The English Patient and the Italian Risorgimento: Medical Tourism and the Body Politic in Giovanni Ruffini's Doctor Antonio (1855)

Doctor Antonio (1855), Giovanni Ruffini's novel of therapeutic travel, cross-cultural love and Risorgimento propaganda, pairs an English patient's quest for renewed health in Italy in the 1840s with the concurrent resurgence of the Italian nation through political action. An Italian revolutionary activist turned man of English letters, Ruffini wrote seven novels in English, of which the second, Doctor Antonio, was his greatest critical and popular success. Employing the popular Victorian practice of recuperative travel as a key plot device, and using this device to convey Italian political messages to nineteenth-century English readers, the novel offers a context-specific variation of the rhetorical tradition of representing the ‘body politic’ as a site of health, disease and medical management. This essay investigates Doctor Antonio's relation to Anglo-Italian literary, political and medical contexts in the mid-nineteenth century. More specifically, it analyses how the novel's medical plot supports Ruffini's aims of challenging negative stereotypes of Italians and advancing the cause of Italian liberalism. A reading of Lucy Davenne's illness and treatment as an allegory for the condition of the ailing, but potentially resurgent, Italian nation is developed and critically reflected upon. The intersection of medical and political frames of meaning in the text is further explored by interpreting the space and community of Lucy's convalescence as the model of an ideal society to which both English and Italians might aspire. Finally, the essay considers the novel's material impact on the development of medical tourism in northern Italy, and the political significance of this impact.     

Challenging Englishness from the racial margins: William Macready's Irishman in London; Or; The Happy African

William Charles Macready's farce The Irishman in London; Or; The Happy African (1792) can be read as an exploration of Englishness in its relationship to Irishness as presented on the London stage in the period following the French Revolution. This article examines Macready's play as a critique of the common identification of Irishness with blackness that uses stock characters and attitudes to examine English identity. Through a marriage plot displaced from the traditional romantic heroes onto their Irish and black servants, we see English as a commercial identity rather than a cultural one. Linking race to culture and culture to nationality, Macready's play presents Irishness and blackness as culturally rich while calling into question the content of Englishness.     

Sister-in-Law Marriage in the Empire: Religious Politics and Legislative Reform in the Australian Colonies 1850–1900

In 1835, a statute was passed in the parliament of the United Kingdom making it illegal for a widowed man to marry his sister-in-law. 1 Lord Lyndhurst's Act (1835) 5 & 6 Will VI c. 54. Marriage to a sister-in-law after a wife's death was common practice in nineteenth-century England and colonial Australia and aunts often took on the responsibility of raising children after a sibling's death. In the 1840s, a protracted parliamentary and social debate began over whether a widowed man's marriage to his sister-in-law should be made legal and this debate lasted over seven decades. In the Australian colonies, where English law had been inherited, 2 Those Australian colonies settled prior to the passing of Lord Lyndhurst's Act inherited the English position regarding deceased wife's sister marriage at the time, that such unions were voidable in the ecclesiastical courts during the lifetime of the parties, and in those colonies established afterwards, the 1835 statute applied and deceased wife's sister unions were illegal. In both cases colonial parliaments attempted to pass legislation to clarify the law. a similar debate occurred in the 1870s. The marriage was legalised in most of Australia in the 1870s while it remained illegal in England until the turn of the century. The parallel debates in each country provide a window into the comparative effect of religious culture on the development of marriage law. One of the primary reasons for the protracted nature of the struggle for marriage reform in England was its significance for the relationship between church and state. This article explores the implications of the relationship between church and state in Britain and the colonies for marriage legislation.     

Revisiting Dred Scott: Prudence,Providence, and the Limits of Constitutional Statesmanship

Abstract

After the Dred Scott decision in 1857, Abraham Lincoln embarked on a public campaign to prevent the expansion of slavery in the federal territories. Lincoln's opposition to Dred Scott was, however, bound up with a certain theoretical orientation that is often rejected in the general milieu of modern constitutional theory. Within the context of two recent revisionist accounts of slavery and American constitutionalism, I argue that our retrospective evaluations of the sixteenth president's statesmanship must enter into a deeper engagement with Lincoln's attachment to natural law and his theological interpretation of the Civil War.     

Sociability and Hugo Grotius

Summary

Grotius has a rudimentary theory of sociability. Only with hindsight has a remark about appetitus societatis been promoted to the starting point of a theory that flourished in the writings of later natural jurists. In this article, I address the issue of the appearance in Grotius's natural law of sociability [as the 1715/38 English translation of John Morrice renders appetitus societatis, following Barbeyrac's sociabilité]. Writing in the just war tradition, Grotius is first of all interested in finding out the conditions for peace, and although injustice is a condition of war, it is not per se true that injustice is a perversion of society. Apparently, not all societies are perfect and the violence of war and the legal actions of peace are both instruments for achieving a greater modicum of justice in this world. Yet appetitus et custodia societatis is called the foundation of justice. Grotius achieved this context for sociability in phases, through a series of writings from c. 1600 until De iure belli ac pacis of 1625, and its revision of 1631. In this development the notion of fides plays an intriguing role, through which we can obtain a better understanding of the meaning of appetitus societatis in the later work. The present article is a sequel to a previous publication, on fides in De iure praedae (Ms. 1604/5). Analysing the genesis of appetitus societatis in De iure belli ac pacis, I argue that Grotius was changing his strategy over the years, without however arriving at a definitive solution to the question of what commits men to the pursuit of justice.     

Julius Drachsler's Intermarriage in New York City

Abstract

Julius Drachsler's 1921 book, Intermarriage in New York City, examined 171,356 individual marriage license applications from New York City in the years 1908–12. The author found little intermarriage across social lines among immigrants but a considerable amount among their U.S.-born children. This study replicates Drachsler's by taking a 1% sample (N = 1,714 cases) of the same set of marriage license applications for the same years. The replication results show that Drachsler correctly found an increasing trend to intermarriage between the first and second generations, and with close to the same proportions as Drachsler's work. The replication study of New York City marriage licenses is also consistent with the results from a 1910 sample of married couples living in New York City, taken from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample. The replication study differs from Drachsler's reported findings on the extent of intermarriages across social lines of nationality and race, mainly due to the idiosyncratic way that Drachsler defined those two constructs. The New York City marriage license files offer the researcher further opportunities to pose and answer questions about intermarriage.     

Oracular Ventriloquism: Political Theology in The Female American

ABSTRACT

This essay scrutinizes a scene of colonial religious conversion that appears in the pseudonymous 1767 novel, The Female American. The protagonist's use of ventriloquism and indigenous technology to create the illusion of divine intervention is considered in the light of Carl Schmitt's suggestion that secular political power inherits and translates forms of pre-modern theological authority. The novel's dual investments in proto-feminist literary representation and Anglican missionary proselytism are in tension with one another and help to explain the central character's ambivalence toward her inventive mode of conversion. Hence, the novel dramatizes the Euro-colonial disavowal of theological and decisionist force while, at the same time, hinting at the democratizing potential of forms of fictional address.     

The Locke Essay: Achievement and Promise

Abstract

Strauss's essay on Locke is devoted to Locke's early lectures on the law of nature, a text unpublished when he initially wrote on Locke in Natural Right and History. One purpose of his essay was to show that the Locke text did not contradict the position on the law of nature that Strauss had earlier attributed to him. Strauss also used the essay as an opportunity to further his own reflections on traditional natural law doctrine.     

Orthodox violence: “Critique of Violence” and Walter Benjamin's Jewish political theology

This paper deals with the role of Judaism in Walter Benjamin's famous 1921 essay on violence and law, Zur Kritik der Gewalt. Despite the intense attention devoted to this essay, the role of Jewish myth in it has not yet been thoroughly explained. This study contends that the association between what Benjamin termed revolutionary violence and the Jewish messianic tradition, which plays a central role in the evaluation of Benjamin's text, is far more problematic than has hitherto been assumed, and poses a serious challenge, which has not been fully examined in its historical context. Second, this essay claims that the subversive elements that many have supposedly found in Benjamin's text and the attempts to link these elements to messianic traditions are also unconvincing. Third, the paper contextualizes Benjamin's thought within the framework of the Jewish political–theological debate of the period. It contends that Benjamin's theory of law and justice should be understood not as a revolutionary, anti-republican text, as has been generally accepted, but as a secularized conservative orthodox one. In doing so, it seeks to shed light not only on Benjamin's early thinking and its influences, but also on the neglected element of Jewish orthodoxy within the broader topic of political theology.     

The Continuity of Victorian Traces: A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book

Both King Solomon's Mines (1885) and Allan Quatermain (1887) pursue a quest to regenerate the authority of the English gentleman as ‘the highest rank that a man can reach upon this earth’. The present essay focuses upon Haggard's construction of this ideal of masculinity through the combination of the qualities of the gentleman with those of the barbarian. The discussion follows both Laura Chrisman and Bradley Deane in attending to the relationship between the ideological structures of metropole and colony. This article, however, situates Haggard's masculinist ideology in relation to the wider cultural poetics of late-Victorian material culture, particularly as manifested in the imperial souvenir – a complicated category of thing that comprises artefacts, hunting trophies and human relics. Attention to their thingness entails reflection upon the complexity of textual representations of objects and practical encounters with them as constituent elements of late-Victorian material culture. In addition to examining the significance of hunting and battle trophies in Haggard's fiction, close attention is also paid to the keynote spectacle of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition at the South Kensington Museum in 1886, Rowland Ward's habitat diorama, ‘The Jungle’, and to Ward's subsequent forays into ‘animal furniture’. Through reflection on such formations of objects, the thingness of the imperial souvenir illuminates the ideological formations within which hegemonic masculinity and imperialism were articulated at this key moment in the mid-1880s.     

Religion,Community and The Infanticidal Mother: Evidence From 1840s Rural Wiltshire

Abstract

The existing literature on the history of infanticide has typically considered the crime as a reaction to a specifi c set of diffi cult individual circumstances, but has not attempted to place the infanticidal mother within a longer personal timeframe. Nor has the role of her religious belief been much examined. This article investigates three key elements in the case of Rebecca Smith (1807–1849), the last woman executed in England for the murder of her own infant: her bad marriage; her poverty; and her Baptist religion. These factors provide context for her socio-economic and psychological development, and thus for her status as England's best documented serial infant killer. The article suggests that, as a married woman, Smith's choices were infl uenced by conditions both wider and deeper than the more immediate issues which have tended to be associated with infanticide by unmarried women.     

Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi — Antisemitism on the Stage and in Reality

Abstract

Professor Bernhardi was one of Schnitzler’s most successful plays, and at the same time, a key document in the development of his Austrian-Jewish identity. The central conflict in the play is not, as often assumed, that of science against religion, but rather that between the critically minded individual and those who submit to a political or religious programme. The figure of Bernhardi reflects Schnitzler’s own position on the Jewish identity crisis, which may be termed ‘enlightened apolitical individualism’. In addition to his experiences working in his father’s clinic, Schnitzler drew inspiration for the plot from sources that are cited here for the first time.     

Demetrios Capetanakis: a Greek poet (coming out) in England

Abstract

The homosexual undertones of Demetrios Capetanakis's English writings become evident when the work is seen in the context of the British literary circle that was instrumental in its publication. However, reading Capetanakis's poems as a 'coming out' narrative leads us to assess the mismatching interpretations of gender and sexuality in Greece and the West and the larger complications of identity and identifications. It is suggested that, in Capetanakis's work written in English, what seems at first a liberating expression of the 'true self' through writing can instead be viewed as positing the problem of the idea of a stable, unified and solid identity.     

Chivalrous models of Patriot Kingship: Gilbert West,Lord Lyttelton and The Idea of a Patriot King

This article examines two explorations of the theory expounded in Lord Bolingbroke's The Idea of a Patriot King (written 1738, published 1749), Gilbert West's 1742 dramatic poem The Institution of the Order of the Garter and Lord Lyttelton's The History of the Life of Henry the Second (1767–1771). Both were associates of Bolingbroke's in the Patriot movement and were committed to his ideological programme, understanding its potential and appeal. They both recognised the significant potency in Bolingbroke's last and final theorem, that of the Patriot King, whose miraculous function it was to stamp out corruption, reform the state and rule as a father to his people. Yet they both reframe the theory, by providing relatable models of Patriot Kingship. The models West and Lyttelton provide are two historical English kings, Edward III and Henry II. By portraying these monarchs as Patriot Kings, both writers construct a mythopoeic idealisation of the English and British past, in which the manners of chivalry form the basis of Patriot Kingship. Both these works should also be understood within the context of an eighteenth-century tradition of using the English and British past to extol monarchy and reflect of contemporary politics and society.     

Henry Savile's Tacitus and the English role on the Continent: Leicester,Hotman, Lipsius

This article argues that Henry Savile's widely admired Tacitus of 1591 should not be read as an implied call for a more aggressive English stance against Spanish advances on the Continent (as one recent article suggests), but precisely for a more restrained and prudential approach. Secondly, it calls into question the generally accepted view that Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, played a prominent role in the composition of the book. It argues that in reconstructing the work's original intellectual context and especially that of the supplement The Ende of Nero and the beginning of Galba, the main emphasis should not be on Essex's political and military career, but on that of his stepfather Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The article provides an investigation (as far as the surviving information allows) of the background in Continental politics and political thought in relation to the text of The Ende, which suggests that it should primarily be read from the perspective of the unsuccessful English intervention in the Low Countries in 1585–88.     

Does the Law and the Constitution of the Family Have to Change?

The law and constitution of the family has been targeted for transformation in recent years, leading most notably to the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, mandating same-sex marriage as a matter of constitutional law. In this essay I undertake a thought experiment, asking how advocates of traditional marriage ought to want the law of marriage to change in light of this development. I begin by reviewing the argument for legal change sketched by Aquinas and then applying it to developments concerning marriage in modern America. Next I sketch the natural-law argument on behalf of traditional marriage. Finally, I turn to the case of Michael H. v. Gerald D., in which the Supreme Court upheld a statutory reiteration of the common-law presumption that the husband of the mother is the father of her child, against a challenge from the biological father, suggesting that this case, long admired by conservatives, needs to be reconsidered—and that the dissent in the recent Indian Adoption Case recognizing a constitutional right of biological parents might prove useful to the restoration of marriage law.     

Republic in early modern China: The cross-cultural dissemination of a political concept

ABSTRACT

The English term republic and the Chinese term Gonghe (共和, “joint harmony”; i.e., “republic” in modern Chinese) stem from different conceptual origins and carry different connotations. When they first encountered the term republic, the intellectuals of China and Japan could only understand it by drawing on the political knowledge of Chinese antiquity. But soon after, two different concepts corresponding to the term republic emerged in the form of Chinese characters within the Chinese and Japanese linguistic environments—minzhu (民主, “people's rule”) and gonghe, which gradually shed their ancient Chinese significations. After its coining as an early modern political concept in the Japanese language, the term gonghe sporadically filtered into the Chinese linguistic context during the 1880s and 1890s. In 1898–1902, the concept of gonghe rapidly gained popularity in China, primarily due to its introduction by Liang Qichao (梁启超, 1873–1929) and other figures, with a clearly demarcated line separating the term from its ancient Chinese significance. As the concept of gonghe spread in China, it became embroiled in the contemporary tide of political reform, both influencing and being influenced by this trend. In the first decade of the 20th century, two competing interpretations of the term gonghe appeared. The moderates, represented by Liang Qichao, maintained that the evolution of the political system had a natural order; that their contemporary China did not yet have the conditions to adopt a republican system; and that it was necessary to first improve the citizens’ character, and cultivate the habits of self-governance among the people. The radicals, represented by Sun Yat-sen (孙中山, 1866–1925), held that China should overleap a constitutional monarchy, overthrow the Manchu emperor through violent revolution, and directly establish a republican form of government. The views of the radical party won discursive power, but their discussions and deliberations on the implications of a republic were clearly inadequate. Following the outbreak of the 1911 Revolution, a republican form of government was quickly established, but its functional results fell far short of people's expectations, causing the concept of a republic to be distrusted, criticized, and even shelved.     

Contextualizing marriage: conjugality and Christian life in Jonas of Orléans' De institutione laicali

The De institutione laicali by Jonas of Orléans has frequently been examined as a source for conjugal life in the Carolingian period, but rarely analysed in its entirety. In this article I propose an overall reading of the text, based on the version addressed to Count Matfrid before 828, in order to place the chapters about marriage in their context. I will formulate new interpretations of its purposes – arguing that Book II was configured as a speculum comitale – and of Jonas's view of marriage. The De institutione laicali will therefore be shown to have served the needs of Carolingian representations of society and public power.