In Calvin's Geneva, the changes associated with the Reformation were particularly abrupt and far-reaching, in large part owing to John Calvin himself. Adultery and Divorce in Calvin's Geneva makes two major contributions to our understanding of this time. The first is to the history of divorce. The second is in illustrating the operations of the Consistory of Geneva--an institution designed to control in all its variety the behavior of the entire population--which was established at Calvin's insistence in 1541. This mandate came shortly after the city officially adopted Protestantism in 1536, a time when divorce became legally possible for the first time in centuries. Robert Kingdon illustrates the changes that accompanied the earliest Calvinist divorces by examining in depth a few of the most dramatic cases and showing how divorce affected real individuals. He considers first, and in the most detail, divorce for adultery, the best-known grounds for divorce and the best documented. He also covers the only other generally accepted grounds for these early divorces--desertion. The second contribution of the book, to show the work of the Consistory of Geneva, is a first step toward a fuller study of the institution. Kingdon has supervised the first accurate and complete transcription of the twenty-one volumes of registers of the Consistory and has made the first extended use of these materials, as well as other documents that have never before been so fully utilized.

Stalin's American Spy tells the remarkable story of Noel Field, a Soviet agent in the US State Department in the mid-1930s. Lured to Prague in May 1949, he was kidnapped and handed over to the Hungarian secret police. Tortured by them and interrogated too by their Soviet superiors, Field's forced 'confessions' were manipulated by Stalin and his East European satraps to launch a devastating series of show-trials that led to the imprisonment and judicial murder of numerous Czechoslovak, German, Polish and Hungarian party members. Yet there were other events in his very strange career that could give rise to the suspicion that Field was an American spy who had infiltrated the Communist movement at the behest of Allen Dulles, the wartime OSS chief in Switzerland who later headed the CIA. Never tried, Field and his wife were imprisoned in Budapest until 1954, then granted political asylum in Hungary, where they lived out their sterile last years. This new biography takes a fresh look at Field's relationship with Dulles, and his role in the Alger Hiss affair. It sheds fresh light upon Soviet espionage in the United States and Field's relationship with Hede Massing, Ignace Reiss and Walter Krivitsky. It also reassesses how the increasingly anti-Semitic East European show-trials were staged and dissects the 'lessons" which Stalin sought to convey through them.

The floating world--the closely related pleasure and entertainment districts of Tokyo in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--embodied and idealized fashion, chic, and urbanity for its habituees, and inspired a profusion of woodblock prints depicting renowned courtesans and adored matinee idols. Considered ephemera in their time, these prints are treasured works of art today. In this volume of floating world prints (ukiyo-e), the authors present a selection of Kabuki actor portraits and theater scenes from The Art Institute of Chicago's world-renowned Buckingham Collection of Japanese Prints. Together with interpretive essays that place the prints in their historical and cultural context, the authors offer a catalog of 880 prints, 136 of them in color, containing the most complete and up- to-date information available about each print. Donald Jenkins's essay explains printmaking and explores the lives and milieu of the Katsukawa school print makers. Timothy Clark, in his essay, vividly depicts the world of Kabuki theater and describes a particular production of a popular play, from the vantage points of various participants. Osamu Ueda has provided dates and identification for the subjects of many of the prints in the collection, as well as biographies of the leading Kabuki actors and brief lives of the printmakers of the Katsukawa school.

Gerald K. Stone has collected books about Canadian Jewry since the early 1980s. This volume is a descriptive catalog of his Judaica collection, comprising nearly 6,000 paper or electronic documentary resources in English, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Logically organized, indexed, and selectively annotated, the catalog is broad in scope, covering Jewish Canadian history, biography, religion, literature, the Holocaust, antisemitism, Israel and the Middle East, and more. An introduction by Richard Menkis discusses the significance of the Catalog and collecting for the study of the Jewish experience in Canada. An informative bibliographical resource, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Canadian and North American Jewish studies.

A founding member of the early twentieth century German avant garde artists' group "Die Brücke," Ernst Ludwig Kirchner moved to Berlin in 1912 and became enthralled by what he called "the symphony of the great city." He responded to the intensity of Berlin's street life by recording the urban spectacle around him--most notably in "Berlin Street Scene" (1913-14), which is widely considered one of the greatest German paintings of the twentieth century. This beautifully illustrated, scholarly volume--written and edited by the noted independent curator and art historian Pamela Kort--provides a full exploration of the history and significance of Kirchner's masterpiece. Featuring full reproductions and details of "Berlin Street Scene" and other related artworks, as well as plentiful documentary photographs and supporting materials, this volume illuminates the ominous force of nervous energy and sexual tension that Kirchner sensed lurking beneath the veneer of civilized life.