The Thesaurus Exemplorum Medii Aevi (ThEMA): An Introduction

Abstract

Johannes Borquardi was a priest-brother at Vadstena Abbey from 1428 until his death in 1447. He was a renowned preacher and has left three extant volumes of sermons. At the end of many of his sermons, he writes suggestions for yet another sermon on the same theme or for the same day. There are some 60 such short texts, some mentioning only one or two suitable sources, others listing many books; sometimes they even give a Vadstena shelf-mark. These texts are invaluable for our knowledge of the Abbey library in many aspects. In some cases, we can check how Johannes himself used his own suggestions, since we also have his next product for the same feast. In this paper, I have studied how Johannes used one of his 'endnotes' to compose a sermon for St Matthias by cribbing from Peregrinus de Oppeln and Guilelmus Peraldus. I hope to show just how skilfully he uses his sources and how elegantly he pastes in his quotations, so that the sermon becomes a new, consistent and homogeneous text.     

Upwardly Mobile Footnotes: German References in the Encyclopédie des gens du monde 1

Images should be released from the monopoly of art history and integrated into the study of history itself. For culture, in the strict sense of the term, is an essential aspect of political history, especially in a state as centralised as 18th- and 19th-century France. This is the context in which visual images of Napoleon should be explored. Under the Directory, he began shrewdly to exploit paintings and engravings in his first campaign to win over public opinion, rapidly achieving renown by putting a face to his name. The development and profusion of images under the Consulate and Empire reveal the way, or ways, in which Napoleon sought to present himself to contemporaries and posterity. They also illustrate his main objectives: the strengthening of his power and the consolidation of his dynasty. The number and variety of these images suggest that he was acutely aware of his lack of legitimacy. Napoleon himself realised just how much he resembled a 'colossus with feet of clay'. In order to base this colossus on firmer foundations he set to work all the means at his disposal, not least painting and sculpture.     

MISSIONARIES AND WAR LORDS: A STUDY OF CULTURAL INTERACTION ON ABAIANG AND TARAWA

Hiram Bingham Jr, Protestant missionary, landed at Abaiang in the Gilbert Islands in November 1857. He came not only with a distinct missionary policy but also with an inner vision based on his ideals and his own personal interpretation of the Protestant Christian message. Bingham envisaged a loving community which was made up of both ruler and the ruled, including men and women, young and old. For their part, Gilbertese on Abaiang did not share Bingham's view of God or the cosmos. They had their own spirits (Anti) and lived in a world punctuated by wars. Given their limited contact with Europeans, most Islanders on Abaiang and Tarawa saw little relevance in the particular type of Christianity that Bingham espoused and attempted to convey to them. Yet despite this dissonance, two war chiefs (uea) began a communication. This communication was meaningful to their side but was not shared by the other. Bingham was perceived in a way he would not have wanted and he, in turn, misinterpreted the entire situation in Abaiang and nearby Tarawa. The result was that the missionaries became embroiled in the wars and failed to usher in a reign of peace and benevolence.     

‘No One Knows What He is Until He is Told’: Audience and Personhood in a Colonial African Diary

ABSTRACT

This article explores questions of audience and personhood in the diary of Akinpelu Obisesan, a Yoruba man who lived in colonial Nigeria. In particular, it examines how Obisesan wrote between the genres of autobiography and biography so as to generate a sphere for self-fashioning in the colonial context. After introducing Obisesan and exploring briefly the relationship between autobiography, diary writing and the self, I show how Obisesan’s diary narrated a deeply relational form of personhood, which he both generated as a writer and consumed as a reader. The article analyses this narrative, exploring how Obisesan constituted various real and imagined audiences for his diary, while simultaneously claiming his privacy and ‘archiving himself’ into a tin trunk. In the final section of the article, I present a close reading of sections of the 1927 diary, to show how, when writing his diary, Obisesan projected multiple audiences into his text. He used these audiences as a foil for enhancing his own sense of self, thus constituting his personhood and legitimating his precarious social position in colonial society.     

A Review of “The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact,Theory, and Sign of Contradiction”

Abstract

Responding to Samuel Huntington's argument in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, this article explores the problematic character of American national identity. While Huntington presents himself as trying to conserve a traditional American identity based on both political creed and Anglo-Protestant culture, I contend that America's founding political theory and its philosophic sources are ambiguous on the question of culture and national identity. The Declaration of Independence and the social contract theories that helped inform it seem to invite a kind of cosmopolitan commitment to a creedal identity while at the same time leaving open the possibility of a more exclusive cultural identity. In the end, this ambiguity works to undermine a public sense that the political order should try to conserve a particular culture, a tendency that is furthered by a democratic regime's natural inclinations toward universalism and egalitarianism. It seems, then, that the problem of the preservation of American cultural identity is rooted in the very culture that Huntington wishes to preserve.     

The Shaping of John Lambert's Allegiance and the Outbreak of the Civil War

Abstract

'Sir Philip Musgrave and the Re-Establishment of the "Old Regime" in Cumberland and Westmorland c. 1660–1664: Local Loyalty and National Influence'. This paper examines the career of Sir Philip Musgrave in Cumberland and Westmorland during the period 1660–64, and illuminates the continuing integration of outlying English regions and their gentry families into a national polity, wherein gentry horizons frequently stretched beyond the boundaries of their native counties, and in which their local and national political 'worlds' were often inextricably linked. Musgrave was eager to consolidate the newly restored authority of the monarchy and Church of England, as well as his own influence within the returning 'old regime'. In cooperating with central government against Protestant Nonconformity, Quakerism and political insurrection in the Lake Counties, Musgrave and other local government officials highlight how local and central interests could dovetail. On one level, Sir Philip had little difficulty in perceiving himself as a straightforward servant of the State, declaring himself a 'State physician' during the application of the Corporation Act in Cumberland and Westmorland. Yet, as this paper will demonstrate, Sir Philip Musgrave was more than a mere compliant Royalist yes-man. As servants of central government, Musgrave and a number of his local associates were extremely important as agents of political innovation. In interpreting, applying and calling for changes in policy, they demonstrate that the exercise of political power in the developing British State was not simply a top-down process.     

“Mad” Elves and “Elusive Beauty”: Some Celtic Strands of Tolkien's Mythology [1]

Contrary to Tolkien's refutation of “Celtic things” as a source for his own mythology, this article attempts to show how his work has been inspired by Celtic folklore and myth. The article is not just a source study. It concentrates on one main example from Tolkien's early literary writings that betrays a Celtic influence. At the same time it discusses Tolkien's complex attitude towards “things Celtic” within the context of his strong sense of English identity. Finally, it seeks to explain Tolkien's derogatory comments on Celtic material as a result of popular ideas of “Celticity.”     

Histoire embrouillée: Making material histories in Southern Africa

This article examines how historical knowledge about Southern African chiefdoms was produced in D.F. Ellenberger's research archive (c. 1860–1913) and archaeology drawing on his scholarship. I describe a historiographic approach detailing how Ellenberger's work co-opted the material world to create historical facts, obscuring diverse meanings of home, movement, and authority.     

Leviathans Old and New: What Collingwood Saw in Hobbes

Summary

R. G. Collingwood presented his major work of political philosophy, The New Leviathan, as an updated version of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. However, his reasons for taking Hobbes's great work as his inspiration have puzzled and eluded many Collingwood scholars, while those interested in the reception of Hobbes's ideas have largely neglected the New Leviathan. In this essay I reveal what Collingwood saw in Hobbes's political philosophy and show how his reading of Hobbes both diverges from other prominent interpretations of the time and invites us to reassess Hobbes's complex association with the origins of liberalism. In doing so, I focus on Collingwood's science of mind, his ideas on society and authority, and his dialectical theory of politics, in each case showing how he engaged with Hobbes in order to elucidate his own vision of civilisation. That vision is based on the development of social consciousness, which involves people coming to understand the body politic as a joint enterprise whereby they confer authority upon those who rule.     

Articulating national identity in Turkmenistan: inventing tradition through myth,cult and language

A study of myth, cult, and language as tools of state power, this paper analyzes ways national identity was constructed and articulated in one state. When Türkmenistan became independent in 1991 its first president, Saparmyrat Nyýazow, promoted himself as the ‘savior’ of the nation by reconceptualising what it meant to be Türkmen. Myth, public texts and language policy were used to construct this identity. While they were the targets of the state's cultural products, Türkmen citizens contributed to the processes of cultural production. Nyýazow legitimised his authoritarian leadership, first by co‐opting Türkmen citizens to support his regime, and then by coercing them as participants in his personality cult. The paper concludes that Nyýazow used the production of culture, ‘invented tradition’ in Hobsbawm's sense, to bolster his agenda and further his own power. It also argues that the exaggerated cult of personality Nyýazow cultivated limited his achievements, rather than solidifying them.     

Localisation and William Macewen's Early Brain Surgery Part I: The Controversy

Neurosurgery for the removal of brain tumours based on localising signs is usually dated from the 1884 operation by Bennett and Godlee. However, within weeks of that operation claims were made on behalf of William Macewen, the Glasgow surgeon, to have been the real pioneer of such surgery. According to Macewen's protagonists, he had conducted seven similar operations earlier than Bennett and Godlee and, in a notable 1888 address, Macewen described these seven pre-1884 cases and a number of others operated on after 1884. This paper, which is in two parts, contains an evaluation of the claims made for the priority of Macewen's pre-1884 operations. Part I deals mainly with Macewen's work in fields other than brain surgery that are relevant to it and sets out the facts of the controversy. It begins with a brief biography of Macewen, describes his pioneering work in antiseptic and aseptic surgery, his work on osteotomy and bone regeneration, and his use in brain surgery of the knowledge so gained. Part I concludes with an examination of the battle waged in the newspapers between Macewen's and Bennett's and Godlee's supporters, and of previously unpublished correspondence between Macewen himself, David Ferrier and Hughes Bennett. The primary records of the patients on whom Macewen operated, together with other materials relevant to the controversy, are examined in Part II.     

An Anatomy of the London Agent

This article considers the London agent through the careers of Gilbert Mabbott and, to a lesser extent, William Raylton. The London agent was a commonplace in early modern political culture, but the phenomenon is rarely addressed in the historiography. I argue for the importance of the agent to early modern English history in general, but I also consider Mabbott's situation in particular. Because of the civil wars, Mabbott was able to rise beyond his social station as a scrivener and freed himself from the bonds of the patron‐client relationship. This article seeks to define some of the roles played by agents in the early modern period by looking at Mabbott's and Raylton's work for their major employers: Thomas Wentworth, Hull, royalist delinquents and their children, various parliamentary armies, and Oliver Cromwell. It ends by looking at the wealth that Mabbott acquired through his work, both before and after the Restoration, as demonstrative of how an agent's power could yield impressive rewards when freed of social constraints.     

Henry VIII's Progress Through Yorkshire in 1541 and its Implications for Northern Identities

Abstract

Henry's visit to the North in 1541 has been seen as, alternatively, a powerful response to the ongoing threat to order in the years after the Pilgrimage of Grace or a move in diplomatic relationships with Scotland and France. This paper suggests the level of immediate threat of disorder in the North was low and that the role of the journey in relations with Scotland was more its consequence than its cause. Rather it finds the significance of the visit in a potential renegotiation of the position of the North within the wider realm, a question opened by political and constitutional changes since 1530, a negotiation which the King himself overthrew. Instead of accommodation, Henry sought to emphasise the extent of his defeat of the Pilgrims and the Percy interest, and to humiliate utterly all but the most clearly loyal elements, especially in York itself. Yet the memory of his triumph, if triumph it was, was poisoned for Henry by his failure to meet James of Scotland and by the collapse of his marriage to Catherine Howard; and it passed remarkably quickly from the collective memory of the North, overlain by a developing sense of relations with the Tudors, as with their predecessors, as supportive of a distinctive northern identity.     

Globalisation and Singaporean transmigration: re-imagining and negotiating national identity

Within the context of globalisation that confronts the world today, I aim in this paper to illustrate one particular state's attempts at constructing a `nation' amidst efforts to encourage its citizens to globalise, actions which are ostensibly, or at least, potentially, contradictory; and to analyse how these citizens who became transmigrants construct and negotiate their sense of `nation' and national identity. Specifically, my empirical questions centre on Singaporean transmigrants working in China. I ask the following questions. What happens to the sense of national identity among Singaporeans and their relationship with the `nation' when confronted with transnational conditions? What are the forces that impinge on the on-going construction of community and (re)construction of national identity amongst Singaporeans? What are the implications for a young state in its attempts at nation-building? This paper examines how the Singapore state continually attempts to establish the boundaries of the nation-state through hegemonic, policy and strategic actions. From the perspective of individuals, transnational location enhances their sense of national identity rather than its demise, leading to assertions of `Singaporeaness' and rootedness. I present empirical evidence that physical presence in a territory is not a necessary condition for a feeling of nationhood, and examine how Singaporeans maintain this sense of national identity through their everyday actions.     

Principles of Lightweight Structures in the Sculptural Conceptions of Naum Gabo

Abstract

The Russian-born artist Naum Gabo (1890–1977) often employed new materials and techniques which demonstrate how his spatial conceptions developed towards a sculptural expression of lightness, balance and equilibrium. These principles reverberate with concepts of optimum structures, in which minimum-weight design is achieved through removal of redundant material. Not only formal aspects of his sculptures correspond to this concept, but also Gabo's shared aesthetic and structural concerns with twentieth-century architecture and engineering, in terms of transparency, spatial openness, efficiency and lightweight design are consistent with this idea. Similar notions surfaced in prevailing interests in nature's sense of order and perfection as the basis of biologically-inspired design, which Gabo encountered especially in the work of the biologist D'Arcy Thompson and the art critic Herbert Read. This paper investigates the aesthetic and structural affinities Gabo's sculptures bear with these notions, highlighting how these informed his sculptural conceptions. His oeuvre demonstrates how his constructive technique enabled Gabo to convey an aesthetic that would be appropriate for a modern, industrial society. The aim of this paper is to offer a new way of looking at Gabo's sculptural aesthetic by identifying analogies with theoretical formulations of minimum weight frame-structures, as encountered in the theory of the scientist engineer A.G.M. Michell (1904). Consistent with his historical context, this work demonstrates how Gabo's sculptures convey an aesthetic of balance, equilibrium, and lightness precisely because his sculptural language is rooted in principles of optimum structures to which he responded in visual as well as structural terms.     

Poetry as Thought and Action: Mazzini's Reflections on Byron

Summary

This article opens with a brief introduction to Giuseppe Mazzini, with particular reference to his commitment to republicanism, an ideal that would be fulfilled in Italy only after considerable time and with great difficulty. It then focuses on Mazzini's critical reception of Byron. Although Giuseppe Mazzini and Percy Bysshe Shelley would have allowed a more obvious comparison, it was Byron who really attracted Mazzini's attention and criticism. Mazzini uses Byron, on the one hand, as a means to demonstrate that Italians could discuss European poetry without putting at risk their national identity, or, as the classicists maintained, that fragile and fragmented profile of a nation that contemporary Italy offered to the minds and hearts of thousands of young people. On the other hand, however, Mazzini questions Byron's authority by subverting and converting his value, in a very personal way: he gradually substitutes Byron's with a different authority and credits him with new values. Mazzini could not accept Byron as the emblem of elitism and isolation: Byron's solipsism needed to be purified, and his renowned cynical attitude tempered; eventually Byron's myth needed to be connected to the destiny of peoples and nations.     

Living in the tenth century. Mentalities and social orders

In his series of lectures, Le pouvoir psychiatrique, Michel Foucault employs concepts from the military field of knowledge in order to analyse the founding scenes of psychiatry. I focus on three issues connected to Foucault's use of these military terms. Firstly, I examine why Foucault was reluctant to use concepts from sociology and psychology in Le pouvoir psychiatrique and how this affects the notions that he had formulated in his earlier work, Histoire de la folie. Secondly, I show how he challenges traditional understandings of the founding scenes of psychiatry by using concepts from a different field of knowledge. In doing this, he creates metaphors, and this is something that he himself had previously been critical of doing. Thirdly, I reflect upon the fact that Foucault's creative use of concepts from different disciplines and examples from different historical times can be related to episodes in his own life; I argue why it is important to supplement a structural analysis with linguistic, phenomenological and hermeneutical ones.     

Tom Paine: The greatest exile

In this contribution, I reassess the opposition between Saint-Pierre's idealism and Rousseau's realism. Rousseau accuses Saint-Pierre of having a defect in his analysis and political judgement which, if he had been consistent, would have led to a revolutionary position in the strong sense – a position of which the author of The Social Contract himself disapproved. In short, not only was Saint-Pierre far from being a convinced absolutist; Rousseau's own writings on the Abbé do not advocate a ‘republican solution’, which he regarded as impracticable for the Europe of his time.