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At a time in which university officials, blog posters, and even most of those writing about “the crisis of the humanities” underline the “relevance” of what we teach and research, one wonders: what ever happened to curiosity for curiosity’s sake, to knowledge that actually isn’t useful to us, at least right now? Often the study of things distant from ourselves and not immediately applicable—What did the Romans eat for breakfast? Why were the boyars unable to resist Ivan IV? What inspired Balzac to write Lost Illusions?—are questions that engage us not because we can see their “relevance” to us, but because we are curious about how other people have lived and thought (or in the case of the boyars, died, having been sautéed in giant frying pans). We may try to make them so, and may succeed in making a better or worse case, but doesn’t that somehow diminish the beauty of just knowing something fascinating about another place, time, or culture?

This article surveys the European, and especially German, porcelain industry’s output of classicizing figurines between about 1740 and 1900 in order to comprehend what vision of the classics Europeans wished to bring into their homes. First made by Italians, classicizing figurines and cameos became a German (and English) specialty, and helped to knit together European luxury markets as well as to spread familiarity with classical iconography to northern and eastern climes. Made for aristocratic courtiers, the first pieces reflect a ‘libertine’ classicism; by about 1790, this style had largely been displaced by a more serious and exacting (but also cheaper!) ‘chaste’ classicism exemplified by Jasperware and white biscuit porcelains. After 1815, industry conditions and the disinterest of new consumers led to the freezing of classicizing porcelains in this latter, ‘chaste’ idiom. As a widely-owned household good by the mid-nineteenth century, porcelain provided an important, if narrow, form of classical education that has left its mark on the tourist industry, and on our perceptions of the classical world.

SUMMARYMicrospore embryogenesis is a model for developmental plasticity and cell fate decisions. To investigate the role of miRNAs in this development, we sequenced sRNAs and the degradome of barley microspores collected prior to (day 0) and after (days 2 and 5) the application of a stress treatment known to induce embryogenesis. Microspores isolated at these timepoints were uniform in both appearance and in their complements of sRNAs. We detected 68 miRNAs in microspores. The abundance of 51 of these miRNAs differed significantly during microspore development. One group of miRNAs was induced when the stress treatment was applied, prior to being repressed when microspores transitioned to embryogenesis. Another group of miRNAs were up-regulated in day-2 microspores and their abundance remained stable or increased in day-5 microspores, a timepoint at which the first clear indications of the transition towards embryogenesis were visible. Collectively, these miRNAs might play a role in the modulation of the stress response, the repression of gametic development, and/or the gain of embryogenic potential. A degradome analysis allowed us to validate the role of miRNAs in regulating 41 specific transcripts. We showed that the transition of microspores toward the embryogenesis pathway involves miRNA-directed regulation of members of the ARF, SPL, GRF and HD-ZIPIII transcription factor families. We noted that 41.5% of these targets were shared between day-2 and day-5 microspores while 26.8% were unique to day-5 microspores. The former set may act to disrupt transcripts involved in pollen development while the latter set may drive the commitment to embryogenesis.

Microspore embryogenesis is a model for developmental plasticity and cell fate decisions. To investigate the role of miRNAs in this development, we sequenced sRNAs and the degradome of barley microspores collected prior to (day 0) and after (days 2 and 5) the application of a stress treatment known to induce embryogenesis. Microspores isolated at these timepoints were uniform in both appearance and in their complements of sRNAs. We detected 68 miRNAs in microspores. The abundance of 51 of these miRNAs differed significantly during microspore development. One group of miRNAs was induced when the stress treatment was applied, prior to being repressed when microspores transitioned to embryogenesis. Another group of miRNAs were up-regulated in day-2 microspores and their abundance remained stable or increased in day-5 microspores, a timepoint at which the first clear indications of the transition toward embryogenesis were visible. Collectively, these miRNAs might play a role in the modulation of the stress response, the repression of gametic development, and/or the gain of embryogenic potential. A degradome analysis allowed us to validate the role of miRNAs in regulating 41 specific transcripts. We showed that the transition of microspores toward the embryogenesis pathway involves miRNA-directed regulation of members of the

In barley, it is possible to induce embryogenesis in the haploid and uninucleate microspore to obtain a diploid plant that is perfectly homozygous. To change developmental fates in this fashion, microspores need to engage in cellular de-differentiation, interrupting the pollen formation, and restore totipotency prior to engaging in embryogenesis. In this work, we used the barley cultivar Gobernadora to characterize the transcriptome of microspores prior to (day 0) and immediately after (days 2 and 5) the application of a stress pretreatment. A deep RNA-seq analysis revealed that microspores at these three time points exhibit a transcriptome of ∼14k genes, ∼90% of which were shared. An expression analysis identified a total of 3,382 differentially expressed genes (DEGs); of these, 2,155 and 2,281 DEGs were respectively identified when contrasting expression at days 0 and 2 and at days 2 and 5. These define 8 expression profiles in which DEGs share a common up- or down-regulation at these time points. Up-regulation of numerous glutathione S-transferase and heat shock protein genes as well as down-regulation of ribosomal subunit protein genes was observed between days 0 and 2. The transition from microspores to developing embryos (days 2 vs. 5) was marked by the induction of transcription factor genes known to play important roles in early embryogenesis, numerous genes involved in hormone biosynthesis and plant hormonal signal transduction in addition to genes involved in secondary metabolism. This work sheds light on transcriptional changes accompanying an important developmental shift and provides candidate biomarkers for embryogenesis in barley.

Cet essai replace Der Stil de Gottfried Semper dans le contexte ou il a vecu, celui de la production de masse de biens de luxe. En nous centrant sur les manufactures de porcelaine du xixe siecle, une des « industries d’art » majeures de son epoque, nous chercherons a expliquer pourquoi les recommandations formulees par Semper pour reformer l’art de la porcelaine furent a la fois profondement pertinentes et impossibles a appliquer. Contraints par les realites economiques de l’epoque post-napoleonienne a produire pour le marche plutot que pour une clientele aristocratique, les fabricants de porcelaine du xixe siecle eurent a adapter leur vaisselle a une clientele de la classe moyenne, moins interessee par le grand art que par un luxe accessible. La concurrence de marche induisit a la fois une diversification des styles et la recherche de methodes de production moins couteuses, des innovations condamnees par les critiques d’art (y compris Semper). Semper lui-meme ecrivit beaucoup sur la ceramique et dessina plusieurs modeles pour les manufactures de Meissen et de Sevres, mais ses œuvres elaborees etaient difficiles a produire, onereuses et decalees par rapport au gout du grand public. Cet essai montre comment l’historicisme et la production de masse s’imposerent avec necessite a des fabricants qui auraient peut-etre aime se definir comme des artistes, mais qui auraient fait faillite s’ils avaient suivi les conseils de Semper.

This essay investigates the origins and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of the new field known as Wissensgeschichte from the perspective of an American intellectual historian. It argues that while some historians of science may be ready to embrace a new identity as historians of knowledge, this terminology remains baggy and invites facile applications of Foucauldian theory. The essay concludes with the hope that the history of knowledge approach may instead open up new avenues for conversation and collaboration between historians of science and garden variety historians.

SUMMARYThis essay discusses Hans Aarsleff's long battle to demonstrate the importance of the French and British thinkers of the mid-eighteenth century to the development of modern linguistic thought. Contesting claims that German scholars were the first to develop historicised theories of language, Aarsleff, along with his Princeton colleagues Lionel Gossman and Anthony Grafton, helped pioneer longue duree studies of the history of philology and of historiography that cross national boundaries as well as the so-called Sattelzeit (stretching from about 1780 until 1820). Although the importance of his work was, for a long time, little appreciated by modern intellectual historians, this essay argues that it is time that we fully learned Aarsleff's lessons.

Establishing the identity, and the chronology, of the Persian religious reformer Zarathustra has been of great interest to western scholars since antiquity—but became an urgent question in the early modern era. Scholars trained chiefly in biblical exegesis particularly wished to know if Zarathustra had preached a monotheistic or a dualistic faith. The complexity of the source material, however, made it difficult to decide this question, and impossible to securely place Zarathustra in time. Even after the deciphering of Old Avestan, the question of Zarathustra’s dates has remained enormously fraught, and dependent on inferences from classical or biblical texts. The ongoing quest to date Zarathustra shows us that ‘orientalism’ as a scholarly enterprise exhibits many continuities across the centuries and that chronology continues even today to be a crucial and controversial subject.

If you have never had a conversation with Tony La Vopa—and I mean a serious, four-hour conversation, in which topics range from Rousseau to the Final Four to marzipan to Kant—you have missed out on one of academia's great pleasures. Tony is one of intellectual history's most beloved conversationalists: because he knows many things, because he loves to tell stories, because he listens, because he argues. He also, incidentally, has mastered the pithy, but somehow personal, email: he once wrote me, simply “You’re not resting,” and another time: “I’m alarmed about your porcelain addiction.” Those readers who know Tony only from his work on this journal or his published works will know the clarity, deep intelligence, and admirable density of his research and his editing, but may not know much about the conversations that he has sustained and that have sustained him across his career, and haven't caught the impish glint in his eye when he launches into a story about his own current fetishes (photography, gooseberryKüchen), or lightly, invitingly, teases you about your own (according to Tony, mine include “loony men in gray suits”). And so, having had the pleasure of being a friend, coconspirator, and conversation partner of Tony's for several decades now, I have gladly accepted the honor of further acquaintingModern Intellectual History's readership with the career and contributions (so far!) of Anthony J. La Vopa, whose work has done so much to make intellectual history the thriving field it is today.

The world that went to war in August 1914 was a very ancient one. Those who special- ize in the social and military history of the war may be less surprised by this opening remark than the nonspecialists among us who are accustomed to emphasizing the war's novelties and the deep cultural schism represented by the mere date 1914. I myself embarked on the writing of this lecture with an antiquated view of the cultural history of the war and its aftermath shaped predominately by the work of the great Paul Fussell, who led me, and I think others, to believe that the war sounded the death knell for all "high diction," and its close corollary, "high" culture, in which classical antiquity played so great a role. 1 But my inquiries, and a veritable avalanche of new scholarship, has suggested that there was, in fact, a great deal of cultural continuity across the war's divide; and, as complementary recent work in the field now called "classical reception" has underscored, reports of antiquity's death at the hands of the modern are grossly overrated. 2 The ancient world survived the war as a central part of German and European culture, and not merely as kitsch or as conservative reac- tion, though undeniably interwar classicism (like prewar classicism) had these forms and functions. One of my central aims in this impressionist talk—though regrettably without the many nice pictures I was able to use in the oral version—is to take the GSA's interdisciplinary structure as license to range widely across the worlds of both bourgeois and elite culture in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the hopes of demonstrating just how much the moderns owed the ancients, and how long, even after four and a half years of mechanized mass murder, many "moderns" continued to look to antiquity for inspiration, aesthetic pleasure, and consolation. If my argument here proves convincing, I would like to ask if perhaps the time has come to ask for a bit more modesty from modernism, and some deeper recognition that the persistence of the ancient world was not only something crucial to the making of twentieth-century culture, but remains a creative force, still at work around us. In its final pages, however, this talk takes on a second mission, and that is to explore, briefly, the history of classical scholarship in this period, and especially its relationship to changes in the wider culture of the Kaiserreich and the Weimar

Rather than merely condemning nineteenth-century oriental philologists for adopting racial terminology, this essay inquires into the reasons many of these scholars had for hoping that race could serve not just as a descriptor signifying something like a tribal genealogy (as in the “race” of the Levites or the Argives) but as a surrogate for historical analysis. I argue that we must understand the very great uncertainties “orientalists” of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries faced with respect to Near Eastern chronologies and their desire to identify which peoples created the first forms of monotheism as key reasons for the adopting first of linguistic and then of biological forms of analysis as means of telling the story of the earliest “Aryans.” This neo-Romantic form of racism did not succeed instantly in displacing the “Semites” from their traditional position in Christian consciousness as the inventors of the true religion, but it did contribute to that process, resulting in opening the way both for more inclusive world prehistories and for more racialized and anti-Semitic accounts of the origins of European civilization.

The aim of this study was to measure genetic diversity and population structure among 92 Canadian barley cultivars using two types of molecular markers (SSRs and DArTs) and pedigree data. A total of 368 alleles were identified at 50 SSR loci. The number of alleles per locus ranged between 2 and 13 ([Formula: see text] = 7.36) and PIC values ranged from 0.34 to 0.86 ([Formula: see text] = 0.69). For the biallelic DArT markers, the genetic distance matrix was based on 971 markers whose PIC values ranged between 0.06 and 0.50 ([Formula: see text] = 0.39). A third distance matrix was computed based on the kinship coefficient. Clustering of genotypes was performed based on the genetic distance matrix and the three dendrograms obtained showed the genetic relationships among barley cultivars. The topological similarity of the three dendrograms was estimated using a congruence index and showed the three dendrograms to be in very good agreement. Statistical analysis also showed a highly significant correlation between the SSR and DArT matrices (r = 0.80, p < 0.002) compared with lower yet significant correlations of the pedigree data with both marker types (r = 0.46, p < 0.002; r = 0.52, p < 0.002). Finally, we assessed linkage disequilibrium in this germplasm and found it to be quite extensive, as the mean distance between marker pairs with significant (P < 0.001) r2 values >0.5 was 3.8 cM. Information obtained from comparing results of different genetic diversity estimation methods should be useful for the improvement and conservation of barley genetic resources.

Cet article retrace les pratiques et croyances entourant les menstruations au Québec au cours de la période 1900-1950. En s’appuyant sur des témoignages recueillis auprès d’hommes et de femmes qui ont vécu au Québec au cours de la période étudiée, l’auteur traite du secret entourant le phénomène menstruel, des moyens dont disposaient les femmes pour ne pas laisser voir qu’elles étaient menstruées, des expressions utilisées pour faire allusion aux menstruations sans les nommer, ainsi que des craintes et interdits entourant le sang menstruel. Le recours à diverses études portant sur les menstruations dans d’autres cultures ou à d’autres époques permet en outre de démontrer que les pratiques et croyances recueillies au Québec étaient loin d’être exclusives, certaines étant même universellement partagées et s’inscrivant dans la longue durée., This article looks at practices and beliefs regarding menstruation in Québec during the first half of the twentieth century. Using oral sources from the period, the author deals with topics such as the secretive aspect of the menstrual cycle, the ways women used to hide their state, coded expressions that referred to menstruation, and also the fears and taboos surrounding the topic. By referring to studies on menstruation in other cultures and from other times, the author shows how beliefs and practices found in Québec were far from unique, and were sometimes even part of a universal culture with a long history.

Cet article examine les origines de l’histoire de l’art non occidental a travers le travail profondement anti-classique de l’historien de l’art autrichien Josef Strzygowski. La formation sociale, politique et culturelle que Strzygowski recut a la fin du xixe siecle a la peripherie de l’Empire austro-hongrois lui a procure le gout pour des formes d’art non canoniques, de meme qu’une puissante antipathie a l’egard de ce qu’il nommait « l’art du pouvoir » mediterraneen. Il apprit beaucoup de son predecesseur Rudolf von Eitelberger, mais aussi d’autres collegues et collectionneurs des peripheries de l’Autriche, et produisit des syntheses novatrices qui insistaient sur le besoin d’etudier des formes non-traditionnelles de beaute. Ses liens avec le nazisme rendirent en fin de compte difficile pour ceux qui defendent l’art non occidental de le louer comme leur predecesseur, mais il devint tout de meme une sorte de heros pour certains nationalistes dans les peripheries habsbourgeoises, et hors d’Europe.

Reviewing five recent books in German classical and oriental studies, this essay argues that the question of archaic Greece's debts to the Orient remains a particularly lively one in German-speaking Europe. Like their predecessors in previous generations, iconoclastic classicists like Walter Burkert, oriental archaeologists like Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948) and maverick outsiders like Raoul Schrott have attacked the enraptured view of ‘the Greek miracle’ familiar to those educated in classicalGymnasien. And yet the question of Greek cultural autonomy is still alive, in part because there are too many uncertainties for it to be answered definitively, and in part because it continues to play a role in attempts to define modern European identity.

Most Fusarium head blight (FHB) resistant barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) accessions perform relatively poorly from an agronomic point of view. Due to the polygenic inheritance of FHB resistance, introgression of this complex trait into well-adapted elite germplasm will likely require multiple cycles of hybridization and selection to combine resistance and agronomic performance. The use of anther culture to produce doubled haploids would seem well justified to reduce the time required to achieve this goal. Unfortunately, little is known concerning the androgenic response of the small number of genotypes with known partial FHB resistance. To make the best use of such FHB resistance donors in a barley improvement program, we first characterized the FHB resistance of eight reported FHB resistance sources (Chevron, Gobernadora, Seijo II, Shyri, Svanhals, Zhedar I, F104-250-9 and C97-21-38-3) in our own FHB nursery in Quebec City (QC, Canada). In parallel, we assessed the androgenic response of these same eight lines with that of three cultivars (ACCA, Léger and Cadette) of known androgenic response. Finally, the androgenic response of F(1) hybrids involving some of these genotypes used as parents was measured and compared to that of the parental genotypes. Very large and significant differences were observed in the number of green plants produced by the different accessions and F(1)s. Although anther culture seemed very promising for some accessions, for others, the androgenic response was so low that a conventional approach would seem more appropriate.

There has been a good deal of talk, in the years since Edward Said’s Orientalism appeared in 1978 about Europe’s ‘discourse on the Orient’. This presumably coherent set of speech acts and artistic ...

Fusarium head blight (FHB), a fungal disease caused by several species of Fusarium, results in reduced yields and grain quality in barley (Hordeum vulgare). Various mycotoxins are produced by the Fusarium spp., and these can be very harmful to animals and humans. As a basis for progress in devising future management strategies for FHB in barley, it is necessary to identify the most common causal Fusarium spp. in Quebec and to determine whether their prevalence varies over space and time. In this study, we identified the Fusarium spp. present in 144 samples of barley seed harvested in 12 administrative regions of Quebec in 2000, 2001, and 2002. In total, 20 species of Fusarium were identified on the basis of the morphological characteristics of the fungal isolates. Overall, infection levels (expressed as percentages of infected kernels) were 8.3%, 8.2%, and 36.3%, respectively, for 2000, 2001, and 2002. Three species were responsible for most of these infections: F. graminearum (41.0% of infected seed), F....

Focusing on the study of the ancient Orient in fin-de-siècle Germany, this essay argues that “orientalism” had a wider range of cultural consequences than the term usually evokes in studies of Western imperialism and its ideologies. The essay describes the development of a generational movement in German scholarship that was characterized by its vigorous championing of the Orient over and against the dominant tendency to isolate and exalt classical civilizations, and especially ancient Greece, and by its role in destabilizing Western presumptions. It demonstrates that the furor orientalis did contribute to the decentering of the Greeks and the ancient Hebrews, bequeathing to the twentieth century both a much deeper and more diverse picture of the ancient Near East and an obsession with origins that could be mobilized by racist propagandists. The essay offers three case studies of groups which exemplified this furor—the Panbabylonists; the Religious-Historical School; and the iconoclastic mythographer Heinrich Zimmer, who represents a strong strain of Schopenhauerian Indology. It concludes by suggesting the more constructive directions taken by orientalists outside Germany in the 1920s–1940s, and poses the question: how long will the peaceful solutions they promoted last?