De Excidio Patriae: civic discourse in Gildas’ Britain

This article explores the use of civic discourse in Gildas’ De Excidio Britonum. It argues that such language and imagery functioned within a larger dialectical argument that exhorted readers to choose virtue over vice. Gildas assigned the Britons collective moral agency by styling them citizens (cives) of a shared homeland (patria) defined by cities (civitates). Due to the citizens’ moral failings, however, this urban landscape had been compromised: enemies had destroyed the patria’s cities, rendering it a place of desolation. Only a return to virtue could save the Britons from ruin and grant them access to heavenly Jerusalem.     

‘In gente Britanniarum,sicut quaedam nostratum testatur historia …’: national identity and perceptions of the past in John of Salisbury's Policraticus

This article examines the construction of national identity in John of Salisbury's Policraticus (c.1159). This well-known treatise has not been included in recent discussions of identities in medieval Britain. The focal point of the analysis is the author's contradictory representations of Britones. John of Salisbury emphasised the distinction and hostility between the Britons/Welsh and the English; at the same time, he claimed that the ancient Britons (Brennius and his companions-in-arms from Geoffrey of Monmouth's De gestis Britonum) were ‘compatriots’ and ‘ancestors’ of the ‘contemporary’ inhabitants of the English kingdom. Comparison with other twelfth-century texts reveals specific features of the model of national identity traced in the Policraticus: the appropriation not only of the British past, but also of the British name and identity, and the imagining of a unified people of Britain. This culminated in the invention of the unique term gens Britanniarum, which nevertheless did not exclude the ‘English’ as an alternative or even interchangeable name. The article discusses political agendas behind John of Salisbury's use of the language of ‘Britishness’, most importantly, support for the pan-British ambitions of the archbishops of Canterbury. The example of the Policraticus, with its combination of both conventional and original elements, nuances our understanding of how and for what ideological purposes national identity might have been constructed in twelfth-century England.     

Constantine,Helena, Maximus: on the appropriation of Roman history in medieval Wales,c.800–1250

This article explores the ways in which the three fourth-century figures, Constantine the Great (d. 337), St Helena (d. c.330) and Magnus Maximus (d. 388), were represented in texts produced in, or connected with, medieval Wales. The texts concerned may be described as genealogical, hagiographical or literary, and were written in either Latin or Welsh between about 800 and 1250. They include, amongst others, the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, Geoffrey of Monmouth's De gestis Britonum, and the vernacular prose tale Breudwyt Maxen Wledic. It is argued that the appropriation of the fourth-century figures occurred in a more limited number of contexts than has previously been supposed. Moreover, the evidence indicates that writers responsible for composing or redacting texts about these figures were far more likely to turn to earlier written texts for information on their subjects than to any contemporary oral traditions.     

Superstitionis Malleus: John Toland,Cicero, and the War on Priestcraft in Early Enlightenment England

Summary

This paper explores the role of the Ciceronian tradition in the radical religious discourse of John Toland (1670–1722). Toland produced numerous works seeking to challenge the authority of the clergy, condemning their ‘priestcraft’ as a significant threat to the integrity of the Commonwealth. Throughout these anticlerical writings, Toland repeatedly invoked Cicero as an enemy to superstition and as a religious sceptic, particularly citing the theological dialogues De Natura Deorum and De Divinatione. This paper argues that Toland adapted the Ciceronian tradition so that it could function as an active influence on the construction of his radical discourse. First, it shows that Toland championed a particular interpretation of Cicero's works which legitimised his use of Cicero in this rational context. Then, it shows the practical manifestations of this interpretation, examining the ramifications for how Toland formed three important facets of his campaign against priestcraft: his identification of priestcraft as a superstition; his argument for a rational religion in which priestcraft could play no role; and his portrayal of anticlericalism as a service to the Commonwealth.     

Hobbes on the supernatural from The Elements of Law to Leviathan

Hobbes's unusual religious views in his classical work, Leviathan, are often seen as a product of his attempt to reconcile Christianity with his philosophical materialism. Yet given Hobbes's materialistic view in his earlier works too, this explanatory framework alone is not sufficient for grasping distinctive features of Leviathan. This article remedies this lacuna by paying close attention to an understudied aspect of the development of Hobbes's religious theory from The Elements of Law to Leviathan: his treatment of the supernatural and, particularly, of matters of faith known by supernatural revelation as opposed to natural reason. I argue that over time Hobbes developed an epistemological analysis of supernatural revelation and refined his argument about the sense in which matters of faith are supernatural and about the extent to which they are found in the Bible. It was not materialism per se but the more sophisticated analysis of the supernatural in Leviathan that enabled Hobbes to admit the sphere of the supernatural to a much smaller extent than in De Cive and to discuss in detail what he sees as a matter of faith and beyond the scope of philosophy in De Cive.     

On Authority and Political Destination: Michael Polanyi and the Threshold of Postmodernism

ABSTRACT

This study challenges a prevalent view that Aquinas's political thought develops over time on the question of legitimate resistance to tyranny. Many scholars argue that Aquinas gradually restricts the scope of legitimate political resistance and morally permissible tyrannicide. On this view Aquinas defends tyrannicide in his early Commentary on the Sentences, adds strong qualifications in the Summa Theologiae, and finally repudiates tyrannicide in De Regno. This study finds the evidence for such a development lacking and seeks to rehabilitate a long and diverse Thomistic tradition of legitimate resistance including tyrannicide. Indeed, a close reading of De Regno shows that Aquinas upholds a doctrine of political resistance and defends the legitimacy of tyrannicide under certain circumstances. Moreover, Aquinas's doctrine of political resistance is wide open and underdeveloped. Later attempts to clarify and qualify Aquinas's doctrine of political resistance, therefore, are appropriate and even necessary.     

Contextualizing marriage: conjugality and Christian life in Jonas of Orléans' De institutione laicali

The De institutione laicali by Jonas of Orléans has frequently been examined as a source for conjugal life in the Carolingian period, but rarely analysed in its entirety. In this article I propose an overall reading of the text, based on the version addressed to Count Matfrid before 828, in order to place the chapters about marriage in their context. I will formulate new interpretations of its purposes – arguing that Book II was configured as a speculum comitale – and of Jonas's view of marriage. The De institutione laicali will therefore be shown to have served the needs of Carolingian representations of society and public power.     

Introduction: Religious toleration in the Age of Enlightenment

ABSTRACT

This article is an introduction to a special issue on ‘Religious Toleration in the Age of Enlightenment’. It begins by characterizing the Enlightenment's attitude towards religion as an opposition to bigotry and ecclesiastic authority based on a particular interpretation of the European Wars of Religion. Then it acknowledges the problematic nature of the phrase ‘Age of Enlightenment’, which seems to push some of the most relevant eighteenth-century realities to the margins of history. Next, it challenges some common scholarly assumptions regarding Enlightenment ideas on tolerance. In particular, it disputes that these ideas were essentially principled, secular, pluralist and liberal. By way of conclusion, this introductory article suggests that the Enlightenment's main contribution to the history of toleration is found not in the originality or subtlety of its ideas, but rather in the promotion of a new mentality according to which toleration came to be regarded as an essential feature of modern civilization.     

Catholic resistance theory: William Barclay versus Jean Boucher

ABSTRACT

This article examines William Barclay's response to Jean Boucher's De Justa Abdicatione Henrici Tertii (1589) in view of the complexities of Catholic political thought in this post-Tridentine period. It argues that Barclay's famous category of ‘monarchomach’ is problematic for its avoidance of the issue of confessional difference, and that on questions of the relationship between the respublica and the ecclesia Barclay struggled to find an adequate response to Boucher in his De Regno et Regali Potestate (1600). His De Potestate Papae (1609) is treated as the intellectual extension of his battle with Boucher, and more broadly his confrontation with the position of the Catholic League and Jesuits on indirect papal power. By considering Barclay's works in the context of French Gallicanism and the Catholic League in the French Wars of Religion, this discussion aims to reposition Barclay in relation to other Catholic political theorists and thereby re-evaluate the category of Catholic resistance theory.     

Political economy and mimetic desire: A postmodernist reading of ‘Babette's feast’

Spinoza's use of the phrase “sui iuris” in the Tractatus Politicus gives rise to the following paradox. On the one hand, one is said to be sui iuris to the extent that one is rational; and to the extent that one is rational, one will steadfastly obey the laws of the state. However, Spinoza also states that to the extent that one adheres to the laws of the state, one is not sui iuris, but rather stands under the power [sub potestate] of the state (TP 3/5). It seems, then, that to the extent that one is sui iuris, one will not, in fact, be sui iuris. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of Spinoza's notion of being sui iuris that enables us to overcome this paradox and sheds light on Spinoza's relationship to the republican tradition. I work towards this goal by distinguishing between two ways in which Spinoza uses the locution, which correspond to two different conceptions of power: potentia and potestas. This distinction not only allows us to save Spinoza from internal inconsistency, it also enables us to see one important way in which Spinoza stands outside of the republican tradition, since he conceives of liberty not as constituted by independence, or citizenship in a res publica, but as being sui iuris in the first sense described above: being powerful.     

Bede,iconoclasm and the Temple of Solomon

In Bede's lifetime (c.673–735) the churches at Wearmouth‐Jarrow were richly decorated with panel paintings from Rome. This essay examines the significance that those paintings held for Bede and his community, and it reveals the strategies that Bede employed to defend them in his commentary on the Temple of Solomon (De templo), which was written after images had become a contentious issue in Byzantium during the reign of Emperor Leo III (714–41). This has important implications for our understanding of Bede's place in the intellectual landscape of early eighth‐century Europe, and it shows the ambitious nature and topical relevance of his mature exegetical programme.     

Gellner redux?

The work of Ernest Gellner continues to be an influential part of nationalism studies. A recent appraisal has raised questions about the argument that Gellner offered in his central text on nationalism, Nations and Nationalism. This article takes up other issues in Gellner's work on nationalism. The article examines Gellner's influential definition of nationalism and the interpretation that he placed on that definition, as well as his treatment of ‘political cohabitation’. It also pays more attention to Gellner's later work, namely, Gellner's discussion of ‘the time zones of nationalism’. The paper draws on secondary literature but its primary purpose is to assess the coherence of Gellner's arguments.     

Making an Edgier Interpretation of the Gold Rushes: Contrasting Perspectives from Australia and New Zealand

This article examines the interaction between changing interpretations of history and visitor interpretation provided at heritage tourist sites. Generally, the literature distinguishes between history (which is seen as objective and fixed) and heritage interpretation (which is characterised as biased, selective and serving parochial interests). It is argued that history is actually far more dynamic and subjective and that this requires an ongoing revision of interpretation for visitors as historical interpretations change. To illustrate these processes, Goodman's concept of a new ‘edgier history of Gold’ is applied to interpretation at Sovereign Hill and the Mount Alexander Diggings in Australia and the Central Otago Heritage Trail in New Zealand.     

Memory,narration and spectrality in Brian Friel's Faith Healer and Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

This article proposes an examination of how Brian Friel's Faith Healer functions as an intertext in Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. This shall be the first extensive consideration of Frank McGuinness's debt to Faith Healer, the play that convinced him that drama was the form most suited to his vision. How both plays consider the relationship between history, memory and art will be a key concern. Attention shall also be paid to the shared cultural and historic traditions that unite both Friel and McGuinness. The essays that McGuinness has written on Friel will be shown to be as valuable in interpreting McGuinness's work as they are to illuminating Friel's. It shall be argued that McGuinness, far from merely parroting Friel's aesthetic, uses the earlier writer's legacy to create new and original works.     

Norman Gash and the Making of Mr Secretary Peel

In May 1961, the firm of Longmans published the first volume of Norman Gash's monumental life of Sir Robert Peel. Mr Secretary Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel before 1830 was hailed at the time as a landmark and has proved surprisingly durable as an interpretation of Peel's early life and formation. This essay is concerned with locating Gash's work within its political, biographical, and historiographical context. It begins by considering the reaction of Peel family members to Gash's biography, before tracing the antecedents of his historical preoccupations and intellectual development in the years leading up to the publication of Mr Secretary Peel. It presents a wide range of new evidence relating to Gash's life and emergence as a political and parliamentary historian, drawing upon sources which have come to light in the decade since his death in May 2009.     

Thomas Hobbes and the Term ‘Right Reason’: Participation to Calculation

Three times between 1640 and 1651, once at considerable length, Hobbes used and accepted, and then mocked, repudiated and discarded, the ancient/medieval term recta ratio/right reason. These repeated fluctuations in his thinking and rhetorical strategy occurred during the writing of his three major treatises on moral and political theory, one additional note on the term in De Cive, and an unpublished commentary on Thomas White's De Mundo. They are made obvious by his substitution of recta ratio for reason or natural reason when recycling passages from Elements of the Law for use in De Cive, and by his subsequent reversal of that substitution when revising other passages in De Cive for use in Leviathan. Despite incorporating recta ratio as a structural element in De Cive, he finally reverted in Leviathan to regarding the term as a deceptive verbal construct, non-existent in rerum natura, and ridiculing its users and proponents. Right reason carried connotations linked to it in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, and Hobbes's reversals in his view and use of it, and his final dismissal of it, provide further evidence and justification for the now familiar modern claim that he was a herald of modernity.     

The Dnieper Trade Route in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: A Note

Abstract

The reconsideration of Arthur J. Marder's evaluation of the date at which the admiralty recognized the threat to Britain from the Germany navy has implications for others of Marder's arguments that have been the subject of extensive revisionist critique. This article reexamines the revisionists's most important conclusion, namely that Marder misunderstood the origins of Admiral Sir John Fisher's revolutionary new warships, HMS Dreadnought and HMS Invincible. Despite the revisionists's criticism, not only do many of Marder's claims withstand close scrutiny but also some that have been largely ignored need to be given greater prominence.     

Marie Redonnet's L'Accord de paix: The question of resistance and the turn-of-the-millennium novel

This article discusses how Marie Redonnet's 2000 novel L'Accord de paix addresses the question of resisting the ideology of turn-of-the-millennium consumer society. It takes its bearings from Redonnet's explicit points de repère (Genet's travesty of the symbolic order, Debord's integrated spectacle and Sartrean engagement) and from the intersection of her critical works with Cixous's criture féminine and Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires. The discussion identifies how L'Accord de paix converges with and diverges from these writers' differing conceptions of agency, and how Redonnet self-reflexively seeks to counter appropriation by the order she seeks to oppose. Situating the questions of misogyny and difference within the question of resisting turn-of-the-millennium symbolic violence, it reveals a literary commitment that simultaneously harnesses the legacy of the past and makes a travesty of the market-driven symbolic order of the present. The article argues that by transmitting the responsibility for resistance from writer to readers, Redonnet inscribes in storytelling a hope for discovering new bearings for the future.     

Pufendorf disciple of Hobbes: The nature of man and the state of nature: The doctrine of socialitas

No doctrine of Pufendorf's is better known than that of socialitas. The reason is that Pufendorf himself declared that socialitas was the foundation of natural law. No interpreter of Pufendorf can therefore avoid dealing with it. Moreover, Pufendorf linked the issue of socialitas to the question of the state of nature, thus raising important issues with both theological and philosophical implications.

Given the prominence and importance of this theme in Pufendorf's work, a close analysis of what he meant by it is central to the interpretation of his work, even though this means to pose again a new number of questions already discussed in the scholarly literature. In particular, this article examines the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes with regard to this central theme. In fact, a traditional historiographic topos is that Pufendorf and Hobbes fundamentally disagree on the doctrine of socialitas, while the former is closer to Grotius and to the Aristotelian-classic tradition that see man as a social animal.

This article takes, instead, Pufendorf to be a follower of Hobbes, and tries to explain how the more traditional view of Pufendorf as a critic of Hobbes was in some way due to Pufendorf's own attempt to distance himself from the accusations of Hobbesism (and hence of atheism and moral indifference) that the critics made against him when his work first appeared. In order to do this, Pufendorf tried to rethink his own position within the history of ethics, and put himself on the side of the Stoics, of Grotius and of Cumberland, against Epicurus and Hobbes. This retrospective ‘illusion’ has greatly influenced later scholarship, giving us a distorted image of Pufendorf's own view of socialitas. A more precise account of the latter gives a better prospective from which to look at the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes.