beginning to enter the American consciousness in ways that involved anything but parlor trickery. Straddling a fine line between religious myth and scientific philosophy, mesmerism's spiritual tenets resonated almost perfectly with important currents in contemporary religious life. Universalists, Swedenborgians, and early spiritualists adopted the doctrine of mesmerism as evidence of man's unity with the Almighty. The self-made mind-cure practitioner Phineas Quimby used mesmeric theory to develop his "power of positive thinking," a concept that led eventually to the emergence of the Christian Science movement. But, Fuller shows, mind-cure cultists such as Quimby also helped transform mesmerism into a kind of self-help spirituality. Later writers condensed the principles of mesmeric healing into handy maxims that could be assimilated by a popular reading audience. Thus Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls presents a paradigmatic instance of the role played by psychology in the American sensibility. In addition, Fuller's study constitutes a rich and hitherto unexplored chapter in American intellectual history.

Stephen Girard, the second richest American of his time after John Jacob Astor, was the last of the great merchant bankers and the first of the great investment bankers. This is a study not only of an influential man and the bank he operated in Philadelphia but also of the growing interdependence between the institutions of government and finance in early nineteenth-century America.

In a period when precedents were being set in a new nation and large corporations were beginning to predominate in the business of banking, Girard, a man of undisputed business acumen, established in Philadelphia what was to become the largest private bank of its time and as such a monument to free enterprise. At the same time, along with Astor and other influential financiers, Girard was instrumental in financing the War of 1812 and in establishing the second Bank of the United States. His close association with the Madison administration and the Treasury Department made him a key figure in the evolving relationship between the federal government and the financial community.

Applying modern statistical techniques to the comprehensive records of the old Girard Bank, Donald Adams has uncovered a great deal of information, hitherto largely unavailable to scholars, about banking practices in early America. In this book he analyzes day-to-day operations—the kinds of loans that were typical, the devices for maintaining liquidity, the organization of staff—as well as long-run investment decisions and their impact on the formation of American finance.

While other studies have been made of the anatomy and influence of early chartered and corporate banks, Adams' is the first history of America's largest private bank. It provides a rare glimpse of the inner structure and strategy of an important financial institution and of the entrepreneurial and political activities of its founder.

"The service of social work is directed primarily to freeing and helping individuals to find and fulfill themselves—their own unique selves—within the society of which they are a part."

This emphasis on "respect for individual personality, for the significance of the individual as such and in his own right" is the keynote of these writings of the late Dean of the Pennsylvania School of Social Work.

Chosen for the most part from the work of the last decade, the writings collected here stress his interest in public welfare and penology, the two fields in which his contributions have been most extensive and consistent.

The volume is divided into four parts:

I. Earlier Formulations of the Philosophy Underlying Social Work Practice
II. Public Welfare
Ill. Penology
IV. Final Statement of the Philosophy Underlying Social Work Practice

This sharing of the wisdom and understanding of a lifetime dedicated to professional service in the field of social work will prove helpful and stimulating to administrators, teachers, and social workers everywhere.

Since the Soviet judicial system is patterned largely after the political system, the study is introduced with an explanation of the governmental plan of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics and its constituent parts. The author, who is thoroughly conversant with Russian language, life, and politics, has discussed the political and social philosophy of the Soviet as it affects the administration of criminal justice.

The material has been collected not only from published records but from firsthand observation in Russia. It has been brought up to date by a summary of a Project for a New Soviet Code of Criminal Procedure (August, 1931).

Based on proletarian political philosophy, the Soviet Codes differ very widely from Russian Imperial Law and from European practice in general, the most striking instance being, the abolishment of trial by jury. By considering the social, economic, and human background of Soviet Law, the author has brought out these contrasts in a lucid fashion, and although the book is primarily a legal treatise, it provides a wealth of new information for general readers.

Founded in 1921 as a separate Wharton department, the Industrial Research Unit has a long record of publication and research in the labor market, productivity, union relations, and business report fields. Major Industrial Research Unit studies as published as research projects are completed. This volume is Study no. 46.

The industries covered are these six: automobile, aerospace, steel, rubber tire, petroleum, and chemical. Among the major questions explored are: How have these industries responded to the black labor market at hand? What are the key elements affecting black employment and advancement? What real effect has court action had on the problem of assigning blacks their rightful place in the seniority order?

This study is based upon individual reports on specific industries first published in the Racial Policies of American Industry series. New, updated material has been added, and the first chapter is designed to give an overview of the several industries discussed. A final chapter compares and contrasts the situations in the six industries.

Ballads offer one of the most fascinating and revealing records of humankind—their deepest feelings and most profound experiences, their laughter and joys, their troubles and sorrows. There is no battle, no romance, no escapade, no tragedy recorded in song which is not rich both in historical significance and in contemporary experience. A ballad is a link with past generations, traditions, and the basic character traits of a people, a region, or a country. The associations formed, the recollections stirred make the study of this form of music a rewarding experience.	

Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England is complied an edited from the Helen Harness Flanders Ballad Collection at Middlebury College. The texts of the ballads are printed and their tunes set exactly as the singers gave then in the original form, with succinct and accurate notes to reach. This rich collection contains nearly all the traditional ballads of America, many of them in multiple versions. Volume III contains Child ballads 95-243 from the numbered Francis James Child Collection.

As unions increasingly resort to corporate campaigns, top-down organizing, neutrality agreements, and consumer boycotts, it is easy to forget that federal labor laws were designed to eliminate the causes of substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce.

Our global economy continually shows that the fortunes of different companies increasingly are interdependent. At the same time, federal labor laws in the U.S. place important restrictions on secondary boycotts—defined as picketing or other union efforts based on one company's dispute to disrupt the affairs of other companies and consumers. Secondary boycotts have played an even more important role in the construction industry, where union disputes often affect dozens of employers working at a single location. Secondary boycotts present among the most complex problems dealt with by U.S. labor laws.

This book examines how federal law limits secondary picketing and comparable activity, while preserving First Amendment free speech rights and protecting primary union activity, even though picketing or pressure directed toward one company almost always affects other parties and people. Ralph M. Dereshinsky looks at the development of labor law, National Labor Relations Board decisions, and court reviews relating to four types of secondary boycott situations. A case-by-case analysis is made to determine the direction and consistency of Board and cournt handling of labor-management disputes over common-situs picketing, allied employer picketing, consumer boycotts, and hot-cargo agreements.

Smallpox inoculation in the eighteenth century was the genesis of modern immunology. This new method of purposely contracting a disease in order to secure protection from it was an empirical folk practice from the New East that ran counter to traditional European habits of thought in both medicine and religion.

Based on diligent research in all available sources, this detailed study brings into relief the significant factors that made smallpox inoculation acceptable to Western Europeans—namely, the increasing threat and fear of the disease, particularly among the upper classes; a strong program led by members of such respected scientific groups and the Royal Society in London and the Academic Royale des Sciences in Paris; the interest and participation of both the English and French royal families who furnished an example for their subjects to emulate.

In presenting this account of an important development in medical history Genevieve Miller offers evidence to prove that, contrary to the usual view, most religious leaders were not opposed to the practice of inoculation and that a number of them were active proponents. She also points out how, in the sphere of medical thought, experience with inoculation clarified ides concerning the etiology of smallpox by supplying proof that it originated with a specific material substance introduced into the human body from without.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1996

The Decameron is a narrative account of a situation in which narration takes place-a collection of one hundred stories set within a larger story. As a group of young men and women fleeing the plague trade stories to pass the time of crisis, storytelling occurs in a social context that allows for comment upon the tales by the tellers themselves, in a setting that elicits one story in return for another.

In his close and original analysis, Pier Massimo Forni uses the notion of rhetoric as a guiding principle for a critical assessment of the Decameron. He explores the discursive tools with which the narrators connect the contents of their stories to their audience's environment, and goes on to argue that the book is significantly marked by Boccaccio's habit of exploring the narrative potential of rhetorical forms.

By showing how the Decameron marks a new stage in the development of vernacular realism, Forni also charts a new course in Boccaccio criticism. Viewing the cultural and rhetorical context of the medieval masterpiece from a fresh perspective, he offers intriguing insights into the functioning of Boccaccio's narrative. Adventures in Speech maps the cognitive poetic processes that rule the complex authorial network of relationships involving speech, event, received culture, and narrative objects.

This volume investigates African-American employment in banking and insurance in the United States. The authors describe how these once almost all-white industries are now employing large numbers of African-American and what problems remain to be solved before equal employment opportunity can be fully attained. Appendices tell the story of African-American-owned banking and insurance companies and their status today.

Located in primarily urban areas, banks and insurance companies may soon be among the largest employers of African-Americans. The centralized personnel structure of banks gives them a significant advantage in employing African Americans, but the authors find that both banks and insurance companies have been slow to employ black managerial personnel.

This study is based upon individual reports first published in the Racial Policies of American Industry series. A final chapter compares and contrasts the situations in banking and insurance, paying particular attention to the reasons for varying progress in the two industries.

Founded in 1921 as a separate Wharton department, the Industrial Research Unit has a long record of publication and research in the labor market, productivity, union relations, and business report fields. Major Industrial Research Unit studies are published as research projects are completed. This volume is Study no. 47.

New disorders require new polices, says economist Sidney Weintraub. In this book he draws together many of his shorter writings to deal with economic problems that have defied orthodox monetary and fiscal remedies.

Weintraub has long been noted for his vigorous criticism of both monetarist and Keynesian schools of thought for their failure to cope with disorders in our economy involving unemployment and inflation. Keynes, Keynesians, and Monetarists contains the original article on TIP, written in collaboration with Henry Wallich, outlining a tax-based incomes policy to combat inflation in an era of unemployment. This essay has been the focus of extended discussion in official quarters, among economics and in the public press.

Not everyone complies with the United States Internal Revenue Code. Many individuals and organizations fail to file timely tax returns, assess their tax liability correctly, or pay taxes when due. To improve compliance, tax administrators must choose among alternative strategies, such as increasing evaders' risks of punishment, motivating social norms, and making compliance easier.

Concerned with these choices, the IRS asked the National Academy to assess previous research on the determinants of taxpayer compliance and to highlight the most promising areas for future research. The Academy's panel authored the two-volume Taxpayer Compliance. Volume 2 is a collection of eight background papers commissioned by the panel. They present novel theories and research ideas proposed by scholars from many social sciences to improve the understanding of taxpayer compliance. The varied topics addressed include: the political and institutional context of the American tax system; a typology of noncompliance; a study of the way the visibility of noncompliance affects patterns of taxpaying in the house-painting profession; and theories of ways tax practitioners may affect their clients' compliance.


These papers not only illustrate for a general audience what various disciplines can add to knowledge but also suggest for specialized researchers the opportunities that taxpayer compliance offers for extending and testing the theories of their disciplines. Taxpayer Compliance will be a valuable reference for tax practitioners and others concerned with noncompliance problems, and for scholars and students of law and sociology, political science, social psychology, and economics.

Not everyone complies with the United States Internal Revenue Code. Many individuals and organizations fail to file timely tax returns, assess their tax liability correctly, or pay taxes when due. To improve compliance, tax administrators must choose among alternative strategies, such as increasing evaders' risks of punishment, motivating social norms, and making compliance easier.

Concerned with these choices, the IRS asked the National Academy to assess previous research on the determinants of taxpayer compliance and to highlight the most promising areas for future research. The Academy's panel authored the two-volume Taxpayer Compliance. Volume I presents the panel's report, which critically reviews previous research on the subject, reaches conclusions about the findings, and recommends future research programs to fill gaps in knowledge. The report also recommends ways to maintain and develop the intellectual, financial, and data resources devoted to taxpayer compliance research.

Volume I presents the panel's report, which critically reviews previous research on the subject, reaches conclusions about the findings and recommends future research programs to fill gaps in knowledge. The report also recommends ways to maintain and develop the intellectual, financial, and data resources devoted to taxpayer compliance research.

Taxpayer Compliance will be a valuable reference for tax practitioners and others concerned with noncompliance problems, and for scholars and students of law and sociology, political science, social psychology, and economics.

Abraham ben Hananiah Yagel 1553-c.1624) composed his Hebrew work Gei Hizzayon (A Valley of Vision) in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century. This striking text, so different from the other writings of the prolific physician, natural philosopher, and kabbalist, is first an autobiographical account of the vicissitudes of the author's years as a Jewish loan ­banker. It is also a description of a heavenly journey he is taken on by the soul of his recently deceased father, who visits his son while he is imprisoned in Mantua for debt. Finally, it is a series of theological and moral discussions based on the insights of Judaism, particularly the kabbalah as understood by Yagel and his Italian contemporaries.

A Valley of Vision is unique in Hebrew literature in its integration of traditional Jewish materials with contemporary literary and iconographic innovations. It is also a fascinating window into the social and cultural world of Italian Jewry at the end of the sixteenth century and its effect on the entire late Renaissance period.

David B. Ruderman's is the first translation of this important work into any Western language. The book will be of great interest to both the specialist and the general reader of Jewish and late Renaissance history, thought, and literature.

Although social sciences such as anthropology are often thought to have been organized as academic specialties in the nineteenth century, the ideas upon which these disciplines were founded actually developed centuries earlier. In fact, the foundational concepts can be traced at least as far back as the sixteenth century, when contact with unfamiliar peoples in the New World led Europeans to create ways of describing and understanding social similarities and differences among humans.

Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries examines the history of some of the ideas adopted to help understand the origin of culture, the diversity of traits, the significance of similarities, the sequence of high civilizations, the course of cultural change, and the theory of social evolution. It is a book that not only illuminates the thinking of a bygone age but also sheds light on the sources of attitudes still prevalent today.

Although social sciences such as anthropology are often thought to have been organized as academic specialties in the nineteenth century, the ideas upon which these disciplines were founded actually developed centuries earlier. In fact, the foundational concepts can be traced at least as far back as the sixteenth century, when contact with unfamiliar peoples in the New World led Europeans to create ways of describing and understanding social similarities and differences among humans.

Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries examines the history of some of the ideas adopted to help understand the origin of culture, the diversity of traits, the significance of similarities, the sequence of high civilizations, the course of cultural change, and the theory of social evolution. It is a book that not only illuminates the thinking of a bygone age but also sheds light on the sources of attitudes still prevalent today.

Albertanus of Brescia is an important figure in the cultural history of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. He is best known among literary scholars for the influence of his writings on Brunetto Latini, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer. In addition, his sermons have received attention as part of the history of lay confraternities and lay preaching in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. James M. Powell shows that Albertanus's contributions considerably surpass even these notable attainments.

Powell contends that Albertanus was an original social theorist who drew on his experience with religious confraternities and with the law to develop a theory of consent. Albertanus developed the idea that society rested on voluntary acceptance of a rule, much as did religious life. This acceptance laid the foundation for social cohesion and legal enforcement. Albertanus's ideas were to find great prominence in the later Middle Ages. Powell's purpose in writing Albertanus of Brescia goes beyond the study of his eponymous subject. Through Albertanus, Powell examines how major developments of the twelfth century began to find expression in the mind of an early thirteenth-century secular thinker. In Albertanus, Powell perceives an individual bringing received, bookish authority into confrontation with lived experience. To Powell, the example of Albertanus suggests a much more complex picture of medieval approaches to social theory than that previously evident in the literature.

This is the first book-length study of Albertanus and his works. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of medieval, Italian, intellectual, and literary history, and political theory.