Immodest Acts

Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy
by Judith C. Brown

The discovery of the fascinating and richly documented story of Sister Benedetta Carlini, Abbess of the Convent of the Mother of God, by Judith C. Brown was an event of major historical importance. Not only is the story revealed in Immodest Acts that of the rise and fall of a powerful woman in a church community and a record of the life of a religious visionary, it is also the earliest documentation of lesbianism in modern Western history.
Born of well-to-do parents, Benedetta Carlini entered the convent at the age of nine. At twenty-three, she began to have visions of both a religious and erotic nature. Benedetta was elected abbess due largely to these visions, but later aroused suspicions by claiming to have had supernatural contacts with Christ. During the course of an investigation, church authorities not only found that she had faked her visions and stigmata, but uncovered evidence of a lesbian affair with another nun, Bartolomeo. The story of the relationship between the two nuns and of Benedetta's fall from an abbess to an outcast is revealed in surprisingly candid archival documents and retold here with a fine sense of drama.

Pasyon and Revolution

Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910

by Reynaldo Clemena Ileto

Ileto's book is a wonder and the first to ever draw parallels between Western and Southeast Asian traditions especially the practice of the Pasyon. Outwardly, the pasyon looks every bit a practice that can be deemed bizarre. Participants reenact Jesus Christ's punishment and crucifixion. Ileto enables the reader to draw insight between the practice and draw its origins from from both Western and Eastern trraditions. A must for any student of Southeast Asian studies.

Pasyon and Revolution, unlike earlier Philippine historical writings that use largely the Filipino educated elite's categories of meaning, seeks to interpret Philippine popular movements in terms of perceptions of the masses themselves. Ileto submits to varied kinds of analyses standard documents as well as such previously ignored sources as folk songs, poems, and religious traditions, in order to articulate hidden or suppressed features of the thinking of the masses. Paramount among the conclusions of the book is that the pasyon, or native account of Christ's life, death and resurrection, provided the cultural framework of movements for change. The book places the Philippine revolution in the context of native traditions, and explains the persistence of radial peasant brotherhoods in this century. Seen as continuous attempts by the masses to transform the world in their terms are the various movements that the book analyzes - Apolinario de la Cruz's Cofradia de San Jose, Andres Bonifacio's Katipunan, Macario Sakay's Katipunan, Felipe Salvador's Santa Iglesia, the Colorum Society, and other popular movements during the Spanish, revolutionary, and American colonial periods.

A further interesting dimension of this literature on peasant social movements is the scope it provides for writing "history from below" in my view. Iletos excellent examination of the Philippine peasantrys experience of Holy Week and the meaning of the "pasyon" gives us local perspectives and details on peasant protest.

A Past Revisited

The Philippines: A Past Revisited
by Renato Constantino

This book is Constantino's attempt at a major breakthrough in Philippine historiography: he looks at the oppression of the Filipino masses from earliest time to 1941 and the struggle of men like himself to crack through the stereotypes hitherto propagated by Spaniards and Americans about the Filipinos.

Clash of Spirits

Clash of Spirits: The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island

by Filomeno V Aguilar, Jr.

This book, based on the author’s doctoral thesis at Cornell University, is a history of sugar planting in Negros, a Visayan island in the Philippine archipelago. The author, who is from the Philippines and until recently taught in Australia, identifies himself as a Roman Catholic, but offers a balanced, often critical, account of the historical forces, including the Roman Catholic Church in Spain, that have shaped power relations and hegemonic formations on the island.

Aguilar’s book is a wide-ranging study of the rise of sugar haciendas and the sugar-planter class from the Spanish through the American colonial periods. It is rich in detail that ranges from the anecdotal to the statistical, derived from archival materials in the Philippines, Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom; from published scholarship; and from fieldwork involving key-informant interviews, observation of rituals, and documentation of folklore. The analysis is in two parts: the first a reconstruction of the history of the Visayan Islands under Spanish colonial rule from the late sixteenth century to 1855, when the sugar economy was established; and the second an eclectic and complex account of power and hegemonic formations surrounding the sugar-planter class since 1855. The rich material is organized around the author’s well-defined theoretical positions: that the social structure is essentially fluid; that political economy is intrinsically and dialectically intertwined with culture; and that the relationship between structure and agent is mutually determining and dialectical.

We read about indigenous indios, Chinese, Chinese mestizos, waves of Augustinian and then Franciscan friars, foreign merchants, and representatives of the colonial state, all intermingling in a complex society that cannot be straightforwardly explained in terms of simple power relations. In different situations and historical circumstances, each social category possesses and utilizes varying levels of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital. The study examines the transformation and shifting fortunes of each social category over time and in response to external circumstances. The mestizo sugar-planter class, for example, appears quite weak in relation to a scarce indio labor force under the “neutral” Spanish colonials, but during American colonialism becomes a powerful socio-economic force whose dominance is later subject to the influx of foreign capital and technology.

Aguilar employs the cockfight, a prominent feature in local cultural practice, as a dominant metaphor to shed light on fluid developments in the socio-economic structure. Around the cockpit, gamblers play a skilled and calculated game of manoeuvre, casting their bets on cocks that have, notionally, an equal chance of winning, but whose “inner strength” – that differentiating winners from losers – only a skillful gambler can detect. Social relations were similarly ambivalent, the site of complex and risky negotiations and manoeuvre. Individuals and classes that gambled skillfully rose in prestige and power, but could just as easily fall into decline as a result of misfortune or bad judgement.

Aguilar also explores the dialectical connections between myths and folk histories on the one hand and developments in social, economic, and political structure on the other. Indio shamans such as “Papa” Isio, whose grotesque imitation of Catholic signs and ritual was an effective mode of anti-colonial resistance, had supernatural powers that commanded the following of large numbers of indio plantation laborers who had broken their debt obligations to mestizo sugar-planters. Fantastic stories were spun around prominent mestizo leaders such as Juan Araneta, who communed with a powerful preternatural spirit, was invincible to bullets, and boldly committed acts sacrilegious to Catholicism. This story relates quite clearly to the celebration of anti-colonial heroism and the anti-Catholicism of Masonic capitalism that was on the rise. We read about Kanlaon, a volcano that is really an enchanted city with a centrifugal mill producing sugar for “America” and manned by engkantos or golden-haired, blue-eyed spirits of fair complexion.

Aguilar’s study is an ambitious and original attempt to reconstruct an important component of Philippine history, explaining historical dynamics in terms of local culture as a simultaneously determining and determined site of power and hegemony. Aguilar brings together a wide range of existing scholarship on Philippine history and anthropology, which he uses with concepts from cultural theory to analyze, often very convincingly, his own material obtained from archives and fieldwork. His writing is always clear and often vivid. Only its broad coverage may make it difficult for the reader to follow the central lines of argument. Strategically placed summary paragraphs and a concluding summary would not only help orient readers (as would a glossary of non-English terms), but would also integrate the material more effectively. On the other hand, this colorful and engaging book has many interesting accounts that make it accessible to a non-academic reader. Students would find in this book useful historical and ethnographic material illustrating the complex processes of negotiation under weaker forms of hegemony.

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume II

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume II

by Edward Gibbon

Famous for its unflagging narrative power, fine organization, and irresistibly persuasive arguments, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has earned a permanent place of honor in historical literature. Gibbon’s elegantly detached erudition is seasoned with an ironic wit, and remarkably little of his work is outdated.

This second volume covers 395 A.D. to 1185 A.D., from the reign of Justinian in the East to the establishment of the German Empire of the West. It recounts the desperate attempts to hold off the barbarians, palace revolutions and assassinations, theological controversy, lecheries and betrayals, all in a setting of phenomenal magnificence.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume I

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume I

by Edward Gibbon

British parliamentarian and soldier Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) conceived of his plan for Decline and Fall while "musing amid the ruins of the Capitol" on a visit to Rome. For the next 10 years he worked away at his great history, which traces the decadence of the late empire from the time of the Antonines and the rise of Western Christianity. "The confusion of the times, and the scarcity of authentic memorials, pose equal difficulties to the historian, who attempts to preserve a clear and unbroken thread of narration," he writes. Despite these obstacles, Decline and Fall remains a model of historical exposition, and required reading for students of European history.

Gibbon’s masterpiece, which narrates the history of the Roman Empire from the second century a.d. to its collapse in the west in the fifth century and in the east in the fifteenth century, is widely considered the greatest work of history ever written. This first volume covers the last two hundred years of the Roman Empire leading up to its collapse.

St. Augustine

St. Augustine
by Gary Wills

Saint Augustine, by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and cultural critic Garry Wills, is a 145-page biography of a saint whose collected works total 13 volumes. Despite its brevity, the book offers a complex and compelling interpretation of Augustine's life and work. Much of Wills's task is demythologizing: Augustine was not a central figure in 4th-century Christianity but was "peripheral in his day, a provincial on the margins of classical culture," who did not know Greek, the intellectual lingua franca of his time. Although Augustine has been portrayed by artists as a bishop "wearing all the episcopal finery of the late Middle Ages," he actually "dressed in the gray clothes of a monk." And far from being a self-righteous pontificator, Augustine was "impatient with all preceding formulations, even his own." He wrote, "Since it is God we are speaking of, you do not understand it. If you could understand it, it would not be God." Wills also argues that Augustine's Confessions (which, Wills persuades the reader, is an anachronistic, egoistic translation of the original Latin title, a word Wills more accurately renders as "Testimony") has been misread in a way that suggests Augustine led a debauched sexual life before his conversion. In the Shocking Revelation department, Wills does, however, find more detailed (if elaborately coded) information about Augustine's mistress and about the son they raised together than other biographers have found. Like Wills's masterful Lincoln at Gettysburg, Saint Augustine accomplishes its revisionist aims completely and yet lightly. Wills makes his arguments without ever forgetting his first job: telling the story of a life.

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
by Richard Rodriguez

Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English, and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum.

Here is the poignant journey of a “minority student” who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation — from his past, his parents, his culture — and so describes the high price of “making it” in middle-class America.

Provocative in its positions on affirmative action and bilingual education, Hunger of Memory is a powerful political statement, a profound study of the importance of language ... and the moving, intimate portrait of a boy struggling to become a man.