Crimson,Scarlet, Murrey and Carnation: Red at the Court of Henry VIII

Abstract

Red, in all its various shades, was a colour with many associations at the court of Henry VIII. This article presents a thematic analysis of the key circumstances when red clothing was worn at Henry VIII's court, namely the robes worn at sessions of parliament by the nobility and secular clergy, the livery issued at coronations, as well as livery given to members of the king's household and his army in 1544. In addition, the king wore red for key days in the liturgical year as his medieval predecessors had, while it also formed part of his everyday wardrobe. Red was also significant for others at the Henrician court, including the secular and ecclesiastical élite. As such, it was a colour that was associated with wealth, status and parliamentary authority.     

Recent Archæological Researches in Rome

Luminescence dating has been applied to ceramic bricks sampled from a selection of English medieval ecclesiastical and secular buildings in Essex, Kent and Lincolnshire, ranging in age from the fourth to the late sixteenth centuries. The results obtained for the Anglo-Saxon churches, which included Brixworth, confirmed the reuse of Roman brick in all cases. The dates for the earliest medieval brick type indicate that brick making was reintroduced during the eleventh century, a century earlier than previously accepted, and dates for bricks from the same secular Tudor building indicate that the practice of recycling of building materials during the late medieval period was also applied to brick.     

Fronto, the bishops, and the crowd: Episcopal justice and communal violence in fifth-century Tarraconensis

Augustine's Epistula 11* was addressed to the bishop of Hippo by an aristocratic laymen called Consentius. The letter recounts, ostensibly verbatim, the tribulations of the Spanish monk Fronto in his efforts to prosecute what he regards as a heretical conspiracy amongst the clergy of Hispania Tarraconensis. Fronto's narrative is a rare first-person account of the late antique judicial process, in all its complexity of overlapping imperial and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. The present article examines the letter's evidence for judicial strategies and rhetoric, as well as the role of status, power and violence in influencing legal outcomes.     

The Colonial Religion of the Anglican Clergy: Western Australia 1830 to c. 1870

This article sets out to remedy an historiographical oversight in Australian history by identifying the principal characteristics of the religious culture of Anglican clergy in the colony of Western Australia between 1830 and about 1870. Using sources, both personal from clergy or clergy wives, and official correspondence with the colonial governments, and clergy correspondence to mission societies and their bishop, a number of features of clergy religion are delineated. They enable a comparison to be made between metropolitan and colonial Anglican clergy cultures. These include anxieties about status and income; the involvement of the clergy in charity, education, church building, and public worship; isolation and religious competition. While many of these were familiar to English clergy, they took on new aspects in the colonial context, which required the clergy there to become conscious that the colony was a new land, however much they attempted to remake it in their own ecclesiastical image.     

Security,secularism and gender: the Turkish military’s security discourse in relation to political Islam

This article examines the sexual and corporeal constructions of risk within the security discourses of the Turkish military in response to the rise of political Islam and Islamist identities in Turkey. I look at the Turkish military as the self-proclaimed guardian of the secular Republic, which, until recently, has actively configured political Islam as a risk to national security and ingrained such risk onto the body of the headscarved woman. My analysis covers a time frame from 1980s to late 2000s when the military issued memorandums and public statements against the rise of political Islam and pursued a belligerent campaign to erase ‘Islamist’ identities both from civilian politics and its own structure. The military implemented security regulations and dress codes to detect the ‘Islamist’ military personnel who are most conspicuously identified with the dress style of the women in their families. I explore these security regulations through women’s everyday and personal experiences in relation to their dress, headscarf style and comportment in military spaces and try to understand how ‘Islamism’ is constructed as a security threat in sexually and corporeally specific ways. I demonstrate how secularism is constructed, and needs to be protected, on the basis of a particular regime of gender and sexuality at the merger of traditional gender norms and secular Western modernity.     

Receiving Royals in Later Medieval York: Civic Ceremony and the Municipal Elite, 1478–1503

Abstract

This article examines the later medieval royal entry ceremony in York from the perspective of the social groups that designed and produced the spectacle. Deliberations of York's civic council comprise the main body of evidence for this study. It is argued that a mercantile oligarchy controlled the production of ceremony at every level. York's merchants dominated the design of civic receptions by excluding other secular and ecclesiastical groups native to the city from the decision-making process, and by resisting external interference by groups such as the nobility. The civic council made use of the topography of the city to reinforce the mercantile dimensions of the ceremony and to create a ceremonial space where they could communicate with the royal visitor. The merchant élite also adapted the form and content of the city's nuanced Corpus Christi celebrations to the royal entry. By these means they displayed and consolidated their position at the pinnacle of urban society at a time when their dominance over the city's economic, social and political structures was weakening.     

On the Geography of the Wars Between the Saxons of Northumberland and the Northern Britons,from the Battle of Menao to that of Kaltraez

Abstract

The techniques of spatial analysis are deployed to gain insights into the ways in which smaller churches of the 11th and 12th centuries were designed to be used. A range of plan types is discussed, including churches with one, two and three cells, linear and cross-shaped plans, and ‘round’ churches. The resulting analysis of the forms of buildings is then placed in the historical context of ecclesiastical reform, and it is argued that some of the changes in church layout were designed to separate the clergy from the laity, mirroring their increasing legal and social differentiation. It is also argued that the ways in which clergy used space were similar in all types of church examined, and that they show continuity from early Christian buildings to the late 12th and 13th centuries, when rising belief in the transubstantiation of the Host led to the evolution of new forms of clergy space     

Twelfth-century Italian confraternities as institutions of pastoral care

When studied through canon law and scholastic pastoralia produced in the universities in the thirteenth century and beyond, medieval pastoral care comes across as spiritual care, more specifically the administration of sacraments and preaching, provided by the clergy for the faithful. This article complicates that view by arguing that in the twelfth century, the laity alongside the clergy was active in the provision and organisation of pastoral care. The sources examined are the surviving statutes of five religious confraternities – along with the obituaries and sermons in two cases – in Italy that flourished in the twelfth century and before. Each of these confraternities was centred around a church, established after an apostolic ideal, included laymen and women and local pastoral clergy of all levels, met regularly to celebrate the Eucharist, prayed for the dead members and made public confessions. Members prayed for and attended to the corporal needs of each other in case of sickness. In the final analysis, these twelfth-century confraternities appear as transitional institutions between the early medieval monastic confraternities focusing on prayer and the late medieval and renaissance confraternities focusing on charity. Their study opens a window onto the lay expectations of and contribution to pastoral care in medieval Italy.     

‘As Poor as Church Mice’: Bishops,Finances, Posts,and Civil Duties in the Duchy of Warsaw, 1807–13

Abstract

Relations between the Catholic Church and the secular authorities of the Duchy of Warsaw were characterized by the one’s efforts to maintain its old privileges, and the other’s modernization of the law in a Josephist spirit. Cooperation and compromise between Church and state were possible, but their relations were full of tension, which sometimes erupted into open confl ict. This article presents a wider range of problems than has hitherto been noted in the historiography. From the beginning of 1807, the Catholic clergy was expected to fulfi l new duties, because of the shortage of administrative staff. Confl icts arose over the duties of patrons, payments for the clergy, their taxes, the government’s prohibition on plural holding of benefi ces cum cura animarum, and over ecclesiastical organization in general. The place of the Church was more clearly outlined in the Constitution of the Duchy of Warsaw (1807), but the concept of the ’state religion’ was seen by some clergymen as an opportunity to spread the Church’s infl uence. Further changes opened the higher ecclesiastical ranks to commoners. The civil government and the episcopate also differed on the role of religious orders, with the former looking to employ nuns and monks in social welfare and education. Bishops complained of ministers and offi cials who did not pay priests’ salaries punctually, if at all, but some episcopal interventions led to the authorities releasing the orders from fi nancial obligations and taxes. The Civil Code, introduced in 1808, assigned the duties of registrars to priests. Insofar as divorces and civil marriages were concerned, this role could place priests in contravention of canon law, although in practice almost no such cases occurred. Despite the work undertaken by representatives of the clergy and the civil authorities, no concordat, which would have resolved these issues, was agreed with the Holy See. As a result, the period of the Duchy brought the Catholic clergy great insecurity, alongside their hopes for the Polish nation.     

Social Welfare Provision at the Imperial Edge: Single Mothers and Abandoned Children in the Late Russian Empire

This article looks to the societal and imperial margins to examine attitudes towards social welfare provision in the final decades of the Russian Empire. Drawing on archival material from the Empire's Estliand province (now northern Estonia), the article focuses on the self-representation of single mothers and official discussions of abandoned children. Society was in flux in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as rapid industrialisation, urbanisation and rural-to-urban migration served to undermine traditional social structures, mentalities and identities. These changes were accompanied by the disruption of the traditional patriarchal gender order, as well shifting ideas about who ought to be responsible for taking care of vulnerable groups. In rural Estliand, Estonian-speaking unmarried women sought engagement with Russian imperial judicial structures to secure child maintenance. In the early 1900s, anxieties about the social impacts of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation and the development of new currents in philanthropy, meant that care for foundlings and abandoned children became a burning issue in the minds of Estliand's provincial officials. Examining single mothers and child abandonment in Estliand illuminates tensions between empire-wide and local mechanisms for dealing with social issues, as well as shifting attitudes to gender, the family and charity in light of urbanisation and modernisation.     

An Archive of Difference: Syrian Women,the Peddling Economy and US Social Welfare, 1880–1935

Historians have scrutinised the racial classifications of Arab immigrants in the census, in immigration documents and in early‐twentieth‐century naturalisation cases. However, recent scholarship has shown that other archives – ones that do not focus on interactions with the law – reveal a different process of Arab‐American racialisation. This article contends that looking in other archival spaces, specifically the US social welfare archive, shows how ideas about gender, sexual and class difference constituted early Arab‐American racialisation. Social welfare reformers in institutional settings, including the International Institute of Boston, the National Conference of Social Work and the pages of the social work periodical The Survey, systematically linked Syrian labouring practices with notions of dependency, sexual and gender deviance, and Orientalist difference. Syrian women were racialised through their participation in the peddling economy – a network of peddlers, suppliers and domestic labourers that sustained a widespread profession of the early Syrian American community. Syrian women's labouring practices conflicted with white middle‐class femininity and posed a threat to Syrian claims of whiteness. This analysis demonstrates the centrality of gender, sexuality and class to studies of early Arab America and demonstrates how Arab migrant women's labouring practices affected their communities’ standing in the American context.     

A good social work: women's clubs, libraries, and the construction of a secular society in Utah, 1890-1920

After the renunciation of polygamy, Mormon women formed secular women's clubs as a means of collaborating with non-Mormon women in the construction of a shared secular society. Their common goal was the establishment and maintenance of the mainstream American social order. Activity in these clubs extended women's sphere into the public realm through socially acceptable public activities such as the temperance cause, civic improvements, political reform movements, and child welfare. The women campaigned for public support of libraries as institutions that would construct, preserve, and transmit American culture, educate the young, strengthen the home and family, and reform society.     

Pope Leo of Bourges,clerical immunity and the early medieval secular

This article investigates the early medieval secular through the lens of clerical immunity – that is, the legal exemption of clerics from courts labelled as secular. It focusses on a short text, eventually attributed to Pope Leo, which was written in fifth-century Gaul to define this immunity. By pursuing this text’s fate as it was revised and put to use into the eleventh century, the article demonstrates how the early medieval secular was a religious category employed for different purposes at different times.     

Learning to be a man: public schooling and apprenticeship in late medieval Manosque

This article looks at teachers' contracts and apprenticeship contracts from the Provençal town of Manosque. It argues that, in late medieval Manosque, education was institutionalised and gendered. Manosquin society implemented formal systems in order to inculcate a particular type of masculine identity. This identity, a function of the growing burgher class of townsmen, was driven by rapid urban expansion, economics, and secularisation. This article demonstrates how gender acquisition took place. It also explores in detail the form and content of secular schooling for young boys and apprenticeship for adolescents.     

Salesclerks, sexual danger, and national identity in Egypt, 1920s-1950s

This article investigates change and continuity in anxieties about shopping during the first half of the twentieth century in Egypt to argue that department stores and their salesclerks became critical sites for enacting and challenging new notions of sexuality and citizenship. Retail innovations, such as commission pay, display, free entry, and large commercial staffs, became understood as sexual and moral problems because department stores blurred the boundaries between classes and were public spaces where unrelated men and women could mix. These concerns about sexuality in the 1920s were recycled and amplified in the late 1940s and early 1950s when salesclerks again came under scrutiny during debates over citizenship and ethnicity. I argue that the particular way this latter debate was barnacled by the concerns of the 1920s helped to delineate the broader society's reaction to the challenges of defining Egyptian nationality.     

The ‘Injunction of Jeremiah’: papal politicking and power in the Middle Ages

Throughout the Middle Ages, the ‘Injunction of Jeremiah’ (Jer. 1:10) was employed by countless ecclesiastical writers. Building on an established tradition, medieval contemporaries began applying the allegory of ‘uprooting and destroying, building and planting’ with an intentionally moral and political message. This article examines the Old Testament call narrative with a view to understanding how and why it served medieval popes and other high-ranked ecclesiastics as a political and rhetorical mechanism for legitimising ecclesiastical authority. It argues for a noticeable and deliberate shift in textual interpretation in the ninth century, after which period medieval popes and influential church figures alike marshalled the Injunction to help strengthen the centralising ideology of Rome and her bishop. The effect, it is concluded, contributed ultimately to reinforcing the papacy's claims to govern spiritual and temporal matters throughout Christian society.     

For God,king and country: the personal and the public in the Epitaphium Arsenii

Paschasius Radbertus's Epitaphium Arsenii is a lively and polemical dialogue that takes us straight into the controversies within the court‐connected and competitive elite of the 850s. The latter's membership, ecclesiastical as well as secular, measured each other against the yardstick of public service, and used failure to live up to this as a means of attack. On the one hand, the Epitaphium is a highly personal text, aimed at a restricted audience; on the other, it addresses the shared values of the Carolingian political leadership. This was not a world dominated by ‘the Church’, but one in which many ‘churches’ (monasteries) and their abbots actively participated in the political arena.     

Within sacred boundaries: the limitations of saintly justice in the province of Narbonne around the year 1000

ABSTRACT

Around the year 1000, judges from the ecclesiastical province of Narbonne (southern France and Catalonia) crafted judicial strategies that reinforced the region's Visigothic Code with the power of saints – conceived as gatekeepers to God's heavenly courtroom – to validate the oaths of witnesses. This practice merged liturgically grounded ideas about supernatural forces and space with a law code that prioritised secular authority. To forestall opposition to rulings, officials sometimes held proceedings in churches. This paper examines two unusual cases illustrating the challenges such strategies faced, given the perception that saints were not omnipresent. These disputes raise questions about the nature of saints, the degree of agency humans attributed to them and the utility of sacred spaces for legal ritual. In the province, saints were powerful, but constrained by their inability to act beyond the walls of consecrated sanctuaries housing their relics. This relegated saints to supplementary roles in law.     

‘Because their patron never dies’: ecclesiastical freedmen,socio-religious interaction,and group formation under the aegis of ‘church property’ in the early medieval west (sixth to eleventh centuries)

In the early medieval west, patronate, as adapted from Roman law, was a fundamental category in determining the legal status of freedmen. In many cases it entailed a basic set of obligations. In an increasing number of situations, however, the patron became an ecclesiastical institution, since slaves and freed persons were often given to churches and monasteries. As ecclesiastical institutions regarded their patronal rights over freed persons as part of inalienable church property, the patronal relationship became permanent and inheritable. In Eastern Francia (the Rhineland and beyond) this transformed ecclesiastical freedmen into religiously defined social groups with potentially distinct aims, religious tasks, and organizational structures, and a shared notion of freedom. From the Carolingian period onward, it even became attractive to enter voluntarily into this status. It is argued here that with its underlying network of socio-religious relations, patronate over ecclesiastical freedmen and censuales can be better understood when considered as an element of a ‘temple society’.     

Women's Admission to Guilds in Early‐Modern England: The Case of the York Merchant Tailors’ Company, 1693–1776

The admission of women into the York merchant tailors’ is a remarkable episode in the history of post‐medieval guilds. Within England, the York experience was probably exceptional; across Europe more generally, it can be classified as a rare phenomenon. The article analyses male and female merchant tailors and apprentices in order to identify the gender‐specific characteristics of women guild members. It argues that the decision of the York Company to admit women illustrates that guilds could be flexible in their responses to female employment, depending on local conditions, particularly the attitude of the civic corporation. In consequence, generalisations about the relationship between guild regulation and women's work need to be tested against the results of specific case studies.