Franciscan inquisition and mendicant rivalry in mid-thirteenth-century Marseille

Although Dominicans are more widely studied as the work force behind medieval inquisitions, Franciscan friars began to act as inquisitors of heretical depravity within Provence and elsewhere by the mid-thirteenth century. In this article, the testimony of a Marseille priest, Master Durand, found in the Archives Départementales de Vaucluse Cordeliers d'Avignon 24 H 3, reveals much about the period of political intrigue within the commune of Marseille when the order of Friars Minor first assumed control of the inquisition within the county of Provence. The testimony exposes the tensions between members of the Dominican convent at Marseille and the Franciscan inquisitors as the Franciscans sought to establish themselves as heresy inquisitors in the region and as both mendicant orders sought to retain the approval of the count of Provence, Charles I of Anjou.     

The Inquisition and prohibited sexual artwork in late colonial Mexico

The manufacturing or distribution of pornographic materials was among the many crimes pursued by the Holy Office. Twenty-one denunciations of illicit sexual artwork from 1750 to 1820 are housed in Mexico's Archivo General de la Nación. The items range from illustrations and prints of men and women in sexualized poses to elaborate and ingenious etchings and paintings on watches and jewelry boxes. The protagonists in this article include denouncers, witnesses, and suspects, inquisitors, qualifiers, and other church agents, and producers, sellers, and consumers of prohibited artwork. These cases provide valuable information on the sexual culture of Mexico City's urban leisure class. Those accused of selling and purchasing illegal art did not view themselves as libertines or free thinkers who advocated sexual experimentation. Nor did they advocate anti-Christian or anti-establishment sentiments. Inquisitors did not demonstrate the same fears and anxieties about erotic drawings and artwork that they did with prohibited books, nor did they conflate eroticism and licentiousness with heresy and treason. The consumers of prohibited sexual artwork in late colonial Mexico City seem to have mostly reveled in the excitement of seeing and owning prohibited materials and sharing a good laugh with friends. Neither they nor inquisitors took these items too seriously.     

Politics of scale: Colossal containerships and the crisis in global shipping

This article addresses overcapacity and crisis in global shipping through the case of the HMM Algeciras, the world's largest containership inaugurated in 2020. When she left the South Korean shipyard where she was built, the HMM Algeciras (with a size of two soccer fields) could carry 24,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) across the world's oceans. By following the mega-containership's links to two South Korean shipping companies, Hyundai Merchant Marine and Hanjin Shipping, and her connections to a southern European port, the authors unpack some of the current flip sides of global maritime shipping. In this article, the authors argue that the promise of profit and endless growth, which has led to overcapacity in global maritime shipping, is spurred on by what they call ‘false economies of scale’. Claims of the future profitability of colossal containerships are, they argue, state-driven political performances of scale.     

Impoverished mothers and poor widows: negotiating images of poverty in Marseille's courts

In the early fifteenth century, in Marseille's court of first instance, a sailor's wife Margarida Gramone sued her son-in-law's estate to recoup money she had spent nursing her dying daughter and granddaughter. She justified her claim on the money by arguing that she had been completely impoverished by the medicine, doctors and wet nurses that her sick family had needed. She called witnesses to attest to her impoverished state and they told a story of a woman unable to pay her bills and reliant on the charity of her neighbours. Other witnesses in the same case, however, suggest Margarida was not poor, but a woman of means. Attempting to reconcile this discrepancy, this article will examine how Marseille's legally savvy citizens negotiated between at least two different attitudes towards the poor: a Christian celebration of charity and a legal scepticism of a pauper's word. The legal records from late medieval Marseille show a multivalent attitude towards the poor. They suggest that the city's citizens were able to draw on different narratives about poverty in order to win over the presiding judge. At the same time, witness testimony about the poor reminds us that the burden of charity was not always welcomed by Marseille's citizens.     

Impoverished mothers and poor widows: negotiating images of poverty in Marseille's courts

In the early fifteenth century, in Marseille's court of first instance, a sailor's wife Margarida Gramone sued her son-in-law's estate to recoup money she had spent nursing her dying daughter and granddaughter. She justified her claim on the money by arguing that she had been completely impoverished by the medicine, doctors and wet nurses that her sick family had needed. She called witnesses to attest to her impoverished state and they told a story of a woman unable to pay her bills and reliant on the charity of her neighbours. Other witnesses in the same case, however, suggest Margarida was not poor, but a woman of means. Attempting to reconcile this discrepancy, this article will examine how Marseille's legally savvy citizens negotiated between at least two different attitudes towards the poor: a Christian celebration of charity and a legal scepticism of a pauper's word. The legal records from late medieval Marseille show a multivalent attitude towards the poor. They suggest that the city's citizens were able to draw on different narratives about poverty in order to win over the presiding judge. At the same time, witness testimony about the poor reminds us that the burden of charity was not always welcomed by Marseille's citizens.     

Organicism,womanhood and domesticity in Anne LaBastille's Woodswoman saga

Anne LaBastille's Woodswoman saga presents an ecological approach to organicism that aims to recuperate the notion of nature and the wilderness as live organisms in perpetual, cyclical transition. LaBastille's conception of nature as an animate entity to which the self is intimately connected unleashes her discursive advocacy for a necessary reversion to a communion with natural rhythms. Her hermitage represents a voluntary conversion into the laws of nature, a conversion which results in the identification of the self as a self-in-place, and in the redefinition of the categories of domesticity, privacy and territoriality from an ecofeminist perspective. Such redefinitions lead to an implosion of the notion of femininity itself: as LaBastille negotiates between the categories of womanhood, the wilderness, and private and public domains in accordance to organicist principles, she opens a new discursive space that acknowledges women's need for a territory of their own where they too can become independent selves-in-relation.     

Printing Oliver Cromwell's Speeches: The Making of a Split Personality

Oliver Cromwell's speeches are used frequently by historians of the interregnum, yet all current printed editions of the speeches have significant problems. They fail to consider the variations in different versions of each of the speeches and they consequently ignore the complexity of the sources. Each speech exists in more than one early version and each source has a provenance which is often difficult to determine. Additionally, no two versions of the same speech are identical, as each version has its own unique variations. These small variations in the wording have the potential to alter the meaning. This article looks in detail at these issues in relation to Cromwell's kingship speeches of 1657; some versions portray him as a conservative gentleman who ruled similarly to a king, while others present him as a religious fanatic who sympathised with the religious sects. Such differences can often be attributed to the personal beliefs of particular authors. As a result of the variations in the sources, the historian's interpretation of Cromwell is necessarily affected by which source he or she uses for Cromwell's speeches. Cromwell's speeches are an important source, but if historians hope to make use of them, they must acknowledge the complexities of the original sources.     

Durán of Huesca (c. 1160–1230): A Waldensian Seeking a Remedy to Heresy

Despite the debates about the nature of medieval heresy, especially the Cathars and the Waldensians, in recent scholarship, very little attention has been given to Durán of Huesca, a Spanish Waldensian who wrote two anti‐heretical treatises before and after he was reconciled with the Roman Church in 1207. This article examines how Durán's decisions to join the Waldensians and later to return to the Catholic Church were motivated by his commitment to defending the sacraments and the Incarnation against what he saw as dualist heresy. That his major decisions were in response to this heresy suggests that while old scholarship might overemphasise the cohesiveness of heresy in the south of France, it is important not to dismiss the existence of explicit heretical belief altogether. Moreover, the centrality of the Incarnation and the sacraments in Durán's shifts in association reveals that the Waldensians were active, rather than passive, participants in shaping how the Church hierarchy and other dissident groups perceived and categorised them.     

Poison and romance: Oscar Wilde and the strange case of Edith Thompson

Oscar Wilde considered crime and sin no impediment to art or culture, as the case of the poisoner-artist-critic Thomas Wainewright (1794–1847) allowed him to demonstrate. English society of the time, as George Orwell famously declared, was as fascinated by poisoning as was Wilde. One of Orwell's cases was that of Edith Thompson who, along with her young lover, was convicted in 1922 in London of conspiracy to murder her husband whom it was alleged she had tried to poison. She and her lover were hanged in early 1923. Thompson's preoccupation with poison was entangled with her preoccupation with popular romance fiction of the day which she read copiously and discussed perceptively with her lover in the letters that helped to convict her. Her favourite novelist was Robert Hichens, the acquaintance, imitator and caricaturist of Wilde. She quoted Hichens's novel Bella Donna (1909) in letters to her lover, including on the practical matter of poison, which helped convince the jury of her guilt. Her trial, like Wilde's trials – all involving sexual transgression – raised the difficult question of whether literature could poison and influence for the worse its readers or whether it lay outside both morality and the world of action. Moreover, were Thompson's own letters literature and fantasy or were they oblique discussions of practical intent, including the intent to murder? As in the case of Wilde, a larger question supervened. In part through her reading, in part through her own experience, Edith came to believe, even before the murder, that freedom is an illusion, fate an inescapable reality.     

Power and Ethnicity History and Anthropology

This essay reflects on the relationship between anthropological and historical scholarship of ethnicity, picking up on themes explored by Andre Gingrich, by considering the epistemological and evidentiary limitations of social scientific and historical analysis and reconstruction. Beginning with the consideration of the pioneering transdisciplinary efforts of Robert Darnton and Clifford Geertz, it argues that many of the weaknesses ascribed to such efforts are actually part of the nature of social scientific investigation which, in the terms of Peter Winch, must take into account two sets of relationships: that of the relationship between the scientist and the phenomena that he or she observes and the symbolic system that he or she shares with other scientists, which can only be understood from the social context of common activity. How these two relationships challenge social scientific analysis of ethnicity are examined through a consideration of the difficulties of applying Anthony Smith's definition of an ethnie to either Fredrik Barth's classic essay on “Pathan Identity and its Maintenance” or Helmut Reimitz's study of Frankish identity. It concludes that neither anthropologists nor historians are simply describing societies as they are or as they were but rather attempt to describe societies as witnesses within them thought they should be, and we do this for our own society, not for those of the participants, past or present.     

Karl Polanyi and the Modernity-versus-Postmodernity Debate

The originality of Karl Polanyi's work in the interwar period has gained increasing recognition in recent years, during which time the major debate on modernity has erupted. In order to link Polanyi's work with this debate, I will first discuss his legacy on the controversial concept of progress, and then relate his position to this debate. It is my contention that Polanyi's position combines the better aspects of the two rival approaches to modernity. I will then re-link Polanyi's thought to the intellectual figures, movements and climate of his time and thereby disclose a curious affinity between his thought and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. This affinity can best be understood within the parameters of the historical context that they once shared.     

A bloodied bond: Fly River heads and body image in Beatrice Grimshaw's colonial landscapes

In a paper published previously in the Irish Studies Review I discuss the anthropomorphic features of Beatrice Grimshaw's landscapes in relation to colonial fears of the unknown. Following on from this I argue in the present work that this trope, ubiquitous in colonial literature, is exacerbated in Grimshaw's oeuvre by a body image or body image tendencies associated with penetrability, the foundations of which would have been laid long before she first saw the delphinium skies of the south. Grimshaw's body image, her realisation of her own physicality, is the primary focus of this essay. Drawing on the research of psychologists Seymour Fisher and Sidney E. Cleveland, I explore Grimshaw's conception of body boundaries, the boundaries of the touristic self and the indigenous Other. Such an analysis requires an examination not only of the body, and its extension dress, but also of physical terrain, the spaces and places, landscapes of the past and the present, home and the away, within which these cartographies of flesh and bone move.     

Conversion Narratives and the Roman Inquisition in Malta, 1650–1700

This article analyses the conversion narratives which Christian renegades to Islam narrated to the inquisitor on their arrival in Malta in the second half of the seventeenth century. A few of them really believed in their new faith and were declared formal heretics, but the great majority had either been brought up as Muslims since a tender age or else were only suspected of believing that one can save oneself as a Muslim. The inquisitors were very indulgent with them and believed them when they said that they preserved the Christian religion in their hearts and were Muslims only on the outside.     

The life and passion of Artemisia1

When reading Susan Vreeland's novel The Passion of Artemisia, we find ourselves in seventeenth century Renaissance Italy and the social life of Artemisia d'Orazio Gentileschi, a woman painter who was raped, tortured by the Inquisition and due to her fine and original paintings, was the first woman painter to become a member of the famous Accademia del Disegno. In sum, she struggled for her personal and artistic liberation long before anyone in Europe had heard about feminism. Moreover, Artemisia is a timely reminder of how sometimes in the past for Europeans, and more specifically for Italians, Art in general and Painting in particular, was an integral part of a form of life not only for artists but for ordinary people as well.     

STALINISM IN RETROSPECT: HANNAH ARENDT

Established writers whose reputation is affixed to a particular line of argument are typically ill disposed to change their minds in public. Some authors sincerely believe that the historical record vindicates them. Others are determined that the historical record will vindicate them. Still others ignore the historical record. Among students of totalitarianism, no one had more at stake reputationally than Hannah Arendt. It is not just that The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) established her as the premier thinker on its topic. It is also that totalitarianism, as she understood it, ribbons through all of her subsequent books, from the discussion of “the social” in The Human Condition (1958) to the analysis of thinking in the posthumously published The Life of the Mind (1978). How ready was she to adapt or to change entirely arguments she had first formulated as early as the mid‐to‐late 1940s? “Stalinism in Retrospect,” her contribution to Columbia University's Seminar on Communism series, offers a rare opportunity to answer, at least partially, this question. Arendt's foil was the publication of recent books on Stalin and the Stalin era by three Russian witnesses: Nadezhda Mandelstam, Roy Medvedev, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. According to Arendt, the books meshed with her own theoretical conception of Bolshevism while changing the “whole taste” of the period: they contained new insights into the nature of totalitarian criminality and evil. “Stalinism in Retrospect” documents Arendt's arguments and challenges to them by a number of the seminar's participants. Of particular note is the exchange between her and Zbigniew Brzezinski, an expert on the Soviet Union, a major interpreter of totalitarianism in his own right, and soon to be President Carter's National Security Advisor (January 1977–January 1981). Notes by the editor, Peter Baehr, offer a critical context for understanding Arendt's argument.     

‘Halt! Be Men!’: Sikelgaita of Salerno,Gender and the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy

This article examines the career of Sikelgaita (1040–1090), wife of the Norman conqueror of southern Italy, Robert Guiscard, as a means of understanding the impact of the ‘other’ Norman conquest of the eleventh century. Sikelgaita is unusual in that she has left images in narrative sources both within and well beyond the confines of southern Italy. She is also well documented at a local level. Both types of material combine to reveal her crossing gender boundaries in titles she used, the way in which she managed property, her legendary presence alongside Robert on his campaigns and, more speculatively, in organising a campaign of written propaganda to ensure the succession of her son to his father's patrimony in preference to his half‐brother by Sikelgaita's predecessor as Robert's wife. Her history raises the problems of women's access to written texts, their conscious shaping of their own identities, their conflicting loyalties between natal and marital families, and the need for competing male heirs to prove themselves against a prevailing notion of masculinity in a period when one aggressively masculine group, the Lombards, was being supplanted in power by another, the Normans. As such, it demonstrates that the lives of so‐called ‘exceptional’ women continue to have a value to historians of gender in the middle ages, and can often demonstrate the patriarchal boundaries which even they could not cross.     

Woman's Work in the Service of Empire: Lady Margaret Field (1905–94) from School Teacher to Governor's Wife

The presence of single and also of married British women in overseas colonies, especially those employed by or married to men in the Colonial Service in the later colonial period, has been the subject of scholarly enquiry. Their lives, roles and values and their distinctive contribution, if any, to the development of empire and of its ending have been debated. Their gendered roles were usually subordinate in a masculine culture of empire, and especially as wives they are commonly regarded as marginalised. The archived records left by Lady Margaret Field reveal her commitment as a single woman to a colonial mission and her sense of achievement as a school teacher and educational administrator, while also acknowledging the independence and career satisfactions she subsequently lost when she married a senior Colonial Service officer who rose to be a governor. But it is also apparent that, though incorporated and subordinate as a governor's wife to her husband's career, she was not marginalised to a separate sphere. As is evident from this case study, governors’ wives had important and demanding political duties, and such responsibilities need to be acknowledged.     

Exorcism as Empowerment: A New Idiom

During the years 1610 and 1611, two Ursuline novices underwent an exorcism in southern France. In the spring of 1611, their confessor, Father Louis Gaufridy, was condemned of witchcraft and rape by Dominican inquisitors, and burned at the stake by state officials. The Dominican inquisitors found Father Gaufridy guilty of causing the Ursulines to be possessed by demons, and luring the young women to caves where they participated in illicit activities. Rather than accepting the role of victim, the Ursulines, working in collusion, accomplished the miraculous: public exoneration, and reintegration into their religious community accompanied not only by a reclaimed stature as women religious, but by an elevated stature. Through an intricate play of accusation and expiation, carefully worked through the demons that possessed them, the Ursuline novices reconstructed themselves as virtuous women religious.     

On Political Theology: The Hidden Dialogue between C. Schmitt and Ernst H. Kantorowicz in The King's Two Bodies

In recent years, Ernst H. Kantorowicz's work The King's Two Bodies (1957) has been the object of both historical and philosophical research. Kantorowicz decided to subtitle his book ‘A Study in Medieval Political Theology’, but few scholars have actually recognised his work as research in ‘political theology’. The aim of this article, then, is to uncover the sense(s) in which his book might be considered a work of ‘political theology’, especially in the sense coined by Carl Schmitt in 1922. Such a discussion ultimately aims to contribute to the foundation of political-theology research, a subject that has been widespread among European intellectuals in the twentieth century and which continues to be a focus of interest. This article argues that Kantorowicz's book can be interpreted as a practice of—and also an enriching addition to—Schmitt's thesis on political theology, even if it does not mention Schmitt's name. Such a conclusion is only possible by accepting that there was a heated dialogue between Kantorowicz and Schmitt through Erik Peterson's work. The article further discusses its approach with other scholars that, even though they are based on similar hypotheses, make different conclusions.     

Women's rights and misogyny in Brazil: An interview with Debora Diniz

In 2018 anthropologist and feminist Debora Diniz appeared as an expert witness in a Supreme Court hearing that addressed decriminalizing abortion. After receiving death threats, she was placed under police protection and forced to go into hiding. The police discovered that a right-wing extremist gang plotted an attack against her, and Diniz had to go into exile abroad, a fate she shares with several other academics working on women's rights and economic and racial inequalities. In this interview, Diniz reflects on the Brazilian political climate and its consequences for academics, freedom, women's rights and healthcare.