Sir Charles Grandison,Natural Law and the Fictionalised English Gentleman

This article enquires into the relation between enlightened humanist conceptions of natural law and the period novel's fictionalization of the English gentleman in the context of its marriage plot. Marriage played a key role in enlightened theorisations of natural law precisely as an institution capable of grounding familial and civil life in an emerging concept of human nature. Yet public debate about the state's role in the regulation of marriage in mid-eighteenth-century England demonstrates that natural law lent itself to very different models of sovereignty and governance. The antinomies that characterized natural law's circulation in the English context are uniquely fictionalized in Samuel Richardson's last novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), a lengthy parallel narrative of failed courtship and matrimonial felicity that draws upon Pufendorf's model of natural law, yet is only partly implicated in its secular humanism. The novel's eponymous gentleman hero – a ‘Man of Religion and Virtue’ – exemplifies a mix of Anglican piety, civic virtue and disinterested sympathy that is sanctioned by natural law and sealed by the English marriage plot.     

The strange case of the Turkish and Venetian judges in eighteenth-century Mani wall paintings

Abstract

Investigating church wall paintings in Mani, Greece, the author identified a common theme of the Ainoi, the graphic interpretation of Psalms 148–150. Within this scheme there is often a specific depiction of the 'Judges of the Earth' as an Ottoman judge and a Venetian nobleman. This depiction is unique to Mani and is restricted to the mid-eighteenth century and those areas of Mani dominated by the rule of the kapetanoi. The paintings allude to the lack of established legal systems in that period of Mani's history and refer back to times of stable law under Ottoman and Venetian rule.     

The United States and the Question of the Greco-Turkish War, 1919–1922

Abstract

In the post World War II era, the strain in the trilateral relation between the United States, Greece and Turkey is one of the most disquieting and vexatious elements to emerge from American foreign policy. The so-called southeastern flank of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is currently beset with tensions that threaten to impede its contributory role in NATO's overall defense strategy for southeastern Europe (if they have not already done so). In this political drama, the principal antagonists, Greece and Turkey, have a number of outstanding differences which on occasion have brought them to the precipice of war. As a result, the United States has intervened as the protagonist and consequently has become the recipient of the enmity of these two NATO allies for not recognizing their ‘special’ claims or interests. As in the characteristic classical Greek drama, the chorus of NATO partners offer a common chant: they are united in proclaiming that the current state of affairs seems to portend failure to the concerted effort to defend Western Europe.     

American civil–military relations today: the continuing relevance of Samuel P. Huntington's The soldier and the state

Fifty‐five years after it was first published, Samuel Huntington's The soldier and the state remains an essential starting point for serious discussions of American civil–military relations. In part this is due to the boldness and ambition of the author. Huntington brought theory to a research area that had suffered from too little theorizing and then went on to formulate concepts that scholars and practitioners of civil–military relations still find useful. These include: the conceptualization of the military as a profession; the articulation of the two central forces shaping the nature of military institutions as the functional and the societal imperatives; and the formulation of subjective and objective control as the two main patterns of civilian control. This review article briefly revisits these concepts and argues that they retain utility in illuminating important issues in American civil–military relations today. It also argues, however, that Huntington's contributions were productive but not perfect. Some of his specific definitions, such as the content of military expertise, are debatable. Some of his central concerns, such as whether the United States could sustain a strong military over an extended period of time, are no longer central today. Finally, in some places the literature has moved beyond what Huntington offered. The best example is the ongoing debate over how the country's political leaders and its most senior military officers should interact. It is precisely on this point that Huntington's objective control is the weakest. While The soldier and the state certainly does not deserve uncritical acceptance, it does continue to merit a fair hearing. Current discussions of American civil–military relations are likely to be more reasonable and productive if Huntington is given a voice.     

Archaeology as a Tool to Illuminate and Support Community Struggles in the Black Metropolis of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Abstract

The South Side of Chicago — the 'Black Metropolis' — has been the site of many struggles over the years: for human dignity and civil rights; against restrictive real estate covenants; and to control present-day gentrification, to name a few. This legacy is inscribed on the landscape above and below ground. Black Chicagoans are keen to preserve the material manifestations of prior struggles and use preservation to benefit the current inhabitants of 'Bronzeville'. These activists have welcomed the author into collaborative projects that use archaeology and historic preservation to further their goals. Excavation at the Phyllis Wheatley Home for Girls and the Bronzeville Cultural Garden has contributed to our efforts to identify and present stories of the Great Migration and its consequences. At stake are our understandings of how racial and other identities shaped life in this community in the past as well as the neighbourhood's role in the city's future.     

Warfare and propaganda: the portrayal of Andronikos II Palaiologos (1282–1328) as an incompetent military leader in the Histories of John VI Kantakouzenos (1347–54)

Abstract

The Histories of Kantakouzenos is the main source for the civil war between Andronikos II and Andronikos III which was fought intermittently from 1321 until 1328. This article examines how Kantakouzenos remodelled and fabricated events, conversations and deliberations in order to depict Andronikos II as an incompetent military leader. By criticizing Andronikos II's military abilities and by blaming him for the military failures of the period, Kantakouzenos diverts suspicion of his personal responsibility and Andronikos III's mistakes that led to the advance of Byzantium's enemies and demonstrates that the elder Andronikos was not worthy of being on the throne.     

The reception of Solomos: national poetry and the question of lyricism

Abstract

Through the reception of Solomos, this paper explores the tension between the lyric and the narrative, and the extent to which the roles of national and lyric poet are compatible. The critical reception of Solomos demonstrates that his recognition as a lyric poet was not on an equal footing with his presentation as a national one. It shows that his joint treatment as the national poet of Greece and its greatest lyric poet is problematic and not convincingly argued. It also argues that Solomos's reception can be summarized as the conflict between the historical and the aesthetic approaches.     

Reviews

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 1970s the women's/feminist theatre has gained a dominant position on the European and the American stage. Women have stormed the postmodern stage either as solo dramatists and artists or as collaborative teams, forging a new female theatre language and training audiences to new ways of theatre reception. The publication of Lizbeth Goodman's Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own (Routledge, 1993), one in a long series of recent studies on women's theatre, already heralded an advanced epoch of a polyvocal feminist theatre embracing a multiplicity of female differences along the paradigms of gender, race, sexuality and ethnicity. Within the dynamic spectrum of development and intercultural exchange that ensued in the field of women's theatre the Greek women's contribution is faceless and anaemic. The situation is both distressing and calling for systematic research, especially since the scanty sociological studies concerning the position of women in contemporary Greece are inadequate in throwing full light on such a complicated problem. In 1992 Savas Patsalidis made the first serious attempt to analyse the foetal state of women's theatre in Greece in his article ‘Greek Female (Feminist?) Theatre: A Preliminary Approach', published in the Greek journal Utopia (4, Nov.-Dec. 1992, 105–38). My own interest in the issue in my capacity as a feminist and drama critic springs from my long-standing research in British women's theatre and my understandable comparative inquiry, as a Greek national, into the causes that might have led to the striking absence of an analogous phenomenon in my native country. I have deliberately used the word immaterial in the title of this paper in order to suggest, on the one hand, the relative lack of a distinct theatre discourse of women as speaking subjects and moving bodies on stage, inscribing female experience and female desire, and, on the other hand, the unimportance, in terms of power, of women theatre practitioners as still very few of them hold key positions in theatre institutions and the theatre industry.     

Images of towns in Frankish Morea: the evidence of the ‘Chronicles’ of the Morea and of the Tocco

Abstract

In the summer of 1205 Raimbault of Vacqueyras, the troubadour who had shared Boniface of Monferrat's exploits in central Greece, exclaimed enthusiastically in Salonica:

‘Never did Alexander or Charlemagne or King Louis had such a glorious expedition, nor could the valiant lord Aimeri or Roland with his warriors win by might, in such noble fashion, such a powerful empire as we have won, whereby our faith is in ascendant; for we have created emperors and dukes and kings, and have manned strongholds near the Turks and Arabs, and opened up the roads and ports from Brindisi to St. George's Straits'.     

'This stalwart fellow of five lands and two seas': The Life of Fukushima Yasumasa

Abstract

Although known primarily for his lone horseback ride from Berlin to Vladivostok in 1892–93, Fukushima Yasumasa's career encompassed more than just this one remarkable ride. Born in 1852, Fukushima was caught up in the 1867 civil war, before beginning a military career that took him to almost all corners of the globe. In addition to his service during the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese and 1904–05 Russo-Japanese Wars, Fukushima played an important part in the development of Anglo-Japanese and Japanese-Mongolian relations in the early twentieth century, an aspect of his career that has been largely overlooked. This article re-examines Fukushima's career.     

'Mark one or more': Counting and projecting by race on US Census 2000 and beyond

In 1997, the US Government revised its standards for the collection of data on race. Previous US government practice dating back to the first US Census in 1790 forced people into mutually exclusive categories. The new policy allows people to identify themselves as being of more than one race. The 2000 Census is the first major national data collection exercise to use this new system and its results will reveal both the promise and the perils of the new system. On the positive side, the new scheme allows people who think of themselves as 'mixed' to be counted as such in official data. However, multiple race responses complicate efforts to count minority populations eligible for civil protection and voting rights laws. Furthermore, the new systems pose new opportunities and challenges for social scientists concerned with the measurement of ethnic and racial inequality. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of the new rules for the imagination of America's ethno-racial future through population projections.     

Digging Franco's Trenches: An Archaeological Investigation of a Nationalist Position from the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

As part of a project on the archaeology of the civil war and dictatorship in Spain, a Nationalist position was excavated in the village of Abánades (Guadalajara), which was occupied between March 1937 and the end of the war. The sector that was excavated comprised a trench, two dugouts, and a stone-and-concrete covered trench. The findings reveal more about daily life in General Franco's trenches, while they also offer insights into totalitarian ideology, international involvement in the conflict, and the war economy.     

Ian Hunter's Civil Philosophy

Summary

Ian Hunter's normative commitment is to civil philosophy. His sustained critique of metaphysical philosophy is to be understood in the context of his proposition that civil and moral philosophy are at war. Since civil philosophy is the only guarantor of social peace, the stakes are high.     

The uses of Greek Orthodoxy in the early poetry of Yannis Ritsos

Abstract

The influence of Greek Orthodoxy on Ritsos' poetry, previously neglected because of the poet's political commitments, is examined. Against the backdrop of the poet's Orthodox upbringing and his early conversion to communism, Ritsos' uses of Orthodoxy in certain poems written before 1948 are considered. The diversity is demonstrated during this period of Ritsos' conception and treatment of the tensions and oppositions between Orthodoxy and Marxism. The ideological influence of Varnalis on the earliest collection, Tρακτ?ρ, can be contrasted with the more nuanced use of Orthodox material in Eπιταφιο? and the sympathetic depiction of childhood religion in Mια πυγολαμπιδα φωτιζ?ι τη νυχτα. Only in the particular conditions of wartime Greece does Ritsos manage a bridge between Orthodoxy and Marxism: H Kυρα Aμπ?λιων synthesizes Ritsos' liberation message with images rooted in popular religion.     

Political Crisis and Palestine's Cultural Heritage: A Case Study from the Khirbet el-Lauz Site in Area C

Abstract

The protection of Palestine's archaeological heritage faces several serious obstacles: unenforced laws, lack of public awareness, deterioration of Palestine's economic status, unregulated urban development, and the protracted political conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis. As a result, a significant number of archaeological features and sites have been vandalized, looted, or intentionally destroyed without compunction over the past several decades. The Palestinian-Israeli political conflict has negatively affected the archaeological heritage in “Area C,” which remains under complete Israeli civil and military control. This area includes nearly 60% of the archaeological heritage located within the Palestinian Occupied Territories, but the Palestinian Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage lacks the authority to monitor and protect these sites. Furthermore, the Israeli civil and military authorities in the West Bank do not provide the necessary protection of cultural heritage resources in Area C. The devastation of these resources throughout the Palestinian Territories provides the impetus for this research. The main aim is to identify the results of the political conflict on Palestinian archaeological and cultural heritage sites, using a case study at the site of Khirbet el-Lauz.     

‘I beg you to tear up my letters …’ Nikos Skalkottas's last years in Berlin (1928–33)

Abstract

Nikos Skalkottas (1904–49), the Greek pupil of Schoenberg, was one of the greatest and most prolific atonal and twelve-note composers of the twentieth century, though unrecognised in Athens during his lifetime. The fifty-six letters that he wrote to his patron Manolis Benakis illuminate Skalkottas's life and his music, the financial and emotional difficulties leading to his enforced departure from Berlin, his aesthetic viewpoint, his opinions on Greece and its musical life, and his reasons for composing the popular ‘36 Greek Dances’. This is the first published account of this important documentary source.     

Demetrios Capetanakis: a Greek poet (coming out) in England

Abstract

The homosexual undertones of Demetrios Capetanakis's English writings become evident when the work is seen in the context of the British literary circle that was instrumental in its publication. However, reading Capetanakis's poems as a 'coming out' narrative leads us to assess the mismatching interpretations of gender and sexuality in Greece and the West and the larger complications of identity and identifications. It is suggested that, in Capetanakis's work written in English, what seems at first a liberating expression of the 'true self' through writing can instead be viewed as positing the problem of the idea of a stable, unified and solid identity.     

Love and Marriage Among the Ruins

Abstract

Walker Percy articulated that the American South, liberated by civil rights legislation and economic growth from former strife, was needed in a new quest to save the Union. Percy believed that the troubles facing America were the philosophical and anthropological failures of late-modern thought. Difficult consequences emerged from these failures in the form of failed marriages. The distinctive capacity of the person to intimately love the other for the other's own good is displaced, if not eliminated, by theorists who narrow man to a this-worldly preoccupation while simultaneously denying his unique aspects. One injured element, broached by Percy in his novels The Second Coming and Love in the Ruins, is the shared love of the domestic family that becomes misconceived and misshaped in an age no longer conversant with the sacramental significance of man. Percy's discerning observations in these novels afford a unique purchase on the institution's diminishment in the midst of a humanistic age. The failure of this basic and complex love is one of the most deeply and painfully felt consequences achieved by the intrapersonal splits that have resulted from the age of theorist–consumerism. From man's failures to move beyond ideology and theory emerge his inability to even understand love's connection with his existence.     

Seventeenth-Century Glass Trade Beads from La Salle's Fort St. Louis and the Grand Village of the Kaskaskia

Abstract

Glass trade beads are described here from two seventeenth-century sites located in the upper Illinois Valley, La Salle's 1682–1691 Fort St. Louis and the nearby Grand Village of the Kaskaskia, destroyed during an Iroquois raid in 1680. Simple monochrome drawn beads characterize both bead assemblages and each contains significant percentages of very small (<2 mm) and small (2–4 mm) size beads. Dominant colors are blue, white, and black. Turquoise-blue beads were a staple of the French trade at this time in the Illinois Country, particularly in transactions involving La Salle and his successors based at Fort St. Louis. Comparative treatment provided as part of this research indicates that there are significant similarities between the bead assemblage from Fort St. Louis and the beads recovered from the 1686 wreck of La Salle's ship Belle in Matagorda Bay off the Texas coast.