Norman Gash and the Making of Mr Secretary Peel

In May 1961, the firm of Longmans published the first volume of Norman Gash's monumental life of Sir Robert Peel. Mr Secretary Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel before 1830 was hailed at the time as a landmark and has proved surprisingly durable as an interpretation of Peel's early life and formation. This essay is concerned with locating Gash's work within its political, biographical, and historiographical context. It begins by considering the reaction of Peel family members to Gash's biography, before tracing the antecedents of his historical preoccupations and intellectual development in the years leading up to the publication of Mr Secretary Peel. It presents a wide range of new evidence relating to Gash's life and emergence as a political and parliamentary historian, drawing upon sources which have come to light in the decade since his death in May 2009.     

Columbanus in Europe: the evidence from the Epistulae

The continental career of Columbanus has long attracted the attention of scholars because of his achievement as a writer, monastic founder and reformer, and political actor. His Epistulae are one of the most important pieces of evidence in understanding his attitudes and purposes during his twenty‐year sojourn on the Continent, and they emphasize the importance of his ecclesiastical and secular relationships. However, the Epistulae have seldom been analysed independently and together, as their study has often been focused on single letters or specific aspects of the collection. This paper looks at the Epistulae in a more general way, to point out what they tell us about Columbanus's theological and ecclesiastical positions, and the connections he established on the Continent.     

L'europe sans illusions

In his doctoral dissertation—The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, finished in 1919 and published as a book in 1920—Walter Benjamin explores the epistemological and aesthetic foundations of the concept of criticism expounded by the early German Romantics Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. Many of the themes in the dissertation recur in his later work, which has led scholars to believe that much of Benjamin's thought is directly influenced by the Romantics. However, a detailed investigation of the origins and development of the dissertation reveals that the picture is much more complicated. Reading the dissertation alongside the biographical material now available, this article argues that the major themes which preoccupy Benjamin in The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, including his theories of language and knowledge as well as his messianic philosophy of history, in fact predate his study of the Romantics. As well as being a potential entry ticket to an academic career, the dissertation constitutes Benjamin's first sustained attempt to develop and consolidate his own epistemology and aesthetics in a more or less systematic way. He does so through a series of ‘judicious interpretations’ of the Romantics, whose work he reads selectively, anachronistically and creatively to provide a vehicle for his own thought.     

Henry ‘the Navigator’

Infante Dom Henrique of Portugal, better known as Henry the Navigator, has enjoyed much attention from historians and public alike. Past writers have elevated him to an icon of chivalry and Portuguese national spirit, or, because of his impact on the early overseas expansion, ascribed to him a Promethean role in the rise of modernity. The works of Sir Peter E. Russell, including his new biography Henry ‘the Navigator’: a life (New Haven, 2000), have made a great contribution to separating the historical Dom Henrique from his ‘culture hero’ counterpart, Henry the Navigator. They represent a key point of departure for new research, which will need to focus on placing Dom Henrique in the context of his times and his contemporaries. Thanks to the dramatic advances that have taken place over the last twenty years in the historiography of late medieval Portugal and of the early European overseas expansion, as well as in the prosopography of the Iberian nobility, it is now possible to aspire to an in-depth contextualization of Dom Henrique's life and career. It is likewise possible to exploit much more fully the existing primary sources, both published and unpublished. The foundation now exists for an histoire totale approach to Dom Henrique, an undertaking called for by Vitorino Magalhães Godinho in his comprehensive 1990 program of research on the Portuguese overseas expansion.     

‘The Epitheatrical Cartoonist’: Matthew Somerville Morgan and the World of Theatre,Art and Journalism in Victorian London

This article examines the vibrant cultural milieu inhabited by one of Victorian Britain's most famous cartoonists, Matthew Somerville Morgan. Morgan is well-known as the cartoonist who attacked Queen Victoria's withdrawal from public life (and her associations with John Brown), and the lifestyle of Albert, Prince of Wales, in the short-lived rival to Punch: the Tomahawk. Likewise, his post-1870 career in New York as cartoonist of the ‘Caricature War’ over the 1872 Presidential elections, and involvement with ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody have been well-studied. However, his involvement with the world of the 1860s Victorian stage – and the social circles in which he moved – have not been given close attention. This broader social, cultural, and economic context is essential to understanding Morgan's role as a cartoonist-critic of politics, class, gender and art in Victorian Britain. Special attention is given to the ways in which Morgan's work as a theatrical scene-painter informed his other pursuits, including his political cartoons for Fun, the Comic News and the Tomahawk. So central was the theatre to Morgan's life story that he may be appropriately described as an ‘epitheatrical’ figure. Indeed he is one of the most spectacular exemplars of the interconnected worlds of journalism, high art and theatre in Victorian London. The theatre provided him with the artistic and journalistic connections needed to raise himself above his lower-class origins; to move in ‘clubland’ and fashionable bohemian society; and to win an influential place in the key political and cultural debates of his age.     

A Single Thread of Meaning: Esperanza Ortega's Hilo solo

Scholarship on Marie de France's Lai de Lanval has long held Guinevere's accusation of homosexuality against Lanval to have been motivated by hurt feelings: it is made, in the words of one commentator, "in the fury of a woman scorned." This article suggests that subtler motives may have been apparent to the text's earliest audiences. By the twelfth century, sodomy was increasingly categorized by ecclesiastical legislation as a kind of treason. Accordingly, it is likely that Guinevere's charge is meant to counter Lanval's insinuation that, in attempting to seduce him, she has tried to lure him into an act of treason as well.     

TWO BIOGRAPHIES OF NAPOLEON

The central argument of this review essay is that the British and French traditions of biography, and specifically Napoleonic biography, are quite different. The two works under consideration are outstanding examples of the differences. Boswell's Life of Johnson is the cornerstone of modern British biography, and Andrew Roberts follows this example. Although Johnson was not a political or military figure but a man of letters, Roberts's biography of Napoleon adheres to the close focus on a single man, with only limited excursions beyond his hero's life and deeds. In addition, Roberts's work is essentially a military biography, and his considerable strengths lie here. The French, without a Boswell, have relegated biography to a lesser role, until recently. Patrice Gueniffey, in what will be a multi‐volume work—this first volume goes only to 1802—is more interested in Napoleon's place in the history of Europe, and especially Revolutionary France. Napoleon is often confined to the wings while Gueniffey sets the stage. Roberts's judgments and assessments, while shrewd and informed, are often more conventional than those of Gueniffey, who sees the Egyptian campaign as one of the important keys to understanding the young Bonaparte and his subsequent career. He is also deeply interested in fixing Bonaparte's place in the French Revolution. Because Gueniffey ends his first volume with the Consulate, a more detailed comparison of the two works is not possible.     

Botanical exchanges: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Duchess of Portland

In 1766 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in exile from France and Switzerland, came to England, where he made the acquaintance of Margaret Cavendish Harley Bentinck, Duchess of Portland. The two began to botanise together and to exchange letters about botany. These letters contain salient statements about Rousseau's views on natural theology, gardens, botanical texts and exotic botany. This exchange entailed not only discussions about plant identifications and other botanical matters, but most important, reciprocal gifts of books and specimens in the manner of gentlemanly scientific correspondence of the period. Rousseau volunteered his services as the Duchess's ‘herborist’ or plant collector, and collected specimens and seeds in her behalf; these were destined for her own extensive herbaria and other natural history collections. Rousseau, who elsewhere denied female talent for science, admired the Duchess's knowledge of natural history, acknowledging his own as inferior. Their correspondence ended when the Duchess sent him the Herbarium amboinense of Georg Rumpf (Rumphius), an important work of exotic botany. Rousseau considered exotic botany to be the antithesis of the domination-free nature from which he derived solace and inspiration.     

Thomas Traherne,Thomas Hobbes,and the Rhetoric of Realism

Abstract

Thomas Traherne has often been seen as a mystic detached from the turbulence of his period. Recent scholarship has attempted to place him more firmly in context. This article contributes to this trend in arguing that Traherne's late works, especially Commentaries of Heaven, were shaped by the pressure of responding to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. Though Traherne makes only one direct reference to Hobbes, his idiosyncrasies in thought, argument, and mode of expression are all fundamentally influenced by the need to counter Hobbes's account of ethics, metaphysics, and language. Traherne is particularly concerned to assert and display an ardent realism against Hobbes's nominalism. In doing so, he creates a complicated play of rhetorical figures, especially abusio or catachresis, as embodying theological commitments. This both places Traherne more clearly against the background of the intellectual history of the period in which he lived, and demonstrates his particularity as a writer.     

Between history and hagiography: Eadmer of Canterbury's vision of the Historia novorum in Anglia

Written between c.1093 and the end of the 1120s, Eadmer of Canterbury's Historia novorum in Anglia is one of the best-known sources for the study of Anglo-Norman political, ecclesiastical and cultural history. This article explores the identity of the text as it developed in Eadmer's own mind. While modern scholars have placed the Historia novorum within the development of English national historiography, Eadmer showed no desire for his work to be received in this way. Instead, Eadmer's Historia was profoundly influenced by his extensive experience in writing the lives and miracles of saints. The Historia novorum occupies a space between history and hagiography, which successfully redeployed Eadmer's experiences of writing the past through hagiography, in order to produce an innovative and unique example of the genre of medieval historiography.     

“A new science”: Yeats's A Vision and relativistic cosmology

In this essay I will place Yeats's enigmatic text A Vision in the context of contemporary science, challenging constructions of Yeats's career as committedly anti-scientific. As I will show, Yeats's philosophy is in fact merely anti-Newtonian and anti-positivist, as relativistic science was not incompatible with his occult interests. I will offer an alternative reading of this text, explaining key aspects of its construction in relation to the post-Einsteinian revolution in cosmology, which, I will argue, was ultimately creatively enabling for him.     

'This stalwart fellow of five lands and two seas': The Life of Fukushima Yasumasa

Abstract

Although known primarily for his lone horseback ride from Berlin to Vladivostok in 1892–93, Fukushima Yasumasa's career encompassed more than just this one remarkable ride. Born in 1852, Fukushima was caught up in the 1867 civil war, before beginning a military career that took him to almost all corners of the globe. In addition to his service during the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese and 1904–05 Russo-Japanese Wars, Fukushima played an important part in the development of Anglo-Japanese and Japanese-Mongolian relations in the early twentieth century, an aspect of his career that has been largely overlooked. This article re-examines Fukushima's career.     

These Familiar Things? Witchcraft,War Crimes and Prince Rupert “the Devil”

This review article provides an examination, viewed through the prism of Mark Stoyle's “The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog,” of the reputation of Prince Rupert of the Rhine during the English Civil War and Restoration. In particular, it focuses upon the injection of violence into civil society by the Prince and his troops; and the manner in which the experience of war re-activated fears and theories of witchcraft, bringing to prominence the figure of the familiar spirit. Through the comparison of recent biographical studies with the primary sources that illuminate and underpin Rupert's career, the Prince emerges as a more equivocal figure but also, arguably, as a far more capable statesman and military commander.     

Between the General and the Particular: Reminiscences of Plato's Timaeus in Piotr Rawicz's Le sang du ciel

Piotr Rawicz's novel Le sang du ciel depicts a Jewish protagonist, Boris, who manages to escape the Nazi genocide and, as a result, doubts his own legitimacy to bear witness to the other Jews' fate during that period. His difficult relationships with the Jewish community find expression in an intertextual construction, founded on the ontocosmology developed in Plato's Timaeus. Boris uses—and sometimes perverts—Plato's world vision both to measure his own inauthenticity and to define new ways of creating a state of "fusion" with the "beings" surrounding him. Another technique to overcome Boris's inability to testify is the use of a frame narrative, which, moreover, sheds new light on the protagonist's identity as a witness.     

Eavesdropper on the Past: John W. Burrow (1935–2009), Intellectual History and Its Future

Summary

Focused on the much-debated historiographical and academic status of intellectual history, this article addresses for the first time and in detail the methodological views of the British historian John Wyon Burrow (1935–2009). Making use both of his published works and of unpublished material left to the University of Sussex Library (including lectures, letters, academic projects and biographical sketches), its goal is to provide a thorough account of an original and eclectic intellectual historian and, at the same time, cast new light on the role of the discipline in the scholarly context of the last few decades in Europe and the US. More specifically, the following pages will illustrate Burrow's work and career, with particular attention being paid to his insistence on narrative, imagination, irony and style; present his writings as an original instance of the anti-methodological practice of intellectual history; and study his opinions of what it means to carry out the métier d'historien. Finally, by examining Burrow's idea of the intellectual historian as a creative ‘eavesdropper’ on the ‘conversations of the past’ and as a ‘translator’ of past dialogues, this article will both pose some central questions and advance some proposals concerning the future of intellectual history.     

Robert Grosseteste and the simple benefice: a novel solution to the complexities of lay presentation

That pastoral care was the main focus of Robert Grosseteste's theological work and correspondence is well established: Grosseteste is often characterised as the vehement, uncompromising promoter of the pastoral ideal in the face of strong opposition, ecclesiastical and lay. Less close attention has been paid to whether the records of his diocesan administration demonstrate the practical outworking of his pastoral theories. Although narrow in compass, his administrative rolls for the English diocese of Lincoln are not entirely sterile. They show Grosseteste experimenting with a novel form of parish organisation, using grants of simple benefices (simplex beneficium) to ensure appropriate provision for a parochial priestly function whilst offering a constructive compromise to the laity who had the right to nominate clergy for churches (the patrons) when their candidates were deemed inadmissible. The practical working out of these proposals reveals that they had both educational benefits, particularly for potential clergy, and allowed Grosseteste to focus his educational and pastoral efforts directly within the parishes.