The Cap of Liberty: Roman Slavery,Cultural Memory,and Magic Mushrooms

The commonest psychedelic mushroom growing naturally in Britain, Psilocybe semilanceata, is known in English as the Liberty Cap. This name, which references an ancient Roman social practice, has caused considerable speculation in modern literature. This article provides a conclusive etymology for how a magic mushroom acquired this obscure name.     

Las Casas and His Amerindian Nurse: Tropes of Lactation in the French Colonial Imaginary (c.1770–1815)

This article investigates Marmontel's reworking of the ancient legend of Pero and Cimone in his bestselling novel Les Incas (1777). According to an anecdote in Valerius Maximus's Memorable Doings and Sayings (c.30 CE), Pero saves her father, condemned to death by starvation, by breastfeeding him in prison. In Les Incas, it is Bartolomé de las Casas who is being cured from a fatal illness through the milk of an Amerindian princess. Jean‐Michel Moreau the Younger illustrated this lactation scene in the first edition of Marmontel's novel; his engraving inspired Louis Hersent to render the topic in oil three decades later. My article explores the ways in which French Enlightenment writers and artists employed lactation imagery to propose a utopian reform of colonial relations – the voluntary offering of America's riches to benevolent white patriarchs – at a time when the nature of government authority, paternity, maternity, race and kinship were being redefined. In 1808, Hersent's painting of ‘Las Casas Cured by Savages’ appears curiously anachronistic in the context of contemporary novels and paintings that portray colonial relationships as inundated by death and bloodshed. In Chateaubriand's Atala (1801), lactation imagery is employed to signify white men's necrophilic desire, genocide and loss.     

Women's Talk and the Colonial State: The Wylde Scandal, 1831–1833

Between 1831 and 1833 the Chief Justice of the Cape Colony, Sir John Wylde, was involved in a scandal surrounding anonymous accusations of incest resulting from the alleged pregnancy of his unmarried daughter. The rumours led to an official inquiry by the secretary of state. The resulting political crisis took place against a background of social tension over impending slave emancipation. The records of the inquiry, together with contemporary comment, form the basis for a discussion of how gender roles, gossip and a separation between public and private spheres informed the operation of Cape colonial politics and society.