“The Age of Innocence”: Personal Histories of the 1960s “Digging Circuit” in Britain

There is a substantial literature on the use of oral history in archaeology, but there has been little consideration of the kinds of oral history and memory produced by the practice of archaeology. Through the personal narratives of a range of people involved in excavation during the 1960s in Britain, this paper explores understandings of what has been described as an archaeological “sub-culture”. It examines the ideas and interests that motivated peoples’ engagement in the “digging circuit” at this time, and looks at how these were implicated in the archaeology that was produced. We argue that such accounts do not simply expose the “subjective” context in which archaeological knowledge of these sites emerged but constitute an explicit and vital challenge to established accounts of archaeology in Britain at this time.     

The plebe in the Florentine Histories: Machiavelli’s notion of humours revisited

According to recent scholarship, the Florentine Histories expresses Machiavelli’s growing scepticism toward the popolo. This more elitist ‘late Machiavelli’, however, is an illusion. I show that the illusion arose from (1) the scholarly oversight of Machiavelli’s criticism of the popolo in his early work, Discourses, and (2) the failure to notice his new terminological distinction between the popolo and the plebe in the Florentine Histories. Machiavelli never was a whole-hearted defender of the popolo in the first place, for his consistent commitment was to preserve the balance between the popolo and the grandi. Nor was he unusually critical of the popolo in his later work, Florentine Histories: he directs his harshest criticism to the lower-class plebe and not to the middle-class popolo.     

Locating the “People Without History” in Histories of the Ancient Near East

Three books discussed here illustrate multidisciplinary approaches to studying ancient civilizations and a range of methodological and theoretical perspectives. They suggest that in addition to the traditional focus on elites and urban origins, we should analyze nonelites and smaller scale communities. I concur that focusing on elites gives an incomplete and inaccurate picture of life and culture in the ancient Near East. Instead, these books shed light on the “people without history” in the ancient Near East. This “social history” must be integrated into economic and political models of past cultures to fully understand ancient civilizations.     

The Violence of Poverty: Theology and Activism in an “Age of Austerity”

ABSTRACT

Faith groups are in the front line of the struggle to defeat poverty in breadline Britain. Given their roots in local communities Churches and Christian NGOs are well-placed to challenge economic policies that have resulted in the spiraling of food poverty, homelessness, personal debt and child poverty. By framing poverty as a political choice, a form of structural violence and systemic sin this paper brings peace studies and political theology into a constructive dialogue. In the face of ongoing “austerity” the paper demonstrates that poverty represents a clear and present danger to the social fabric of the UK and argues that only a re-imagined interdisciplinary theology of liberation can provide academics and activists with the tools needed to defeat systemic poverty and the cultural violence upon which it rests.     

“The Gudeman of Ballangeich”: rambles in the afterlife of James V

This article concerns a corpus of legends in which James V of Scotland disguised himself as the “Gudeman of Ballangeich” in order to enjoy amorous adventures. The traditions may or may not be contemporary, and equally there is no certainty about whether they reflect actual behaviour (although kings in general, including the Stuart kings, have been known to disguise themselves for a variety of reasons, including pleasure). However, in later centuries, allusions to the “Gudeman of Ballangeich” were used by Scots to refer surreptitiously to a Scots king, by Jacobites to refer to a Stuart king, and members of The Beggar's Benison, an eighteenth‐century libertine club, used tales of James V to evoke memories of a better, pre‐Union, pre‐Calvinist Scotland of cultural creativity and sexual liberty. The legends of James V helped maintain the positive, popular image of this monarch as the “poor man's king” in the face of less kind judgements from contemporary elites and subsequent generations of historians.     

“The Balkans’ Other within”: Imaginings of the West in the Republic of Macedonia

Using the case study of the Republic of Macedonia, I explore how people who live in a realm conventionally cast as insufficient of “the European Self” imagine “the West”. Such imaginings are important because they are intertwined with negotiations of nationhood and citizenship. I argue that in local constructions of the global social order, Macedonia emerges in an interstitial position between “the Balkans” and “the West” as “the Balkans’ Other Within”. Social actors craft this position out of Western hegemonic constructions of the Balkans as a socio‐political anomaly and portray “the Other within” (Macedonia) as the engulfed land of promise. The case study of Macedonia allows us to refine the concepts of “Balkanism” by underlining local perspectives on the promise that “the West” carries for the Balkans and “Orientalism” by emphasizing the possibilities that the construction of the Orient charts for the future advancement or demise of the Self.     

“Tell Thou the Tale”: Shakespeare's Taming of Folktales in The Taming of the Shrew

William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew adapts two European folktales, “The Taming of the Shrew” (ATU 901) and “Lord for a Day” (ATU 1531). The playwright adapts these tales in order to negotiate his role as storyteller with the audience, alternately insisting on his right to innovate and deferring to the audience by allowing them to choose among multiple possible endings.     

“The Delicious Sense of Foreignness”: American Transcendentalism in the Atlantic

Abstract

This essay presents one example of the ways in which place, transiency, and change have shaped the American experience. In the mid-nineteenth century a diverse group of American Transcendentalists came together on the island of Fayal in the Azores. The Transcendentalists' reaction to the Portuguese Catholic culture they encountered in the Azores indicates a broader pattern among nineteenth-century American liberals. These tourists operated within a larger transatlantic atmosphere of uncertainty characterized at times by hope but also by crisis. This culture of uncertainty, moreover, was one of the key factors in shaping how American liberals struggled with their conceptions of religion and nation.     

Magic Bullets for Mental Disorders: The Emergence of the Concept of an “Antipsychotic” Drug

When “antipsychotic” drugs were introduced into psychiatry in the 1950s, they were thought to work by inducing a state of neurological suppression, which reduced behavioral disturbance as well as psychotic symptoms. This view was reflected in the name “neuroleptic.” Within a few years, however, the idea that the drugs were a disease-specific treatment for schizophrenia or psychosis, and that they worked by modifying the underlying pathology of the condition, replaced this earlier view, and they became known as “antipsychotics.” This transformation of views about the drugs' mode of action occurred with little debate or empirical evaluation in the psychiatric literature and obscured earlier evidence about the nature of these drugs. Drug advertisements in the British Journal of Psychiatry reflect the same changes, although the nondisease-specific view persisted for longer. It is suggested that professional interests rather than scientific merit facilitated the rise of the disease-specific view of drug action. The increasing popularity of atypical antipsychotics makes it important to examine the origins of the assumptions on which modern drug treatment is based.     

The ‘young emperor of Constantinople’: an overlooked prosopographical note in an itinerary of the fourteenth century*

Abstract

In 1385 two German travellers, Peter Sparnau and Ulrich von Tennstaedt, set out on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. They left Plaue near Arnstadt on 30 July, travelled to Venice, where they boarded a ship, and reached Alexandria on 19 August 1385. Sparnau and Tennstaedt visited the peninsula of Sinai and the Holy Land. Boarding a ship in Beirut, they sailed along the western shore of Asia Minor and finally reached Constantinople, where they spent Christmas 1385.