Neo-Latin literature in nineteenth-century Europe: an overview

To date, neo-Latin studies have been hardly concerned with the nineteenth century, let alone the twentieth century. It would seem that literature written in Latin (called ‘neo-Latin literature’ from the Renaissance onwards) had completely lost its significance. However, recent research has shown that Latin verses were still quantitatively and qualitatively important, even if they no longer enjoyed the same popularity as in previous centuries. This article is a synthesis of what we know about neo-Latin literature in nineteenth-century Europe. The first section discusses the question of its quantitative and qualitative significance. Section 2 deals with the specific features of the neo-Latin literature in the nineteenth century. Section 3 presents the situation in Germany in order to give a more precise idea of the phenomenon. The aim of this article is to provide an impetus for further investigation in the field and to cast light on a facet of the nineteenth century that has long been forgotten.     

Europe in the nineteenth-century American mind: The literary perspectives

This article evaluates Karl Popper's contribution to analytic philosophy, and outlines some of the contradictions in his work which make it difficult to locate in any particular tradition. In particular, the article investigates Popper's own claims to be a member of the rationalist tradition. Although Popper described himself as a member of this tradition, his definition of it diverged quite radically from that offered by other supporters of rationalism, like, for example, Mach, Carnap, and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. The reason for this was that Popper believed the rationalist tradition, if it were to remain coherent and relevant, needed to overcome the dilemma posed by Hume's problem of induction. Popper believed that this problem rendered conventional understandings of rationalism, science, and inductive reasoning incoherent. This article suggests that Popper's principal contribution to modern philosophy was to reconfigure the rationalist tradition in such a way as to circumvent the problem of induction while preserving the rationalist commitment to reason, rational debate, and objective knowledge. Popper's reconfiguration of the epistemological bases of the rationalist tradition challenged dominant understandings of rationalist and analytic philosophy, and may be appropriately understood as part of a wider move among philosophers like Quine and Putnam to challenge conventional understandings of analytic philosophy, and of what philosophy itself could and could not achieve. It also informed a vision of social and political life (and of the social and political sciences) as rooted in principles of freedom, equality, and rational debate, but which cannot be fit within the traditional ideological landscape.     

The production of borders in nineteenth-century Europe: between institutional boundaries and transnational practices of space

The article proposes a synthesis of the major historical works on nineteenth-century European borders. Founded on an original methodological approach, the article advances a rethinking of the concept of ‘territoriality’ traditionally attributed to the rise of modern nation-states. The innovative method adopted is based on combining the focus on spatiality in recent historiography – especially in global history – with the categories and the ethnographic method developed within the border-studies field. The analysis is conducted in two directions. The first focuses on ‘borders’, specifically on some border-creation processes developing throughout the European continent. The second is more centred on European ‘borderlands’, conceived as trans-state and trans-national regions, mainly linked to the space's well-established social practices, familial and economic networks and religious experience. On the one hand, the article highlights how nineteenth-century borders were not simply the product of an institutional decision performed by emerging nation-states, but also the result of an interactive dialectic between state institutions and social actors inhabiting the borderlands. On the other, it shows how the borderlands as cross-border territorial entities continued to exist alongside the new territorial state limits, helping shape a more complex European spatiality than traditionally stated.     

Iron Age temperate Europe: Some current research issues

The Iron Age designates the 800 years preceding the Roman conquest of Europe. This period represents the latest social and cultural development of indigenous European societies before the annexation of much of temperate Europe into the Roman Empire and the final phase of cultural change before the beginning of local traditions of written history north of the Alps. Our understanding of the Iron Age has changed substantially over the past 30 years, as a result both of recent discoveries and of new perspectives. Much recent research has focused on specific themes such as changing social structure and patterns of ritual behavior. I attempt here to provide an overview of current understanding and debate on some of these topics in Iron Age archaeology. The subject and its literature are vast, and my treatment is selective. The references will guide the interested reader to the wider literature.     

Azaria's antecedents: stereotyping infanticide in late nineteenth-century Australia

Recent historical studies have reconsidered the plight of white women accused of infanticide in Australia, casting new light especially on the motives of single women and mothers of large families. Still unredeemed and largely unanalysed, however, is the baby-farmer. This article explores stereotypes of this bête noire of the nineteenth-century city, addressing concurrent medicalisation of the maternal body, child-birth, infant feeding and foster care. In so doing it also analyses representations of the midwife and the wet-nurse, along with their essentialised opposite, the good mother, who abided by the newly defined "rights of the child".     

Single Working-class Women and the City in Java and Vietnam

Through investigation into the lives of single migrant women who work as department store salesgirls in Surabaya and Ho Chi Minh City, this paper suggests that while commonalities exist with regard to their controlled use of beauty in the workplace, their lack of time and disposable income, and the temporary nature of their right to live in their respective cities as migrants, there are significant differences between them. These differences run contrary to conventional stereotypes of the “outspoken” Javanese woman and the “servile” Vietnamese woman, which in turn are based on stereotypes of the bilateral Southeast Asian kinship tradition and the patrilineal East Asian kinship tradition respectively. Taking into account the forces for and against conservative gender relations in both societies, this paper suggests that it is the Vietnamese working-class woman who exercises more power over how she lives in the city.     

Taming sovereignty: constituent power in nineteenth-century French political thought

Political theorists recently focused their attention on the history of the idea of constituent power. This, they claim, shows that the notion of pouvoir constituant expressed the radical and absolute power of the sovereign people. In other words, constituent power pointed at the democratic and irresistible core of popular sovereignty. In this paper, I argue that the analysis of nineteenth-century French political thought offers a different account of constituent power’s history. Relying upon archival resources, I show that in the aftermath of the French Revolution politicians and legal scholars used constituent power to tame the very idea of sovereignty and the powers from it derived. First, during the Restoration constituent power was used to pose a limit to the power of the monarch. Second, throughout the July Monarchy scholars resorted to constituent power to oppose the Parliament's claim to be the sovereign power and the only legitimate author of the constitution. Moreover, they also used it to claim that claim that, even if the people was sovereign, its power was restricted to authorizing the constitution. Third, during the Second Republic, jurists and politicians addressed the people’s sovereign power in terms of constituent and constituted power. While the first was meant to disappear after the constitution’s approval, the second was a second-order power limited by the hierarchy of norms and the rigidity of the constitution.