When Bereaved of Everything: Objects from the Concentration Camp of Ravensbrück as Expressions of Resistance,Memory, and Identity

When survivors from the Ravensbrück concentration camp arrived in Sweden in spring 1945, some of the objects they brought with them from the camp were collected and preserved. These are modest in appearance, but were – as oral testimonies show – invaluable in camp. The concentration camp context of obliteration stretches the limits of interpretation of material culture to its extreme. In this article the objects are discussed as expressions of resistance, memory, and identity. These immaterial values were among the most vital coping strategies used by the prisoners against the dehumanization laid upon them by the camp administration. The material culture was central in enabling, upholding, and realizing these.     

On Salisbury Cathedral

Abstract

In his last will and testament, dated January 1514, Sir Henry Vernon detailed his intent that a chapel should be founded at the collegiate church of St Bartholomew at Tong, as a final resting place for himself and his wife, and as a chantry for the souls of his family. Completed, it seems, by early 1519, the form of the chapel and its decoration indicates that Sir Henry was commemorated in the artistic language of the very finest contemporary chantry projects. Indeed, a number of the chapel's features are directly copied from the most illustrious of all late medieval chantries: Henry VII's chapel at Westminster Abbey. The chapel, physically and institutionally, also offers insight into the nature of late medieval piety. Unusually, the foundation makes no explicit charitable provision, long established as a central element of the contemporary doctrine of salvation. Yet the chantry-chapel was a physical and institutional appendage to a 'family' mausoleum, whose collegiate function had a strong charitable element. As such, the chapel suggests that, although chantries and tombs were themselves intensely personal, spiritual legacies were viewed in the same way as territorial interests: as inherited familial institutions, which could and should be augmented, rather than enterprises by, and limited to, individuals. In short, through its location, form and decorative scheme, the chapel demonstrates that, whilst numbering in their hundreds by the Reformation, such chapels were far from simply formulaic expressions of piety. Rather, they could serve as the vehicle for the creation of a very specific identity for the chapel's founder.     

加害与受害的双重变奏——对朝鲜BC级战犯的审判及其遗留问题

因日本殖民者在朝鲜实施强制动员计划,许多朝鲜青年被迫或自愿应募为战俘营看守,协助日军看管盟军战俘。日本战败后,盟国为了追究日本法西斯虐待战俘、侵犯人权的罪行,设置军事法庭进行审判,一些战俘营的朝鲜看守作为BC级战犯被起诉和审判,129人被判决有罪。朝鲜BC级战犯背负“对日协力者”的名声,遭遇来自亲朋故旧的蔑视,同时给在故乡的亲人带来了不堪承受的精神压力,一些战犯既不能回归祖国,也无法融入日本社会,面临精神和物质的双重困境,扮演了加害者与受害者的双重角色。他们为了洗刷罪名、恢复名誉、争取合法权益而进行了持久的抗争。     

‘My Freind who Writes for Me’: Scribes and Scribal Relationships in the Letters of Seamen, 1793–1815

This article examines the use of scribes in letters of one group of men during a specific period: British Royal Navy servicemen below the rank of commissioned officer during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815. The letters of one such seaman in particular, Richard Greenhalgh, are unusual in that he himself could write, but preferred to have someone to write for him, as is shown by many references to ‘his freind who writes for me’. Contrasts between the scribe’s style of writing and that of Greenhalgh are noticeable, especially after Greenhalgh and his scribe were parted by being sent to serve on different ships. The letters also reveal the relationship between writer and scribe, and the writer’s family and his scribe. The letters contain messages to be passed between a network of family and friends on board ship and on shore, strengthening ties between them, vital in wartime to the morale of the seamen and for the reassurance of those at home. References found in other surviving letters demonstrate the use of scribes by different seamen, also seamen acting as scribes for shipmates, adding to knowledge of scribal culture among this social group.     

Affamer les prisonniers de guerre: entre mythes et réalités, 1914–54

Since the end of the nineteenth century, prisoners of war must be taken in care by their guardians, in terms of food. Sometimes this food is not good enough and leads to cases of starvation. Considering ideological conditions as well as material and chronological evolutions, this paper tries to explain how the prisoners are very often hostages in hands of their guards and how starvation can be an ideological tool.     

The Original Justice Roberts

The Supreme Court had rarely, if ever, seen a fight quite like the one over the farewell letter to a departing Justice. It started routinely enough in the summer of 1955, when Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone drafted a letter of farewell to Justice Owen J. Roberts, who had suddenly resigned after fifteen eventful years on the Court. The six-sentence missive went first to the Senior Associate Justice, Hugo L. Black, to be signed and passed along to his Brethren.     

Gift-giving and books in the letters of St Boniface and Lul

The Anglo-Saxon missionary and archbishop St Boniface (d.754) and Lul, his protégé and successor in the see of Mainz (d.768), left behind a rich collection of letters that has become an invaluable source in our understanding of Boniface's mission. This article examines the letters in order to elucidate the customs of gift-giving that existed between those who were involved in the mission, whether directly or as external supporters. It begins with a brief overview of anthropological models of gift-giving, followed by a discussion of the portrayal of gift-giving in Anglo-Saxon literature. Two features of the letters of Boniface and Lul are then examined — the giving of gifts and the giving of books — and a crucial distinction between them revealed. Although particular customs of gift-giving between the missionaries and their supporters were well established, and indeed bore some resemblance to ‘secular’ gift-giving customs depicted in Anglo-Saxon poetry, books, while exchanged frequently, were consistently excluded from the ritualised structures of gift-giving. A dual explanation for this phenomenon is proposed: first, that books were of greater practical importance to the mission than other forms of gifts; second, that their status as sacred texts rendered them unsuitable for inclusion within rituals that depended upon the giver emphatically belittling the material worth of their own gift.     

‘Questo cor che tuo si rese’: the private and the public in Italian women's love letters in the long nineteenth century

Love letters are attracting increasing scholarly attention, especially from historians of scribal culture and historians of emotions. This article brings these two strands together to explore the unpublished love letters of four Italian women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their letters, spanning a period from the 1840s up to the First World War, provide insights into the genre, and into women's lives and emotions in this period. Three of them were from the bourgeoisie or piccola borghesia and one, in slightly contrasting mode, was a peasant. Women of the middle class lived a secluded life, and writing was essential to express themselves, to construct an identity and to become visible. Their love letters were anything but private: they were continually supervised and scrutinised by their families, so that their letters inevitably had a public quality and were sometimes multi-authored. Single young women needed to subvert social rules in order to establish their independence and claim private space for their love correspondence.     

The Correspondence of Asturian Emigrants at the Turn of the Century: The Case of José Moldes (c. 1860–1921)

The private letter, one of the most representative expressions of mass literacy, was the product of improved postal services and epistolary manuals. In the nineteenth century, which also witnessed the new phenomenon of mass emigration, letter writing became one of the most common practices. This article discusses the correspondence of José Moldes, an Asturian who left Spain for Puerto Rico at the age of fourteen and settled shortly afterwards in Chile. He died in his native Asturias at the age of sixty-one. Throughout these fifty or so years, José wrote letters to keep in contact with members of his family, to control them when he became head of the household or to manage his businesses and investments. About 120 of his letters survived in the Moldes-Barreras family archive, through which we can reconstruct his experiences. The essential characteristics of this epistolary corpus emerge from an analysis of its material and graphic aspects, suggesting the profound influence of immigration on personal writing.     

Force-feeding and Mapuche Autonomy: Performing collective rights in individual prison cells in Chile

In August 2010, the decision was taken to feed thirty-two Mapuche prisoners spread throughout prisons in Chile's southern regions intravenously and against their will. Imprisoned Mapuche activists had in the years previous turned to the hunger strike to protest their conviction under anti-terror legislation and the conditions of their incarceration, and the Chilean government eventually responded by force-feeding or threatening to force-feed starving inmates. This paper examines the performativity of the confrontation between prisoners refusing food and the authorities seeking to feed them against their expressed wishes. It analyzes how the strategy of self-starvation and the debate about the hunger strikers' right to make choices about their own bodies enabled starving prisoners to embody the broader struggle for Mapuche autonomy. The distinction between the individual and the collective eroded as the debate moved between, and overlapped, international conventions on the ethical treatment of prisoners and the rights of indigenous peoples. As a result, the collective struggle of the Mapuche people was performed in individual prisons cells, as the Chilean penal system emerged as an important new front line in a centuries-old conflict.     

Recording and curating relics at Westminster Abbey in the late Middle Ages

ABSTRACT

Westminster Abbey’s relics, and objects functionally related to them, were kept in the shrine chapel of St Edward the Confessor, where the kings and queens of England were customarily buried. They constituted a discrete collection, curated by a dedicated monastic officer titled ‘the keeper of St Edward’s shrine and the relics of St Peter’s church’. Inventories of the chapel, made when the office changed hands, survive from 1467, 1479 and 1520. These documents are analysed here for what they reveal of the contents of the collection, monastic interest in it, and the way the relics and related objects were cared for. As an important aspect of the chapel’s spatial configuration, the problem of where precisely the relics were located is also investigated. By examining the routine management of a single, important collection, the article aims to contribute to a more holistic understanding of the cult of relics in the late Middle Ages.     

Account of a Roman Sepulchre at Geldestone,Norfolk

Rescue excavation between 1988 and 1990 in advance of river erosion examined a substantial part of the small medieval rural hospital of St Giles by Brompton Bridge and later post-medieval farm. Established in the latter half of the twelfth century for the infirm, including lepers, the hospital layout consisted of a detached stone chapel adjacent to the river crossing, with a timber hall to the west. This hall was destroyed by fire, and a sequence of timber buildings were then constructed in adjacent areas. By the fifteenth century these structures also included a stone building, possibly a refectory. The first small chapel was replaced in the thirteenth century by a larger structure, which went through a period of expansion and then subsequent contraction by the fifteenth century. Only in the fourteenth century were a hall, probably a guesthouse or the master's lodgings, and dovecote built adjacent to the chapel. The cemetery to the south of the chapel was partially examined. The site appears to have been a largely economically self-sufficient unit with an attached farm. The hospital was abandoned during the latter half of the fifteenth century, but the site and some of the buildings were subsequently reoccupied as a farm from the mid-seventeenth century. The farmhouse underwent conversion from a longhouse to a house of hearth-passage plan in the early eighteenth century. The former chapel was reused as a byre and additional stables constructed. The farm was moved to its present location to the south in the mid-eighteenth century and the former hospital site finally abandoned.     

鸦片战争时期的战俘问题

战俘问题一直是人类文明史上一个值得关注的问题:不同文明冲突过程中,如何对待和处理战俘,体现着冲突双方的观念、相互认知和交往方式.鸦片战争史研究中,战俘问题一直是被忽略的战争组成部分.鸦片战争时期战俘的获取、处置、交涉,以及其中反映出的观念,是我们了解这场战争的一个侧面,也是由此观察清王朝的一个视角.     

Identity Destruction or Survival in Small Things? Rethinking Prisoner Tags from the Mauthausen Concentration Camp

In concentration camps across Europe, replacing prisoners’ names with numbers was key to Nazi strategies for annihilating the identities of their victims. Number tags issued in the Mauthausen concentration camp are remembered by survivors as materializations of their destroyed identities and bureaucratic means in the murderous camp economy. However, several preserved tags carry prisoner-made decorations which point towards personalization strategies, making these items highly desired objects in current memorial practices for constructing narratives of survival. By taking an object-biographical approach, this chapter traces the ontological shifts the tags have gone through and discusses the relationships of camp life, the post-camp reading of material culture, and memorial practices.     

‘Slowing down the going-away process’ — Tom Stoppard and Soviet Dissent

Tom Stoppard is a playwright most noted for his ferocious wordplay and playful approach to reality. In the 1970s and 1980s, his concern for like-minded prisoners of conscience in the Soviet bloc informed his activism on their behalf, utilising his public profile in an attempt to reposition their plight in the West. Stoppard’s activism was largely informed by his involvement with a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working to publicise human rights violations in the Soviet Union, who provided him with the most up to date information on these abuses, and gave him access to dissidents. This article explores Stoppard’s activism on behalf of Soviet prisoners of conscience, highlighting the impact that these organisations had on his activism. Through an assessment of Stoppard’s efforts, it highlights the important role that NGOs and celebrity politics played during the cold war.     

1921年初《新青年》同仁之间几则通信的时间问题

1921年初,《新青年》同仁围绕《新青年》要不要自沪移京编辑等问题发生了激烈的争论,各方之间为此作了大量的通信。这些通信的书写时间,绝大部分已经清晰,但也有少量重要信札,其书写时间或被弄错,或仍属混沌,亟待厘清。     

Excavations at Bamburgh: New Revelations in Light of Recent Investigations at the Core of the Castle Complex

The article documents the results of a series of investigations undertaken by the Bamburgh Research Project (BRP) within the Inner Ward of Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland between 1997 and 2010, using resistivity, ground penetrating radar survey, and limited excavation. Throughout the course of the investigation around the ruins of the medieval chapel, material evidence was found of Romano-British activity. Furthermore, stone structures of pre-twelfth-century date were revealed. Two phases of a possible early medieval defensive wall were identified beneath the north wall of the current chapel structure, and a stone building was found beneath the main body of the church which may represent part of the church of St Peter, mentioned by Bede.     

‘History meets Archaeology: St Helen’s Chapel,Malham, Revisited’ *

Documentary evidence describes how in 1549, during the suppression of the chantries under Edward VI, the medieval chapel in Malham township was destroyed. Combining this evidence with aerial photographs and geophysical surveys, a potential site for the ancient chapel and cemetery was identified. Between 2015-2017 archaeological excavations confirmed that this site was the ancient chapel. The notes update the original article about Malham chapel in Northern History, 52 (2015), which was written before the excavations began.     

Restituting Church Buildings and Negotiating Church Factions： Missionary Mapmakers and the Making of Local Networks （1712-1716）

At the turn of the 18th century, the Kangxi emperor initiated a large project to map the vast territories of the Qing. The land surveys that ensued were executed by teams of Qing officials and European missionaries, most of them French Jesuits first sent to China in 1685 and actively supported by the French crown. Early 18th century Jesuit publications foster a much-heralded claim that these missionary-mapmakers drew on their status of imperial envoys during the surveys to locally advance the position of the Catholic church. This article strives to explore the format/on of such local networks by these missionaries as they passed through the cities and towns of the Chinese provinces. On the basis of archival material, details emerge of contacts with local Qing administrators and Chinese Christians, and of attempts to purchase and recover local churches. This is then discussed against the background of the Rites Controversy, in an attempt to evaluate how such local networks relate to the rivalry between missionaries of different orders. The article emphasizes that there was （and perhaps is） no such thing as ＂pure science＂ by underscoring that important technical achievements such as the Qing mapping project are often shaped by complex networks and historical contingencies.     

MEDIEVAL MERCHANTS’ LETTERS IN NORTHERN EUROPE

This article is concerned with the characteristic features that define medieval merchants’ letters. It explores systematically a collection of merchants’ letters from early 16th-century Finland, the so-called Scheel’s collection, which is unique in medieval northern Europe. Scheel’s letters show surprising conformity. They followed the conventions of letter writing, including their content, form, and style. Scheel’s letters were employed primarily as operative instruments in the organizing and controlling of transactions, reflecting similar functions to other European merchants’ letters. In line with other European correspondences, they also included most of the components of the rules of letter writing.