How the News was brought from Byzantium to Angoulême; or,The Pursuit of a Hare in an Ox Cart

Abstract

Adémar of Chabannes (988-1034) of noble family, a-monk in the monastery of St. Cybard (Eparchus) at Angoulême, compiled a Chronicon in three books. The first begins with the origins of the Franks and ends with the death of Pepin the Short in 768; the second deals with the reign of Charlemagne; the third covers the years 814 to 1030. The first two books and the first fifteen chapters of the third (down to the year 877) are wholly derivative from identifiable sources. But from chapter sixteen onward the third book provides valuable information chiefly on the period 877-1030 in Aquitaine, presumably drawn from local written sources and from the memories of Adémar's associates. These included notably his two uncles, who were attached to the monastery of St. Martial at Limoges, as was Adémar himself in his youth. It was at St. Martial that on a stormy night in 1010 Adémar had a vision in the heavens of a fiery Cross with Christ upon it weeping a great river of tears: an experience that rendered him so thunderstruck (attonitus) that he kept it secret in his heart until many years later when he was nearing the end of his Chronicon. Then he wrote it down. From St. Martial he returned at the age of twenty-two to St. Cybard, took orders, and spent his life in writing. The‘original’chapters of his Chronicon only occasionally evince any interest in or knowledge of events in France north of Loire.     

The map drawings of Aegidius Tschudi (1505–1572)

‘On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said: “We don't show churches on our maps.” Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was very clearly marked. “That is a museum,” he said, “not what we call a ‘living church.’ It is only ‘living churches’ we don't show.”

It then occurred to me that this was not the first time I had been given a map which failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes. All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps.’

E. F. Schumacher, ‘On philosophical maps,’ A guide for the perplexed (New York, 1977).     

Generation as a social variable

ABSTRACT

In this short paper, I start with a case study – about how elementary school children in the early twentieth century in England understood their responsibilities vis-à-vis family (and school). This example provides a window into a past which deeply contrasts with present-day children’s and adults’ understandings and lives. I go on to consider (very briefly, for the field is vast) how ideas about childhood changed in the interwar years and how, since then, children have become locked into educational establishments – as well as into families. It seems to me that in these circumstances we are not used to thinking of children as thoughtful and active members of society. So it is no surprise to me that adults do not look to inter-relations with children as key variables towards understanding the social order. I note that my emphasis is on the UK, since I know most about that!     

Everyday Life in Byzantium: Some Problems of Aproach

Abstract

In 1554 a Franciscan friar of Angoulěme, André Thevet, published at Lyons his Cosmographie de Levant. The author had recently returned from a three year journey to Constantinople and the Holy Land, and the Cosmographie was the first of a number of geographical works.     

George Sigerson: Charcot's translator*

Abstract

Senator George Sigerson (1836–1925), Dublin's first neurologist, was also a significant contributor to Anglo‐Irish literature. His medical career and literary accomplishments are outlined, the focus of the article being Sigerson's friendly relationship with Charcot (with whom he corresponded), and whose Leçons sur les maladies du système nerveux he translated.     

Why Dennis v. United States is a Landmark Case

A landmark, Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary tells us, is “an event or development that marks a turning point or a stage.” In my life, the case of Dennis v. United States ¹ is a landmark, or perhaps more accurately, a series of landmarks. My 1973 doctoral dissertation was on Dennis. ² Four years later that thesis became my first book. ³ My second book, a collection of articles on American political trials that appeared in 1981, contained an essay by me on Dennis. ⁴ By then, I assumed, I had said about everything I had to say on the case. In 1993, though, Mel Urofsky brought me back to it, asking me to write a retrospective article on Dennis for the Journal of Supreme Court History, of which he had just become the editor. ⁵ Now, fifteen years later, here we are together again. I am beginning to think that the “grave and probable danger” test that Dennis introduced into constitutional law will be inscribed on my tombstone.     

Reading back from Experimental Painting

ABSTRACT

My book, Experimental Painting (1970), was the product of a decade of coming to terms with the history of modern art and with contemporary manifestations of the avantgarde. While at Cambridge from 1960 to 1967, I published art criticism, initially in locally published magazines, and then went on to review art exhibitions both nationally and internationally. This led to being co-editor of Form, which produced further opportunities. The term ‘experimental’ that I adopted in 1970 was intended to suggest the paradigm of scientific discovery which suited some, if not all, of the artists I studied. This article considers concepts directly imported from contemporary scientific enquiry that seemed relevant to me at the time, notably those from experimental psychology, psychoanalysis and structural linguistics. I relate them to the character of intellectual life at Cambridge in a period which saw much debate about the relationship between Sciences and Humanities as ‘Two Cultures’.     

TEMPORAL TRENDS IN NATIVE CERAMIC TRADITIONS OF THE LOWER CATAWBA RIVER VALLEY

Abstract

Bennie Keel’s 1972 work at Upper Sauratown was the opening salvo of the Research Laboratories of Archaeology’s 30-year Siouan Project, which continues under the guise of the ongoing Catawba Project. Keel’s early work at the protohistoric Hardins and early historic era Belk Farm sites in the Catawba River Valley continues to inform the current phase of Piedmont Siouan research. This study compares and contrasts Keel’s Hardins and Belk Farm ceramic assemblages with those from the later Catawba sites of Nassaw Town, Old Town, and New Town to achieve a diachronic view of Catawba ceramic development. This comparison reveals a long span of stylistic and technological continuity abruptly terminated by rapid emergence of the modern Catawba ceramic tradition between 1760 and 1770.     

Demetrius the Chronographer and 141 BCE

We only have six fragments from a book written by Demetrius the Chronographer. Scholars claim he lived and worked in Alexandria about 225-200 BCE and he is an early witness for the date of the LXX. However, the few chronological details we have indicate that he used the year 141 BCE as the base year for his chronology. There are no early witnesses for the LXX and there are no reliable obstacles for lowering the date for the LXX to 130 B.C. or even lower.     

Don Isaac Abravanel and Leonardo Bruni: A Literary and Philosophical Confrontation

Abstract

Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was one of the first Jewish thinkers to express republican positions, yet very little is known about his knowledge of humanistic republican conceptions. Had he read Leonardo Bruni’s republican writings? Had he even heard of them? In this essay I attempt to address this philological gap by comparing Abravanel’s republican commentary on 1 Samuel 8 with Bruni’s Laudatio florentinae Urbis, especially the motif of the plea to God to authorize a political regime. This comparison is particularly useful for illuminating their respective positions on republicanism, their shared interests and conceptions, as well as their divergent attitudes to their own political and historical environment. This divergence, I argue, sheds light on the early modern Christian and Jewish receptions of ancient republicanism.     

Improvisation and Hybrid Genres: Reading Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

ABSTRACT

In the first section I ask two questions: what sort of a poem is Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and what is the immediate experience of reading it in sequence? These two questions are the practical equivalents of the main terms of my title. I try to answer them by reconstructing a first reading of the poem in the light of my own experience and the imagined one of the first readers of the poem. I suggest that two terms—accretion and elimination—are helpful here and that, in some ways, the structure and sequential experiencing of the poem resemble the structures of extended nineteenth-century musical forms. In the second section, I reverse perspective and take a position at the end of the poem. From such a point, it is easier to find what the poem has included and eliminated and this, in turn, suggests the kind of poem that it is. In the third section I tackle the terms “improvisation” and “hybrid genres” directly, link them with my earlier arguments, and engage with some theorists, especially Bakhtin. In particular, I argue against the view that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage dissolves genre but argue that genres are nevertheless “open categories.” My conclusion is less definite. I confess to difficulties that still bother me.     

The cologne map publisher Peter Overadt (fl. 1590–1652)

Abstract

Peter Overadt is one of the many lesser‐known figures of the second generation of the Cologne school of map making, which had been founded about 1570 by Frans Hogenberg. Overadt is noteworthy as the first continental publisher (aside from Jodocus I Hondius, who was at that time active in London) to have decorated printed topographical maps with marginal historical‐political images. During the first phase of his business (1592–1600), he issued eight maps, with a three‐sheet map of Germania as the pinnacle of his production. After 1600, Overadt's firm was primarily engaged in the publication of religious prints with a Catholic orientation. Topographical productions from this later period are three large town views and the re‐issue of a map of the Rhine area, printed from a re‐worked copper plate of 1594 by Theodoor de Bry.     

A Public Faith—but for Everyone and Every Public?

Abstract

Miroslav Volf’s sets out a strong, good thesis about the freedom religious people ought to have to participate in public as fully themselves, as religious people. This thesis is in tension with the fact that some people seek to harm others, or to radically compromise public life itself, in the name of their religion. Along the way, Volf makes a number of points that seem puzzling, at least overstated, but perhaps even incoherent with other claims he makes or with data that he likely also knows. I raise the possibility that the author’s social location may help to explain at least some of these debatable features of his otherwise salutary book.     

Historians and friends: reflections on some contemporary historians*

ABSTRACT

This article is based on the text of a talk at the University of Athens in October 2018, in which I drew brief cameo portraits of five historians who inspired me and whose lives I admire: David Herlihy (1930–1991), Michael Baxandall (1933–2008), Marino Berengo (1928–2000), Hans Baron (1901–1988), and Marvin Becker (1922–2004). It is difficult to find strong common methodological or ideological ground shared by all five. Their priorities were different, their guiding lights in each case came from an internal dialogue between their own passions and the inspiration they received from teachers and readings, not by the methodological preferences that dominated the profession in their lives. What, in the end, left a deep imprint on me was their character. Their commitment was to ideas and to dialogue. National, religious, ideological, or methodological differences did not cloud their judgment of others, especially of young scholars. All five, growing up in the Fascist era, were portents of the more level tones of the liberal democracy that slowly, amid myriad obstacles, set root in the decades following 1945.     

Secular Islam

ABSTRACT

While he appears to have been a relentless critic of secularism as a liberal ideal, the celebrated Indian poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal might also be considered among its more important non-European theorists. Globally one of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century, Iqbal started publishing in its first decade, reaching the height of his power and popularity during the inter-war period until he died in Lahore in 1938. He studied philosophy as well as Arabic and Persian thought in Lahore, Cambridge, and Munich, and drew extensively upon European as much as Asian thinkers. I will argue here that Iqbal followed an important tradition of pre-modern philosophy by thinking about the relationship between politics and theology in esoteric terms.     

The “Realism” of Augustine's “Political Realism”: Augustine and Machiavelli

Abstract

Arendt and Tocqueville both celebrate a participatory notion of political freedom, but they have a fundamental disagreement about the role that political education should play in fostering an active citizenry. I contrast Tocqueville's “educative” conception of politics with Arendt's “performative” conception, and I explore an important but little-noted difference between the two theorists: whereas Tocqueville argues that it is the task of statesmen “to educate democracy,” Arendt warns that those who seek to “educate” adults are inappropriately aspiring to be their “guardians.” I argue that although Arendt's warnings about the dangers of intertwining politics and education are at times salutary, Tocqueville is ultimately correct that education must be a key task of democratic leadership, and he is right to suggest that politics can itself be educative in crucial ways.     

Capitalism,Christianity, America: Rethinking the Issues

Abstract

Appreciative of the points made by all four commentators, William Connolly seeks to clarify some issues and modify a few positions taken in his book Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (2008). Philip Goodchild's account of "resonance" is superb, but I hesitate over his tendency to argue that the demise of capitalism is inevitable. Catherine Keller deepens the theological issues pursued in my book, as she shows additional ways to open "theopoetic" connections between those who pursue deep, multidimensional pluralism. David Howarth makes important links between my position and that of Ernesto Laclau, and he joins me in resisting those who eschew engagement with the state as they fight off the neoliberal/evangelical machine. I use the occasion of this dialogue to explore further the relations between conceptions of immanence and those of transcendence. Kathy Ferguson admirably shows how the experience of grief by evangelical women opens a possible door to engagements of agonistic respect. In each engagement I try to follow some of the suggestions and to add a couple of my own.     

“But it's Alright,Ma, it's Life,and Life Only”: Radicalism as Survival

Hunger stole upon me so slowly at first. I was not aware of what hunger really meant [emphasis added]. Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger, staring at me gauntly … this hunger baffled me, scared me, made me angry and insistent … I would grow dizzy and my vision would dim. I became less active in my play, and for the first time in my life I had to pause and think of what was happening to me. ( Wright 1977 )

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