Publications

Sarah K. Scott and M.L. Stapleton. Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman

Contributions to this volume explore the idea of Marlowe as a working artist, in keeping with John Addington Symonds' characterization of him as a 'sculptor-poet'. Throughout the body of his work-including not only the poems and plays, but also his forays into translation and imitation - a distinguished company of established and emerging literary scholars traces how Marlowe conceives an idea, shapes and refines it, then remakes and remodels it, only to refashion it further in his writing process. These essays necessarily overlap with one another in the categories of lives, stage, and page, which signals their interdependent nature regarding questions of authorship, theater and performance history, as well as interpretive issues within the works themselves. The contributors interpret and analyze the disputed facts of Marlowe's life, the textual difficulties that emerge from the staging of his plays, the critical investigations arising from analyses of individual works, and their relationship to those of his contemporaries. The collection engages in new ways the controversies and complexities of its subject's life and art. It reflects the flourishing state of Marlowe studies as it shapes the twenty-first century conception of the poet and playwright as master craftsman.

Joshua P. Hochschild. The Semantics of Analogy, ReReading Cajetan's De Nominum Analogia

"The Semantics of Analogy" is the first book-length interpretive study in English of Thomas de Vio Cajetan's (1469?-1534) classic treatise on analogy. Written in 1498, "De Nominum Analogia" (On the Analogy of Names) has long been treated as Cajetan's attempt to systematize Aquinas' theory of analogy. A traditional interpretation regarded it as the official Thomistic treatise on analogy, but the current scholarly consensus holds that Cajetan misinterpreted Aquinas and misunderstood the phenomenon of analogy. Both approaches, argues Joshua P. Hochschild, fail to accurately assess Cajetan's work and ignore its philosophical and historical context. In "The Semantics of Analogy", Hochschild reinterprets "De Nominum Analogia" as a significant philosophical treatise in its own right. He addresses some of the most well-known criticisms of Cajetan's analogy theory and explicates the later chapters of De Nominum Analogia, which are usually ignored by commentators. He demonstrates that Cajetan was aware of the limits of semantic analysis, had a sophisticated view of the relationship between semantics and metaphysics, and expressed perceptive insights about concept formation and hermeneutics that are of continuing philosophical relevance.

Timothy J. Sullivan. New York State and the Rise of Modern Conservatism

From the early 1960s until 1980 New York's Conservative and Republican Parties battled on the editorial page, at the ballot box, and in the courts over the ideology of the GOP. New York State and the Rise of Modern Conservatism recounts the story of how New York, reputedly the most liberal of all states, played a critical role in conservatism's political ascendancy and in the redrawing, according to ideology, of the country's party lines. Examining the colorful personalities central to the transformation, including Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Bill Buckley, John Lindsay, Roy Cohn, Jackie Robinson, Clare Booth Luce, G. Gordon Liddy, and William Casey, author Timothy J. Sullivan recounts the details of the party's battle, a battle that ultimately forced the state's liberal Republicans to choose between their party and their ideology, resulting in a reliably conservative national GOP prepared to nominate Ronald Reagan.

"This book describes a significant moment in New York's political history. It sheds a great deal of light on the political and ideological history of the last forty years, including the reasons for the decline of Rockefeller Republicanism, the party's subsequent shift to the Right, and the rise of ideological third-party politics." -- Vincent J. Cannato, author of The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

David Cloutier. Leaving and Coming Home: New Wineskins for Catholic Sexual Ethics

Manuel, Reardon, Wilcox. The Catholic Church and the Nation-State

"A book that astutely crosses the theology-political science divide to probe the relation between faith and culture. The authors capture multiple tensions and ambiguities as the Catholic Church faces challenges of secularization, nationalism, and democracy across the globe."  -Clarke E. Cochran, Texas Tech University

"Manuel, Reardon, and Wilcox have assembled a superb group of scholars to discuss the global challenges to the Catholic Church. Organized thematically and covering all corners of the world, this work should become an essential read for anybody interested in Catholism or religion more generally". - Anthony Gill

Michelle W. Patterson. Natalie Curtis Burlin: a Life in Native and African American Music

Natalie Curtis Burlin (1876–1921) was born to a wealthy New York City family and initially trained for a career as a classical concert pianist. But in 1903, she left her family and training behind to study, collect, and popularize the music of American Indians in the Southwest and African Americans at the Hampton Institute in the belief that the music of these groups could help forge a distinctive American identity in a time of dramatic social change.

Michelle Wick Patterson examines the life, work, and legacy of Curtis at the turn of the century. The influence of increased industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and shaken social mores motivated Curtis to emphasize Native and African American contributions to the antimodernist discourse of this period. Additionally, Curtis’s work in the field and her actions with informants reflect the impact of the changing status of women in public life, marriage, and the professions as well as new ideas regarding race and culture.

Many of the people who touched Curtis’s life were among the intellectual, political, and artistic leaders of their time, including Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Lummis, Franz Boas, George Foster Peabody, and others. This well-researched and richly textured portrait of Curtis illuminates the life and contributions of an important early ethnomusicologist, meticulously portraying her within the social, intellectual, and political developments of the day.

Peter A. Dorsey. Common Bondage : Slavery As Metaphor in Revolutionary America

“This is a brilliant book that I believe will make a very valuable and original contribution to the way scholars understand the use of language in the era of the American Revolution and the origin and limited nature of Revolutionary era anti-slavery sentiment.”
—Robert Olwell, author of Master, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790

In the American revolutionary era, the antislavery rhetoric of certain founding fathers often took on a life of its own. The distinctions they drew between the British imperial order and the bright dawn of liberty in a new American republic seemed, at times, to compel the freedom of the slaves as well as the freedom of white colonists. But Peter A. Dorsey shows that this rhetoric was often more strategic than principled, and he argues that understanding this ploy helps to explain why an early antislavery movement failed to achieve its goals once the American Revolution was over.

In Common Bondage, Dorsey examines how patriots and those who opposed them understood slavery within a broader tradition of revolutionary thought. Especially prominent in the rhetoric and reality of the eighteenth century, this fluid concept was applied to a wide variety of events and values and was constantly being redefined. Dorsey explains the classical meaning of rhetoric as “to persuade” but notes that it can also mean “to mask” or “to mislead.” He shows how these different senses of the word merged, as revolutionary rhetoric was used to achieve limited ends.

By examining the figurative extension of slavery in revolutionary rhetoric, Dorsey recaptures the transforming energy of the ideas it promoted and points toward a better understanding of the regressive aftermath. The resulting composite psychology of the slave-holding culture that existed during the country’s formative years allows us to better trace the development of American racism.
Peter A. Dorsey is the chair of the English Department at Mt. Saint Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland. He is the author of Sacred Estrangement: The Rhetoric of Conversion in Modern American Autobiography.

Sister Anne Higgins. How the Hand Behaves.

Published Nov. 8th.

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Other publications:

Cloutier, David. Love, Reason, and God's Story: An introduction to Catholic Sexual Ethics. 2008.

Collinge, William. The A to Z of Catholicism. 2001

Collinge, William. The Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine-Four Anti-Pelagian Writings. 1992

Hochschild, Joshua P. Virtue's End: God in the Moral Philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas. 2008

Hochschild, Joshua P. Ethics Without God?: The Divine in Contemporary Moral and Political Thought. 2008

McCarthy, David. Gathered for the Journey: Moral Theology in Catholic Perspective. 2007

McCarthy, David. The Heart of Social Teaching: Its Orgin and Contemporary Significance. 2009.

Stay, Byron. The Writing Center Director's Resource Book. 2006