In This Issue

     The contributions to this issue—three research articles, a trio of retrospective assessments of the impact of Edward W. Said's Orientalism on the practice of history, and a review essay analyzing trends in the study of ancient Greece and Rome—range widely through time and space. They also address topics that are nothing if not diverse. Readers will find discussion below of subjects as different from one another as sexual practices and discourses of the distant past are from late twentieth-century diplomacy, as the structures of European medieval architecture are from late nineteenth-century Iranian debates on nationalism and modernity. Three themes run through the issue, nonetheless, which serve as connecting threads.

     One is the way that built environments represent understandings of power, an issue that is flagged in both Americanist Mary P. Ryan's consideration of city halls and Maureen C. Miller's discussion of religion as a marker of difference in medieval Europe. A second theme, which has more to do with editorial intent and represents long-term efforts by this journal to encourage discipline-wide conversation, relates to cross-fertilization between areas of specialization. The author of this issue's review essay, Ruth Mazo Karras, is not an expert in the history of the ancient period but rather a medievalist who has done extensive work on the subject in question, sexualities. The contributors to the symposium "Orientalism Twenty Years On," similarly, do not work on Western Europe or the Middle East (the two regions that concern Said most in his book). These authors are, rather, specialists in American diplomatic affairs (Andrew J. Rotter), southeastern Europe (K. E. Fleming), and the European Middle Ages (Kathleen Biddick), whom we asked to discuss the impact (or lack of impact) or Said's work on their fields. The third connecting thread relates to the problems of alterity and distortion that, in part because of works such as Orientalism, historians have been concerned with for some time now. This theme is the result in part of editorial intervention (the three reviews of Said's work were commissioned) but in part of a fortuitous circumstance: the decision by Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet to submit to us an essay on Qajar-era humanism in Iran. This essay shows how scholars can explore the flow of ideologies and concepts across borders—including those separating Western Europe from the Middle East—in a fashion that respects the agency of all the actors involved.

Articles

     Maureen C. Miller argues persuasively that religion—like race, class, and gender—can be and in medieval Europe often was an important category of difference. She looks at various ways that the Catholic clergy of the day set themselves apart from other members of society, not only in their literacy, education, and mentalité but also in their material culture. This is shown via consideration of the structural layout of the episcopal hall and analysis of some of the events that took place within it, including entertainments that were distinctly ecclesiastical and offered a critique of secular courtly culture and models of lordship. The value of the essay lies both in the new light it sheds on a subject that specialists have long debated (the overlaps of and divergences between clerical and lay culture in medieval Europe) and in the implications it has for all historians concerning the need to be prepared to look beyond the now familiar triumvirate of race, class, and gender when trying to unravel the various concepts of difference in play in a particular time and place.

     Mary P. Ryan examines the public buildings of nineteenth-century American cities with an eye toward contributing to several different sorts of literatures and debates. She strives, first of all, to expand our understanding of the history of Western public architecture by adding to the case-study literature a careful look at the American City Hall as a physical structure and cultural symbol. Second, this essay challenges conventional narratives of American urban history that posit a decline from civic virtue to city corruption. The author also outlines a new technique of historical analysis, with potentially very wide applications, that is called "civic materialism" and involves bringing the built environment into political history as something that provides a context for, influences, and is a document to be interpreted while struggling to understand power relations. Ryan argues that "public architecture" needs to be seen as "more than an inert by-product of governmental processes," since it "can affect the quality of civic life" in myriad ways, and backs up her claim effectively with fascinating detail concerning municipal buildings constructed in New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco between 1795 and 1892.

     Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet shows that "Iranian humanism" is not the oxymoron that some readers may assume it to be when first encountering the phrase. Her essay presents the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the 1900s as a period of change and intellectual inquiry for Iran, during which ideas associated with humanism that built on both local and imported traditions and understandings were very much in the air. She is particularly attentive to the complex process by which new understandings of nationalism were incorporated into debates on humanism and learning among Iranian intellectuals, and to the way that here, as in many other contemporaneous contexts, notions of hygiene and modernity became intertwined. This study has much to offer all historians concerned with the flow of concepts across cultural and physical borders, the role of humanism in shaping political agendas, and the visions that the literati elites of many countries have embraced of reinvigorating their homelands by promulgating notions of progress and citizenship that combine old and new symbols and values.

Review Essays

     The first three contributors to this section of the issue—Andrew J. Rotter, a specialist in American foreign relations, K. E. Fleming, an expert in the history of the Balkans, and Kathleen Biddick, a medievalist—all examine the same book: Edward W. Said's Orientalism. Rotter, framing his contribution around the idea of "Saidism without Said," stresses the fact that references to Orientalism are still rarely made in works by diplomatic historians. This is ironic, in his view, because in their studies of U.S. foreign relations, many people in his field have been embracing the concern with rethinking and putting on a more equal footing the interactions between cultures that is at the heart of Said's book. Fleming, meanwhile, shows that the situation in Balkan studies is radically different: historians in her field routinely cite Said, and the issue debated now is the extent to which "Orientalism" and "Balkanism" should be treated as comparable phenomena. That is, while Western intellectuals have often treated both southeastern Europe and the Middle East as backward "others," have they done so in the same way? Several recent books discussed by Fleming have provided different sorts of answers to this question. Biddick, finally, uses her grounding in the study of a period as opposed to a place that is often used as an opposite to the modern West to raise another set of issues relating to Said. Can his model travel through time as well as space, and which parts of his approach have been easiest and most difficult for medievalists to accept and adapt?

     Each of the authors, while grappling with different questions specific to his or her field, also has insightful things to say about the strengths and weaknesses of a book that has made an indelible mark on many different intellectual landscapes. Orientalism has become one of those broadly influential works that historians can praise, reject, argue with specific features of, claim should be modified, and so forth—but can only ignore completely at their own peril. The three reviews of it provided here constitute, therefore, a significant service to the field in delineating sharply a series of interesting approaches to Said's arguments and impact.

     Standing on its own is another review essay, by Ruth Mazo Karras, which focuses on five recent works on sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean basin. Karras approaches the topic as that of an outsider interested in what the literature in question has to contribute to general understanding of the topic of sexuality. She argues, convincingly, that classical Greece and Rome are of special importance where the historiography in question is concerned, because of the many claims that have been made about the links between ancient and modern approaches to sexuality. Paying particularly close attention to concepts of "active" and "passive" sexual roles and the ways these roles shape ideas about gender, this review essay is filled with valuable insights into issues ranging from Michel Foucault's effects on historical scholarship to the debates over "social construction" versus "essentialism" that continue to rage in many subfields.

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