Scholars of money often take for granted its instrumentality. Deborah Valenze argues that this is a mistake, for it overlooks the historical contingency and variability in money's uses, meanings, and discourses. In this book, Valenze examines money in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, demonstrating how and when money took its “modern” social and moral form. By doing so, she opens up theoretical questions about the relationship of money to mobility and constraint, the potential of money to create hierarchy and limit freedom even while it affords new relationships and movements, and the role of money as a moral and social measure of self in everyday life. The abstracting power and the unstable meanings of money, Valenze contends, shaped early modern British culture in sometimes contradictory ways.

With the rise of HIV and other “emerging diseases” having global reach over the past twenty years, interest in historic plague has flourished. The Justinianic plague in and around the Roman empire from a.d. 541 to 750, however, has received far less attention that the Black Death of 1348 and its recurrent strikes in Europe to the eighteenth century. This difference results in part from the comparative paucity of sources for the former and its greater linguistic demands, which require a knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern as well as Western languages. Because of these demands, Lester Little argues persuasively that a multiple-authored work by authorities in different parts of Europe is now needed before a single-authored synthesis can be adequately written.

This history by two scholars of literature and film is a series of essays on the patterns and “tones” of French culture in the late 1920s and the 1930s. The Popular Front (1935–1938) comes in only as background, and its cultural programs (the subject of Pascal Ory's 991-page La Belle Illusion) are not discussed here. Breaking with what the authors call “standard history” or “the straight story,” this study zigzags back and forth across the years between the wars (and even later), pausing to examine selected movies, cinematic themes, canonic novels, literary careers, and the diverse political stances taken by cultural leaders. The authors' model for this anti-narrative history is Alain Resnais's film of 1974, Stavisky…, which they analyze at length, praising its multi-perspectival, ambiguous evocation of a period. Accordingly, they focus on episodes and fragments from different cultural strata, uncovering unexpected coincidences and similarities that constitute the “harmonics” of the past (as Sergei Eisenstein and Resnais put it). Their method also owes much to some Surrealists' ideas, counterbalanced by a Structuralist interest in cultural regularities. Still another model invoked throughout is the non-linear format of a newspaper, with parallel columns juxtaposing unrelated stories on a given day.