Excavation at Aguas Buenas,Robinson Crusoe Island,Chile, of a gunpowder magazine and the supposed campsite of Alexander Selkirk,together with an account of early navigational dividers

Abstract

Excavations were undertaken of a ruined building at Aguas Buenas, identified as an 18th-century Spanish gunpowder magazine. Evidence was also found for the campsite of an early European occupant of the island. A case is made that this was Alexander Selkirk, a castaway here from 1704 to 1709. Selkirk was the model for Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. A detailed discussion is given of a fragment of copper alloy identified as being from a pair of navigational dividers.     

Masculinity and medicine: Thomas Walsingham and the death of the Black Prince

This article examines the nature of the illness that plagued Edward the Black Prince (1330–76) for the last nine years of his life and caused his death. The prince's premature death had profound political repercussions and a discussion of his symptoms provides a lens through which to examine late medieval attitudes to a wide range of social, religious and medical issues. The prince's symptoms, especially those described by Thomas Walsingham in his Chronica maiora, suggest traditional explanations of his death are incorrect. This article offers a number of varied but connected medieval and symbolic interpretations as well as a consideration of methodologies appropriate for analysing such material     

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.     

The “Travesty” of Aeschines in Demosthenes' De Corona

From 1914 to 1920, Pérez de Ayala produced his most serious and political writings. In his Novelas poemáticas de la vida española (1916) and Política y toros (1920), Ayala criticizes what he perceives as the backward state of the Spanish nation, focusing on the idiosyncrasies of the Spanish man through his depiction of three weak male characters. Nevertheless, wary of falling into the pointlessly excessive criticism of the nation that could be called domperiquitismo after Larra's memorable character Don Periquito, in the early 1920s Ayala subverted the organicistic language of his own criticism and that of many of his contemporaries by playfully concluding that Spain's real illness was orchitis. Although reading Ayala's earnest and contentious writings from this brief period is indispensable to fully appreciate the richness of his oeuvre, the works differ from the rest of his production, which is characterized by a more humorous yet critical slant.     

Silas Marner,Catalepsy, and Mid-Victorian Medicine: George Eliot's Ethics of Care

‘Silas Marner, Catalepsy, and Mid-Victorian Medicine’ reads Eliot's novel Silas Marner through the history of medicine, and particularly in the context of Marner's strange cataleptic trances which embody his alienation and suffering. Eliot, I argue, employs catalepsy in order to investigate ideas of illness and care, especially as that relates to professional medicine and to ideas of community. Focusing on cataleptic case histories and on Eliot's personal health concerns I show how issues of care become philosophical questions about ethical responsibility. It is through Silas Marner and his catalepsy, I conclude, that Victorian scholars can come to understand more about what that means within Eliot's canon and, more widely, in the mid-Victorian period. Overall, the article provides a unique reading of Silas Marner, drawing on significant new archival research on catalepsy and in Eliot's writing of illness narratives.     

KOSELLECK,ARENDT, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well‐known for his work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time(s). It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them (Heidegger, Löwith, Schmitt) as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti‐totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience.     

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.     

Masculinity and medicine: Thomas Walsingham and the death of the Black Prince

This article examines the nature of the illness that plagued Edward the Black Prince (1330–76) for the last nine years of his life and caused his death. The prince's premature death had profound political repercussions and a discussion of his symptoms provides a lens through which to examine late medieval attitudes to a wide range of social, religious and medical issues. The prince's symptoms, especially those described by Thomas Walsingham in his Chronica maiora, suggest traditional explanations of his death are incorrect. This article offers a number of varied but connected medieval and symbolic interpretations as well as a consideration of methodologies appropriate for analysing such material     

Industrializing Crusoe: Adventure,Modernity and Anglo-American Expansionism

This essay focuses on two updated, Americanized versions of the Robinson Crusoe story published in the final quarter of the nineteenth-century: Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island and Douglas Frazar's Perseverance Island: or the Nineteenth-Century Robinson Crusoe. The first half of the essay considers how these Robinsonades reworked Defoe's novel as a fantasy of applied technology in an industrialized agrarian context. The second half of the essay engages with recent historical work on nineteenth-century British expansion in order to consider how Verne's and Frazar's adventures might be understood in relation to the flow of migrants and money from Britain to America around the period the novels were written. As a result, the essay proposes The Mysterious Island and Perseverance Island as literary vehicles that inspired visions of agro-industrialization at a time when Victorian subjects were increasingly drawn to the American West as a site in which to sink their labour and finance. Thus linking the circulation of the adventure form with overseas capitalist enterprise, the essay concludes by reflecting upon how such expansionism might be understood with regard to the discriminatory processes of primitive accumulation and uneven development that have characterized the growth of the modern capitalist world system.     

Texts,topoi and the self: a reading of Alfredian spirituality*

Challenging the allegation that Alfred's spirituality as Asser presents it is no more than a string of textual fictions, this article outlines a context for understanding Alfred's spirituality as a functional process of living texts, or of ‘textualizing’ the self. The discussion first draws support for this view from the history of early medieval spirituality and then demonstrates the theme's relevance both to Asser's representation of Alfred and to the king's own writings. Attention is given especially to the congruence between Alfred's depiction in the Life and Gregory the Great's teachings on the ideal rector as propounded in the Pastoral Care, a text carefully read and famously translated by Alfred himself. The comparison suggests that the main spiritual models for Alfred's kingly piety may be understood to reside in, and to involve assimilation of, this work of Gregory, making it possible to conceptualize the king's self‐presentation in terms of a conscious project to ‘live’ Gregory's text by bringing the ideals of the Gregorian rector to life in his own person. Such an argument helps to explain Alfred's interest in Gregory, to account for his concern to translate the Pastoral Care, and to legitimize the predominant images associated with the king's spirituality as indicative of a kind of functional piety grounded in the reading of texts, rather than simply reflected, perhaps falsely, in Asser’s Life.     

Georg Friedrich Handel's strokes*

Abstract

Although there is no definite proof, it seems most likely that Georg Friedrich Handel suffered from cere‐brovascular disease, which caused two or three minor strokes and weakness of his eyesight in his last years. His etiologically important risk factors and the symptoms of Handel's strokes are presented and evaluated by primary sources; various diagnoses are discussed. In Handel's musical work, no direct impact from his illness can be found, but there are some indirect outflows of Handel's pathography on his compositions, especially the Messiah.     

“Tearing Down the Burning House”: James Buchanan's use of Edmund Burke

The 1854 Ostend Manifesto has long been scorned as an expansionist treatise, a leading indicator of “Young America's” hold on the antebellum Democratic Party, and a signal of Franklin Pierce's failed presidency. Unnoticed is the genesis of the document's most famous metaphor, of Cuba representing a neighbor's “burning house” that could cause American intervention. The primary author of the Manifesto was minister to Great Britain and future president James Buchanan, and he attempted to smooth over the rough suggestion of an American takeover of the island by borrowing imagery from Edmund Burke's 1791 Reflections on the Revolution in France. Buchanan's use of Burke, the anti‐revolutionary English philosopher of prudence and critic of ideology, demonstrates the wide but underappreciated popularity of Burke with American politicians of all parties. Not just Whigs and Southern planters, but also Northern Doughface Democrats such as Buchanan, especially in the 1850s, used Burke to preach calm, moderation, and political prudence. As his use in the Manifesto makes clear, a larger study of Edmund Burke's appeal to Americans is badly needed to plot his broad influence on American politics leading up to the Civil War.     

Leviathans Old and New: What Collingwood Saw in Hobbes

Summary

R. G. Collingwood presented his major work of political philosophy, The New Leviathan, as an updated version of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. However, his reasons for taking Hobbes's great work as his inspiration have puzzled and eluded many Collingwood scholars, while those interested in the reception of Hobbes's ideas have largely neglected the New Leviathan. In this essay I reveal what Collingwood saw in Hobbes's political philosophy and show how his reading of Hobbes both diverges from other prominent interpretations of the time and invites us to reassess Hobbes's complex association with the origins of liberalism. In doing so, I focus on Collingwood's science of mind, his ideas on society and authority, and his dialectical theory of politics, in each case showing how he engaged with Hobbes in order to elucidate his own vision of civilisation. That vision is based on the development of social consciousness, which involves people coming to understand the body politic as a joint enterprise whereby they confer authority upon those who rule.     

Merchants,Malaria and Manliness: A Patient’s Experience of Tropical Disease

From 1862 until 1874, John Holt lived on the island of Bioko (Fernando Pó), laying the groundwork for a company that would become one of the most influential trading houses in western Africa. During his time on the coast, Holt was almost continually ill with malaria and other tropical diseases, and his illnesses had a major impact on how he experienced and interpreted his life and work in Africa. This paper draws on Holt’s private papers, as well as merchant memoirs and the historiographies of medicine, hydrotherapy and masculinity to explore merchants’ views of illness and how they were deeply embedded in broader assumptions about manliness during a time of rapid imperial expansion.     

Le modèle des petites filles: structure familiale dans l'œuvre de la comtesse de Ségur

This article discusses how Petrarch's self-portrayal as a spokesman for peace, armed with quill and inkpot, is brought forward in the canzone "Italia mia benché 'l parlar sia indarno" and in his epistles of the 1350s. The poet's activity as peace mediator appears in this famous canzone dedicated to Italy well before the epistles were written. Dated to 1344, the poem's thematic kernel seems to have been subsequently unfolded and broken down into the epistles that Petrarch later sent to the political leaders of his day. Petrarch's cry for peace in the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta is threefold: he invokes spiritual, societal, and teleological peace. The different faces of this threefold pining for harmonic conciliation find an outlet in the invocations of, respectively, Chiare fresche e dolci acque, "Italia mia," and the Canzone alla Vergine. "Italia mia," his most distinctly political text as well as heartfelt plea to the lords of Italy, marks Petrarch's last attempt to recompose the political fractures of Italy within the peninsula itself; from the 1350s onward, Petrarch addresses his political appeals solely to foreign rulers, a sign of the waning independence of Italian states.     

When the Subject is the Object: Islamic Advice Literature Modes and the Treatment of Slavery in The Qābūs Nāmih and The Nasirean Ethics

This paper investigates the difference of perspective which informs The Qābūs Nāmih's and The Nasirean Ethics’ respective treatments of the topic of slavery. While in various parts of their discussions both works show an engagement with each side of the hybrid status of a slave's existence as both subject and object, The Qābūs Nāmih deals with the issue almost entirely in terms of the slave's status as an object, while The Nasirean Ethics engages this issue with clear acknowledgments to his/her status as a subject. It is possible that the divergent approaches of these two works are a reflection of the two distinct modes of the genre of Islamic advice literature in which they were respectively written.     

Reims,Bibliothèque Carnegie, 806: a little‐known manuscript of Benedict of Aniane's Concordia regularum

Benedict of Aniane is usually portrayed as the major instigator of a series of monastic reforms undertaken by Louis the Pious in the early years of his reign, which attempted to impose the Rule of Benedict of Nursia as the sole monastic standard across Francia. Based on information provided by Ardo, Benedict of Aniane's biographer, the Concordia regularum has been seen as Benedict's main instrument in his attempt to convince or compel others to accept the Rule as a superior norm. The Concordia itself is a sort of commentary on the Rule, where almost the whole of St Benedict's Rule is explained by texts drawn from other monastic rules. However, a number of fragments from a copy of the Concordia, apparently written a decade or more before the accession of Louis, contests Ardo's chronology, and challenges our traditional understanding of both Benedict of Aniane's role in monastic reform and of the Aachen reform councils. An edition of these fragments is included in an Appendix.     

An exile's hopes: the search for a liberator in Michael Marullus

Abstract

Michael Marullus, fifteenth-century Greek, soldier and Latin poet, lived almost all his life in exile. In his earliest poetry revanchist thoughts directed at his country's Ottoman conquerors are hardly present, and superhuman powers are held responsible for the catastrophe. Later, Byzantine reliance on foreign forces is blamed. With time however and political developments in central and western Europe, a crusade or Türkenzug seemed to become more likely, and Marullus turned to the Habsburg Maximilian I and Charles VIII of France as possible liberators. This paper attempts to describe the poet's developing treatment of the themes of defeat and exile and his response in the last decade of the fifteenth century to the possibility of military action against the Ottomans.     

The romance of the Inland Isle: Tocqueville's Democracy in America and the landscape of Providence

Nearly two centuries after its publication, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1990a) remains among the most influential accounts of American political culture. This essay argues that the rhetorical foundation of the Democracy's enduring cultural power is its “imaginative geography” (Said 2000), about which I make two, interrelated claims. The first has to do with the Democracy's identification of the American land with divine Providence. I claim that the providential landscape is the chief means by which Tocqueville contains and organizes the account of the tension between achieved liberty and natural freedom that drives the Democracy. My second focus is on the romantic character of the providential landscape. Cosgrove (2005, p. 302) reflects upon the “tenacity of the island condition on the Western imagination” as frame and vessel of “imagination, desire, hopes and fears.” I argue that the Democracy's “Inland Isle,” as I call it, is a metaphorical island in this sense, and that its theoretical capacity and exhortative power derive from Tocqueville's use of an idiom expressive of a distinctively French tradition of landscape theorizing in which garden metaphor was used to construct meanings of equality and freedom, and voice and identity, in an emerging national, bourgeois order.