‘A deeply fascinating, sui generis book by a brilliant scholar-writer, which uses the life story of a Renaissance prodigy to summon an angel-host of ideas, people and stories, all circling the question of language’s ability to transcend the mortal realm’ Robert Macfarlane
Does there exist a form of speech so powerful as to allow the speaker to control the listener, taking over their thoughts and even their will?
The Grammar of Angels tells the story of Renaissance prodigy and polymath Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the uncontested marvel of an age of true wonders. Pico dedicated his life to a quest to find the sublime; to reconcile all existing thought into a philosophy that would settle the most important questions about human existence. This philosophy would also provide tools by which man could transcend his mortal limitations and join the ranks of the angels. At the heart of Pico’s ideas were questions that he traced through the depth and breadth of human thought, from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians to the medieval Arabs and Jews. He made use of everything at his disposal from Europe’s broadening horizons and asked primal questions of himself and the world. Why is it that we can be astonished by beauty? That the hairs on the backs of our necks can be made to stand by intoxicating rhythms and harmonies? That we can be provoked to ecstatic experiences by the simple means of an incantation? In Catholic Italy, the implications of this line of thought were dangerous and provoked violent reactions, suggesting as they did that the notion of the individual might be just as much of an illusion as a flat earth or a geocentric universe. That there may well be notions of the divine other than the Christian God.
During a tempestuous life at the exquisite heart of the Italian Renaissance, Pico’s life is a testament to intellectual daring, to a human dignity founded in the willingness to think the unthinkable and to peer over the edge of the abyss in search of answers.
Millions of Africans were enslaved and transported to the Americas in the eighteenth century. Europeans–many of whom viewed themselves as enlightened–endorsed, funded, legislated, and executed the slave trade. This atrocity had a profound impact on philosophy, but historians of the discipline have so far neglected to address the topics of slavery and race. Many authors–including enslaved and formerly enslaved Black authors–used philosophical ideas to advocate for abolition, analyze racist attitudes, and critique racial bias. Other authors attempted to justify the transatlantic slave trade by advancing philosophical defenses of racial chattel slavery.
Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century explores these philosophical ideas and arguments, with a focus on the role race played in discussions of slavery. In doing so, author Julia Jorati reveals how closely associated Blackness and slavery were at that time and how many White people viewed Black people as naturally destined for slavery. In addition to examining well-known authors like David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jorati also discusses less widely studied philosophers like Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Lemuel Haynes, and Olympe de Gouges. By revealing important aspects of debates about slavery in North America and Europe, this book and its companion volume on the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries are valuable resources for readers interested in a more complete history of early modern philosophy.
Philosophers from Europe and colonial America engaged in heated debates about the morality of slavery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and these debates provide insights into the roots of modern racism. Julia Jorati explores the philosophical ideas, theories, and arguments that are central to early modern discussions of slavery. Some texts explicitly examine the morality of the transatlantic slave trade or of the enslavement of indigenous people in the Americas; others discuss slavery in predominantly theoretical ways. Based on these texts, Jorati shows that race and slavery came to be closely associated in this period. This association was often made through an endorsement of the theory of natural slavery: Black and indigenous people were commonly viewed as natural slaves, or naturally destined for slavery. The theory that some people are natural slaves also features prominently in theoretical discussions of slavery, and many philosophers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries embraced versions of it.
Jorati surveys a wide range of historical material, from the views of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, to many less widely studied philosophers like Gabrielle Suchon, Morgan Godwyn, and Epifanio de Moirans. Jorati’s volume, along with its companion Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century, illustrates the significance and philosophical sophistication of early modern debates about slavery, and serves as a valuable resource for scholars, instructors, and students who are curious about this widely neglected topic.
The Kingdom of Champassak was founded in 1713 in what is now southern Laos, and its royal lineage, the House of Champassak, continues to the present. In this first historical study of Champassak, Ian Baird explores the ways it has asserted its sovereignty across time and through monumental historical shifts, including the delineation of national boundaries for Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In re-creating this story, Baird draws not only on a dazzling variety of primary sources in English, French, Lao, and Thai but also on many years spent in conversation with members of the Na Champassak family, who are now spread across a wide geographical area, from Laos and Thailand to France and the United States. Each chapter treats one historical period, identifying the Champassak approach to sovereignty during that time. Through this deep history, Baird shows how sovereign power, even within one case, takes a wide range of forms, always contingent, contested, and uneven across space and time.
A compelling treatise on the relationship between power and enclosure
Fortress Power presents a genealogy of fortification as a material and political technology intent on obstruction, tracing its implementation across battlefields, borders, and urban environments. Drawing on the influential work of philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, Derek S. Denman places the fortress alongside the archetypes of the prison and the camp, citing them as paradigmatic of how space is transformed into a tool of domination and control.
Focusing on the defensive architecture of bastion fortresses, urban design, and border landscapes, Fortress Powercharts the rise of a form of governance grounded in hostility, extending the scope of its subject from a piece of military construction to a much broader political concept. Detailing how power manifests in everything from city centers to international boundaries, the book analyzes the logic of fortification as it moves through various contexts in the advancement of surveillance, exploitation, warfare, and political authority.
Through a unique blend of architecture and design studies, political theory, international relations, geography, and migration studies, Denman outlines the disquieting legacy of the fortress to highlight its role in the formation of modern government and the enactment of violence. In an era marked by the increasing prevalence of authoritarian power and conflicting geopolitical boundaries, he presents an insightful investigation of the weaponization of the built environment.
Lynne is now on Instagram and has posted several tiles relating to this essay.
It’s a review article of my Foucault books, especially The Early Foucault and Foucault’s Last Decade. But saying that really doesn’t do justice to this wonderful text, which is beautifully written and does so much more than discuss my books. Enormous thanks to Lynne for writing this.
This essay reviews the first and last volumes of Stuart Elden’s four‐volume intellectual biography of Michel Foucault, The Early Foucault (2021) and Foucault’s Last Decade(2016). It borrows from Roland Barthes an abecedarian method to experiment with the play between order and archive that subtends Elden’s Foucault series. Like Foucault, Elden deploys an explicitly archival method for thinking philosophically. That method brings both historiographical and conceptual clarity to our understanding of Foucault within the chronological frame of his life. As a poetic order, the acrostic experimentation of abecedarian writing brings into view the nonchronological archival murmur that both shapes and exceeds Elden’s ordering of fragments in dossiers and the gaps between them.
Critical Data Studies has come of age as a vibrant, interdisciplinary field of study. Taking data as its primary analytical focus, the field theorises the nature of data; examines how data are produced, managed, governed and shared; investigates how they are used to make sense of the world and to perform practical action; and explores whose agenda data-driven systems serve.
This book is the first comprehensive A-Z guide to the concepts and methods of Critical Data Studies, providing succinct definitions and descriptions of over 400 key terms, along with suggested further reading. The book enables readers to quickly navigate and improve their comprehension of the field, while also acting as a guide for discovering ideas and methods that will be of value in their own studies.
Critical Data Studies is essential reading for students and scholars from across the sciences, social sciences and humanities, as well as those who work with data professionally who want to extend and enrich their conceptual and practical understanding of data and their use.
This study illuminates the complex interplay between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and architecture. Presenting their wide-ranging impact on late 20th- and 21st-century architecture, each chapter focuses on a core Deleuzian/Guattarian philosophical concept and one key work of architecture which evokes, contorts, or extends it.
Challenging the idea that a concept or theory defines and then produces the physical work and not vice versa, Chris L. Smith positions the relationship between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and the field of architecture as one that is mutually substantiating and constitutive. In this framework, modes of architectural production and experimentation become inextricable from the conceptual territories defined by these two key thinkers, producing a rigorous discussion of theoretical, practical, and experimental engagements with their ideas.
Shakespeare Unlearned dances along the borderline of sense and nonsense in early modern texts, revealing overlooked opportunities for understanding and shared community in words and ideas that might in the past have been considered too silly to matter much for serious scholarship. Each chapter pursues a self-knowing, gently ironic study of the lexicon and scripting of words and acts related to what has been called ‘stupidity’ in work by Shakespeare and other authors. Each centers significant, often comic situations that emerge — on stage, in print, and in the critical and editorial tradition pertaining to the period — when rigorous scholars and teachers meet language, characters, or plotlines that exceed, and at times entirely undermine, the goals and premises of scholarly rigor. Each suggests that a framing of putative ‘stupidity’ pursued through lexicography, editorial glossing, literary criticism, and pedagogical practice can help us put Shakespeare and semantically obscure historical literature more generally to new communal ends. Words such as ‘baffle’ in Twelfth Night or ‘twangling’ and ‘jingling’ in The Tempest, and characters such as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Holofernes the pedant, might in the past have been considered unworthy of critical attention — too light or obvious to matter much for our understanding of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Adam Zucker’s meditation on the limits of learnedness and the opportunities presented by a philology of stupidity argues otherwise.
The untold story of the academics who became OSS spies, invented modern spycraft, and helped turn the tide of the war
At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and, in an effort to fill its ranks with experts, the OSS turned to academia for recruits. Suddenly, literature professors, librarians, and historians were training to perform undercover operations and investigative work—and these surprising spies would go on to profoundly shape both the course of the war and our cultural institutions with their efforts.
In Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham draws on personal histories, letters, and declassified OSS files to tell the story of a small but connected group of humanities scholars turned spies. Among them are Joseph Curtiss, a literature professor who hunted down German spies and turned them into double agents; Sherman Kent, a smart-mouthed history professor who rose to become the head of analysis for all of Europe and Africa; and Adele Kibre, an archivist who was sent to Stockholm to secretly acquire documents for the OSS. These unforgettable characters would ultimately help lay the foundations of modern intelligence and transform American higher education when they returned after the war.
Thrillingly paced and rigorously researched, Book and Dagger is an inspiring and gripping true story about a group of academics who helped beat the Nazis—a tale that reveals the indelible power of the humanities to change the world.
In April 1956, at Gif-sur-Yvette just outside of Paris, the first meeting of the International Colloquium on Mycenaean texts took place. The proceedings of the conference, edited by Michel Lejeune, were published later that year as Études mycéniennes: Actes du Colloque international sur les textes mycéniens (Gif-sur-Yvette, 3-7 avril 1956). Just a few years before, in 1952, Michael Ventris and John Chadwick had deciphered Linear B, a early script which precedes the Greek alphabet, and the texts in Linear B give a first sense of the Greek language, a few hundred years before Homer. Alice Kober did earlier foundational studies of this script, which Ventris and Chadwick used in their work (see for example here, here and here). But Kober died in 1950, at the age of just 43, and did not live to see the publications of Ventris and Chadwick.
In one of his two 1953-54 courses at the Collège de France, Georges Dumézil discussed the work of Ventris and Chadwick, a couple of years before the publication of their Documents in Mycenaean Greek, which was completed in 1955. Given the date, I think Dumézil must have been using“Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives”, published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1953. Some slides of the alphabet, possibly used by him in this course, are in his archives in Paris. The importance of this work was acknowledged by Emile Benveniste too, who recognised in a 1968 interview that the Mycenaean texts “draw back the prehistory of Greek by some five hundred years”. He discusses the script in, for example, his 1968-69 Collège de France course published in Last Lectures.
Benveniste and Dumézil both attended the Gif-sur-Yvette conference, along with Ventris and Chadwick, and a range of other French and European academics. The history of the conferences (at the Wayback Machine) says that Pierre Chantraine organised the event with Lejeune. Chantraine had been a student of Antoine Meillet, alongside Benveniste, in the 1920s. There is a photo of them all at the start of the volume. Benveniste takes part in the discussions, but neither he nor Dumézil gave a formal paper.
The participants in the 1956 Gif-sur-Yvette conference, taken from Études mycéniennesKey to the photograph of the participants in the 1956 Gif-sur-Yvette conference, taken from Études mycéniennes (name of the dog not provided)
It was the first of a series of such conferences but the only one attended by Ventris. Five months later he died in a car crash, aged just 34. Documents in Mycenaean Greek was published a few weeks after his death, and Chadwick produced an expanded second edition in 1973. As well as several papers on Mycenaean texts, the conference also set up a working group and passed a series of resolutions outlining plans for collaborative work and setting out an agenda for future study. All these texts are included in the volume Lejeune edited, which is dedicated to Ventris. How much more Ventris would have done had he lived is unclear. Reports suggest that once he had cracked the code, further work on the language did not interest him nearly as much. A technical account of the work of Ventris and Chadwick is found in the opening chapters of Documents in Mycenaean Greek, but a more readable account is Chadwick’s 1958 book The Decipherment of Linear B, which tells the story for a wider audience. There, Chadwick provides an account of Ventris’s work before they started to work together, in which he regularly acknowledges the work of Kober. The Ventris-Chadwick correspondence is in Cambridge, and parts are online, including their initial letters to each other; the Ventris papers are at the Institute of Classical Studies in London and the University of Texas at Austin. Austin also has Kober’s archives.
Ventris’s story has been told, not just by Chadwick, but notably by Andrew Robinson in The Man who Deciphered Linear B, and Kober’s work has been explored by Margalit Fox in The Riddle of the Labyrinth, but I think there is less about the French connection to this story. Although both Benveniste and Dumézil acknowledge the importance of this work, neither seems to have been much involved after this 1956 event. Lejeune, however, was part of the International Committee on the language. Lejeune was also a student of Meillet, and from 1954 had been teaching on Mycenaean. He would publish extensively on the language. Lejeune connects to Benveniste’s story in several ways. He was the nominal second-rank candidate when Benveniste was elected to the Collège de France in 1937, succeeding Meillet; Benveniste and Lejeune were colleagues at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in comparative grammar; and Lejeune worked with Mohammad Djafar Moïnfar in compiling the second volume of Benveniste’s Problèmes de linguistique générale in 1974. In The Decipherment of Linear B Chadwick says that Dumézil’s tribute to Ventris was the most “simple and touching”: “Devant les siècles son œuvre est faite” (p. 139). It suggests that his work is complete for centuries to come, a reputation that would endure well beyond him. But his contribution also points backwards, as Benveniste indicated, opening a view of centuries before.
John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B: The Key to the Ancient Language and Culture of Crete and Mycenae, New York: Vintage, 1958.
Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code and the Uncovering of a Lost Civilisation, New York: Ecco, 2014.
Alice Kober, “Evidence of Inflection in the “Chariot” Tablets from Knossos”, American Journal of Archaeology 49 (2), 1945, 143-51.
Alice Kober, “Inflection in Linear Class B: I – Declension”, American Journal of Archaeology 50 (2), 1946, 268-76.
Alice Kober, “The Minoan Scripts: Fact and Theory”, American Journal of Archaeology 52 (1), 1948, 82–103.
Michel Lejeune (ed.), Études mycéniennes: Actes du Colloque international sur les textes mycéniens (Gif-sur-Yvette, 3-7 avril 1956), Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1956.
Andrew Robinson, The Man who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris, London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.
Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, “Evidence for Greek Dialect in the Mycenaean Archives”, Journal of Hellenic Studies 73, 1953, 84-103.
Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaen Greek, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956.
This is the first post of an occasional series, where I try to post short essays with some indications of further reading and sources, but which are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare ideas, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. The other posts so far are:
