“Horned cattle and pack horses”: zooarchaeological legacy collections from the unauthorized (and unscreened) Spanish Fort

ABSTRACT

In 1689, the governor of La Florida ordered the construction of a fort near the Muscogee (Creek) ancestral community of Apalachicola, supplying it with a caravan of “horned cattle and pack horses.” The fort, referred to as “Spanish Fort,” was abandoned a year later. Archaeological investigations of the fort were carried out in 1960 without sieving, and a large collection of faunal remains was minimally studied. Despite the limitations of the recovery methods, a recent analysis of these zooarchaeological legacy collections provides insight into the provisioning strategies of the Spanish military 150 years after initial colonialism began. Spanish Fort was better provisioned than its predecessors, such as Fort San Juan, but with a limited range of domesticated livestock—only cattle and horses. The presidio may have traded with the Apalachicola community in order to diversify their diet, but butchering marks indicate that the presidio’s soldiers processed their own meat at the fort. Having learned hard lessons from earlier colonial expeditions, Spanish military colonialists minimized the outpost’s vulnerability by not relying heavily on the local Native American population, while building a transactional relationship with Apalachicola to ensure the community’s cooperation. The zooarchaeological materials from Spanish Fort also indicate that the fort was intentionally destroyed by fire, providing a glimpse of Spanish adaptive strategies as the mission of securing the inland Southeast from rival colonialism abruptly ended.     

Onstage Rumor,Offstage Voices： The Politics of the Present in the Contemporary Opera of Li Yu

Much scholarly work on the literary culture of the early Qing dynasty has focused on notions of memory, trauma, and nostalgia. In contrast, this essay investigates the ＂contemporary operas＂ （shishi xiqu） of the seventeenth-century Suzhou playwright Li Yu to argue for the importance of the notion of＂the present day.＂ How is this notion of the present day given dramatic form in Li Yu＇s operas and what implications does this interest in the contemporary have for the broader cultural scene of the early Qing dynasty？ This paper will answer these questions by investigating one dramatic technique favored by Li Yu： the inclusion of snippets of rumor and ＂news＂ reports into the play. By including such contemporary media reports, Li Yu not only generates a constantly evolving sense of the present, he also projects this sense of immediacy beyond the fiction of the stage into the ＂reality＂ of the audience, creating a form of opera eminently suited for both reflecting and producing local Suzhou activism, as evidenced in Li Yu＇s most famous work, Qing zhong pu （Registers of the pure and loyal）, a work chronicling the popular Suzhou protests of the mid-1620s and Wanli yuan （Reunion over ten thousand miles）, which stages the dissolution and reintegration of family and empire right after the fall of the Ming.     

Spain and the Partition Treaties (1697–1700)

This study takes an analytical approach to the diplomatic strategy adopted by the Spanish monarchy in confronting the challenge it faced associated with the Partition Treaties that were signed by Louis XIV, William III and the United Provinces in 1698 and 1700. By consulting Spanish sources to complete the understanding of the diplomatic process, this study analyses the political action that Spain mobilized in its defence around 1700 and describes the evolution of Spain's foreign policy as the product of the mistrust that had developed between the main powers of Europe. This mistrust was politically answered by Madrid with Carlos II's last will and other planned measures to ensure the viability of the project that contained a turning point in the policy underlying the alliances of the monarchy. Although, like that of the other powers, Spain's manoeuvrability was restricted, this study concludes that Spain was able to create policy action plans and rationally implement them; moreover, the dynamics resulting from the negotiation and signing of the Partition Treaties led the monarchy to oppose them at all costs and naturally led to the choice of a French heir as its only solution.     

Writing travels: power, knowledge and ritual on the English East India Company's early voyages

Most discussions of the relationships between 'the East', 'the West' and writing have, following Edward Said, involved interpreting the representations of people and places within travel writing, novels and other literary forms. This paper argues that this restricted engagement with practices of reading and writing limits the ways in which the relationships between people involved in the global geographies constructed since the fifteenth century can be understood. Through presenting a detailed discussion of the role of royal letters within the voyages of the English East India Company in the early seventeenth century, it argues that an analysis of 'how writing travels' which concentrates on the production, carriage and use of texts as material objects can foreground the active and collective making of global geographies as a contested enterprise involving multiple agents in a variety of sites. This paper presents writing as a global cultural practice and traces its place in the making of an early modern trading network.     

The wealthier inhabitants of Croydon in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries

This article examines the wealthier inhabitants of Croydon in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, focusing on differences in wealth, ownership of property and social relationships. Using wills and subsidy lists, four broad categories of people were identified: gentlemen, yeomen, tradesmen and craftsmen and widows. There was no simple gradation of wealth between these groups; although gentlemen were generally among the richest subsidy payers, yeomen and tradesmen could also figure. In terms of social relationships and the ownership of property, there were differences. Gentlemen tended to marry within their own social group, appoint other gentlemen as overseers in their wills and were more likely to own land outside Croydon. The social relationships of yeomen and tradesmen/craftsmen were more focused on the town itself, as were their land purchases. Two groups of individuals can therefore be seen, not one homogenous entity as some scholars have argued.     

SAME/DIFFERENCE? TOWARD A SAPPHIC/NONBINARY SEXUALITY OF HISTORY

What is the next step when one has published a strong intervention in a field but later recognizes that one's angle of vision deserves new scrutiny? In this article, which began as a roundtable talk, I return to The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (2014) to interrogate its “same-sex” logic through a nonbinary/trans lens. My book argues that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century representations of the sapphic became a flash point for European cultures grappling with questions of power and governance, desire and duty, mobility and difference in an age of colonialism, racial capitalism, revolution, and reaction. In figuring the sapphic exclusively through notions of sameness, however, The Sexuality of History does not do justice to trans and nonbinary figures both historical and fictional. Is there a place among sapphic subjects for these figures, and, if so, with what implications? I argue here for a both/and approach that requires recoding certain figures as nonbinary while still insisting on their efficacy as signs of the sapphic. This recoding encourages a more nuanced exploration of the cultural work performed by sapphic representations and a more expansive conception of what I have called a sapphic episteme. Such revisionist thinking may be useful at a time of social and theoretical tensions at the intersections of “lesbian” and “trans.”     

Descartes and the pineal gland in animals: A frequent misinterpretation

Abstract

Rene Descartes presented a number of reasons for his choice of the pineal gland as a logical place for the soul to interact with the physical machinery of the body. It is often stated that one of his reasons was that be believed animals do not have pineal glands, whereas humans alone possess a soul and this small structure. This is a misinterpretation of Descartes. The philosopher knew that barnyard and other animals possess pineal glands, having seen this with his own eyes. His point was that the pineal is unique in humans only because of a special function — acting as the seat for the rational soul.     

多元化、多样化、拓展化与开放性——西方学术界“17世纪普遍危机”论争及其启示

20世纪中期起,西方学术界围绕着"17世纪普遍危机"问题进行了一场论争,促进了对近代早期欧洲史的理解.透过其研究历程,我们从中可得到诸多启示.     

Abstracts of Articles

STEPHEN M. LEWIS, ‘Vikings on the Ribble: Their Origin and Longphuirt’. Parts of north-west England were settled by groups of Scandinavians in the tenth century, certainly Cumbria and the Wirral. South-west and northern Lancashire also witnessed Scandinavian immigration. Some, but very likely not all, of these Scandinavians had come from Dublin after they were temporarily expelled by the Irish in 902. But where did these Irish Northmen establish their initial winter camps and their first ship-bases, what were called longphuirt (sing. longphort) in Ireland? There is little doubt that such bases existed before some of these Irish exiles stopped being a raiding force and started to settle down. Not one ship-base has ever been found in north-west England, unlike in Ireland or even in other parts of England. Based on an examination of geography and longphort site-types, this article proposes and evaluates the three most likely sites for such longphuirt along the Ribble estuary. The historical background and context for Scandinavian activity and settlement in south-west Lancashire is also discussed; as are related events in Ireland and Northumbria. The period covered is roughly 902 to 919.     

Grand vizieral authority revisited: Köprülüs’ legacy and Kara Mustafa Paşa

In response to the recently expanding ‘renewal of faith’ literature and religion-based approaches to the Ottoman seventeenth century, this article sources the many available Ottoman chronicles and European diplomatic reports to shed light on the accumulation of full executive power in the hands of Köprülü grand viziers, starting from 1656. I demonstrate that, by the time Kara Mustafa Pa?a assumed the grand vizierate in 1676, the achievements of Köprülü Mehmed Pa?a and, more remarkably, his son Faz?l Ahmed Pa?a, had elevated the post of the grand vizierate to a practically unrivalled status in the Ottoman decision-making process. Further, I illustrate that Kara Mustafa Pa?a had already established himself as a self-assured individual in Ottoman bureaucracy long before he became the grand vizier. In conclusion, the article directs readers to reconsider Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pa?a’s ambitious undertakings – especially the siege of Vienna – as a combined outcome of the decision-making patterns established by the first two Köprülüs, coupled with the self-assurance that Kara Mustafa Pa?a had attained long before his appointment as the sultan’s ‘absolute deputy’.