The three last years of Manuel II Palaeologus' reign between two stroke attacks: aphasia or not?

The authors attempt to solve the enigma about the possible aphasia of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus (1391-1425) in the 3-year period between his first and his second and fatal stroke. The texts of historians and chroniclers reveal that Manuel remained semi-paralyzed at bed and his motor disability alienated him from the state affairs and condemned him to isolation from all embassies and contact with others, except his family. Only the funeral oration of the Bishop Bessarion raises the suspicion of a speechless emperor. All testimonies referring to this infirmity are examined.     

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.     

The many deaths of Manuel: Illness and fate in the Andes

In a village of the Equatorial Andes, a woman tells of the sudden death of her epileptic husband in disturbing circumstances. The study of the Manuel case through his wife's account shows the essential role of the aetiology of a morbid phenomenon in understanding its fatal outcome, as well as the subordination of nosology — shared by all the members of the collectivity — to a personal interpretation by the victim — or his spokesman. Finally, when the victim can no longer describe his illness following the loss of the vernacular language — in this case Quechua — the language of the body can fill this silence.     

From scholar to bureaucrat: the political choice of the historical geographer Zhang Qiyun

In the mid-1920s, under the guidance of his teacher, Zhu Kezhen, Zhang Qiyun established himself as a scholar by compiling middle school geography textbooks. He reached the peak of his early academic career when he joined the National Defense Planning Commission (Guofang sheji weiyuanhui) in 1932. His subsequent setbacks offered him a different kind of experience. During his tenure at Zhejiang University (1936–1949), he strived to combine research and administrative work. His friendship with Chen Bulei, Chen Xunci, and others, provided him with the connections to move from academia into politics. More important, beginning in the 1940s, Zhang contributed his scholarship in historical geography and geopolitics to the ruling regime and attracted Chiang Kai-shek’s attention. In 1948, some of the students at Zhejiang University started a movement to oust Zhang, which truly alienated him. During the power transition in 1949, Zhang made a political choice entirely different from the one made by his longtime mentor Zhu Kezhen, epitomizing the political divergence among scholars in the last years of the 1940s.     

Luis Simarro Lacabra [1851–1921]: From Golgi to Cajal Through Simarro,via Ranvier

Knowledge of cerebral structure and function in its modern form can be traced to the neurone doctrine based largely on the work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal [1852–1934] and his lifelong exploitation of the Golgi method. Cajal openly acknowledged his debt to the neuropsychiatrist Luis Simarro Lacabra [1851–1921] who introduced him to the method in 1887, and recalled that the sight of the silver-impregnated nerve cells was the turning point which led him to abandon general anatomy and concentrate on neurohistology. Simarro, who dissipated his free time in trying to improve not only the scientific but also the political world around him, was able to produce exciting Golgi preparations of the cerebral cortex after he returned from voluntary exile in Paris from 1880 to 1885. Certainly it was there that he learned the methods of experimental histology from Louis-Antoine Ranvier [1835–1922] whose laboratory exercises, in the guise of lectures, he attended assiduously.     

Duke Richard of York's intentions in I450 and the origins of the wars of the roses

The return of Richard, duke of York, from Ireland in 1450 represents his first overt attempt to remedy certain grievances. His criticism of the Lancastrian régime eventually brought him leadership in the Wars of the Roses. The grivances of 1450 are contained in two bills addressed to Henry VI. At first, the duke harboured personal grievances — fear of attainder and having his claim to the throne bypassed, resentment at his counsel being ignored and his debts unpaid — which were exaguerated by unsertainty and the king's readiness to believe the worst. Richards apreciation of the widespread hostility towards the government and the disarray of the king's Household after Suffolk's murder enabled him to convert grievances into public criticisms in his second bill. He encouraged investigations into official oppression in southeastern England, and his supporters may have stimulated risings there to demonstrate support for him. Compared with Henry's nervous reaction to York's first bill, he firmly checkmated the pretensions of the second, and Yorks achievement in 1450 was limited. But he had taken a first step towards appealing for support by converting personal grievances into a general bid for sympathy. Whether he aid so for personal or public motives — or both — remains an open question.     

At the ogre's house

The female helper identified in two recent articles in this journal is a figure in a stereotyped scene that exists in a number of different folktales. When the hero arrives at the ogre's house, this woman warns him that when the ogre returns, he will eat him. Then she protects the hero by hiding him. When the ogre comes in, he smells the human, but the woman (his wife, daughter, grandmother, or captive) prevents him from finding the visitor.     

邓小平企业管理实践与理念的历史考察

邓小平是我们党第一、二代中央领导集体中考察企业次数最多的领导人之一.其企业管理思想以他两个时期的工厂劳动实践为基础:法国勤工俭学使其在青年时期就接触到现代企业管理,江西新建县拖拉机厂劳动实践对其企业管理思想形成产生直接影响.邓小平重视企业调研,先后考察国内外企业200多次,改革开放前主要考察北方国有制企业,改革开放后主要考察南方多元制企业,在南方企业考察中提出了"三个面向"式、"一主多元"式、"市场经济"式企业管理新理念,对于当代中国企业的发展具有重要指导意义.     

杨端六与罗素——从罗素长沙讲学说起

五四时期英国哲学家罗素来华讲学,以其大哲学家的眼光,就中国问题发表看法,激起中国思想学术界颇大的反响。从英伦学成而归的杨端六,是罗素在上海、长沙讲学期间的一位重要译员。针对国人盲目追崇的学风,杨端六在报章上发表批评文章,主张应该理性地对待罗素及其他西方哲人的学说。他本人亦从罗素实用哲学中吸取精神养料,进行着社会政治实践。杨端六与罗素的思想交往,以往鲜有人讨论,但不失为这次中西文化交流中的一缕理性之光。     

Marc Bloch: Did he repudiate Annales history?

Since the summer of 1944 when Marc Bloch fell before a Nazi firing squad, no book dedicated to him and his historical writing has yet appeared. There is, however, an imposing corpus of publications in learned journals and collections of articles discussing his contributions to historical methodology and also his life, especially those acts of courage that led to his untimely death. The task here, then, is to probe into Bloch's writings and to ponder his life and what others have said about him in an attempt to ferret out his thoughts about the nature of history and historical methodology and to determine whether in the last few years of his life his view of history altered dramatically.     

Fédération et/ou confédération

A concern to pin ideological labels on Morris has obscured the continuing importance of romanticism and Protestantism for his socialist politics. Romanticism led him to seek self-realisation in an art based on naturalness and harmony, and Protestantism led him to do so in the everyday worlds of work and domestic life. From Ruskin, he took a sociology linking the quality of art to the extent of such self-realisation in daily life. Even after he turned to Marxism, he still defined his socialist vision in terms of good art produced and enjoyed within daily life. Moreover, his over-riding concern to promote a new spirit of art, not his dislike of Hyndman, led him to a purist politics, that is, to look with suspicion on almost all forms of political action.     

略议石涛的山水画艺术

继承传统而又张扬个性,深八生活而又高于生活,痴迷自然而又超越自然,终使石涛成为一代大师。     

Duke Richard of York's intentions in I450 and the origins of the wars of the roses

The return of Richard, duke of York, from Ireland in 1450 represents his first overt attempt to remedy certain grievances. His criticism of the Lancastrian régime eventually brought him leadership in the Wars of the Roses. The grivances of 1450 are contained in two bills addressed to Henry VI. At first, the duke harboured personal grievances — fear of attainder and having his claim to the throne bypassed, resentment at his counsel being ignored and his debts unpaid — which were exaguerated by unsertainty and the king's readiness to believe the worst. Richards apreciation of the widespread hostility towards the government and the disarray of the king's Household after Suffolk's murder enabled him to convert grievances into public criticisms in his second bill. He encouraged investigations into official oppression in southeastern England, and his supporters may have stimulated risings there to demonstrate support for him. Compared with Henry's nervous reaction to York's first bill, he firmly checkmated the pretensions of the second, and Yorks achievement in 1450 was limited. But he had taken a first step towards appealing for support by converting personal grievances into a general bid for sympathy. Whether he aid so for personal or public motives — or both — remains an open question.     

Tradition and the individual talent: remarks on the poetry of Michalis Ganas

Abstract

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. (T.S. Eliot)     

Adapting Catholicism to Confucianism: Matteo Ricci’s Tianzhu Shiyi

Tianzhu Shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven) is the single most important proselytizing work of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), the legendary founder of the early modern Jesuit China mission. Controversial since the early seventeenth century, it has been both praised and condemned for Ricci’s claim of a monotheistic affinity between Catholicism and Confucianism. Ricci’s gesture of friendship to Confucianism won him many Chinese friends and posthumously made him famous or notorious in Europe, but as this essay contends, it was never more than a tactical cover for him during his lifetime. Since the real purpose of his cultural adaptation was his unobtrusive engagement with the ancient Chinese philosophical idea of tianren heyi (humanity’s unity with heaven), what is ultimately so instructive about Tianzhu Shiyi is the light cast on Ricci’s intricate relationship with his Chinese friends and on the ironic twists and turns of his complex legacy.     

Albania during WWII: Mustafa Merlika Kruja’s Fascist Collaboration

This essay discusses the fascist collaboration of Mustafa Merlika Kruja, Albania’s prime minister from 1941 to 1943. In textbooks published before 1990, Kruja was called the Albanian Quisling and his very name was associated with treason. Yet even in publications after the 1990s Kruja was seen as Albania’s black sheep and only few sources viewed him objectively. Aiming to unite Albania with Kosovo, he stressed the need to fight communism, which for him was synonymous with antinationalism and, which he believed, would bring Albania to ruin. Thus Kruja used anticommunism and nationalism as his main political weapon to gain support for his collaboration with fascist Italy and with Albanian nationalists.     

从俄藏档案看周达文生平事迹研究中的几个问题

周达文是贵州镇远出生的中共早期重要人物。先后在莫斯科东方大学、中山大学、列宁学院学习和工作,受到中共中央和共产国际的器重,《斯大林全集》中的《给丘贡诺夫的信》就是写给他的。由于他的后半生是在苏联度过,为研究他的生平事迹带来很大困难。俄罗斯新解密的档案材料,可以帮助我们考察清楚他的生卒年月、他在北京的革命活动、在留苏中共党员中的作用和地位、他坚持反对王明的宗派主义和左倾冒险主义并因此而被陷害致死,以及后来苏联最高法院为他平反等重要问题。     

George III and Parliament*

Circumstances were auspicious when George III came to the throne in 1760, but soon his political actions were much criticized and he was accused from early in his reign until well into the 20th century of weakening the independence of parliament and undermining the constitution. Some contemporaries did defend him and these views received powerful support from Sir Lewis Namier and his followers in the 20th century. Both interpretations have their flaws, however, because of the failure to recognize the profound changes in the context in which George acted over his long reign and the subtle changes that occurred in Britain's unwritten constitution over that half century. By examining how the king appointed and dismissed ministers, sought to influence the composition of both houses of parliament, and endeavoured to shape government policy, this article seeks to revise our understanding of the king's relations with parliament and the constitution and to relocate our overall assessment of him between those offered by his many critics and defenders both during his reign and long afterwards.     

贵州麻江高枧夏家史考

“树由根而发,水由源而流”,当紫禁城里传出贵州麻哈州人夏同袜高中状元之时,祝贺之余要思考的便是原因,固然夏状元本人是成就这一巅峰时刻的本因,然他身后的那个家族对他的影响亦不容忽视。历史沧桑变幻,关于夏状元以及他的那个家族已经变得愈加模糊,便是他的后世子孙对他亦是不甚清楚。纵有热心人士努力,但不成系统,本文试图为夏家600余年的历史理出一个脉络,希望抛砖引玉,以此为起点展开对夏状元及其家族的研究,作为600百年前来到贵州的汉族,这个家族的成长发展具有一定的典型意义,具有较高的研究价值。