The American Historical Review October 2006 [antikvár]

In This Issue The October issue contains three articles and an AHR Forum, along with our usual extensive book review section. The articles take us first to the moon (in the company of seventeenth-century English writers), then to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Africa, and finally to the Roman Empire. The Forum is on the timely subject of anti-Americanism. Articles In "Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon," David Cressy suggests that 1638 was England's lunar moment. For it was about then that speculation about the plurality of worlds, the likelihood that the moon was inhabited, and the possibility of space travel bringing humans and lunar creatures into contact fostered a veritable lunar discourse among clerics and others in Stuart England, drawing upon ancient and medieval astronomical, theological, and literary traditions. Cressy demonstrates that lunar interest was hardly limited to astronomical or scientific circles. Indeed, a high proportion of those who wrote about the moon were churchmen who wondered how lunar inhabitants would fit into Christian history and whether they too were the seed of Adam. Cressy's article shows that in a post-Copernican, post-Reformation, and post-Columbian Europe, the bounds of wonderment were virtually unlimited. Derek Peterson's "Morality Plays: Marriage, Church Courts, and Colonial Agency in Central Tanganyika, ca. 1876-1928" offers a corrective to conventional views of Africa's legal history as defined in terms of a perpetual contest between modern governance and inflexible tradition. The essay focuses on the history of conjugal litigation in late-nineteenth-century Tanganyika. Anglican missionaries used record books and marriage certificates to define marriage as a contract authorized by God, thus allowing them to punish extramarital sex as adultery. Litigants, however, were hardly passive in the face of such efforts; they learned to use these bureaucratic modes of religious and social control to their own advantage. Husbands and wives entered into the legal process by articulating their own interests and complaints in a recognizable moral discourse that could draw judges' attention and sympathy. In this way, they were able to pursue claims concerning such pertinent issues as wives' deference, payment of bridewealth, or marital residence. By naming their spouses