Lincolnshire Superstitions

Studies in Folk-Song-and Popular Poetry. By Alfred M. Williams, with a Prefatory Note by Edward Clodd. 8vo; pp. vi., 329. Elliot Stock, 1895.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Translated by C. H. S. Davies. Putnam Sons, New York. By Joseph Jacobs.

Egyptian Tales Translated from the Papyri. First Series, IVth to XIIth Dynasty Edited Flinders Petrie, Hon. D.C.L. Illustrated by Tristram Ellis. London, Methuen &; Co. 1895.

Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World collected from oral tradition in South-West Munster by Jeremiah Curtin. David Nutt, 1895.     

The Reformation of the Eyes: Apparitions and Optics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe

Apparitions were the subject of fierce theological and philosophical debate in the period after the Reformation. But these controversies also raised issues fundamental to the nature and organization of human vision. They crossed and recrossed the boundaries between religion and the science and psychology of optics. Apparitions, after all, are things that appear, and spectres are things that are seen. Before they could mean anything to anyone they had to be correctly identified as phenomena. Their religious role, whether Protestant or Catholic, presupposed a perceptual judgement — essentially visual in character — about just what they were. During the early modern period this judgement — this visual identification — became vastly more complex and contentious than ever before, certainly much more so than in the case of medieval ghosts. The sceptics, natural magicians, and atheists turned apparitions into optical tricks played by nature or human artifice; the religious controversialists and demonologists thought that demons might also be responsible. This essay argues that the debate that ensued, irrespective of the confessional allegiances of the protagonists, was the occasion for some of the most sustained and sophisticated of the early modern arguments about truth and illusion in the visual world.     

Haunting the State: Rumours,Spectral Apparitions and the Longing for Buddhist Charisma in Laos

Buddhist ascetic monks and hermits that move largely outside of the institutional structures of the monastic order (sangha) have a long history in mainland Southeast Asia. In Lao Buddhism these figures seem to have largely disappeared, but due to their charismatic qualities they still occupy a crucial position in the social imaginary. This article explores rumours and narratives about the existence of ascetic monks and hermits in contemporary Laos. I argue that rumours about, and narratives of, spectral apparitions of these figures express a longing for Buddhist charisma that is partially rooted in Laos’ revolutionary past, and in recent social and economic changes. As Buddhist charisma can point to alternative, personalised sources of power, I argue that rumours and spectral apparitions can be interpreted as haunting, and therefore afflicting and challenging the current politics of religion of the Lao state.     

Apparitions of Desire: Clive van den Berg and the Art of Historical Unknowability

This paper considers the art of South African artist, Clive van den Berg. Van den Berg has long been engaged in a careful exploration of landscapes and their capacity to bear traces of what is no longer known, often in ways that question the archive fever of contemporary historians and cultural activists. In a variety of media – from fire‐installations to oil pastel, from light and wood to acrylic, in video and in mono‐print – he has probed the history of eros and its relationship to the violences of apartheid, simultaneously citing the aesthetic traditions of the Italian Renaissance and Southern Africa. The paper both describes and explicates the aesthetico‐political ambition of the artist's work as it has developed over the last decade, in the aftermath of apartheid's dismantling.     

Place,identity and social conflict in post-industrial England: cases from South Lincolnshire in the 1980s

ABSTRACT

This article examines a case of social conflict in an overlooked corner of England (Lincolnshire) in the late 1980s when self-described ‘local’ people opposed private housing developments and the migration of ‘southerners’, ‘townies’ and ‘commuters’ into their towns and villages. Protestors lamented change and disliked newcomers. This was a reaction to the arrival of affluent, ‘post-industrial’ workers on the back of a booming service sector. They personified a series of complex, interconnected socioeconomic and cultural changes which disrupted patterns of life rooted in disappearing productive industries and destabilised communities amidst factory closures, agricultural mechanisation, job losses and now suburbanisation. This affected meanings ascribed to places and introduced hierarchies and conflicts structured around Britain’s transition towards a service economy. Opposition was expressed through nostalgia, conservationism, inverse snobbery, anti-metropolitanism, attachment to ‘local’ identities, and concerns about declining independence, community and power. This paper argues that these protests demonstrate the emergence of new ideas about social relations, difference and distinction in post-industrial England. The findings also highlight feelings which would slowly seep into a new, reactionary politics foreshadowing the way that many towns and rural areas (including Lincolnshire) embraced a new political right in the first decades of the next millennium.     

Reconstructing Kirkstead Abbey,Lincolnshire: The Charters,Earthworks and Architecture of a Lost Cistercian House

Kirkstead abbey, in the Witham Valley of Lincolnshire, is a little-known but highly significant Cistercian house, both for its early history and architecture, and for the fact that it was treated unusually on being one of the monasteries seized by the Crown for the treason of its president after the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536. Substantially ruined and poorly preserved above ground, recent study has questioned its traditional interpretation. Its standing remains are sparse but extremely informative; its site at least partly marked by earthworks; and its home estate can be reconstructed from a late 13th-century cartulary and a remarkable series of loose charters.     

Pollen analytical investigations at Crosby Warren, Lincolnshire, in the Vicinity of the iron age and Romano-British settlement of Dragonby

Open-cast ironstone mining at Crosby Warren, near Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire exposed an extensive section through “cover sand” deposits. revealing buried podzol soils and peat layers. Stratigraphic studies, pollen analysis and radiocarbon dating have been carried out on three representative profiles. From these investigations it would appear that the “cover sands” in this area were stabilized under mixed oak woodland by c. 300 BC. After c. 100 BC woodland clearance and farming activities have been distinguished. Local alterations in land-use may be linked with cultural developments at the nearby Iron Age and Romano-British settlement of Dragonby. It is suggested that the impact of man upon the vegetation during Iron Age and Romano-British times probably facilitated podzolization and sand blowing.