Ordinary Writing and Scribal Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spain: Memory Books

This article is a study of the survival of scribal culture in nineteenth-century Spain in the form of the so-called ‘memory books’ (libros de memorias). I analyse their relationship with the educational developments of the period, as well as the material characteristics and the content of these texts, in order to define their typical features. These texts were the products of hybrid writing practices, in the sense that several elements were frequently superimposed on one another: economic news, personal, family and social events and even historical details. Hence the similarity between the memory books and other genres such as account books (libros de cuentas) and family books (libros de familia). Lastly, I will examine some nineteenth-century examples as epigones of a writing genre which had its origins in the later Middle Ages and Early Modern period.

“One morning, while tidying up the bedroom, Rosa opened the drawer in the trunk where Cholo kept his papers. There she found the papers about the property and, in a corner, together with the Family Book and the social security booklet, the papers from the bank […]. And she was about to put it away when it occurred to her to take off the elastic band around the big folder which Cholo had kept from his time in Switzerland. There were things, names and so on that she didn’t understand, but in the middle there were also some of the cards she had sent from Aran.”1 1.?Manuel Rivas, En salvaje compañía (1994) (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1998), 100–101. View all notes     

Between Virgins and Priests: The Feminisation of Catholicism and Priestly Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Spain

The feminisation of religion in the nineteenth-century has been broadly discussed by historians and sociologists. Considering the main contributions of that debate from a critical perspective, this article defends the hypothesis that the Catholic Church identified itself with the same characteristics with which it defined femininity in the nineteenth-century through the symbolic link with the Virgin Mary. Although this discursive feminisation of Catholicism left laymen in a difficult situation, it did contribute to reinforcing the patriarchal and hierarchical structure of the Church. The great challenge to bishops and priests, the leading subjects in the project of re-Christianising society, was to demonstrate their condition as men within a feminised organisation. This article will mainly focus on Spain, although with the international perspective that any study about Catholicism requires.     

解读霍夫施塔特的地位革命史观

理查德·霍夫施塔特是二战后美国著名的历史学家。在他的史学思想中,地位革命史观是引人注目的,在上个世纪50年代的社会语境中曾经引发了众多学者的激烈讨论。这一史观强调,在社会转型的关键时期,经济利益并非导致社会变化的唯一决定性要素,体现人的尊严的“地位政治”同样具有不容忽视的作用,有时甚至会引发社会性革命。本文力图通过解读这一史观,从一个侧面展现霍氏的史学思想及其他对现实生活的反思。     

The Karaghiozis Performance in Nineteenth-Century Greece

Abstract

Out of the vacuum of the sparsely developed dramatic environment of nineteenth-century Greece grew a performance totally unrelated to the largely literary and western-European oriented theatre of Athens under the influence of the king and his court. It was a performance which, unlike the literary theatre, aroused the interest of the common man through its use of folk tales, anecdotes, songs, dialects, costumes and characters as the basis of its presentation. Originating in the Turkish folk form Karagöz, the Greek performance, called Karaghiozis, found its roots in an entertainment with which Greeks both on the mainland and in other parts of the Balkans and Middle East were already familiar.     

The Deleterious Dominance of The Times in Nineteenth-Century Scholarship

The Times was a mid-nineteenth-century newspaper phenomenon, defeating rival London newspapers through its skilful management, advanced technology, greater editorial resources and access to powerful politicians. Its authority enabled it to make and break governments. However, the uniqueness of The Times limits its usefulness as a historical source. This article begins with a brief history of The Times, before analysing how the newspaper remains centre stage in the historiography of journalism and of nineteenth-century culture more broadly, despite the digitization of provincial and other London papers. Over-dependence on The Times, it argues, has exaggerated the significance of London daily newspapers and underplayed the importance of weekly papers, particularly those published outside London. The Times was unusual because it was a metropolitan rather than provincial paper, with a focus on political news and a dearth of lighter, broader content, or news of events around the UK. Using quantitative analysis of recent scholarship, the article demonstrates that unwarranted conclusions are still drawn from over-use of this source and from a wider view that it was representative of nineteenth-century newspapers in general. The conclusion urges a more geographically and culturally nuanced approach to Victorian newspapers, beyond a metropolitan-focused political and cultural history.     

Woman in Nineteenth-Century America

The political use of Woman as a universal category, transcending social divisions, has fallen into disrepute. Yet it is necessary, in looking at gender history, to understand not just its obfuscations but its sources and political effects. The essay proposes an intellectual and political history of the uses of the term Woman and a social history of the heterogeneous mixtures of women from different social groups who seized the term and gave it force. Discussing recent scholarship on white and Afro-American women, Stansell argues for the importance of moments of extravagant universalising to the history of women in politics.     

Wilful Design: The Sampler in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This article recovers the cultural significance of the sampler in nineteenth-century Britain. I argue that this mainstay of female education models a circular shape of development in which the young girl painfully revises earlier experience; the subject is conceived of as perpetually reworking herself without obvious linear progression. Though this article is situated against canonical works of Victorian fiction, it focuses primarily on actual samplers to argue that these pieces of childhood embroidery should be recognized as a form of life-writing. After establishing the conventions of the sampler, I turn to an apparently anomalous example that exemplifies the temporal and affective patterns ingrained by the pedagogical exercise of sampler sewing. My central artefact is an autobiographical sampler from the needle of a 17-year-old Sussex girl named Elizabeth Parker. Currently housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, this textile from 1830 recounts Parker’s childhood experiences in service, and the horrors of physical abuse and sexual assault that led her to contemplate suicide, all compressed into 46 lines of cross-stitch. I argue that the sampler as a pedagogical tool resists the Bildungsroman’s model of the self as formed through temporal progression towards self-contained adult agency. Instead, the sampler materially and thematically enforces the recursive temporal dynamics of conversion.     

The Nineteenth-Century Colonial Archaeology of Suakin,Sudan

This paper seeks to examine the role of the built environment as a tool of nineteenth-century British colonial expression within the Red Sea island town of Suakin, Sudan. Within Suakin and its environs, four major European focal points were examined through the use of archaeological survey and excavation. These were; (1) waterfront development (2) centers of colonial management, (3) terrestrial and maritime communication and (4) defense. The central argument of the paper is that economic and social control was maintained through the creation of new urban morphologies and European domination of existing urban space.     

Folk Elements in Nineteenth-Century Puritanism

THE IDIOM OF THE PEOPLE. By JAMES REEVES. Heinemann, 1958. Pp. xii, 244. Reviewed by Margaret Dean-Smith.

EUSKALERRIKO IPUIÑAK: Basque Folktales. Edited with notes and Spanish versions by A. IRIGARAY. Itxaropena Argitaldaria, Zarauz, 1957. Pp. 225, 40 pesetas. Reviewed by P. L. Henry.

DAHOMEAN NARRATIVE. A Cross-Cultural Analysis. By MELVILLE J. and FRANCES S. HERSKOVITS. Northwestern University Press, Evanstown, 1958. Pp. xvi, 490. Reviewed by Jack Berry.

FOLKLORE OF OTHER LANDS. By A. M. SELVI, L. KAHN, R. C. SOULE. S. F. Vanni; New York. Five dollars. Reviewed by K. M. Briggs.

ALTE NEWE ZEITUNG. A sixteenth-century collection of fables. Edited by ELI SOBEL. Folklore Studies x, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1958. Pp. xii, 64. Reviewed by E. Ettlinger.

BRAUCHTUMSGEBÄCKE UND WEIHNACHTSSPEISEN. Ein volkskundlicher Beitrag zur österreichischen Kulturgeographie. By E. BURGSTALLER. Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für den Volkskundeatlas in Österreich, vol. ii, Linz, 1957. Pp. 136, (18), 7; 5 plates, 22 maps. Reviewed by E. Ettlinger.

AN ANALYTICAL INDEX TO THE JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE, Vol. 1–67, 68, 69, 70. By TRISTRAM P. COFFIN. American Folklore Society, Philadelphia, 1958. Pp. xvi, 383. $6.50. Reviewed by Wilfrid Bonser.

DEUTSCHES HANDWERKERLEBEN UND DER AUFSTIEG DER STADT. By MAX RUMPF. W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1955. Pp. 244, 106 photographs. WÜRTTEMBERGISCHES JAHRBUCH FÜR VOLKSKUNDE, 1956. W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1956. Pp. 164; 12 photographs, 1 map and 2 drawings. Reviewed by E. Ettlinger.

DAS VOTIVBILD. By L. KRISS-RETTENBECK. Hermann Rinn, Munich, 1958. Pp. 185; Plates 173. Reviewed by E. Ettlinger.

THE SINGING MOUNTAINEERS. By RUTH STEPHANS. Thomas Nelson &; Sons, Edinburgh, 1958. 18s. net. Reviewed by C. A. Burland.

THE YOUNG TRAVELLER IN MEXICO. By BETTY ROSS. Phoenix House, London 1958. Pp. 136. 9s. 6d. net. Reviewed by C. A. Burland.

THE COLLECTING OF FOLK MUSIC AND OTHER ETHNOMUSICOLOGICAL MATERIAL. Edited by Maud Karpeles. Reviewed by A. H.

THE PREHISTORY OF AFRICA. By H. ALIMEN. Hutchinson, London, 1957. 63s. Reviewed by Robert A. Kennedy.     

The Persian Presence in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry: A Taxonomy

This study employs keyword searches of literary databases such as Literature Online (LION) in an attempt to map the image of “Persia” in nineteenth-century English poetry as it was molded by a proliferation of thoughts and ideas in a variety of contexts. Completeness is not possible, of course, but the article aims to identify and explore some of the major categories within which the image of Persia was formed and disseminated in the nineteenth-century. The scope of the study is not confined to a corpus of poetic works that were written specifically on or about “Persia,” but takes account of a broader range of poems, and attends to the structure, texture and variations of the presence of “Persia” in nineteenth-century English poetry.