Patron saints of early medieval Italy. AD c. 350–800. History and hagiography in ten biographies. Translated and intro. by Nicholas Everett. (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Translations, 5.) Pp. xii + 276 incl. 1 map and 2 colour plates. Durham: Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University/Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2016. $30 (paper). 978 0 88844 565 0 - Volume 69 Issue 2

Background Juvenile-onset Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (JSLE) is a multisystem autoimmune disease characterised by the presence of autoantigens. These may result from increased numbers of apoptotic neutrophils and dysregulated clearance of these neutrophils by phagocytes. Serum from JSLE patients contains high levels of type 1 (α and β) and 2 (γ) interferons (IFN). In the context of JSLE being an inflammatory condition, JSLE neutrophils are likely to be more activated in comparison to healthy, non-inflammatory control neutrophils. Tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-α can prime neutrophils (demonstrated by CD62L shedding), and provides an inflammatory setting for neutrophils as seen in JSLE. Gene expression analysis has shown an IFN and granulocyte signature within SLE; however the interaction between IFN and neutrophils in regards to apoptosis, and the pathogenesis of JSLE, is yet to be elucidated. Objectives To investigate the effect of type 1 and 2 IFNs on neutrophil apoptosis of naïve and primed neutrophils Methods Neutrophils isolated from healthy control adult donors (n=5) were either unstimulated or primed with TNF-α (1μg/ml) for 30 mins. The neutrophils were subsequently incubated with IFN-α (10μg/ml), IFN-γ (1μg/ml) or IFN-β (1μg/ml) for 6hrs. The expression of CD62L after 30 min TNF-α incubation was measured using flow cytometry using CD62L-APC (DREG-56) antibody staining with IgG-APC isotype control. The percentage of apoptotic neutrophils were measured after 6hr IFN incubation using flow cytometry via annexin V FITC staining. Results CD62L expression was reduced in neutrophils exposed to TNF-α compared with unstimulated neutrophils (geometric mean: 1.61 ± 0.30 vs 11.43 ± 1.44). Apoptosis (% ± SEM) was significantly reduced upon IFN-α (6.57 ± 1.18%, p=0.04) and IFN-γ (10.79 ± 1.92%, p=0.04) incubation compared to unstimulated (22.01 ± 3.18%), although IFN-β (20.30 ± 5.10%, p=0.35) and TNF-α alone (26.40 ± 4.30%, p=0.50) had little effect. In neutrophils pre-treated with TNF-α, there was significant increase in apoptosis when subsequently exposed to either IFN-α (48.91 ± 4.84%, p=0.04), IFN-γ (43.09 ± 2.99%, p=0.04) or IFN-β (39.41 ± 3.23%, p=0.04) compared to unstimulated neutrophils. Conclusions There is evidence that both type 1 and 2 IFNs contribute to the development of JSLE. Here we show a differential effect between IFNs on neutrophil apoptosis indicating a potential pro-apoptotic effect of IFNs on neutrophils in a JSLE environment through the pre-incubation with TNF-α. IFNs may contribute to the increase in neutrophil apoptosis in JSLE and lead to an increase in autoantigens that are fundamental to JSLE pathogenesis. References Bennett, L. et al. (2003) Interferon and granulopoiesis signatures in systemic lupus erythematosus blood. J. Exp. Med. 197, 711–723. Kim, T. et al. (1987) Serum levels of interferons in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus. Clin. Exp. Immunol. 70, 562–69. Midgley, A. et al. (2009). The role of neutrophil apoptosis in juvenile-onset systemic lupus erythematosus. Arthritis Rheum. 60, 2390–2401. Wittmann, S. et al. (2004) Cytokine upregulation of surface antigens correlates to the priming of the neutrophil oxidative burst response. Cytometry A. 57, 53–62. Disclosure of Interest None declared

K. ANIPA (ed.), Juan de Valdes, Dialogo de la lengua: A Diplomatic Edition. Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, MHRA Critical Texts vol. 38. 2014. 133 pp. ISBN 978-1-907322-82-2.Juan de Valdes's Dialogo de la lengua (c. 1533) has been edited many times - Anipa lists seventeen earlier editions - but never yet by a sociolinguist. This is surprising, since the Dialogo is essentially a sociolinguistic study of sixteenth-century Castilian rather than a work of literature, or a grammar. Nor has it yet been given a diplomatic edition, which is what serious scholars in the field want to be able to use; this attractive edition is as diplomatic as is humanly possible, within the limitations of computer technology, reproducing the manuscript (BN 8629) with its quirks of underlining, abbreviation, capitals and original spelling. The result is in some respects startling, as we can compare what Valdes says about contemporary usage with what he actually does, noting that he manifests variation in the same way as he says that others do. Anipa has made his high reputation mainly by doing just this, in his PhD and his consequent remarkable first book (2001), comparing what the linguists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries said about spoken language with what contemporary novelists and dramatists actually wrote when trying to represent it, and here is the ideal case: a sociolinguist whose own usage is now open to our view. Valdes and Anipa both know that linguistic variation and inconsistency are not only normal but useful, whereas other editors have tried, to varying extents, to normalize the very text that shows such normalization not to be helpful.Over the last ten years or more, Anipa has already written much about Valdes, and the Dialogo in particular. So not everything in the brief introduction (1-32) is completely new, but it bears succinct repetition. Much of what has generally been said about the work must be wrong, as Anipa shows convincingly. For example, it is not a record of an actual conversation (as has often been baldly stated, without discussion), but an invention of a traditional kind: the dialogue form is 'a fictional shroud on a non-fictional subject' (18). It is not particularly destined for an Italian-reading audience, since Valdes was working in Italy on behalf of the Spanish crown and in a Spanish-speaking and Spanishreading milieu. It has been carefully thought out; Anipa reconstructs from internal references what seems to have been an original Table of Contents (15), with a prologue followed by eight separate sections corresponding to sensible divisions of the subject matter, and the edition prints the whole text according to this pattern, with each section beginning on a new page (in an uncharacteristic departure from the usual close imitation of the manuscript). …

CONSUELO GARCIA GALLARIN, Diccionario historico de nombres de America y Espana (estudio preliminar). Madrid: Silex. 2014. 915 pp. ISBN 978-84-7737-789-4.The fact that this historical dictionary fills over 900 large 2-column pages with information about personal first names (not surnames, and not toponyms), but is still described in the title as a preliminary study, shows what a thorough worker Consuelo Garcia Gallarin is. She has been working in this field for many years, as well as publishing an equally thorough study of Latinisms in Spanish (El cultismo en la historia de la lengua espanola, 2008, reviewed in BHS 85.5: 739-40). This is a historical dictionary in the same sense as the OED is; each entry is copiously illustrated with quoted examples presented in chronological order, precisely dated and located. These do not extend back to Roman or Visigothic times; but early Mediaeval sources are investigated in great detail, and subsequent ones are also quoted from every century, including the present one. We can tell from this how fashions in naming have risen and fallen in different ages. In the event, the data extracted from the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica (INE) for 2010 are among the highlights, even if a reader might feel it tells us more than we wish to know. For example, we learn (263) that in Spain, in 2010, the name Concepcion was the registered name of 176,408 women of all ages, 353 of which had been born abroad - we are even told where; Maria Concepcion of 64,427 (489 born abroad); Inmaculada Concepcion of 6,249; Concha of 1,034. Naturally, Consuelo Garcia is unable to tell us how many of the other 247,084 are usually called 'Concha' in real life. I am not sure I believe all the etymological information, either: Conchita, for example, is said to be borrowed from Italian Concetta rather than being a diminutive of Concha; which may perhaps have been true historically, but cannot be true now. And we can cross-refer to Inmaculada, if we wish: on page 510 we further discover that Inmaculada is the name of 82,766 women (599 born abroad) and Maria Inmaculada of 28,294, especially common in western Andalucia (260 born abroad). There could well be a doctoral researcher somewhere some day who finds these numbers invaluable.Some of the basic information is hard to believe, though; apparently there were (in Spain in 2010) 790 men called Zeus, concentrated in Valencia (904), and 655 called Elvis, related unconvincingly to a sixth-century Irish saint (353-54). …

SIZEN YIACOUP, Frontier Memory: Cultural Conflict and Exchange in the romance fron- terizo. London: MHRA. 2013. 158 pp. ISBN 978-1-907322-91-4.There is a small group of genuine oral ballads which were set and performed in the frontier areas of fifteenth-century Andalucia, and continued to be sufficiently popular for them to be attested in written form a century or so later. These are known collectively as the romances fronterizos. They have been studied by many modern scholars with a variety of agendas, often on the basis of an assump- tion that the composers and performers must have been taking sides in the religious conflicts of the age; but this kind of analysis has not proved easy, since the ballads tend to be ambiguous, or, in Sizen Yiacoup's view, manifesting 'robust polyvalence' (65); as a result, the effect of each performance depends largely on the point of view of the performer. Angus Mackay's realization (first expressed in BHS 53 [1976], 15-33) that there were many cultural features common to each side of that frontier is developed further in this splendid account, as the appeal of these ballads so long after the loss of the frontier society which gave rise to them is seen in terms of a historical memory of a culture that has been lost. Almost all of these ballads concern episodes of war rather than peace, and yet there were cross-cultural military values as well.In this account, the historical context of the original ballad episode is neatly allied to the historical context of the later time that the ballad is attested in written form; it is not surprising, from this viewpoint, that this nostalgic genre is being perpetuated just as the official anti-morisco policies are becoming increasingly fierce. There are genu- inely illuminating analyses to come from this approach, as, for example, the sugges- tion that the spectacular virtuoso brilliance of Reduan's army, destined to fail at Jaen in the campaign of 1407 (as the audience knew, but the original participants did not), would have had a special resonance in the minds of listeners after the no less splendid Armada set off confidently for the English Channel and then came a cropper in 1588 (66). This comparison is convincing because the earliest publication of the Reduan ballad is almost certainly the one published in 1595 in Gines Perez de Hita's Guerras civiles de Granada. It had also been realistic in its original context: the lines 'iQuanta de la yegua baya! iQuanta de la marlota verde!', for example, are not literary tropes but a reference to the real grey mares, which indeed were the Granadans' favourite warhorses, and to the robes they preferred to wear while riding them. It was also intriguing to be reminded that Moraima was the name of Boabdil's favourite wife, and that she was remembered long afterwards, retained in the general memory, so this memory is bound to have coloured the point of the Moraima ballad (42-45); the connection had never occurred to me, and it is illumi- nating. …

STEVEN N. DWORKIN, A History of the Spanish Lexicon: A Linguistic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. xii + 321 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-954114-0.The great majority of the words used in everyday Spanish speech have been there (in some phonetic form) for at least 2,000 years. But many of the words in the dictionary have come from some other source, and these are the ones Steven Dworkin concentrates on in this crisply but densely written survey. Thus, as the author realizes, the book has an inappropriate title; instead of concentrating on the adventures of the native vocabulary, such as the many kinds of semantic change, metaphors, lexical loss, prefixes and suffixes, compounding and acronyms (all of which he knows a great deal about), or even the lexical aspects of phonetic and grammatical change, we have here surveys of the pre-Roman, Greek and Celtic borrowings in Latin, and a chapter each on words taken from Germanic, Arabic, Gallo-Romance (both French and Occitan), Italian, Latin (cultismos), Portuguese and Catalan, languages of the New World and English. Spanish is thus taken for these purposes to begin in 218 BC, with the initial advent of Roman troops into the Peninsula; that is, the identification of the start of the language is based on geographical and historical criteria rather than linguistic (despite the subtitle of the book). Since the majority of the Peninsula's speakers in the initial stages of Roman occupation had a different first language, it seems to Dworkin more reasonable to regard the words that survive from these languages as merely staying where they were. The problems connected with the name we give to the spoken language of the first millennium (is it Latin? Romance? Ibero-Romance? Hispano-Romance? Very Old Spanish?) are rather neatly finessed by his references to 'the Latin-Romance evolutionary continuum' (49) and 'the Hispano- Latin / Hispano-Romance continuum' (80).There are several words with controversial etymology discussed through the several chapters, one after another in long breathless sections without much detailed analysis, often without deciding between competing proposals. Thus Harri Meier's determination to trace every Spanish word back to a Latin etymon, often affixed in some unattested form, rather than to the varyingly plausible pre-Roman or Germanic entity suggested by his fellow Germanic scholars, is admired but not quite recommended; Dworkin was Yakov Malkiel's student, after all, and the resultant multi-pronged caution is only to be expected. Yet one general feature that gradually stands out from his mass of brief but individual and intelligent commentaries is Dworkin's predilection for classifying doubtful cases as borrowings from France: in preference, that is, to envisaging indigenous development (e.g. in the case of flor (121); I find the postulated French origin for flor implausible); or direct borrowing from Germanic (e.g. blanco, which is a Germanism in French, and is seen here as subsequently a Gallicism in Spanish (69 and 123), which could well be right); or from Portuguese (e.g. Old Spanish coita (183- 84)); or from English (e.g. parque (129 and 215) and many other words). The identification of suspected Catalanisms is aided here by a careful look at Corominas's two etymological dictionaries (of Catalan and of Castilian), and if the Catalan word is textually attested before the Castilian that is, usually sensibly, regarded as almost clinching evidence; yet Corominas is often criticized in other cases, usually on the basis of data which he was not aware of at the time.There are many acute observations. The whole idea of 'archaism' is roundly and rightly criticized, for example (49); if a usage seems archaic, that is because a cognate word elsewhere has developed in some way, and in such a case it is the volatility of the cognate that needs explaining, not the supposed archaism, which has merely not done anything at all. Some views quoted from other authors seem to be accepted too uncritically, however; he seems, for example, to give credence to Bonfante's idea that all linguistic innovations in antiquity had to have spread out from Rome, an idea now generally seen as eccentric. …

OROSIUS, Seven Books of History Against the Pagans. Translated by Andrew Fear. Translated Texts For Historians, Vol. 54. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2010. viii + 456 pp. ISBN 978-1-84631-239-7.The historian Orosius (c. 385-c. 418) was born in Gallaecia (perhaps Braga or La Coruna), leftthe Peninsula at the time of the Barbarian invasions, in c. 411, went to North Africa and met Augustine, went to Palestine and met Jerome, returned to Africa, visited Menorca and wrote his lengthy Seven Books of History against the Pagans; and then disappeared from history. As Andrew Fear says in his brief but illuminating Introduction, 'It seems unlikely that such a pugnacious character would have rested on his laurels, and it is therefore likely that Orosius met an early death at around the age of 40, probably in North Africa' (5-6). 'Pugnacious' seems right. Orosius's History is a history of the World, both Christiancentred and Rome-centred, essentially taking the unfashionably optimistic view that contemporary history, including the recent sack of Rome in August 410, was part of God's plan, and that Rome was still in the process of fulfilling its divine destiny to bring Christianity to the whole world.His was a serious-minded approach, but if Orosius is remembered at all these days, he tends to be regarded as something of a figure of fun; Fear quotes Hobsbawm's comment that 'No historian today cares a rap what [he] wrote' (25), and certainly his account of early Roman history is strange in several respects, but his is an important account for our assessment of the times he lived in and, in particular, for an understanding of contemporary Christian attitudes (which are crucial to an appreciation of what people thought was happening at that time). Orosius admired his senior colleague Augustine, without sharing all his views, and it has been said that actual events proved Orosius wrong; but, as Fear does not quite say, the subsequent continuation and spread of Christianity from its Western base at Rome, which could not have been expected in 410, might well be interpreted by a modern Orosius as vindicating his originally sanguine long-term instincts. These were to appeal to later generations, at any rate; Orosius's work, surviving still in 200 manuscripts, was well known and to some extent influential in later times, being translated into several other languages, including into Old English at the court of Alfred The Great and into Arabic in late ninth-century Muslim Spain, presumably for the benefit of Arabic-reading Christians, although the work also went on to influence Ibn Khaldun.Spanish historians understandably tend to see him as one of theirs, but he was also part of the common Christian heritage, being so well known that Dante could refer to him in Paradiso without mentioning him by name and expect his readers to know who he meant: 'quello avvocato de' tempi cristiani del cui latino Augustin si provide' [that advocate of the Christian times with whose Latin work Augustine was provided] (Paradiso, X: 119-20). …