Müntzer,Taubes, and the Anabaptists: Emancipatory History and Political Theology

ABSTRACT

The radical apocalypticism of the sixteenth century mystic and revolutionary Thomas Müntzer has served as an enduring resource for the political left, from early investigations by Engels and Bloch to the recent works of Alberto Toscano and Wu Ming. In one of his lesser-studied works – the 1947 dissertation Occidental Eschatology – Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes places Müntzer at a key juncture in the history of eschatology, first by situating him at the end of the Reformation period, and then by connecting his revolutionary apocalypticism to the critiques of Hegel leveled by Marx and Kierkegaard. This study aims to give a new perspective on Taubes as a philosopher of history, first by showing potentially surprising connections between Taubes’ Occidental Eschatology and the historiography of Anabaptism, and second by making suggestions about how Taubes’ distinctively emancipatory philosophy of history might contribute to thinking about time and history within contemporary political theology.     

After thought. Devotion,Teresa de Jesús,and Miguel de Cervantes

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complex landscape of devotion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, comparing the legislated Christian-only history of Counter-Reformation with the various alternative strands of belief, faith, and devotion present in a variety of areas of cultural production. The article first examines representations of devotion—and methodologies of reading such representations—in areas of production such as architecture, dictionaries, literature, and the arts; at the end of this first section, it coins the concept of “After Thought” as a reading tool to better comprehend and possibly experience devotion in ways particular to early modern Spain, not merely en cristiano but in multiconfessional forms. “After Thought,” both the tool and the article, follow intellectual engagements with Andalusi (not merely Andalusian) past, present, and future environments in early modern Spain. They also engage alternative somatic dimensions of a different “entendimiento” of Christianity, as described by Teresa de Jesús and practiced by both her and Cervantes. Finally, in reviewing the six ducal chapters of the second part of Don Quijote as a rewriting of Castillo interior, the apocryphal condition of this segment of the novel mobilizes yet another wheel in the Trojan horse of fiction, one that exposes the way in which Cervantes refigures Teresa de Jesús, thus yielding two interactive models of “After Thought” in early modern Spain's arts, religion, and spirituality.     

Huancavelica 1563–1824: History and Historiography

The colonial mines of Huancavelica in central Peru boasted unique status, as the sole significant colonial American source of mercury, the main catalyst in the production of silver. This importance notwithstanding, Huancavelica remains relatively little known, in part because its historiography lies widely dispersed among journals and edited collections. This article seeks to facilitate further research by reviewing all significant existing work on the mines (more than eighty publications in total). In doing so, it provides a new guide to the history of Huancavelica, designed primarily to highlight major areas still requiring the attention of scholars.     

Writing History,Making ‘Race’: Slave-Owners and Their Stories†

This article uses the database created by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project (www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs) which documents the recipients of the twenty million pounds paid in compensation to the slave-owners at the time of abolition, as a starting point from which to explore some of the implications of the flow of human and financial capital to Australia in the 1830s and 1840s. Once the Caribbean was no longer a place to make a fortune, descendants of slave-owners chose this new colony of white settlement as the next frontier of empire. Colonial officials, sheep farmers and writers were amongst those who attempted to make a new life, carrying with them attitudes to racial difference which inflected their understanding of Aboriginal peoples.