It is always a risky venture to comment on an article that focuses on issues that lie outside one's own immediate research—risky because one is not familiar with most of the primary sources and with many of the controversies among the specialists in the field. On the other hand, as the gynecologist is just as much a doctor as an ophthalmologist or a surgeon, and they all aim at curing their patients of disease, historians specializing in various fields also belong to the same guild. A perspective from a certain distance can be especially useful if two historians ask closely related questions about the social, intellectual, and political history of a region they both belong to, but make attempts at the answers using differing materials from different epochs.