Conversion narratives were one of the earliest forms of public expression for American women writers, sanctioned and indeed welcomed for their personal, first-hand testimonies about seasons of religious grace. Two eighteenth-century women, Sarah Pierpont Edwards and Sarah Prince Gill, wrote conversion narratives of remarkable craft and insight. These pieces, collected for the first time in The Silent and Soft Communion, represent two generations of Calvinist evangelism, addressing the social implications of spiritual regeneration and presenting full, fascinating accounts of Calvinist...

Christine Buci-Glucksmann s"The Madness of Vision" is one of the mostinfluential studies in phenomenological aesthetics of the baroque.Integrating the work of Merleau-Ponty with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Renaissance studies in optics, and twentieth-century mathematics, theauthor asserts the materiality of the body and world in her aesthetictheory. All vision is embodied vision, with the body and the emotionscontinually at play on the visual field. Thus vision, once considered aclear, uniform, and totalizing way of understanding the material world, actually dazzles and distorts the perception...