Late 10th- and 11th-century cloisonné enamel brooches

AN ENAMEL DISK found in Suffolk in 1972 was the subject of a seminal article by Professor V. I. Evison, in which for the first time a group of Anglo-Saxon cloisonné enamels was established.¹ The current article is likewise concerned with a newly discovered cloisonné enamel, and the group to which the find belongs—a total of fifteen late 10th- and 11th-century enamels known to the author—is added in catalogue form. As three in the British Museum were originally published as late 4th century,² it is to be hoped that further examples will emerge from Romano-British and other collections as a result of the present publication.     

Re-fighting the English Revolution: John Nalson (1637–1686) and the Frustrations of Late Seventeenth-Century English Historiography

The English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century went on being re-fought and reinterpreted long after the original events were over. In the later part of the reign of Charles II, fuelled by the Exclusion Crisis and the Popish Plot and the early strivings of Whigs and Tories, histories of the Civil Wars, Interregnum and Restoration took on a new lease of life and gained added purpose and relevance. John Nalson (1637–1686) is firmly anchored in this period and took up his pen in the re-drawn political and religious battle-lines. This article offers a reassessment of this neglected polemicist and historian, placing him within the context of his times and the intense rhetoric and rivalries to which it gave rise. It examines Nalson's output in relation to other writers of the age—Hobbes, Filmer and Rushworth among them—and takes stock of his changing reputation.     

A New Standard of Review: Craig v. Boren and Brennan's “Heightened Scrutiny” Test in Historical Perspective

“To withstand constitutional challenge, previous cases establish that classifications by gender must serve important governmental objectives and must be substantially related to achievement of those objectives.” ¹ With this one statement, Justice William Brennan, Jr., writing for the majority in the 1976 Supreme Court case Craig v. Boren, ² both reversed the decision of the district court below and—more importantly—redefined the legal standard for equal protection in gender-discrimination cases. Brennan's statement encapsulated decades' worth of development and decisions under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars states from denying “to any person within [their] jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” ³ by creating what is now referred to as the “heightened scrutiny” ⁴ standard for judging equal protection legislation. Yet Brennan's creation of a new standard is quite striking, even when looked at in hindsight. How was Brennan able to create this standard of review, and where did it come from? Was this new step taken by the Justices under equal protection adjudication a mistake, or a necessary reality of the period? Through a close analysis of both the history of the Equal Protection Clause in its relation to gender legislation and the history of feminism during the 1960s and 1970s, the inevitability of Brennan's decision becomes clear. In fact, the creation of the heightened scrutiny standard was an inevitable outgrowth of two separate, yet fundamentally related progressions: the steps taken in the Court in its review of gender-discrimination cases in the years prior to Craig v. Boren; and the changes in society's relation to the feminist movement in the pre-1973 and post-1973 periods.     

Complex Hunter–Gatherers in Evolution and History: A North American Perspective

A review of recent research on complex hunter–gatherers in North America suggests that age-old tensions between evolutionary and historical epistemologies continue to cultivate progress in anthropological understanding of sociocultural variation. Coupled with criticism of the evolutionary status of ethnographic foragers, archaeological documentation of variation among hunter–gatherer societies of the ancient past makes it difficult to generalize about causal relationships among environment, subsistence economy, and sociopolitical organization. Explanations for emergent complexity on the Pacific Coast that privilege environmental triggers for economic change have been challenged by new paleoenvironmental findings, while hypotheses suggesting that economic changes were preceded by, indeed caused by, transformations of existing structures of social inequality have gained empirical support. In its emergent data on mound construction apart from significant subsistence change, the southeastern United States gives pause to materialist explanations for complexity, turning the focus on symbolic and structural dimensions of practice that cannot be understood apart from particular histories of group interaction and tradition. Taken together, recent research on complex hunter–gatherers in North America has not only expanded the empirical record of sociocultural formations once deemed anomalous and/or derivative of European contact but also has contributed to the ongoing process of clarifying concepts of cultural complexity and how this process ultimately restructures anthropological theory.     

‘A Cunning Skill Did Lurk’: Susanna Perwich and the Mysteries of a Seventeenth-Century Needlework Cabinet

A seventeenth-century embroidered cabinet belonging to the Los Angeles Museum of Art includes a rare detail — a coat of arms. This essay explores the likelihood that the maker of this cabinet, as established by its coat of arms, was a member of the Perwich family, who ran a girls’ school in Civil War-era London, and the possibility that the cabinet was made by Susanna Perwich, a musical prodigy and subject of a 1661 biography published shortly after her untimely death. This essay discusses connections between Perwich’s life and the cabinet’s needleworked illustrations, revealing that the cabinet illustrates the Book of Ruth. Cabinets and caskets with their many compartments can be seen as metaphors for the compartmentalisation of the lives of late seventeenth-century Englishwomen who were excluded from many male-dominated physical and intellectual spaces in the aftermath of the English Civil War but who, nonetheless, created and meaningfully embellished personal objects in their own spaces.     

“Strangers are Flocking Here”: Identity and Anonymity in New Orleans, 1810–1860

When the population of New Orleans increased dramatically during the nineteenth century, it became a place of strangers. While historians have documented the experiences of different groups in the city, the nineteenth‐century urban world was defined largely by those unknown, by the strangers one passed in the streets. The present study explores how residents of the city coped with this change by analyzing the meanings they ascribed to strangers. It also illustrates why the ability of a stranger to legitimize his/her identity became a crucial means of escaping scrutiny and obtaining acceptance by society. The essay examines the reception of two groups of strangers: elite travelers who sought to read and interpret the city and its subjects and new residents who sought opportunity and adventure, but instead became alienated from society and castigated as vagrants and suspicious people. Although city residents largely came to terms with the anonymity of city life by the 1850s, this essay explores the preceding decades when strangers invoked both fear and excitement.     

Predicting the Past — Materiality of Nazi and Post-Nazi Camps: A Norwegian Perspective

Archaeological investigations at sites of genocides, oppressions, and imprisonment have, during the last few decades, become a growing field within studies of the contemporary past. This research includes surveys and excavations of Nazi camps, including the iconic sites of the Holocaust, concentration camps as well as POW camps and prisons of the Nazi regime in Germany and in occupied Europe. The present paper evaluates theoretical frameworks for approaches to materiality, social memories, and dissimilation aspects of such sites and relates diverse theoretical approaches to the results of archaeological investigations of Falstad Camp in central Norway.     

Parties,Governments and Pollsters: A New Form of Patronage?

In its first term, the Howard government hired Australasian Research Strategies (ARS), headed by pollster Mark Textor, to conduct market research for several Commonwealth departments and agencies. This was, the Labor Opposition claimed, a case of the Liberals handing jobs to their 'mates'. Textor played a key role in the Liberals' 1996 and 1998 federal election campaigns. However, Labor's attack rings hollow since in the 1980s the Hawke government similarly contracted Rod Cameron's ANOP to conduct opinion research for Commonwealth departments and agencies. At the time Cameron was Labor's strategic pollster and centrally involved in planning Labor election campaigns. On both sides of Australian politics, governments have begun to channel patronage towards their party's pollsters. In this research note, we suggest that this development cannot be explained as 'jobs for the boys'. Instead, this new form of patronage has its roots in the vital role that pollsters now play in guiding election campaigns, and in the commercial reality that Australian politics provides too little work to sustain specialist political pollsters. Parties in government now appear to utilise incumbency to sustain an ongoing relationship with the commercial polling organisations like ANOP and ARS to whom they will entrust much of the planning of their campaign for re-election.     

TIBETAN LANGUAGE AND ITS TERMINOLOGY STANDARDIZATION——Introducing a New Perspective on the Standardization of Tibetan New Words andTerminology

The Tibetan language spoken by the Tibetans belongs to the Tibetan-Burmese branch of the Sino-Tibetan family. It has about six million users who live mainly in the Tibet Autonomous Region （TAR） and four other Tibetan-inhabited provinces： Qinghai Province, Sichuan Province, Gansu Province and Yunnan Province. The standardization of Tibetan terminology is an essential part of China＇s national policy on nationality and national languages. A special column named ＂Tibetan Language and its Terminology Standardization＂ is included in this issue to describe the birth, use, and development of Tibetan language especially the standardization of its new terminology.     

Not Quite an Insider—A Scottish Perspective on a Future Coronation

Abstract

Post devolution, Scotland is ‘a bit different’, but how does that relate to a coronation? A Scottish sense of exclusion from the English establishment's assumptions of UK dominance might be a way into developing forms that are more widely inclusive. In this article, two distinctively Scottish models—of sovereignty and of being a national church—are offered as bases for exploring the shape of a coronation that tries to express who we all are. The theological understanding of sovereignty which was a key contribution from the churches to the debate on devolution sees the sovereignty of God entrusted to the community of the realm, and entrusted by that community to whatever institutions they deem appropriate; this might be a starting point for planning a coronation. The self-understanding of the Church of Scotland as a national church cherishing its independence from state control and with less ‘stake’ in the monarchy might prompt a different church-state relationship to be expressed in a coronation.     

At the Edge of an Empire: Plague,State and Identity in New Caledonia, 1899–1900

This paper examines colonial discourses on race, environment and global identity that arose during an outbreak of bubonic plague in the French Pacific settler colony of New Caledonia between December 1899 and April 1900. The outbreak of plague brought to the forefront colonial anxieties over living on the periphery of empire, definitions of what it meant to be white, the health menace posed by peoples the dominant colonial society categorised as non- white, and the danger the plague posed to the salubrious island environment that had just begun to attract free settlement after the end of the penal colony four years previously. These discourses were linked by the threat, real and imagined, posed by the bubonic plague, intersecting with the ambiguous place held by the outlying colony within the webs of a modern global commercial community and the Pacific world.     

Feminine Wiles and Masculine Weakness: Seventeenth-Century Visual Responses to Tasso’s Crusade

This essay offers a political reading of the artistic choices made by seventeenth-century painters in their depictions of the heroines of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581). It discusses the political subtext of Tasso’s epic poem by exploring the roles Tasso assigns to his oriental heroines and their representation in seventeenth-century paintings. Painters and patrons alike were particularly enthusiastic about the love stories that developed around Jerusalem. But Tasso is promoting a crusade, and the visual focus of later painters on Tasso’s seductive female protagonists and their submission to Christian warriors, suggests that their aim was to display the delights that await those who join a military expedition to conquer the Holy Land.     

Narrative Identity and Trauma: Sebald’s Memory Landscape

Narrative identity is said to consist of a few key reference points—places, events, peoples, ceremonies, rites, ideas, and values—that translate into sites of memory that are representative of a person’s or a community’s past. In this essay I explore the role of traumatic memories in the formation of collective identity, the national or transnational sites of memory that are officialized by the state. I argue that collective traumas need to be counterbalanced by personal memories that can diminish their pain and thus enable people to regain their lost sense of being at home. To demonstrate this claim I discuss the twentieth-century traumas that have affected European identity by and through the life stories of W. G. Sebald’s characters in The Emigrants (1992) and Austerlitz (2001), which combines the collective and the personal narrative identity. I conclude that the performative aspect of the past needs to be translated into personal forms of commemoration that surpass the official memory archive, which task requires a comprehensive and sensitive understanding of those traumas at both the individual and collective levels.