The reception of Solomos: national poetry and the question of lyricism

Abstract

Through the reception of Solomos, this paper explores the tension between the lyric and the narrative, and the extent to which the roles of national and lyric poet are compatible. The critical reception of Solomos demonstrates that his recognition as a lyric poet was not on an equal footing with his presentation as a national one. It shows that his joint treatment as the national poet of Greece and its greatest lyric poet is problematic and not convincingly argued. It also argues that Solomos's reception can be summarized as the conflict between the historical and the aesthetic approaches.     

Ought one to marry? Manuel II Palaiologos' point of view

Abstract

Manuel II Palaiologos wrote his text on marriage and its ethical aspects between 1394 and 1397. At that time he was newly married and his wife had already given birth to their firstborn, John VIII. The text is presented in the form of a dialogue between the emperor Manuel and his mother, the dowager empress Helena Kantakouzene, wife of John V Palaiologos. An unusual case in dynastic policy, Manuel II was a bachelor until his forties. Fortunate circumstances caused him to inherit the throne after the death of his elder brother, Andronikos IV, in 1385, but he himself was not yet married and thus had no legitimate successor. His nephew, John VII, was his long-standing rival. The intention of the author of the dialogue was, without doubt, to show how important inheritance was for the imperial family. The text of the dialogue was subsequently corrected by the emperor himself; the revised version is dated to between 1417 and 1425. This article argues that the text was revised in order to encourage Manuel's own son, John, to marry and have successors.     

On Becoming Pope in Late Antiquity

To an extent unusual among holders of papal office in late antiquity, we know something of the family of Gregory the Great (590–604). His father, Gordianus, was a wealthy Roman who had married a lady named Silvia, who herself had a sister named Pateria, while he had another three aunts, Aemiliana, Gordiana, and Tarsilla, the sisters of his father.¹ He also seems to have had one, and possibly a second brother.² We know from his writings that his three aunts on his father's side adopted a religious life in common, but they attained very different levels, for Gregory reports that, whereas Gordiana disgraced herself by marrying a farmer on her estates, Tarsilla reached the highest level of holiness. He describes his great‐great‐grandfather Felix, a bishop of the Roman church, appearing to her in a vision in which he showed her a mansion of great brightness and told her to come, for he would receive her there; soon afterwards, she died of fever.³ While such details may appear sparse, they provide a basis on which we can make some general statements on the kinds of people who became pope in the period from the late fifth to the early seventh centuries; a table of these popes is appended to this paper. We shall suggest that there was a set of criteria which were met by new popes time and time again, and that these remained surprisingly constant across the period.     

Elizabeth Elstob (1674–1752): England's First Professional Woman Historian?

Elizabeth Elstob was a scholar of Anglo‐Saxon, who published two important books and was admired by the leaders of the new movement for Anglo‐Saxon studies in the early eighteenth century. She was able to be part of this community because her brother William encouraged and enabled it. His death in 1715 was a catastrophe, marking the end of her productive life as an intellectual and plunging her into poverty. She disappeared for almost twenty years, but was discovered and rescued by the first generation of bluestockings. A project she had begun – a history of intellectual women – was taken up and completed by George Ballard. His Memoirs of British Ladies(1752) included Elstob's memories about Mary Astell, and is, among other things, the single most important source of information about this pioneer feminist.     

The Sinclairs of Pigeon Bay and the Romantic 'Prehistory' of the Robinsons of Ni'ihau

Francis and Elizabeth Sinclair and their six children migrated from Scotland to New Zealand in 1840. Francis died there in 1846 and in 1863 Elizabeth resettled her, by then expanded, family in Hawai'i. There they bought the island of Ni'ihau and prospered as ranchers and planters, especially after the 1880s under the family name of Robinson. The early history of the family, up to the 1860s, has been often told, but never completely and often inaccurately, and is contained in two distinct historiographic traditions. This essay attempts to set the record straight by providing an extensive body of detailed, accurate information about the Sinclairs, and to discuss these two traditions. The older and more reliable New Zealand one presents the Sinclairs as hard-working pioneer settlers. The Hawai'ian tradition, in contrast, deriving from an oral record passed on by Francis and Elizabeth's daughter Anne, was dominated by elements of 'family romance'. It presented Francis as an heroic naval captain in the Napoleonic campaigns, making him a mythical ancestor befitting a family that had risen in the world. A more matter-of-fact treatment, though, has prevailed since 1988.     

Travel,migration, exile: Garibaldi's global fame

In this article, it is argued that Garibaldi's global fame owes much to his own experiences as a migrant and exile in the Americas. Overseas, Garibaldi not only acquired several practical and political skills, he also built up an important network of friends and supporters and became a hybrid figure able to adapt his image to diverse political settings. At the same time, Garibaldi relied on the trope of exile, developed by people like Ugo Foscolo, to define his opposition to, first, Italy's Restoration governments and, after Italian unification, the new moderate liberal regime. The article also looks at Garibaldi's life on Caprera and it is further argued that here Garibaldi combined elements of his previous experiences to fashion a role for himself as a ‘foreigner in Italy’. Garibaldi was a symbol of many worlds as well as a hero of two and it is precisely this hybrid nature of his appeal that can explain his global popularity.     

Dionysios Solomos: The Tree of Poetry

Abstract

Dionysios Solomos is a poet of contradictions. The fact is not often admitted either by his supporters or his occasional detractors. But there is a puzzling ambiguity about the poet which is only exacerbated by the labels that have been tied round his neck. Solomos, we are told, is one of the European Romantics, he is the father of modern Greek poetry, an epic poet manqué.     

Darwin Wept: Science and the Sentimental Subject

Could a man of science be sentimental in an age of objectivity, when emotions were largely purged from the field of Victorian science, and feelings themselves defined as animal instincts and reflex mechanisms? This essay addresses the question through Darwin's work on the expression of emotions, and the relationship between his work and his own emotional experience, with particular attention to grief and tears. An old woman in a railway carriage is suddenly overcome with a painful recollection, perhaps that of a long lost child – her mouth becomes ever so slightly contracted, her countenance falls, her eyes suffuse with tears … . An opthalmic surgeon perseveres with his treatise on the physiology of weeping while mourning the loss of his daughter … . With difficulty, a mother prolongs her infant son's screaming in order to record the shape of his mouth for a family friend and famous naturalist … . Her observations later appear in a work on emotional expression (Darwin's), together with photographs of sobbing children, and faces of a psychiatric patient charged with electrodes. Such subject matter, presented in correspondence, private journals, and print, suggest that science and sentimentality could form a more reciprocal pair, where observation was conducted in a sentimental setting, the feelings of observers regulated but not withheld, processed by an experimental regime, and then reinserted in the domain of print, reconfiguring the sentimental for Victorian readers.     

The Levite's Concubine: New Light on a Dark Story

Previous commentators accept that an adulterous wife dared return to her father's house and a benign husband sought to retrieve her, or they stipulate a unique meaning for the phrase . By understanding in a sense attested elsewhere in the Bible, this essay both resolves the crux of implausibility and obviates the need for singular translation. A close literary reading also presents a new interpretation of the entire chapter, demonstrating that the theme of Judges 19 is neither hospitality nor the abasement of women but Israel's Sodom-like abnegation of commitment and compassion down to that last stronghold of security—the family unit. Contrary to other feminist readings, this feminist interpretation reveals the biblical author's empathy toward the concubine, his contempt for the guilty, and his imposition of punishment on the wrongdoers.     

The Life and Career of Sir William Plumpton from 1404 to 1480

Abstract

Plumpton, an ardent Lancastrian, received protection and patronage from the Percies and was loyal to them throughout his life. He enjoyed exceptional local power from 1438 to 1460 as steward of the Honour of Knaresborough. He served as a JP, an MP, sheriff, and steward of Northumberland's Spofforth and other estates in Yorkshire, as well as overseeing his own lands in four counties. Detailed study of the Knaresborough court rolls and Duchy of Lancaster records led to a re-examination of the dating and interpretation of his officeholding and career, particularly in the 1460s and 1470s. He did not regain the stewardship in 1460s, as was believed, but was re-instated in 1471; he was replaced within a few years, probably because of corruption. Principal officeholders at Knaresborough, 1438–1500, are listed, and further unpublished material includes cases which the litigious Plumpton initiated in King's Bench from 1461. His attitudes, often cheating and ruthless, to friends and family, are examined, and his career compared with those of other members of the gentry; Plumpton's status is examined, this being aided by the findings from a rare unpublished fifteenth-century subsidy roll.     

Georg Friedrich Handel's strokes*

Abstract

Although there is no definite proof, it seems most likely that Georg Friedrich Handel suffered from cere‐brovascular disease, which caused two or three minor strokes and weakness of his eyesight in his last years. His etiologically important risk factors and the symptoms of Handel's strokes are presented and evaluated by primary sources; various diagnoses are discussed. In Handel's musical work, no direct impact from his illness can be found, but there are some indirect outflows of Handel's pathography on his compositions, especially the Messiah.     

Ignazio Silone and the Fascist political police

Secondino Tranquilli (alias Ignazio Silone) was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in January 1921. Esteemed by Moscow and the Comintern, Silone was given increasingly important functions in the clandestine PCI organization in the 1920s and was appointed to its Political Office. His political career, which ended with his expulsion from the party in summer 1931, was frequently recounted by Silone himself who, as a famous writer, felt obliged to come to terms with his political past. Recent studies by Mauro Canali and Dario Biocca of Silone's membership of the PCI have shown a rather different truth. The documents they have published show that ever since he was in the young socialist movement Silone was collaborating first with the Italian police and then with the Fascist police. Throughout, he was corresponding with a high-ranking official in the Italian police, Guido Bellone. Their relationship entered into a crisis that ended Silone's collaboration when in April 1928, following the explosion of a bomb in Milan that caused some twenty deaths, his brother Romolo Tranquilli was arrested and sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment. This clearly weighed on Silone's conscience and was probably the original cause of his eventual abondonment of politics and his own 'double' role, to become awriter instead. Thispainful journey involved frequent treatment in specialist clinics where Silone received intensive psychoanalytical treatment.     

Archaeology and Politics in the Holy Land: The Life and Career of P. L. O. Guy

Abstract

Philip Langstaffe Ord Guy's (1885–1952) career in archaeology began as Woolley's assistant at Carchemish and as Chief Inspector for the Department of Antiquities of Palestine during the 1920s. He is best known as director of the Megiddo Expedition (1927–1934), where he employed innovative techniques in balloon photography, and provided a highly influential identification of the pillared buildings found there as stables. He dated these buildings to the Solomonic era, sowing the seeds of a long-running debate over the role of the Bible in archaeological interpretation. Guy was later appointed director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (1935–1939), initiating the short-lived Archaeological Survey of Palestine. After World War II and Israel's War of Independence, Guy became a senior figure within the fledgling Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums as Director of Excavations and Surveys. Active involvement in Zionist politics through his marriage into the Ben-Yehuda family was a controversial factor that impacted on his career within 1920s and 1930s Palestine. Recent archival research allows an assessment of Guy's double life as archaeologist and political activist and the degree to which these areas intersected. His name can be added to the diverse spectrum of archaeologists working in the Holy Land during this formative but turbulent colonial and post-colonial era.     

Orderic Vitalis and Rober of Bellême

The Norman monastic chronicler Orderic Vitalis's treatment of Robert of Bellême, the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman magnate and overmighty subject of the English kings, William II and Henry I, is discussed and compared with evidence from other sources. A contrast is drawn between Orderic's eagerness to portray Robert as a villain and his apparent acceptance of the misdemeanors of Henry I, who is presented favourably because of the period of relative peace following Henry's deposition in 1106 of his brother, the Norman duke, Robert Curthose. Orderic downplays the work of Henry's predecessors, Robert Curthose and William II, and in Robert of Bellême creates a counterweight to his picture of the just king Henry I. His negative assessment of all Robert's actions therefore needs to be adjusted and it is suggested that other modern interpretations based on his work may need similar re-examination and revision.     

The political significance of Christine de Pizan's third estate in the Livre du corps de policie

Although the general historical context of Christine de Pizan's Livre du corps de policie (LCP), the Orleanist-Burgundian feud occasioned by the periodic insanity of King Charles VI, has long been recognised, the precise argument that the author wages through her unique configuration of the third part of the body politic has not been explored. This essay reads the LCP as an intervention into the escalating struggle for power between Charles VI's brother, the duke of Orleans, and his cousin, the duke of Burgundy. Christine's purpose emerges most clearly in her peculiar arrangement of the third part of her body politic, le peuple, where two points bear particular consideration: her inclusion of the University and her division of the ‘merchants’ across two separate categories, a repartition which seems to refer to the contemporary distinction between the highly-placed merchants of Paris and the butchers. Christine seems to be arguing that if the University were to make common cause with the ruling burghers and well-placed merchants, they could force into submission their more restless brothers and sisters, the butchers and their thuggish followers, whom the duke of Burgundy would finally convince to rise up in 1413 in what has become known as the Cabochian Revolt.     

List of figures

Although the general historical context of Christine de Pizan's Livre du corps de policie (LCP), the Orleanist-Burgundian feud occasioned by the periodic insanity of King Charles VI, has long been recognised, the precise argument that the author wages through her unique configuration of the third part of the body politic has not been explored. This essay reads the LCP as an intervention into the escalating struggle for power between Charles VI's brother, the duke of Orleans, and his cousin, the duke of Burgundy. Christine's purpose emerges most clearly in her peculiar arrangement of the third part of her body politic, le peuple, where two points bear particular consideration: her inclusion of the University and her division of the ‘merchants’ across two separate categories, a repartition which seems to refer to the contemporary distinction between the highly-placed merchants of Paris and the butchers. Christine seems to be arguing that if the University were to make common cause with the ruling burghers and well-placed merchants, they could force into submission their more restless brothers and sisters, the butchers and their thuggish followers, whom the duke of Burgundy would finally convince to rise up in 1413 in what has become known as the Cabochian Revolt.     

Out of ‘Common Humanity’: Humanitarianism,Compassion and Efforts in Australia to Assist Jewish Refugees in the 1930s

In June 1935, Edith Roll, a thirteen-year-old from Vienna, wrote to her Australian pen-pal, Jean Doig, aged ten. This correspondence was tragically short-lived. Edith Roll’s family was swept up in the murder and destruction of Jews in Europe. The efforts of Jean’s parents – the respected country doctor, Keith Doig, and his wife, Louie – who attempted but failed to assist Edith and her family, her father, Jakob Roll, her mother Emilie and brother Fritz, are examined in this article. To disregard their efforts as tangential to the history of refugees because they were unsuccessful means we miss an opportunity to explore the historically situated notions of compassion and empathy that can be at the centre of these endeavours. Drawing on personal letters rather than the views of government officials, this article examines the Doig family efforts and what inspired them, arguing that these are a vital part of the complex story of refugee and migration history.     

The long goodbye: Hugo Grotius’ justification of Dutch expansion overseas, 1615–1645

This article examines Grotius’ lifelong support for Dutch expansion overseas. As noted in other publications of mine, Grotius cooperated closely with the directors of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the years 1604–1615. Right up to his arrest for high treason in August 1618, he contributed towards Dutch government discussions about the establishment of a West India Company (WIC). Three years of imprisonment at Loevestein Castle and, following his escape, long years of exile could not weaken his dedication to the cause. His relatives in Holland, in particular his brother Willem de Groot and his brother-in-law Nicolaas van Reigersberch, kept him up-to-date on the fortunes of the VOC and WIC. His expertise on maritime affairs was in high demand. For example, Cardinal Richelieu invited him in November 1626 to become actively involved in the establishment of a French East India Company. As itinerant ideologue of empire, Grotius sought to further his own career and those of his nearest family members, without damaging the interests of the United Provinces. Through Willem de Groot and Nicolaas van Reigersberch, he provided informal advice on Dutch imperial policy to the VOC directors and government officials in The Hague. He was rewarded with the appointment of his brother and his second son, Pieter de Groot, as VOC lawyers (ordinaris advocaten) in 1639 and 1644, respectively. They served as his proxies in diplomatic disputes involving the VOC, the States General and the Portuguese ambassador in autumn 1644, when Pieter and Willem de Groot wrote a defense of VOC claims to the cinnamon-producing areas of Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka), liberally citing De Jure Belli ac Pacis. Grotius’ vision of empire hardly changed in the course of 40 years. In his view, the Dutch had gone to the Indies as merchants, not conquerors, and should regulate themselves according to natural law and the law of nations. Thus he contributed to the creation of two political orders, one for Europe and one for the Indies. European diplomatic relations counted for little beyond the Line. VOC and WIC officials could act as judges and executioners in their own cause, without reference to indigenous rulers, other colonial powers, or even the political authorities back home.     

A PORTRAIT OF WALTER MORRISON (1836–1921) TREASURER OF THE PALESTINE EXPLORATION FUND FOR 54 YEARS,RADICAL REFORMER AND SECRET PHILANTHROPIST

Abstract

Walter Morrison (1836–1921) was the treasurer of the Palestine Exploration Fund for 54 years. He was also a major benefactor, funding expeditions, purchasing drawings for the collection, and giving the PEF their house in Hinde Street, Marylebone. This article draws on material from the Morrison archive to provide a fuller picture of Walter, millionaire, radical politician, generous philanthropist, scholar and landowner. His interest in the Bible Lands, Byzantine and the Near East was formed at Balliol where he was taught by the charismatic Benjamin Jowett; his passion for Yorkshire was formed after he inherited the estate of Malham in Yorkshire; his belief in co-operation, parliamentary reform, and religious toleration informed his contribution to the House of Commons and his choice of friends. His obituary in The Times summed him up perfectly, a “man of simple personal tastes [with] an acute sense of the responsibilities of wealth”.     

Cropsey on Plato and the Unity of Philosophy

Abstract

Cropsey's book, Plato's World, contains his longest and most sustained reflections on a set of Platonic dialogues, but it is not the first work he published on Plato or the last he intended to write. His last collection of essays, On Humanity's Intensive Introspection, shows that in his writings on Plato Cropsey was attempting to answer a broader question: What is philosophy?