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History Workshop Journal of, and identification with, such a language, -that war deaths become bearable, and war itself becomes acceptable. The language of remembrance acts to disguise dominant ideologies just as it acts to console the bereaved. The British live in a nation which not only celebrates the Second World War, in which millions died, as a central aspect of its national identity, but which also uses the public memory of this war as part of the rhetoric which justified the act of sending young men away to kill and die in the Falklands and Gulf wars. This book provides a potent reminder of the power of the language of sacrifice in past wars as a means of justifying future ones.
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poration into official discourse, most notably the White Poppy campaign of the Women's Co-operative Guild, opposed by the British Legion on the grounds that it diverted funds from the Haig Poppy Appeal. Despite these changes, Remembrance Day, and its centre, the two-minute silence, remained a widely shared and unifying experience throughout the 1930s. Ironically, this was to be ended by the declaration of war in September 1939. Central to this impressive study of the meanings of Remembrance Day is Gregory's insistence on the continuing importance of the 'language of sacrifice' in shared, public memories of war. It is only through a widespread acceptance

Short Reviews
MICHAEL W. DOLS, Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, edited by Diane E. Immisch

Oxford, Clarendon Press, pp. xvi. 543, ISBN 0-19-820221-0 reviewed by Aziz Al-Azmeh

This posthumous work by Michael Dols set itself the very ambitious task of reconstructing the question of madness in 'medieval Islamic society'. A work of great erudition, the book begins with an account of medieval Arabic medical notions of madness, which constituted a highly systematized and concatenated version of Galenic humoural notions and detailed accounts of melancholic pathology. The book then moves on to hospitalization, care within the family, and to various kinds of treatment, physical and psychological, such as cauterization, purgation, suggestion, music, restraint, and exorcism. Religious healing and the allied notions of possession and its cognates are then taken up. Three types of fools are then discussed:

the romantic fool who lost his mind because of love, the wise fool, and the holy fool. Finally, the status of mental deficiency and incapacity in Muslim legal text is sketched. The task set by the author was clearly formidable, and the main interest of the book, I think, lies in its indication of the wide purview of the topic and the multiplicity of literature it calls up: medical, religious, literary, legal. The treatment of the material, however, is unfortunately gravely wanting, and the material seems to have been haphazardly arranged, or rather simplistically classified, along topical lines, without the emergence of lines of analysis or of augmentation. The reader also gets the distinct air of an unfinished book

Reviews (though it did have an editor), with much redundant material comprising the author's written-up notes - for instance, on the history of Galenism, on the cult of Muhammad - and with too many typographic errors, misreadings of Arabic words, and small errors of fact. The best accounts in the book are of the medical notions of insanity, and the legal treatments of the loss of reason. These are, after all, based on bodies of literature quite easy to interpret and paraphrase. For the rest, the book seems constrained by a very old-fashioned orientalism, hidebound by a textualist notion of reality and a rather rudimentary philological mode of interpretation. The book does not yield a consequential sense of history, and seems confined in a 'medieval Islamic society' which appears homogeneous and which lasts until

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today, from which ethno-psychiatric studies are used to make arguments concerning the Middle Ages. Though glimpses of this fascinating topic are provided, the opportunity is missed to treat the material according to methods of historical study which are standard in other histories. It is inadequate, in the study of the romantic fool, for instance, to paraphrase two or three literary treatments of the topos. There is in existence a large body of anecdotal, hagiographical, historical, and biographical material which could have been used for depicting the various social, imaginary, medical and other constructions of madness across the whole span of medieval and early modern Muslim societies, but this more fruitful but rather more demanding and theoretically sophisticated approach was unfortunately not considered.

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HARRY HENDRICK, Child Welfare. England 1872-1989. London: Routledge, 1994. ISBN0415007739. Pp. xv + 354. L45.00. reviewed by Jane Lewis There are so remarkably few general more discussion of sexuality. But Henbooks on the history of children that I drick has performed a great service in was unsure as to what to expect from this writing a textbook of this kind, in parone. Harry Hendrick states clearly that ticular it is extremely valuable to have his approach to the subject of child the post-war treatment of children set in welfare will be through social policy. Yet a longer historical perspective. even with the parameters of his subject The relationship between parents, relatively closely defined, the territory children and the state is in any case a he covers is huge, ranging through the valuable starting point in the history of late nineteenth-century work of rescue children. It was as great a preoccupation and reclamation, and infant life protec- at the beginning of this century as it is tion, to the early twentieth-century child proving to be at the end of it, and it has welfare movement, the inter-war em- not received adequate recognition from phasis on child psychology and mental historians who have tended to focus testing, and the post-war stress on delin- rather exclusively on the struggle bequency and most recently on child tween individualism and collectivism. In abuse. Inevitably the focus on social so far as the relationship between policy means that much of interest and parents, children and the state has atimportance cannot be pursued, for ex- tracted attention at all, it has tended to ample legislation on the age of consent take the form of a debate about how far and punishment of incest require much the state has sought to impose predomi-