Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism (Pantheon 2017).
"Paglia considers herself, depending upon her mood, a libertarian feminist, a pro-sex feminist or an 'Amazon' one. What she is really committed to, she writes in one essay here, is this: 'My mission is to be absolutely as painful as possible in every situation.'
Paglia’s arguments are incisive and worth tangling with . . . .When she bears down and worries about sentences more than poses . . . she’s a fearless public intellectual and more necessary than ever."
—Dwight Garner, New York Times (full review here)
Tom Lambert (Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge)
, Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford Univ. Press 2017).
"The focus of the volume is on the maintenance of order: what constituted good order; what forms of wrongdoing were threatening to it; what roles kings, lords, communities, and individuals were expected to play in maintaining it; and how that worked in practice. Its core argument is that the Anglo-Saxons had a coherent, stable, and enduring legal order that lacks modern analogies: it was neither state-like nor stateless, and needs to be understood on its own terms rather than as a variant or hybrid of these models. Tom Lambert elucidates a distinctively early medieval understanding of the tension between the interests of individuals and communities, and a vision of how that tension ought to be managed that, strikingly, treats strongly libertarian and communitarian features as complementary."
—Publisher's description
Saul J. Berman (Yeshiva University), Boundaries of Loyalty: Testimony against Fellow Jews in Non-Jewish Courts (Cambridge Univ. Press 2017).
"Talmudic legislation prescribed penalty for a Jew to testify in a non-Jewish court, against a fellow Jew, to benefit a gentile - for breach of a duty of loyalty to a fellow Jew. Through close textual analysis, Saul Berman explores how Jewish jurists responded when this virtue of loyalty conflicted with values such as Justice, avoidance of desecration of God's Name, deterrence of crime, defence of self, protection of Jewish community, and the duty to adhere to Law of the Land. Essential for scholars and graduate students in Talmud, Jewish law and comparative law, this key volume details the nature of these loyalties as values within the Jewish legal system, and how the resolution of these conflicts was handled. Berman additionally explores why this issue has intensified in contemporary times and how the related area of 'Mesirah' has wrongfully come to be prominently associated with this law regulating testimony."
—Publisher's description
