A Dark Age Peter Principle: Beowulf's incompetence threshold

Many readers, recognizing the incompatibility of heroism with the duties of kingship, have argued that Beowulf tells a story of colossal failure. Drawing on anthropological theory, I propose that the protagonist is more Big-Man than king and that his heroism, far from a socially dysfunctional flaw, is in fact the leash by which society yanks him back from establishing himself as king. Beowulf thus speaks to an aristocracy disinclined to submit to royalty. The poem shines a light on Anglo-Saxons' aversion to despotic rule: to protect its own decentralized political structure, society against the state foredooms King Beowulf to death.     

Gendering the History of Women's Healthcare

This essay examines the genesis and continuing influence of certain core narratives in the history of western women's healthcare. Some derive from first‐wave feminism's search for models of female medical practice, an agenda that paid little attention to historical context. Second‐wave feminism, identifying a rift between pre‐modern and modern times in terms of women's medical practices, saw the pre‐modern European female healer as an exceptionally knowledgeable empiricist, uniquely responsible for women's healthcare and (particularly because of her knowledge of mechanisms to limit fertility) a victim of male persecution. Aspects of this second narrative continue subtly to effect scholarly discourse and research agendas on the history of healthcare both by and for women. This essay argues that, by seeing medical knowledge as a cultural product – something that is not static but continually re‐created and sometimes contested – we can create an epistemology of how such knowledge is gendered in its genesis, dissemination and implementation. Non‐western narratives drawn from history and medical anthropology are employed to show both the larger impact of the western feminist narratives and ways to reframe them.     

Dark Age Traffic on the Bristol Channel, UK: A Hypothesis

Exotic pottery from the eastern Mediterranean and southern Gaul in the late 5th to 7th centuries is recognized as the characteristic find from Dark Age sites in Ireland and western Britain. But there is no consensus on the mechanisms by which they arrived. Interpretations range from diplomatic gifts through souvenirs to commerce. This attempt to resolve the issue is based on sites around the Bristol Channel. The quantities of pottery and numbers of sites are used to generate a rough estimate of the number of ships carrying the pottery to the area. It is argued that the estimated volume represents commercial trade.
© 2007 The Author     

迈锡尼文明、“黑暗时代”与希腊城邦的兴起

关于早期希腊国家的兴起,主流观点认为,迈锡尼文明衰亡后经历了一个黑暗时期,之后城邦于公元前8世纪中期遽然兴起,两者之间存在着明显的中断。这一观点为古典学界普遍接受,成为诸多研究的出发点。本文意在重新审视这一说法,提出西方学者之所以强调两者之间的中断,是因为西方社会的价值观念起了作用。城邦文明历来被看成是现代西方文明的源头,因此它必须同被认为带有专制王权色彩的迈锡尼文明区分开来。然而这样的解释忽略了迈锡尼文明和希腊城邦文明之间的诸多联系,而且考古学证据表明所谓"黑暗时代"亦非通常认为的那般黑暗,希腊人群体的活动在一定程度上得以延续。还有,荷马史诗所反映的历史面貌更可能是公元前8世纪以前而非此后的情形。由此本文认为,更为合理的解释是把城邦兴起看成是迈锡尼王国解体之后希腊社会渐次演化的结果,而非所谓革命性变革的结果。荷马史诗所描绘的情形很可能是迈锡尼文明和城邦文明之间的中间环节。     

The Gendering of the British Working Class

How have feminist historians transformed the account of class formation and consciousness articulated in Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class? Deborah Valenze’s The First Industrial Woman, Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches, Sonya Rose’s Limited Livelihoods, and Ellen Ross’s Love and Toil place the gendering of the British working class at the center of the process and explain the peculiar limitations of the working-class movement. The essay also places these books in the theoretical tradition of socialist feminism and considers them as responses to Joan Scott’s call for a poststructuralist approach to gender, class and power.     

The influence of climatic change on the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Greek Dark Ages

Between the 13th and 11th centuries BCE, most Greek Bronze Age Palatial centers were destroyed and/or abandoned. The following centuries were typified by low population levels. Data from oxygen-isotope speleothems, stable carbon isotopes, alkenone-derived sea surface temperatures, and changes in warm-species dinocysts and formanifera in the Mediterranean indicate that the Early Iron Age was more arid than the preceding Bronze Age. A sharp increase in Northern Hemisphere temperatures preceded the collapse of Palatial centers, a sharp decrease occurred during their abandonment. Mediterranean Sea surface temperatures cooled rapidly during the Late Bronze Age, limiting freshwater flux into the atmosphere and thus reducing precipitation over land. These climatic changes could have affected Palatial centers that were dependent upon high levels of agricultural productivity. Declines in agricultural production would have made higher-density populations in Palatial centers unsustainable. The ‘Greek Dark Ages’ that followed occurred during prolonged arid conditions that lasted until the Roman Warm Period.     

耶稣与犹太教嬗变

在犹太民族的信念里,他们受到耶和华上帝的特殊眷顾,因此,先知们不断强调以色列的救世主即将降临人世,惩恶扬善,为正直善良的人提供一个和平、公正、仁爱的王国。犹太教不是一体一元信仰,经过传承沿革变得支派众多,基督教是这众多支派中的一支。耶稣基督以救世为使命,与其门徒矢志传教获得信众,基督教自身发扬犹太教教义并接受希腊—罗马文化的影响,后来脱离了犹太教演变成世界性宗教。     

Gendering the Black Death: Women in Later Medieval England

This review article of Mavis Mate's Daughters, Wives and Widows after the Black Death: Women in Sussex, 1350–1535 (1998) locates Mate's work within the broader context of the debate about changes in women's social position caused by the collapse in population following the Black Death. Was demographic decline accompanied by growing social and economic opportunities for women or should historians emphasise the continuity of female work as low‐skilled, low‐status and low‐paid throughout the late medieval and early modern periods? How did women's role in the labour market affect the age of marriage, fertility rates and long‐term population change? In general, Mate's conclusions offer support to the ‘pessimists’: women's work was vital to the household but economic centrality did not bring a commensurate social power or legal rights and the ideology of female subordination remained firmly in place. The main problem with Mate's case is, inevitably, a lack of evidence, for family structure, for the sexual division of labour and, above all, for affective relations. Nevertheless, this detailed, empirically based local study shows how successfully women's history has moved into the historical mainstream.     

四川大邑华山村昆虫拍摄记 暗夜的守望——精灵物语

正大多数昆虫喜欢在夜间活动。所以,我们总是安静地"潜伏"着,与它们相约、相守、相望,它们总是无私地展示着多姿多彩、精莹剔透的美丽身躯,来回报我们的辛苦付出。我们将精灵的美丽定格,来与大家分享,让人们认识更多的昆虫,了解它们,喜欢它们,尊重它们,共同努力去维护一个美好的不仅是属于我们的生态星球。雨夜,滴答之声还是那么急促,静静地坐在电脑前,思绪又飞到了华山村。我的那些生命还在绽放的暗夜精灵们,你们还好吗?2015年的夏天,我和成都昆虫拍