The Vectis Report: a Survey of Isle of Wight Archaeology. By H. V. Basford

Warwick Castle is an important example of fourteenth-century castle-building but has seen little detailed survey or publication. This article succeeds Morris' account from 1986 of the south range, which originally contained the great hall and Earl's chamber suite; it publishes and analyzes three elaborate towers in the east range: the gatehouse and two at either end. These provided suites of rooms for guests and the principal members of the Earl's household as well as a magnificent approach and entrance front. The building shows the motives and ambitions of the Third Beauchamp Earl both as a practical design and as a centre from which to assert his power in the county and court.     

Unattached and Unhinged: The Spinster and the Psychiatrist in Liberal Italy, 1860–1922

This article explores the role nineteenth‐century Italian psychiatric sciences played in shaping attitudes towards adult women who never married. Initially in post‐unification Italy unmarried women were largely invisible, while the bachelor appeared to threaten the newly formed nation's fragile political and social stability. In the last decades of the nineteenth century fears about the bachelor faded, replaced by growing concerns about the social dangers posed by the ‘spinster’. Drawing on writings from psychiatrists, anthropologists, sociologists, on patient records from psychiatric asylums as well as popular literature, this article traces the way psychiatric practice and theories transformed the image of the unmarried single woman.     

Cultivating the cosmos: spaceflight thought in Imperial Germany

Space historians have predominantly identified Weimar Germany (1919–1933) as the starting period of German debates over the possibility of spaceflight. However, spaceflight and the utopian potential of outer space were already topics of popular discussion in the late nineteenth century, when calls by German astronomers for speculative restraint were challenged in popular science accounts and fantasy literature. Mass-produced fiction in the first decade of the twentieth century increasingly depicted spaceflight as a technological vision, imagining the spaceship as the successor to the airship. While exploring the historical processes behind this ascent of plausibility of futuristic design, the article shows how popular science media gave public voice to both established and new professional elites and fostered interprofessional exchange. In the 1900s spaceflight developed into a popular theme and boundaries between fiction and popular science blurred.     

清代中期婚姻行为分析——立足于1781—1791年的考察

本文主要依据中国第一历史档案馆所藏乾隆朝刑科题本婚姻家庭类档案中收集的个案资料 ,对 18世纪中后期中国的婚姻行为包括初婚年龄、离婚表现和再婚状况做了初步分析。研究结论表明 ,在当时社会 ,女性早婚是比较普遍的现象 ,男性中早婚和晚婚两种现象并存 ;离婚是人们尽可能避免的 ,离婚中 ,丈夫休妻和嫁卖妻子为主流 ;丧偶妇女再婚和守节并存 ,中青年丧偶妇女再婚比例较高 ,但守节也有一定比例     

Suffragan Bishops in the Medieval Diocese of York

Abstract

By looking at three families, all of Anglo-Scandinavian descent in the male line and neighbours in the Furness peninsula, this article seeks to examine the particular ways in which they, and similar families in the region, adapted to the changes that occurred in the century and a half or so after the Norman Conquest. By the early thirteenth century, an assimilation had taken place whereby these families were beginning to play the role expected of knightly families in thirteenth-century England as a whole, taking their place within a single elite alongside families that traced their male descent back to Continental immigrants. The article examines this process of assimilation by looking at the families' participation in the local aristocratic network, their changing naming practices, their marriage and landholding relationships, and their mix of old and new tenures. It further looks at the introduction of castles, markets and boroughs, and the families' interaction with the growing penetration and sophistication of royal and ecclesiastical administration in the region. Finally, it examines the families' reaction to, and participation in, the transformation of the local Church, both secular and regular.     

The invisible man: body and ritual in a fifteenth-century noble household

Ritual and gesture were central to medieval political cultures, yet few documents survive which attest to daily comportment in non-royal elite households. This article examines the late fifteenth-century ‘Harleian Ordinances’ (from British Library Harl. MS 6815), which describe in rare detail the ceremonies and servants' gestures used in an unnamed earl's house. It focuses on the para-liturgical elements of the household ceremony (notably the use of ritual kisses), argues that the Burgundian court provided direct inspiration for the ordinance, and suggests a connection to Richard, earl of Warwick (‘the Kingmaker’). More broadly, it explores aspects of the relationship between lord and noble servant in the later fifteenth century and contends that nobility – an essentially invisible quality – was in part conjured up through the gestures and deportment of a nobleman's servants. In their attempts to portray power and prestige, noblemen such as the invisible earl of this ordinance established secular household rites which required that their bodies be attended to with an almost religious reverence.     

From Fierce to Adorable: Representations of Polar Bears in the Popular Imagination

From the late 1950s to the early 1980s, technology in the form of aircraft, high-powered rifles, and tranquilizers changed the relationship between humans and polar bears. Whereas the polar bear had been conceptualized as a fierce beast in early-modern expeditionary literature, in the second half of the twentieth century the bear was depicted as vulnerable due to overhunting and in need of scientific study, a process that in itself portrayed the helplessness of the animal when confronted with postwar technologies. Popular American and Canadian periodicals conveyed this shift in the bear’s image. This article examines the polar bear’s image as depicted by the media and argues that the use of certain technologies by sport hunters, wildlife biologists, and conservationists enabled a domination of the bear that altered the animal’s placement within the popular imagination.     

The masculine image of a great power

This essay will use visual representations to illuminate the process whereby seventeenth‐century Sweden became a great European power. During the seventeenth century, a new technology of visual representation had provided European leaders with the illusionist tricks so essential to image‐making. Throughout Europe, political imagery and propaganda assumed important roles in politics. In the Thirty Years War, Sweden projected a very masculine image. Visual representations stressed martial values and prowess, personified by Gustavus Adolphus. As a young female monarch, his daughter Christina did not fit this image. One immediate change during her reign was that the queen represented Sweden's political power, while the martial image was personified by the field marshals. In the late seventeenth century, during the absolutist era, the field marshals maintained their position in the visual representations of Sweden, then, however, in their role as servants to the king. During her reign, the representations of power also underwent several lasting changes. Christina was the first in the line of Swedish monarchs portrayed in her personal image, as a woman at leisure. Another important change was that royal imagery in her reign used visual representations of half‐real, half‐allegorical female figures, which prepared the way for a female allegory, Suecia, personifying Sweden from the era of royal absolutism in the 1680s.     

Death's dance of women

The 1486 edition of La grant danse macabre des femmes by Martial d'Auvergne, also known as Martial de Paris, is the subject of this study. The skeleton, representing death, queries each of the thirty-six women described in the poem. The answers they give tell us about their occupation and the chances of their salvation. The author is a realist who represents only those women he is familiar with and shows deep understanding of the women portrayed. The concerns of the flesh get more attention than the spiritual factors.Death was very important in the middle ages, especially in the late fourteenth and fifteenth century. It was featured in public curiosity, religion, literature, visual and dramatic presentations, and popular beliefs. The authors attempt to describe it and give an answer to the pressing problems of death in the fifteenth century.     

Leonardo Bruni and the Poetics of Sovereignty

Abstract

Leonardo Bruni’s well-known oration, the Laudatio Florentinae urbis, has long stood at the center of discussions on the emergence of the modern republican state. Recent historiographical trends have emphasized the degree to which Bruni’s oration represents a propagandistic attempt both to portray Florence as a territorial power of Northern Italy keen to impose its sovereign authority on neighboring polities and as a republic intent on fashioning an image of itself as a popular sovereignty. It is in this second element of Bruni’s oration that we can discover his rhetorical purposes: he needed to give a distorted image of Florence as enjoying “popular” rule precisely because Florence was in fact moving in the opposite direction towards a more oligarchic concentration of political authority. The essay investigates the changes contemplated in revisions to Florence’s juridical codes at precisely the time of the oration’s composition, suggesting that when these two sources are juxtaposed, Bruni’s oration appears as a strongly ideological literary work the rhetorical gestures of which camouflage the actual historical and legal developments of Florence’s political life in the early fifteenth century.     

Tokugawa Confucian Sermons as Popular Emotional Education: The Moral and Pedagogical Philosophy of Hosoi Heishū*

This article contributes to the growing literature on the nexus of religion and emotion, thinking through the ways in which historians of Japan can make interventions in the field, and exploring research methodologies that speak to a pre‐modern and non‐Christian milieu. In looking to the moral and pedagogical philosophy of Hosoi Heishū (1728–1801), a Tokugawa Confucian teacher and itinerant preacher, this article places an emphasis on the use of contextualised and historically‐specific emic categories of belief and feeling. To do so, it explores the popularising movement of Japanese Confucianism in the late eighteenth century, tracing Hosoi's development of vernacular sermonising and his identification of emotion as both a subject and object of instruction. His rhetorical style and pedagogy is unpacked, followed by an analysis of his popular reception, before turning to a sermon case study to observe these ideas in action. This article offers new insights into the viewing habits and emotional expectations of Tokugawa audiences, underscoring the ways in which emotion terms and concepts can change meaning in how they are defined, embodied, expressed, and valued as part of a broader habitus.     

‘The first duties of persons living in a civilized community’: the Maya, the Church, and the colonial state in southern Belize

In recent years, historical geography has been at the forefront of new scholarship on the spatiality of colonial power and its complex relations with indigenous communities. This literature shows that imperial policies – emerging through state and scientific institutions, cultural practices, and capitalist ventures – required particular ways of conceptualizing, mapping, and organizing spaces and territories which transformed the geographies of indigenous communities, livelihoods, and identities. Through a close reading of archival texts from the late 19th and early 20th century, this paper examines the spatial and political relations between three groups: the Catholic Church, the British colonial state, and the Maya communities of southern British Honduras. Differences between the Catholic Church and the British colonial state – in their aims and approach to winning hegemony over the Q'eqchi' and Mopan Maya – were accommodated and assuaged by a tacit agreement: that the Maya must be settled in permanent communities. Colonial power, in both its spiritual and statist modalities, was imminently geographical, and this geography comprised the common ground between Church and state in their approach to the Maya.     

Emperors,bishops, art and jurisprudence: the transformation of law in Eusebius of Caesarea

This article analyses the collection and repurposing of legal documents in the early fourth‐century historical writings of Eusebius of Caesarea. Some of these individual documents have been the object of repeated study; others are still largely neglected. But they are even more interesting, I suggest, when considered as a collective, as Eusebius’ careful editing reveals they were intended to be. This mobilization of collated and embedded law was, I argue, the meeting of two separate wider trends that took off in this early fourth‐century watershed moment – the so‐called late antique artistic aesthetic, and the gradually changing legal dynamic between government and governed. Eusebius used both as strategies to resist imperial dominance in the uncertain times in which he wrote, constructing an image of the bishop capable of going toe to toe with emperors. In doing so, he anticipated not just the growing conflict between church and state in the centuries to come, but the rhetorical strategies that would come to be employed.     

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.     

Warwick: report on the excavation of an early 17th‐century English shipwreck in Castle Harbour,Bermuda

Warwick, a colonial merchantman owned and operated by Sir Robert Rich, Second Earl of Warwick, sank in Castle Harbour, Bermuda, in1619. Between 2010 and 2012, Warwick's hull remains and associated artefacts were excavated and recorded. Built early in the 17th century, Warwick’s structure revealed a traditional shipbuilding style. Covered with two layers of planking and a layer of sheathing, the ship was purpose‐built for extended transatlantic voyages. Not exceeding 200 tons, Warwick was an average‐size vessel with sufficient burthen to bring supplies and passengers to the colonies and return with tobacco.     

Mechanical Performance of Historical Wrought Iron Rods

Historical masonry buildings are often reinforced with ferrous tie rods. Before the late 18th century, such rods were hot formed by using wrought iron deriving from either the bloomery or the finery process; thereafter, the puddling process was introduced and gradually became prevalent. Several such tie rods are still in service in cultural‐heritage buildings; their analysis can shed light on historical production processes and building techniques, and knowledge of their mechanical performance can be valuable for architectural conservation purposes. Four steel tie rods, which were retrieved from a 17th century masonry building in Turin, Italy, and are dated to the late 17th and early 19th centuries, are examined here, by means of chemical and microstructural analyses, tensile tests and fractographic examinations, and both the material fabrication procedure and its mechanical performance are discussed.     

The Convertible Saint: Expeditus through Time and Space

Expeditus, a Roman soldier who was for centuries simply a name on a list of early Christian martyrs, took on new life in the late eighteenth century in a Catholic cult that expanded greatly in the late nineteenth century and has continued to spread since then. His name linked him with time and the answering of prayers for urgent causes in particularly modern ways, despite growing scholarly scepticism about him. His unforgettable image — a Roman soldier crushing a crow or raven underfoot — has been adopted by Italian fascists and practitioners of Haitian vodou, among many others. Expeditus?s popularity on the internet is only the latest version of this unusual devotion.     

Visualisierungen in der deutschen Geographie des 19. Jahrhunderts. Die Beispiele Robert Schlagintweit und Hans Meyer

Visualization in 19^th‐century German geography: Robert Schlagintweit and Hans Meyer as examples. – Visual representations of nature formed an essential part of 19^th‐century earth sciences. In particular, colonial photography – as a visual source, and as an instrument of the construction of national identities – serves essential research interests of current history and social sciences. The present paper is a case study on the role and function of photography in German geography of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It focuses on the work of the Munich geographer Robert Schlagintweit (1833–1885) and the Leipzig colonial geographer Hans Meyer (1858–1929); the early history of photography in India and the function of images in the geographical exploration of overseas territories are discussed. Although there is nearly half a century between the work of R. Schlagintweit and H. Meyer, their photography shows remarkable parallels. The ideas of both on the practice of visualization are rooted in pedagogic and didactic concepts as well as in popular science. For both geographers photography was essentially a technical help, which often needed graphic revisions. And they both preferred photography to depict people and buildings (compared, for instance, to landscapes). Concerning the more comprehensive question of how far their photography transmitted a specific German ‘image of abroad’, it is indicated that such a specific image should have its essential roots in a peculiar visual culture of German earth sciences in the first half of the 19^th century. Thus the paper offers a starting point for further studies discussing the change from a ‘Biedermeier image’ of foreign cultures to a more ‘colonial’ one in 19^th‐century German geography.     

Temporal changes in diet: a stable isotope analysis of late Iron Age and Roman Dorset,Britain

This study investigates the relationship between diet and cultural change in late Iron Age and Romano-British populations from Dorset, England (1st century BC to the early 5th century AD). Dorset was the only region in Britain to exhibit continuity in inhumation burial rites through these periods and a wide array of environmental, archaeological and material culture evidence is available there. A sample of N = 77 human adult and N = 17 faunal rib samples were utilized for carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis to test the hypothesis that Romanization of the diet would result in greater dietary variation.