Le modèle politique vénitien notes sur la constitution d’un mythe

From the sixteenth century on, the «mixed» government of Venice became a political model for the Europe of theAncien Régime. Harmoniously combining the principles of democracy (the Grand Council), aristocracy (the Senate) and monarchy (the Doge), guaranteeing social peace and the stability of the institutions, claiming to protect Venice from the hazards of history, this form of government gave birth to a veritable myth. An essential part of the reflection on the diversity of Italian republican traditions, the study of the Venitian political myth allows us to question also the disputable usages of the republican paradigm in recent historiography.     

Pope Clement V and the crusades of 1309–10

There were three crusading expeditions in 1309– 1310: against the Muslims in the eastern Mediterranean, the Moors in Granada, and the Venetian soldiers occupying the papal city of Ferrara. The campaigns illustrate the continuing vitality of the crusading movement despite the setbacks of the previous decades; but they also reveal the consequences of extending the crusade to various ‘fronts’, both outside and within the frontiers of Christendom. For Clement V's original intention of concentrating the crusading energy of the West on his project for a Hospitaller passagium particulare was frustrated first by insistent Aragonese and Castilian demands for crusade privileges and taxes for the Granada campaign, and later by the draining-off of papal funds to the Ferrara war. It was the crusade against Venice which proved most successful, and the lesson was clear to the papal court: in a period of soaring military costs and growing suspicion about the real motives of crusading kings and princes, the papacy could best promote the cause of Christ by concentrating on the ‘home front’, the policy pursued by Clement's successor, John XXII.     

Gregory IX's attempted expeditions to the Latin Empire of Constantinople: the crusade for the union of the Latin and Greek churches

Gregory IX's crusade (1236–1240) to safeguard the Latin Empire was the last expedition sponsored by the papacy before the fall of the Latin state in 1261. Like his predecessors, Innocent III and Honorius III, Gregory believed that an expedition against his fellow Christians was necessary to safeguard the land route to the Holy Land and to protect the Latin Empire itself. Gregory also shared with Innocent and Honorius the belief that this was a divinely appointed policy, symbolized by God giving the Greek Empire into Latin hands in retribution for Greek schismstic beliefs. But Gregory's policy had another facet to its justification. He accused the supporters of the Greeks, in particular John II Asen, king of Bulgaria, of sheltering heretics and of allowing a climate in which heresy could flourish. Gregory evolved a method of justifying war against the Greeks and their supporters analogous to that used elsewhere in Europe against those who sheltered heretics. He threatened the guilty with the loss of their lands under the provisions of the Fourth Lateran Council canon, Excommunicamus. To make the theoretical concrete, Gregory tried to form two expeditions, one composed of Europeans, the other of Hungarians and even Bulgarians, against the emperor of Nicaea. But the expeditions failed and Gregory's rationale for warring against the Greeks was not utilized by his immediate successors to the pontifical throne.     

The Construction of the Myth of Survival

A myth has come into being that the poor household/family is able to survive in spite of a lack of resources and the presence of macroeconomic policies that foster unemployment and poverty. It has an accompanying fable that tells of how the poor manage to implement survival strategies that are based on their endless capacity to work, to consume less and to be part of mutual help networks. This myth has become a useful tool for policy makers as they design more aggressive neoliberal economic adjustment policies. This contribution examines anthropological and sociological insights regarding the life of the poor and the organization of their households, in which women's paid and unpaid work is an integral part. Through the lens of a researcher in the field of urban poverty and household organization, the article re‐examines the fable of the good survivor. Evidence debunks the myth, showing that the optimistic message of this fable does not match with the realities of the impact of economic change on women's lives. But the myth is sustained, as this more negative story is not one that supra‐national policy actors want to hear.     

Pioneers,politicians and the conservation of forests in early New Zealand

In pioneering societies there is usually little interest in resource conservation, and scant concern for the consequences of environmental disturbance. Yet legislation to conserve the extensive forests of New Zealand was introduced soon after settlement began, and despite a general desire for material improvement. Ultimately, this paradox is attributable to George Perkins Marsh's demonstration of the ecological consequences of man's impact on his environment in Man and nature. The arguments of this work published in 1864 were soon heard in New Zealand. But a mere handful of New Zealanders recognized the importance of Marsh's ideas. For the most part, they were immigrants from the middle and upper ranks of British society, drawn to the colony by the prospects it offered, and removed from the general struggle to tame the land. Their concern was essential in promoting interest in the questions of environmental disturbance and conservation in the 1870s. The immediate reason for the introduction of the New Zealand Forests Bill in 1874, however, was Prime Minister Julius Vogel's recognition of the applicability of the conservationists' arguments to the New Zealand scene. Thus character and circumstance combined to heighten the impact of Marsh's writing and to temper the ethic of exploitative land use in the pioneering environment of New Zealand.     

William Rufus: myth and reality

The commonly accepted view of the reign of William II (1087–1100) is a political myth, primarily the work of Eadmer, who depicted the king as the villain against whom St Anselm strove to impose the revolutionary Gregorian reform programme in England. Henry I, moreover, denigrated his brother's regime as a cover for furthering William's harsh but constructive policies. Eadmer's writings were quarried by subsequent twelfth-century writers in the mainstream of the English monastic historical tradition, who added their own literary embellishments. Nineteenth-century historians uncritically accepted these accounts and Henry I's gloss on the reign. They then contributed moral judgements of their own, which passed without qualification into modern secondary works.This paper re-evaluates William II's political and governmental achievements, and his ecclesiastical policy. His character is considered in the light of recent work on twelfth-century intellectual and psychological attitudes, and the accounts of more favourable chroniclers. It is concluded that the king developed his father's strong policies in every direction with considerable success, making possible the more publicized but essentially imitative work of Henry I. William's expansion and consolidation of national frontiers, his legal and financial developments, and his maintenance of royal control over the Church are revealed under the distortions of ecclesiastical and Henrician historiography.     

Town founding in seventeenth-century North America: Jamestown in Virginia

Jamestown in Virginia provides a case study of one facet of the geography of England's overseas expansion in the seventeenth century. Recent discussions of not only Jamestown but all early North American settlements have laid stress on two points. The first towns were founded as entrepôts for international trade in raw materials and were located at central points on colonial coastlines to exert monopoly control over trade. But Jamestown fulfilled neither of these objectives. It was conceived by its promoters, at least initially, as a trading station similar, in many ways, to the Kontors of the Hansa towns and the fondachi of Italian city states. In English institutional terms Jamestown was to be a staple. Its location was off-centre with respect to pre-settlement boundary lines. Its founding was influenced partly by perceptions of the Chesapeake and partly by rivalries in the imperial contest for North America. Jamestown's settlers also had a comprehensive list of town site criteria that included references to trade routes, to site defensibility, and to the physical environment. Although not a prototype for later colonization of the Atlantic Seaboard, Jamestown represented the first settlement form.     

Afterimages of the Victorian City

As emblematic spaces of social and cultural contamination, the Victorian street and underworld have had remarkable afterlives in twentieth-century reinterpretations of Victorian cityscapes. This article explores what persists in our vision of the nineteenth-century city well over a century after it was, so to speak, first seen, and how what persists impacts on our attempts to reconstruct that act of seeing. In the lived spaces around us there is in fact continuity, in that the city is a palimpsest and patchwork of Victorian and post-Victorian materials. However, to see those spaces as Victorian is in fact to elide a historical process of physical accumulation and syncretism. This article explores spectral ‘afterimages’ of the Victorian street and underground, in a variety of contemporary sources, ranging from Gary Sherman's Death Line (1972) and John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday (1980) to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (New York: Picador, 1988), the material culture of steampunk and the Telectroscope by the artist Paul St George. It traces two distinct genealogies of renderings of Victorian urban spaces in current popular culture. While filmic renderings are obsessed with the ghostly circulation of Victorian spectres haunting the present, steampunk artists imagine an alternative temporality, locating the origin of an alternative future in the mobility of Victorian metropolitan culture.     

From pear maiden to tower princes: towards a new history of medieval childhood

Twenty years ago, Philippe Arie`s presented a negative view of childhood, characterized by abuse and neglect. The thesis was persuasive, but evidence from England from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries contradicts its tenets. The neglected material suggests that medieval society placed a high value on its children's lives and safety, and condemned harshly those who ignored it. Neglect still existed, but honored as a cultural ideal was a caring commitment towards children. Sermons and medical treatises increasingly described childhood innocence and parental devotion. Narrative literature such asPearl used the image of a grieving parent to underline philosophical themes. The most public of medieval literature, the Corpus Christi plays, directly addressed the parents in the audience on their responsibilities to their children. Richard III's political career was irrevocably affected by his society's beliefs about children. The disappearance of his nephews from public view sparked rumors about his abuse and murder of them. Even mere rumor about an attack on innocents inspired rebellion during Richard's reign and literary condemnation by contemporary chronicles. By the sixteenth century, Richard had become the prime example of the monster shunned by society because of his disregard for its most basic ideal.     

St Anselm and the English investiture controversy reconsidered

The Investiture Controversy in England has generally been viewed as a two-sided contest between king and pope. But in reality the struggle was between three parties — king, pope, and primate. St Anselm, devoted to his duties as God's steward of his office and its privileges, worked against both King Henry I and Pope Paschal II to bring into reality his idea of the proper status of the primate of all Britain. Anselm had a vision of a political model which he conceived as God's ‘right order’ in England, and all his efforts were directed toward fulfilling this vision.The Investiture Contest may be divided into two parts. The first phase began when Anselm was thwarted by Henry I's duplicity in the archbishop's attempt to force the king to accept the decrees of Rome at the height of a political crisis. Anselm may have seen these decrees as beneficial to the Canterbury primacy. From 1101 to 1103, Anselm wavered between supporting either party completely, meanwhile securing from Paschal all the most important privileges for the primacy of Canterbury. Each time Paschal refused to grant a dispensation for Henry, as Anselm requested, he granted Anselm a privilege for the primacy. Thus Anselm's vision of the primate as almost a patriarch of another world, nearly independent of the pope, was fulfilled by 1103.At this point, Anselm abandoned his vacillation between king and pope, and worked seemingly on behalf of Paschal, but in reality on behalf of the Canterbury primacy. During this second phase, Anselm's political adroitness becomes clear by a correlation, never before made, between the church-state controversy and Henry's campaign to conquer Normandy. By careful maneuvering and skilful propaganda, Anselm forced Henry to choose between submitting to the investiture decree or failing in his attempt to conquer Normandy. At the settlement, a compromise was worked out, Henry conceding on investitures, and Paschal conceding on homage. But investiture was only secondary to Anselm. He ended the dispute not when Henry submitted on investitures, but only when he had gained from Henry concessions which made the primate almost a co-ruler with the king, as his political vision demanded. Only after a public reconcilliation with his archbishop did Henry feel free to complete the Norman campaign.Thus the Investiture Controversy was a three-way struggle. Both king and pope compromised, each giving up some of their goals. But Anselm emerged from the contest having won nearly all his political objectives.     

A psycho-historical source: the Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent

Medievalists turn to Guibert of Nogent's Memoirs (1116) for the account of the Laon uprising they contain. And yet this account is poor history. It is didactic and self-righteous in tone; one senses that the writer consistently sacrificed historical truth to the moral point he was trying to make. Scratch this twelfth- century ‘historian’ and you will find underneath a guilt-ridden cleric, haunted by vivid sexual reminiscences of his mother and by the terrible chastening reality of the Virgin Mary. A sensitive reading of the confessional sections of the Memoirs may yield up crucial unconscious impulses in a medieval man's psyche: his ‘masculine’ ambitions for glory, his need to prove his manhood, and yet also his ‘feminine’ desire for selfless submission to God, and his need to achieve a kind of passive holiness and innocence. These opposing impulses may account for the ‘demon’ that tortured Guibert of Nogent.After isolating certain psychological themes in the Memoirs it is possible to relate these themes to various nuances in the psychological ‘milieu’ of twelfth-century France. It is also possible to relate some of these themes to a ‘milieu’ not altogether different from that of twelfth-century France — twentieth-century southern Italy. For in southern Italy, we find that the psychological relationship between masculinity and femininity and (perhaps as a result of this relationship) the prominence of the Virgin Mary in the lives of the people corresponds closely to the situation in twelfth- century France. But this cross-cultural analysis is meant only to illuminate some of the possibilities of psychohistory. At the very least, a psychohistorical consideration of a text such as Guibert of Nogent's Memoirs should reveal some useful correlations between the single psychological current and the larger tides of cultural history.     

Le groupe cathédral dans le paysage urbain en Italie (XIII–XVe siècles)

Reflecting on the alleged differences between the medieval town, based on its cathedral church, and the Renaissance town, supposedly grouped round its prince's palace, the author embarked on an examination of the role of the duomo and its precinct in the Italian town of the later middle ages. Apart from its central importance in religious functions, especially preaching and processions, and the conscious effort to ensure that the town's greatness was matched by the splendour of its cathedral, the author shows that the duomo served as the venue for recieving distinguished visitors, for public declarations, for miracle plays, for funerals, and even for some purely secular activities. The role of the duomo was thus at once religious and social and political.     

English towns in the late middle ages: the case of Great Yarmouth

Historians are divided over the economic fortunes of English towns in the late middle ages. Many argue for a ‘general crisis’ while others emphasize the variety of urban experience. Great Yarmouth is a striking example of a town facing protracted difficulties. Its decline in relation to other English towns between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries is particularly marked. Fourth among provincial towns in the 1334 tax return, Yarmouth ranked eighteenth in 1377 and twentieth in the subsidies of the 1520s.Yarmouth's problems become apparent soon after 1350, but while the Black Death may have killed one-third of its inhabitants, it is not the main cause of the town's misfortunes. Yarmouth depended heavily on two industries: shipping and fishing. The former was undermined by the early stages of the Hundred Years War, and the latter by competition from the Low Countries. A silting harbour which drove away trade and the high cost of building and repairing the town walls added to Yarmouth's difficulties.Whether economic decline is measured in terms of totals, for example total volume of trade, or in terms of individual production or wealth, Yarmouth fared badly. In the second half of the fourteenth century, Yarmouth's trade was much reduced and the town's leading burgesses seem much poorer than their counterparts before 1350. While Yarmouth clearly was in decline from about 1350 onwards, the town's experiences cannot be used to prove the case for a ‘general crisis’. They have to be seen in the context of the continuing prosperity of Norwich and the revival of Ipswich.     

Wealden nature and the role of London in nineteenth-century artistic imagination

The new outlook on nature as a restorative for jaded urban-dwellers that is associated with Victorians' sense of an increasing separation from their natural environment, had a powerful influence upon the imagination of mid nineteenth-century landscape artists choosing to work in south-east England. Although they established close business relations with the metropolis and provincial cities, they experienced a loss of confidence in London as a subject for landscape painting and with new opportunities for travel provided by railways they preferred to satisfy a quasi-scientific curiosity in the visible appearance of natural and semi-natural beauty in the green world beyond London, especially in the expressively-shaped Weald, long connected with aesthetic appreciation and scientific observation. Their specific contribution of plain-air realism was to conceive the Wealden landscape both as a natural marvel and a human epic, an idea then new and exciting to the mind. Their feelings of awe and wonder have Ruskinian undertones and are inextricably linked with the drama of earth history that natural scientists were simultaneously unfolding in a newly constituted laboratory of field studies. This spiriting of a new, imagined, wilderness out of what wooded nature still survived in a shrunken form after the clearings of pioneer farmers became an inexhaustible source of enrichment to nineteenth-century urban life and conforms at least partially with mid-Victorians' perception of a natural habitat juxtaposed with one of the world's largest and most artificial environments that Victorians themselves were creating. It became a nearly symbolic image of an ideal English landscape which existed largely as a protected paradise of the urban imagination.     

1. CARL SCHMITT BETWEEN HISTORY AND MYTH

Carl Schmitt's work defines the history and theory of political myth. But analyzing it represents a challenge to historians and theorists alike. For many historians, Schmitt should be analyzed in his own context, whereas theorists study his writings without enough consideration of the specific context in which he conceived his texts. In this essay, I argue that Schmitt not only contributed to the fascist glorification of the mythical and its novel enactment as the driving force of fascism, but he also represents one of the most intriguing and influential interpreters of the political theory of myth, challenging in turn theories of democracy and the role of reason and secularism in historiography.     

Rural response to urban penetration: Baltimore and St Mary's County,Maryland, 1790–1840

Viewed from a city, urban penetration appeared to benefit the economy of a rural hinterland by expanding markets for a wide range of farm produce and by offering in return a wide variety of cheap consumer goods. From a rural viewpoint, cheap goods from cities took trade away from local craftsmen. The probate records of St Mary's County, Maryland, provide evidence for the effects of Baltimore's penetration into a tobacco-growing rural community during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Baltimore expanded, farmers not only grew more tobacco but also began to supply the city with wheat. A prosperous and diversified agriculture supported millers, merchants and mariners. Up to 1820 an increasing number of young men were recruited as bay pilots, but the introduction of steamships drove sailing ships out of business. After 1820 not only did maritime employment decrease, but most craft industries declined. By 1833, the county's sole cotton mill closed and Baltimore's industrial supremacy was assured.     

Duke Richard of York's intentions in I450 and the origins of the wars of the roses

The return of Richard, duke of York, from Ireland in 1450 represents his first overt attempt to remedy certain grievances. His criticism of the Lancastrian régime eventually brought him leadership in the Wars of the Roses. The grivances of 1450 are contained in two bills addressed to Henry VI. At first, the duke harboured personal grievances — fear of attainder and having his claim to the throne bypassed, resentment at his counsel being ignored and his debts unpaid — which were exaguerated by unsertainty and the king's readiness to believe the worst. Richards apreciation of the widespread hostility towards the government and the disarray of the king's Household after Suffolk's murder enabled him to convert grievances into public criticisms in his second bill. He encouraged investigations into official oppression in southeastern England, and his supporters may have stimulated risings there to demonstrate support for him. Compared with Henry's nervous reaction to York's first bill, he firmly checkmated the pretensions of the second, and Yorks achievement in 1450 was limited. But he had taken a first step towards appealing for support by converting personal grievances into a general bid for sympathy. Whether he aid so for personal or public motives — or both — remains an open question.