EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

By the time you receive this issue, the Twenty-sixth Annual Congress of the Mediterranean Studies Association will have disappeared from your rearview mirror. But Benjamin Taggie opens Mediterranean Studies 32.2 with a fresh look at that unforgettable gathering. His letter of appreciation to the University of Valencia, host of the Congress, seals the event and the city in our collective memory.The articles in this issue also take a fresh look, reconsidering some longstanding assumptions about familiar ideas. For example, in his article “The Venetian Governor’s Palace on Ithaca,” Kyriakos Nikias offers a different view of the familiar asymmetry of center and periphery, considering imbalance itself as an assertion of power. Barbara Spinoula takes another kind of fresh look in “Τὸ ὄνομά σου εἰς τὸ μαρτυρολόγιον: Your Name in the Martyrology—A Funeral Oration for Frank Abney Hastings,” turning directly to the textual evidence of rhetoric for the continuity of classical Greek heroism in modern Greek nation-building instead of relying on thematic evidence. Joseph Agee follows a similar line of argument in “José Ortega y Gasset on Philosophy and Historical Thinking,” reading five works by the Spanish philosopher in the context of his moment, rather than viewing him in relation to other philosophers who were contemporary but divergent practitioners of the discipline. And finally, Didier Course, in “Is Clericalism a Product of Exportation? French Nuns in the Arab World (1835–2008),” leads us through a reconsideration of the history of French colonialism, examining it in its intricate relationship to the history of French female Catholic congregations in the Arab world.Three book reviews continue this reexamination of familiar ideas. Stephan Sander-Faes reviews History of the Adriatic: A Sea and Its Civilization by Egidio Ivetič, an innovative study of this “system of regions,” originally published as Storia dell’Adriatica and now translated into English by Geraldine Ludbrook. In her review of The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason by Josiah Ober, Susan O. Shapiro draws out the author’s perceptive analysis of ancient Greek thought on the tension between self-interest and the good of the community. The review is a reminder of how much we can learn from the Greek example. Beyond Orientalism: Ahmad Ibn Qāsim al-Hajarī Between Europe and Africa by Oumelbanine Zhiri is reviewed by Peter Kitlas, who finds in the author’s close reading of original texts the necessary foundation for her argument that this Morisco translator was not simply a conveyor of knowledge, but that he was actively involved in the production of the knowledge he transmitted. In the midst of winter, this issue brings readers a bit of sunny weather and some fresh ideas to remind us of life in the Mediterranean where change is the rule and the rules are always changing.