The Black Death in the diocese of Ely: The evidence of the bishop's register

The Black Death of 1348-9 is thought to have killed a third to a half of the population of Europe. More exact measurements of the plague mortality are hard to come by, but the ten episcopal registers of England which survived the great pestilence provide some of the most complete and reliable information about the number of deaths on a yearly basis. Although there are qualifications to be made before using this information, the defects in the bishops' registers are not so great that the historian can afford to neglect this valuable source. In addition, there is sometimes anecdotal evidence in the registers which speaks of the human drama of the plague, in contrast to the impassive testimony of numbers. This paper will examine the evidence of the register of Thomas de Lisle, bishop of Ely from 1345 until 1361, as it relates to the Black Death. The first half of the paper will address the statistical evidence, to be followed by a discussion of the anecdotal material. De Lisle's register has not been extensively studied since J. Lunn's 1930 thesis on The Black Death in the Bishops' Registers, which is now lost. A re-evaluation of this evidence will reveal that the inhabitants of East Anglia, and of Cambridgeshire in particular, were among the greatest sufferers of the plague.     

The Ohio Data Archives

The Ottoman government obtained current information on the empire's sources of revenue through periodic registers called tahrir defterleri. These documents include detailed information on taxpaying subjects and taxable resources, making it possible to study the economic and social history of the Middle East and eastern Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although the use of these documents has been typically limited to the construction of local histories, adopting a more optimistic attitude toward their potential and using appropriate sampling procedures can greatly increase their contribution to historical scholarship. They can be used in comprehensive quantitative studies and in addressing questions of broader historical significance or larger social scientific relevance.     

Wired Communities in the City: Sydney,Australia

Questions relating to the ability of particular groups in society to access information and communications technologies (ICTs) have become a growing part of the academic and policy literature. The issues raised in this literature have revolved around a number of themes, many of which can be subsumed under concerns about a growing digital divide whereby society is being divided into information rich and information poor sectors. This differentiation can be between particular social groups irrespective of place, or between people in particular places be these large regional areas (e.g. metropolitan versus non‐metropolitan) or localities and communities within an urban area. This paper focuses on the existence of a ‘digital divide’ across the Sydney metropolitan area. Using ABS 2001 census data the paper presents an analysis of computer and internet access and use for clusters of local communities and focuses on how usage differs across communities as differentiated by socio‐economic status, household and family status and ethnic background.     

The collapse of memory: The case of farm workers (French Vexin,pays de France)

The two authors have carried out an oral survey on a group of retired farm labourers in the French Vexin and the Pays de France regions (north of the lle de France). This paper examines the means by which individual memory registers the collective downward trend of this social group. It is remarkable for instance that respondents tend to recall memories of the “life of yore”;, opposed to life nowadays, instead of describing precise stages of their career, or the social evolution of their group and of the region. Their vision of History is fatalistic, syncretical, motionless, with frequent reference to war, exodus, moments of horror. All these elements express indirectly how a social group was crushed. Fragments of oral litterature that were collected on the same occasion refer also to the theme of social failure.     

Migration fields in a traditional Highland community, 1350–1850

Using information on marriages from a clan genealogy composed in 1705 and from parish registers after 1775, a network of social relations within the Clann Mhuirich has been constructed over a three-and-a-half century period. An examination of marriage records and records of the residences of baptizing families throws light on the means whereby social relationships are formed and maintained over space through time in a Scottish highland community before the mid-nineteenth century. A basic characteristic of a Highland clan was its agnatic structure, binding men and women related to each other by patrilineal descent, often bearing the same surname. The territory occupied by a clan became segmented by a process of agnatic migration as clansmen acquired land through marriage. Another characteristic of clan organization was a tendency towards high levels of clan endogamy. Endogamous marriages reinforced the agnatic structure and maintained continuity of possession of a clan's territory.     

The Politics of Vigilance in Southeastern Nigeria

This article argues that governance can be best analysed within modes of vigilance. Where recent work on the post‐colonial state has emphasized the symbolic and practical constitution of the state through surveillance and spatialization, so in counterpoint, this analysis illustrates that social engagement with the state is based on conceptions of vigilance and practices of counter‐surveillance with both spatial and temporal dimensions. Drawing on an ethnography of Annang youth associations in southeastern Nigeria, this analysis outlines how the micro‐politics of vigilance are based on knowledge of the states' patrimonial ‘ways of operating’ and processes which define internal, localized rights, registers and styles of action. This argument is based on an analysis of popular responses to disorder which contribute to an ‘insurgent’ construction of the public realm in which groups marginalized and excluded challenge the logic, locations, patterns of discourse and constructions of the public good.     

'They Never Trusted Me to Drive': Farm girls and the gender relations of agricultural information transfer

This research explores the ways in which the gender relations of family farming influence the transfer of agricultural information and knowledge resources to farm girls, a rarely studied population. The study is based on a sample of 32 female farmers from southern Ontario, who were interviewed extensively about their experiences growing up on family farms, and about their lives as adult farmers. Their accounts underscore the fact that the gendered division of labour evident on North American farms constrains the information passed on to farm girls (and women) in particular ways. Farm girls do not share fully in the occupational inheritance of agriculture - they are frequently excluded or marginalised from important agricultural resources, including information. This exclusion comes about through the ongoing social processes of agrarian patriarchal culture, operating both inside and outside of the agri-family unit. In particular, the study illustrates how the social construction of agriculture is heavily reinforced by certain types of myth-making, which work to disadvantage farm girls and women.     

Housing tenure and social classes in Kingston Ontario 1881–1901

Housing once again became the subject of political struggles and debates in many countries in the late nineteenth century. It is argued that these struggles may best be understood within the frame of reference of Marxist theory and, in particular, an interpretation of the significance of housing in terms of the production of wage labour as a class relation. From this perspective, attention is directed to the changing relationship between housing tenure and social class. Unfortunately, very little is known about this relationship over the period in question. We lack information on trends in home-ownership in particular and domestic property ownership in general. Furthermore, we lack information on the changing tenure characteristics of the urban populations of the time in relation to their developing class structure. This lack is especially apparent for Canada. On these questions we present evidence from Kingston, Ontario. We note a decline in homeownership which was experienced by all classes. In particular, however, we note a dramatic increase in absentee (as opposed to resident) landlordism. The origins and political effects of these trends may be understood in terms of the particular character of Kingston in the period. Unfortunately, however, it is impossible to define adequately this uniqueness in the absence of comparable research on other American and Canadian cities of the day. We conclude with a set of questions for future research.     

Compulsory Schooling Legislation: An Economic Analysis of Law and Social Change in the Nineteenth Century

Samples drawn from marriage registers in Birmingham and rural Norfolk, England, which report the occupational status for both the groom and his father, were matched with the 1851 and 1881 English censuses, which also contain occupational information. After performing several checks for selection bias, the author concludes: First, although most occupational mobility took place within 10 years of marriage—when the groom was roughly between the ages of 25 and 35—some continued after he turned 50. Second, approximately 35 percent of the men in each area eventually had an occupational status different from their fathers, and about 30 percent changed occupational status over their careers, belying the stereotype of impenetrable walls between classes in Victorian England. Third, upward occupational mobility seemed to slow in both regions as the period under consideration progressed. Fourth, although occupational mobility rates overall were comparable in these urban and rural areas, it was much easier for an individual to rise from an unskilled to a skilled status in Birmingham than it was in Norfolk. Fifth, and perhaps most surprising, literacy had a greater effect on social mobility in rural Norfolk than in urban Birmingham.     

Divorce in early modern rural Japan: household and individual life course in northeastern villages, 1716-1870

Drawing data from the local population registers in two northeastern agricultural villages, this study examines the patterns and factors associated with divorce in preindustrial Japan. Divorce was easy and common during this period. More than two thirds of first marriages dissolved in divorce before individuals reached age fifty. Discrete-time event history analysis is applied to demonstrate how economic condition and household context influenced the likelihood of divorce for females. Risk of divorce was extremely high in the first three years and among uxorilocal marriages. Propensity of divorce increased upon economic stress in the community and among households of lower social status. Presence of parents, siblings, and children had strong bearings on marriage to continue.     

Measuring Inequality: A Fortran Program for the Geni Index,Schutz Coefficient,and Lorenz Curve

Abstract

A new occupational stratification scale, “HISCAM” (historical CAMSIS), has been developed to facilitate the analysis of data coded to the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations. This article describes the derivation and properties of the HISCAM measure. The scale was derived using patterns of inter-generational occupational connections, replicating a method of “social interaction distance” analysis which is widely used in contemporary sociology. Analysis was performed on data for the period of 1800–1938, principally derived from marriage registers covering Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, and encompassing over two million inter-generational relationships. Researchers report how several different HISCAM scales were evaluated and show how this approach can explain social stratification and inequality in the past.     

An event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect

This paper contributes to a rethinking of the ethical sensibilities of geographical research in the context of an emerging interest amongst geographers in non-representational registers of thinking and moving. Rather than undermining geographical engagements with questions of the ethical, the paper argues that this emerging interest in questions of the non-representational actually extends the range and repertoire of empirical contexts and conceptual vehicles within and with which such an engagement can take place. The paper argues that attending to and through the relation between affect and ethics is particularly important to this effort. The importance of affect in this regard is illustrated through a series of examples drawn from an 18-month participatory encounter with a specific therapeutic practice, Dance Movement Therapy. Drawing upon such examples, the paper offers some lines of ethical potential that might provide orientation to further geographical research. In doing this, the paper concentrates in particular on the necessity of cultivating a fidelity to the affective event of geographical ethics as much as remaining faithful to the subject or object of an ethical code.     

A typology of representative institutions in late medieval Europe

This article attempts to follow the tradition established by Hintze and Elias in comparing several aspects of representative institutions throughout medieval Europe. It uses numerous recent case studies and a new more detailed examination of the Low Country sources and it tries to take into account the criticisms levelled at the rather unsophisticated generalizations of earlier scholars. Attention is given to the structure of the institutions, their actual working and their functions.Comparisons are made whenever the available information permits, if possible by quantification, although our information is often too vague and incomplete to permit this. A number of ideal types are formulated as a working hypothesis for further investigation, based on the social structures within which these types of institutions functioned. The essential variables were the extent of urbanization in a particular territory, the form of government and the economic and juridical situation of the nobles and peasants.     

Placing Lefebvre

Geographers have extensively used Lefebvre's concept of space as a social product as a framework guiding urban and political critique. Lefebvre articulates social space through a primarily ontological engagement: he describes a complex and multi‐faceted object that exists in three simultaneous but distinct, co‐producing registers. The famous “triad” has become canonical within Anglophone geography, but the implications of this ontology for knowing or researching the object of “(social) space” often remain implicit. This paper suggests that recent scholarship on place‐making helps to address the latent epistemological challenges of operationalizing Lefebvre's triad. We trace linkages and gaps between Lefebvrian space and contemporary theorizations of relational place. Re‐examining social space through the lens of relational place highlights the potential for links between epistemologically diverse recent research and twenty years of Lefebvre‐inspired critique.     

Texts,Practice and Practitioners: Computational Cultures at Work in Early Modern South India**

This essay will discuss the hegemonic role that texts have come to play in the historiography of subcontinental mathematical traditions. It will argue that texts need to be studied as records of practices of people's working lives, grounded in social hierarchies. We will take particular mathematical texts to show how different occupational registers have come to shape practices that defy the binaries of concrete and abstract, high and low mathematics or the pure and applied conundrum. Measuring, counting and accounting practices as part of the routine work of practitioners performing their caste occupations then provide us with a spectrum of the computational activities that controlled and regulated the lives of people in the past. In the process the act of computing itself gained certain political values such as cunning and manipulation, identified with professions of village accountant and merchant, for example. Drawn from my earlier work on these records, I discuss the occupational role of the accountant as a political functionary who assessed and authenticated the measurements of land and produce in the village, making values of the labor performed by others, and creating avenues for his own proficiency as a mathematical practitioner.     

A typology of representative institutions in late medieval Europe

This article attempts to follow the tradition established by Hintze and Elias in comparing several aspects of representative institutions throughout medieval Europe. It uses numerous recent case studies and a new more detailed examination of the Low Country sources and it tries to take into account the criticisms levelled at the rather unsophisticated generalizations of earlier scholars. Attention is given to the structure of the institutions, their actual working and their functions.Comparisons are made whenever the available information permits, if possible by quantification, although our information is often too vague and incomplete to permit this. A number of ideal types are formulated as a working hypothesis for further investigation, based on the social structures within which these types of institutions functioned. The essential variables were the extent of urbanization in a particular territory, the form of government and the economic and juridical situation of the nobles and peasants.     

Shame and the Embodiment of Boundaries

ABSTRACT Attention to the debilitating feelings of unease, discomfort and anxiety which are the concomitants of everyday encounters and negotiations of Kooris at the mainstream interface brings an appreciation for the lived experience of the colonised minority and throws into relief complex struggles over meaning, manners, personal values, social allegiance and cultural survival. This paper focuses on the habituation and strategic deployment of shame at the racial divide. Koori subjectivities, bodily dispositions and emotional registers are found to be informed both by traditional orientations and by the hegemonic ends of the dominant order.     

Mundane mobilities,performances and spaces of tourism

The extension of information and communication technologies is purported to provide great opportunities for women, with the potential for empowerment and feminist activism. This paper contributes to the debate about women and cyberspace through a focus on the role of the internet in the lives of a group of technologically proficient, socially advantaged white heterosexual new mothers. The internet played a central role in providing virtual social support and alternative information sources which increased these women's real sense of empowerment in the transition to motherhood. Simultaneously, however, very traditional stereotypes of mothering and gender roles persisted. A paradox is evident whereby the internet was both liberating and constraining: it played an important social role for some women while at the same time it encouraged restrictive and unequal gender stereotypes in this particular community of practice. An examination of new virtual parenting spaces therefore has a contribution to make in understanding changing parenting practices in the new millennium.     

Working Borders: The Contexts of Copán Archaeology

The work of archaeologists and the knowledge they produce both help create, and are conditioned by, a variety of kinds of borders, including political, academic, and cultural. In this article I review a series of borders that shape and determine the social conditions in which archaeology at the well-known site of Copán in western Honduras takes place and takes on meaning. I argue that the histories of these borders, their construction, and their crossings reveal structural tensions in the overlapping registers of academia, public history and popular discourse, in which archaeological knowledge circulates. These histories must be consciously interrogated in order to be negotiated. I suggest that by becoming fluent in the cultural conversations ongoing in a place, archaeologists are best able to begin productive collaborations and make informed choices about how they participate in the border-making processes of their work.