Byzantine-Muslim conspiracies against the crusades: history and myth

This article examines Latin allegations of Byzantine-Muslim conspiracies against the crusades in the course of the twelfth century, the charges surviving in various chronicles, reports and letters. While their sensational elements have been noted, the Latin accounts portraying Byzantine rulers as allies of the ‘infidels’ against the crusades and the crusader states have generally been taken more or less at face value by modern scholars. A closer examination discloses how these allegations of Byzantine-Muslim collusion were based on rumour, which mainly evolved and flourished among the rank and file of the crusader armies. They eventually found their way into the chronicles, having become more outlandish in transmission. The functions they fulfilled ranged from creating a scapegoat for the failures of the Crusade of 1101 and Second Crusade, to interpretation and explanation, or rather misinterpretation, in the case of the Third Crusade. Despite the fact that, in general, these theories do not seem to have appealed to Latin emperors, kings, and nobles, paradoxically it was a noble of the Fourth Crusade, Baldwin IX of Flanders, together with his clerical advisers, who finally exploited them in May and June 1204 in order to justify the Latin conquest of Christian Constantinople.     

The history of marriage and the myth of Friedelehe

The idea that Friedelehe and Muntehe constituted two distinct forms of Germanic marriage was based upon an attempt to reconstruct common Germanic culture with scraps of evidence from widely different times and places. A thorough re-examination of the sources for the institutions that were posited, based on this now outmoded methodology, reveals no evidence that transfer of Munt, or guardianship, distinguished between two different types of marriage, except perhaps in Lombard Italy, under the influence of Roman law. The idea that marriage with a dos is a different institution from marriage without one is not attested until the Carolingian period.     

Historiography and historians of neuroscience: towards diversity in the ISHN

This article introduces and critiques the historiographical tradition of the history of the neurosciences as it has been established in the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (ISHN). The founding members of the ISHN were practitioner-historians, practitioners of the neurosciences with an interest in the great moments, ideas and controversies in the history of their field. The historiographical precedent set by these clinician-historians emphasized those aspects of history most interesting to them. Academic historians bring a different approach to the history of neurosciences, particularly an interest in studying the intellectual and cultural contexts of both the inherited and the forgotten ideas about the nervous system. Their approach to history has not been well presented in the ISHN, in part because the current historiographical tradition does not address their interests. This article highlights the methodological and epistemological differences between academic and practitioner-historians and discusses the difficulties that other historical societies have faced in trying to bring them together. The article then suggests ideas for symposia that might facilitate an interdisciplinary dialogue and a revised historiographical tradition that speaks to the needs of both academic and historians and practitioner historians.     

William Rufus: myth and reality

The commonly accepted view of the reign of William II (1087–1100) is a political myth, primarily the work of Eadmer, who depicted the king as the villain against whom St Anselm strove to impose the revolutionary Gregorian reform programme in England. Henry I, moreover, denigrated his brother's regime as a cover for furthering William's harsh but constructive policies. Eadmer's writings were quarried by subsequent twelfth-century writers in the mainstream of the English monastic historical tradition, who added their own literary embellishments. Nineteenth-century historians uncritically accepted these accounts and Henry I's gloss on the reign. They then contributed moral judgements of their own, which passed without qualification into modern secondary works.This paper re-evaluates William II's political and governmental achievements, and his ecclesiastical policy. His character is considered in the light of recent work on twelfth-century intellectual and psychological attitudes, and the accounts of more favourable chroniclers. It is concluded that the king developed his father's strong policies in every direction with considerable success, making possible the more publicized but essentially imitative work of Henry I. William's expansion and consolidation of national frontiers, his legal and financial developments, and his maintenance of royal control over the Church are revealed under the distortions of ecclesiastical and Henrician historiography.     

Roland Barthes: Phenomenon and myth

Brown, A., Roland Barthes: The Figures of Writing (Oxford, Clarendon, 1992), 303pp., £35.00. ISBN 0 198 15171 3

Moriarty, M. Roland Barthes (Cambridge, Polity, 1991), 255pp., £10.95. ISBN 0 745 60456 0     

Fear,feminist geopolitics and the hot and banal

In this paper we bring together Billig’s notion of banal nationalism and recent feminist geopolitical examinations of fear in order to analyze two cases studies of fear among U.S. college students and U.S. soldiers experiencing sexual violence. Putting banal nationalism and feminist geopolitics into conversation, we argue, reveals both their compatibilities and important pathways for political geography and critical geopolitics to build on Billig’s work. In this regard, the paper makes three key contributions. First, we demonstrate how the insights and imperatives of banal nationalism intertwine in critical ways with the work of feminist geographers, as the banal is often rendered feminine and apolitical and as gender itself is often treated as banal despite its role in the reproduction of the nation. Second, we argue that the multi-scalar analytic of feminist geopolitics offers a valuable intervention into banal nationalism, as relational feminist approaches to binaries like intimate/global provide a useful model to account for hot and banal nationalism as a single, intertwining complex. Finally, through an analysis of fear in relation to sexual violence, the paper illustrates both the inseparability of banal and hot nationalism and how they are deeply gendered, as certain forms of deeply hot violence and fear are depoliticized through their banalization (e.g. sexual assault on college campuses), and as violence that is recognized as hot (e.g. war) is maintained through processes that are deemed banal (e.g. gender).     

American Indian ethnohistory: Recent contributions by three historians

Finger, John R. Eastern Band of Cherokees 1819–1900. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984. xiv + 253 pp. including maps, photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 cloth, $12.95 paper.

Miller, Christopher L. Prophetic Worlds: Indians and Whites on the Columbia Plateau. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985. x + 174 pp. including maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.00 cloth.

Morrison, Kenneth M. The Embattled Northeast: The Elusive Ideal of Alliance in Abenaki‐Euramerican Relations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. x + 256 pp. including maps, notes, and index. $24.95 cloth.     

Tradition,myth and the dilemma of Australian foreign policy

For a middle power with a relatively short history of framing a self determined foreign policy, Australia has actively sought to engage with both its immediate region and the wider world. Elite agreement on this external orientation, however, has by no means entailed consensus on what this orientation might involve in terms of policy. Consequently, two, often conflicting, traditions and their associated myths have informed Australian foreign policy-making. The most enduring tradition shaping foreign policy views Australia as a somewhat isolated bastion of Western civilisation. In this mode Australia's myth is pragmatic, but uncertain and sees Asia as both an opportunity and a potential threat which requires the support and counsel of culturally similar external powers engaged in the region to ensure stability. Against this, an alternative and historically later tradition crafted a foreign policy that advanced Australian independence through engagement with a seemingly monolithic and increasingly prosperous Asia. This paper explores the evolution and limitations of these foreign policy traditions and the myths that sustain them. It further considers what features of these traditions continue to have resonance in a region that has become more fluid and heterogeneous than it was during the Cold War and which requires a foreign policy flexibility that can address this complex and strategically uncertain environment.