The East Anglian chronicle

Abraham's sacrifice. Very early on, this Biblical theme became the subject of a number of representations who did not vary much, having a rich and precocious theology as their base: the sacrifice of Isaac prefiguring that of Christ on the Cross. The anecdotal development is one of the major variants. The dramatization of the scene in miniatures, especially noticeable from the 13th century onward, enriched the stylistic effects. The social changes that took place in medieval western Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries (the place of children, attitudes to death...) provoked a final evolution. The previous embellishments were reorganized to take into account the preoccupations of the day.     

The Roadside Burial of Suicides: An East Anglian Study

While folklorists and social historians have assumed that the roadside burial of suicides was a widespread custom in England, there have been few efforts to research or locate specific examples. This study traces documented cases of the practice, and known (or suspected) roadside graves from one area of England in an attempt to establish how common this was.     

The Swiss community in Genoa from the Old Regime to the late nineteenth century

Abstract

Drawing on extensive and original archival research, this article is the first to reconstruct the origins and historical development of the Swiss community of Genoa from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. During these four centuries, the Swiss were constant and significant agents of the Genoese economy and society. The Swiss presence in the city dates back to the mid 1500s, when Swiss soldiers were the predominant component of the army of the Republic. In the 1700s the Swiss community broadened its economic scope and varied its social configuration. It consisted of both a well-established Protestant, élite of merchant-bankers and textile entrepreneurs and a lower layer of craftsmen, confectioners, street vendors and servants. By the end of the 1700s the Swiss élite was such a thriving and well-integrated group that in 1799 Genoa was selected to be the seat of the first Swiss consulate of the Italian peninsula, the second in Europe after Bordeaux (1798). From the Restoration (1815) to Italian Unification (1861), the Swiss merchant-bankers and textile industrialists continued to be active promoters of the city's economic and trading system. In the decades after Unification (1861–80s), Swiss capital investments moved into new economic sectors (steam-shipping and maritime insurance) that contributed to the modernization of the Genoese and Italian merchant fleet. During the nineteenth century the Swiss community created its own social spaces and identity within the city – a church, a cemetery, a school, and a charitable foundation. As in many other northern Italian cities, the consolidation of the community's external image did not weaken the Swiss élite's integration with the local Genoese upper class.     

The transatlantic Muslim diaspora to Latin America in the nineteenth century

Since the 16th century, African Muslims figured prominently among the slave population of the Americas. While the number of Muslims pulled into the trade has always been a matter of speculation, lists of Africans rescued from slave ships provide us with some clues about the size and direction of the Muslim diaspora to Latin America in the 19th century. Based on an analysis of tens of thousands of names recorded in these lists, this essay argues that the majority of Muslim captives leaving Africa departed from Upper Guinea and suggests that Cuba was the center of the forced Muslim diaspora in the Americas. It traces the transatlantic links that connected particular regions of embarkation in Africa to their counterparts in Latin America and considers the implications of those connections for religious and cultural change within 19th-century slave populations. The essay challenges in important ways the colonial/postcolonial divide in Latin American history and uses Islam to pose important questions about the dynamics of social change across slave societies.     

Residential segregation from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century: evidence from the Netherlands

A case study of three early modern Dutch cities (Alkmaar, Delft, and Amsterdam) using geographical information systems and confronting earlier historical, sociological, and geographical models finds clear patterns of segregation below the level of the city block, thus necessitating block-face mapping. The remarkable continuity in patterns of residential segregation is best explained by the workings of the real-estate market, allowing the well-to-do and middle classes to realize their preferences. In Amsterdam, the merchant elites were able to use their political dominance to plan a scenic and expansive residential environment free from noisy and odorous activities.     

A possible eighteenth to nineteenth century example of a popliteal aneurysm from Leicester

Examples of the impressions made on bones by arterial aneurysms are rare in the archaeological record. One such specimen was found in a collection of 5000 pieces of disarticulated human bone from a disturbed eighteenth to nineteenth century graveyard in Leicester. The distal end of an adult femur shows a lesion on the posterior surface that has been identified as that made by an aneurysm of the popliteal artery, by comparison with an authenticated museum specimen of that condition, also of eighteenth century data. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The context of migration: the example of Ireland in the nineteenth century

"A classic case where out-migration interacted with many other geographical phenomena is provided by rural Ireland in the nineteenth century. The apparent turning point was the Great Famine of the 1840s, but the areas with the greatest suffering from starvation did not necessarily show the greatest population decline, suggesting that other forces were active. Considerable economic and social changes were already taking place before the Famine: fertility was being reduced, later marriage was becoming established and considerable emigration was already taking place. Immediately after the Famine those areas which had been hardest hit often reverted to pre-Famine conditions and did not show strong population decline until the 1870s. The Famine was a most serious event, but the modernization of Irish rural life, which linked emigration with changes in family structure, agriculture and population numbers, was more important in bringing about geographical change."