Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages
The game of chess reached western Europe by the year 1000, and within several generations it had become one of the most popular pastimes ever. Both men and women, and even priests played the game despite the Catholic Church's repeated prohibitions. Characters in countless romances, chansons de geste, and moral tales of the eleventh through twelfth centuries also played chess, which often symbolized romantic attraction or sexual consummation. In Power Play, Jenny Adams looks to medieval literary representations to ask what they can tell us both about the ways the game changed as it was naturalized in the West and about the society these changes reflected. In its Western form, chess featured a queen rather than a counselor, a judge or bishop rather than an elephant, a knight rather than a horse; in some manifestations, even the pawns were differentiated into artisans, farmers, and tradespeople with discrete identities. Power Play is the first book to ask why chess became so popular so quickly, why its pieces were altered, and what the consequences of these changes were. More than pleasure was at stake, Adams contends. As allegorists and political theorists connected the moves of the pieces to their real-life counterparts, chess took on important symbolic power. For these writers and others, the game provided a means to figure both human interactions and institutions, to envision a civic order not necessarily dominated by a king, and to imagine a society whose members acted in concert, bound together by contractual and economic ties. The pieces on the chessboard were more than subjects; they were individuals, playing by the rules.
The elements of Chaucer's Troilus
This study of T&C, which we ought to 
have noticed here somewhat sooner, is notable for its use of VC to 
create what Wood openly calls a "Gowerian" reading of Chaucer's poem 
(pp. 168-69). The passages from VC that he draws upon most heavily 
are the opening chapters of Book 5, on love and knighthood; Book 6, 
chapter 12, on the king; the indictment of contemporary England in 
Book 7, chapter 24; and the general treatment of free will and fortune 
in Books 1 and 2. Citing the dedication of T&C to "moral Gower" and 
the likelihood of extensive personal contacts between the two men, he 
argues that Chaucer could not have presented the poem to Gower if it 
contained a view of love radically different from the dedicatee's. He 
concludes that T&C, like VC, is a condemnation of illicit passion, 
particularly among the nobility; that like VC, it was written at least 
in part in response to the grave social and political disturbances of 
the 1370's; and that "the issues of love, freedom, marriage, and loyalty in Old Troy [in T&C] are essentially the same as those treated by 
John Gower in his poem Vox Clamantis about the New Troy" (p. 165). 
Wood refers to CA only in passing, and then implying it advances the 
same straightforward view of love as VC; he gives short shrift to the 
suggestions that Gower's reading of T&C might have inspired the more 
complex and more sophisticated treatment of love in CA. On at least 
one small point Wood may be corrected: the many references to blind 
ness in a poem dedicated to Gower are merely coincidental, for the 
Dedicatory Epistle to VC that Wood cites as evidence of Gower's blind 
ness (p. 162) was only added after 1399. 
 Reviews by Ian Bishop, SAC, 7 (1985), 270-72; and A.V.C. Schmidt, 
Medium AEvum, 55 (1986), 135-37). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.1]
Laboratory Animal Models for Brucellosis Research
Brucellosis is a chronic infectious disease caused by Brucella spp., a Gram-negative facultative intracellular pathogen that affects humans and animals, leading to significant impact on public health and animal industry. Human brucellosis is considered the most prevalent bacterial zoonosis in the world and is characterized by fever, weight loss, depression, hepato/splenomegaly, osteoarticular, and genital infections. Relevant aspects of Brucella pathogenesis have been intensively investigated in culture cells and animal models. The mouse is the animal model more commonly used to study chronic infection caused by Brucella. This model is most frequently used to investigate specific pathogenic factors of Brucella spp., to characterize the host immune response, and to evaluate therapeutics and vaccines. Other animal species have been used as models for brucellosis including rats, guinea pigs, and monkeys. This paper discusses the murine and other laboratory animal models for human and animal brucellosis.