The War on Heresy
R.I. Moore
Harvard, 2012
273.6 m823W
Some of the most portentous events in medieval history—the Cathar crusade, the persecution and mass burnings of heretics, the papal inquisition—fall between 1000 and 1250, when the Catholic Church confronted the threat of heresy with force. Moore’s narrative focuses on the motives and anxieties of elites who waged war on heresy for political gain.
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The War on Heresy is social and religious history at its best, the fruit of many decades of intense engagement with one of the most complex and difficult problems of medieval history. With admirable clarity, R. I. Moore tells the deeply troubling story of how heretics became a persecuted minority, not so much because of their beliefs, but because of the anxieties, needs, and ambitions of their persecutors. This is a masterfully researched and deeply thought book that tells its exciting and still relevant story with verve and with sympathy for the victims of the war on heresy.
--Anders Winroth, Yale University
Queer Compulsions: race, nation and sexuality in the affairs of Yone Noguchi
Amy Sueyoshi
Hawaii, 2012
895.61 N778su
In September 1897 Yone Noguchi (1875 - 1947) contemplated crafting a poem to his new love, western writer Charles Warren Stoddard. Recently arrived in California, Noguchi was in awe of the established writer and the two had struck up a passionate correspondence. Still, he viewed their relationship as doomed not by the scandal of their same-sex affections, but their introverted dispositions and differences in background. In a poem dedicated to his dearest Charlie, Noguchi wrote: Thou and I, O Charles, sit alone like two shy stars, east and west! While confessing his love to Stoddard, Noguchi had a child (future sculptor Isamu Noguchi) with his editor, Leonie Gilmour; became engaged to Washington Post reporter Ethel Armes; and upon his return to Japan married Matsu Takeda all within a span of seven years. According to author Amy Sueyoshi, Noguchi was not a dedicated polyamorist: He deliberately deceived the three women, to whom he either pretended or promised marriage while already married. She argues further that Noguchi s intimacies point to little-known realities of race and sexuality in turn-of-the-century America and illuminate how Asian immigrants negotiated America s literary and arts community.
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