The wives of the ‘first troubadour’, Duke William IX of Aquitaine

The sources which offer insights into the life of Duke William IX of Aquitaine, the ‘first troubadour’, are few and disparate in nature. This study focuses on the conclusions which have been drawn from Anglo-Norman chroniclers' accounts of his clashes with the Church, reportedly over the issue of his adultery, and on Latin poems in praise of the bishop who excommunicated William and whom the duke persecuted.While it is generally believed that the duke married twice, close investigation shows this to be based largely on an error in a nineteenth-century secondary source: it is probable that Philippa of Toulouse was William's only wife. A new reading is proposed of the major Latin verse-compositions referring to the duke's excommunication (1114-17) and it is suggested that the historical evidence concerning the Poitevin claim to the country of Toulouse does not match well with the notion that William attempted to repudiate his wife Philippa, on whom this claim depended.     

Should we Abstain? Spousal Equality in Twelfth‐century Byzantine Canon Law

Spousal equality was not an ideal to which medieval societies generally aspired. Discussions about social order advocated a strict hierarchical structure: the man was to be the head of the household and the master of his wife. Did this subservient state of the wife extend to all spheres of family life or was there a space where spouses could act as equals? In this article I focus on one aspect of Byzantine spousal relations: the marital bed. I argue that there was a difference between lay and clerical couples. Among the Byzantine laity, husband and wife were equally responsible for deciding whether to engage in sexual intercourse. Canon law addressed lay husbands and wives as a couple. Among the clergy, however, the husband's responsibilities towards his flock sometimes required him to decide unilaterally in favour of abstinence. According to the law, it was the cleric's duty to ensure that this happened. As such it was he who was addressed and asked to abstain from his wife. More generally, the clerical status of the husband complicated the situation and needs to be taken into account before any generalisations are made about gender inequality.     

The Obscenity Bargain: Ralph Ginzburg for Fanny Hill

The next‐to‐the‐last witness at the July 1968 hearings on the nomination of Abe Fortas to replace Earl Warren as Chief Justice was James Clancy. Along with another attorney, Charles Keating, who would later gain infamy in the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, Clancy appeared on behalf of Citizens for Decent Literature, an anti‐smut organization that had filed amicus briefs supporting censorship “as essential to the development of good family living” ¹ in the Supreme Court's important obscenity decisions. ² Clancy asserted that everyone should see the materials Fortas had held were entitled to First Amendment protection, and so he had assembled a thirty‐minute compilation of them for the Judiciary Committee's viewing.     

“Man ist nicht umsonst Philologe gewesen …”. Zur Bildungskritik Friedrich Nietzsches

Up to now, Nietzsche's ideas on culture and education have been figured out mainly from his early writings. Accordingly, most authors ascribed to him a negative, at least reluctant attitude towards science and studies. On the contrary, in this paper it is argued that Nietzsche, from time to time, reconsidered and changed his thoughts and that he rather favoured science and studies. To be more specific, four periods may be distinguished. As a boy Nietzsche strived for a religious education. But while a pupil at Schulpforte he changed his mind and strongly pleaded for a secular, historically dominated erudition. Again during the seventies in Basle, he pointed out the dangers of a one-sided historism, but in his later years he returned to his high esteem of history. — Basically Nietzsche was interested in a hermeneutical theory combining artistic vision and scholarly work.     

‘Halt! Be Men!’: Sikelgaita of Salerno,Gender and the Norman Conquest of Southern Italy

This article examines the career of Sikelgaita (1040–1090), wife of the Norman conqueror of southern Italy, Robert Guiscard, as a means of understanding the impact of the ‘other’ Norman conquest of the eleventh century. Sikelgaita is unusual in that she has left images in narrative sources both within and well beyond the confines of southern Italy. She is also well documented at a local level. Both types of material combine to reveal her crossing gender boundaries in titles she used, the way in which she managed property, her legendary presence alongside Robert on his campaigns and, more speculatively, in organising a campaign of written propaganda to ensure the succession of her son to his father's patrimony in preference to his half‐brother by Sikelgaita's predecessor as Robert's wife. Her history raises the problems of women's access to written texts, their conscious shaping of their own identities, their conflicting loyalties between natal and marital families, and the need for competing male heirs to prove themselves against a prevailing notion of masculinity in a period when one aggressively masculine group, the Lombards, was being supplanted in power by another, the Normans. As such, it demonstrates that the lives of so‐called ‘exceptional’ women continue to have a value to historians of gender in the middle ages, and can often demonstrate the patriarchal boundaries which even they could not cross.     

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.     

INTERVIEW WITH

Born in 1903, in north central Mississippi, Clark received his B.A. from the University of Mississippi, his M.A. from the University of Kentucky, and his Ph.D. from Duke. Clark has collected thousands of documents, edited a dozen volumes, and written over 30 books and 60 articles, many of them about the South since the Civil War. Clark has served as president of Phi Alpha Theta, the Southern Historical Association, and the Organization of American Historians. He and his wife, Martha Elizabeth Turner, were married in 1933 and have a son and a daughter. Retiring in the 1970s after four decades at the University of Kentucky and Indiana University, Clark remains active in such historical circles as the Filson Club, where this interview was conducted in April 1991 by Roger Adelson.     

Two heroes,two lives in the Grottaferrata Digenes Akrites

Abstract

The status of Digenes Akrites as hero needs to be reconsidered. For this purpose, a comparison with his father can serve as a starting-point. Father and son are compared in two contexts: the family and the married couple. The differences between them reveal a hero who is not uncontroversial when it comes to family ties: Digenes isolates himself from his family and fails his wife with regard to faithfulness, trust and inseparability. Consequently, he is punished with childlessness. It is only when the oppositions between father and son are considered to be instances of dramatic irony that their true meaning is revealed.     

‘A Young Tory’? The Early Parliamentary Career of Charles James Fox 1768–74

This article seeks to redress the neglect, even by his biographers, of Fox's early career, when he made over 250 speeches in the house of commons in six years. The period when young Fox supported government was an inappropriate prelude to his later fame as opponent of Prime Minister Pitt and champion of ‘liberal causes’. He was anything but a ‘man of the people’ in his authoritarian attitude and detestation of popular opinion, and yet there were signs that he would not be an administration man in the mould of his father, Henry Fox.     

A Patina of Age: Elizabeth Macquarie (née) Campbell and the Influence of the Buildings and Landscape of Argyll,Scotland, in Colonial New South Wales

Elizabeth Macquarie, a daughter of Campbell of Airds, was the wife of Lachlan Macquarie, the fifth governor of New South Wales (1810–21). The buildings of Argyll, Scotland, strongly influenced choices made by Elizabeth in the buildings erected during her husband’s 12-year administration of the colony. By examining these Scottish influences, through theories of landscape and the transfer of traditional, even “old-fashioned,” architectural styles to this far-flung colony, new layers of meaning embedded within the landscape of Sydney Cove are disentangled to reveal a deeper understanding of how British cultural identity was recreated on the far side of the world.     

From ‘Relief’ to ‘Justice and Protection’: The Maintenance of Deserted Wives,British Masculinity and Imperial Citizenship, 1870–1920

In the early twentieth century, local British poor law guardians’ concerns with the maintenance of deserted and neglected families were transformed into imperial, and later transnational, policy promoting justice for abandoned wives and children. Both local court cases concerning maintenance and policy debates at the national and imperial levels reveal the ways in which a breadwinner model of masculinity shaped maintenance policy and practice. Although the maintenance problem was framed differently by local welfare providers and imperial heads of state, concerns about welfare costs and human rights intersected in the figure of the irresponsible male citizen, who challenged the dominant model of British/imperial masculinity by refusing to maintain his wife.     

Interview with Paul Sweet

Paul R. Sweet is a retired Foreign Service Officer and professor emeritus of the Department of History at Michigan State University. Dr. Sweet received his B.A. degree from DePauw University in 1929 and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1934. He has taught at Birmingham-Southern College, Bates College, the University of Chicago, Colby College, and Michigan State University. From 1948 to 1959 he served with the U.S. Department of State and from 1953 to 1963 at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn; from 1963 to 1967 he was U.S. Consul General at Stuttgart. He co-authored The Tragedy of Austria (1948), and is the author of Friedrich von Gentz: Defender of the Old Order (1941), and Wilhelm von Humboldt: a Biography 1767–1808 (1978). He and his wife live in East Lansing, Michigan, where this interview was conducted by Linda Cooke Johnson in October 1996.     

Conference report: 'L'età dei totalitarismi. Silone e la cultura letteraria e politica degli anni venti-trenta'

Giovannino Guareschi, author of the immensely popular Don Camillo stories and editor of the weekly newspaper Candido, spent 14 months in a Parma prison from 1954 to 1955 for having libelled the former Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi. To this day, he is the only Italian journalist since the founding of the Republic ever to have served actual, behind-bars jail time for libel. This study examines several aspects of Guareschi's life in prison – the ways he coped with boredom and loneliness, the attempts he made to understand his fellow inmates and how he defiantly tried to buoy his spirits. In particular, it focuses on both his correspondence with his wife Ennia, a collection of 44 letters, and his personal musings kept in two prison diaries – all documents that have never been published. The analysis rectifies common misinterpretations as to why Guareschi purposely refused to appeal his guilty verdict and chose to go to jail, considers how Guareschi presented himself in his writings and contemplates Guareschi's place in the history of Italian prison writing.     

Sir John Coxe Hippisley: That ‘Busy Man’ in the Cause of Catholic Emancipation

The late 18th and early 19th centuries represent a critical time for the emergence of modernity in western political life. Of particular interest is the confluence at that time of increased religious toleration with political reform. Research for an earlier study, Parliamentary Politics of a County and its Town: General Elections in Suffolk and Ipswich in the Eighteenth Century (Westport, 2002), led to an examination of Sir John Coxe Hippisley, MP (1747–1825). In many ways, his political career is an exemplar of the broader conflicts of contemporary English political life writ small. Set between 1790 and 1818, Hippisley's parliamentary career is fascinating, for while he was an active and precocious supporter of catholic emancipation, he represented Sudbury in Suffolk, a borough with a high proportion of protestant dissenters. His constituents found Hippisley's enthusiasm for catholic emancipation repugnant, but not so much so that they could not be convinced to continue to vote for him if the price was right. Consequently a constant and expensive wooing of his constituents marked his parliamentary career. On a national level, Hippisley's constant and public pursuit of catholic emancipation, coupled with his equally avid quest for preferment, led to a series of quixotic contradictions in his political behaviour. Hippisley and his political adventures thus represent a crucial development stage in the movement for religious freedom in England and the west, as well as providing an illuminating case study on the dynamics of local politics in the time leading up to the first great age of reform.     

James E Byrnes and the Politics of Segregation

Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1934, Thomas S. Morgan received his B.A. from Davidson College, his M.A. from Duke University, and his Ph.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill. He taught in high school in Baltimore, Maryland, and at Wake Forest University, and UNC-Chapel Hill, prior to coming to to Winthrop University where he has remained for the past 27 years. From 1978 to 1981 he was dean of Winthrop's College of Arts and Sciences. Morgan and his wife, Nancy, are parents of three sons. In addition, to publishing some scholarly articles, Morgan wrote the Study Guide for George Tindall's America: A Narrative History in its various editions. In 1972 he served as chair of the membership committee of the Southern Historical Association. Morgan served as president of Phi Alpha Theta from 1991 to 1993, presiding over the final years of service of Don Hoffman, the organization's secretary-treasurer, and the selection of Hoffman's replacement, Jack Tunstall. In April 1994, Morgan received an award for his "Outstanding Service and Exceptional Dedication" as Phi Alpha Theta president. This article is a modified version of his 1993 presidential address.     

大禹与启的父子关系新论

在神话与史书中,我们可以看到大禹与其妻涂山氏婚姻并不和谐,时常有矛盾发生,晚年之时的大禹还将王位传于伯益,而并不传于才能出众的启,从两方面看,启很有可能不是大禹的亲生之子。     

„… daß Sie Ihre Tätigkeit einstellen müssen”︁: Die Entlassung Sergej Tschachotins aus dem Heidelberger Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut 1933

“…that you must have to stop working here.” How Sergej Chakhotin was forced to leave the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute at Heidelberg in 1933. - In this essay the author presents some basically unpublished material according to the dismissal of the Russian natural scientist Sergej Chakhotin, a former assistant of I. P. Pavlov. Chakhotin, who got a sholarship granted by an American institution, worked since 1930 at the newly established Kaiser Wilhelm Institute at Heidelberg, as a scientist. Moreover, he practically engaged himself in the political struggle of the German Social Democrats against Nazism and, in 1932, created the at that time well-known symbol of the Three Arrows. But he was - being a Soviet citizen - a guest in Germany. His political activity was the very reason for his discharge in April, 1933, and even the engagement of some prominent academic collegues was not able to stop the administration measure. So Chakhotin became a political refugee like some of his German collegues.     

金圣叹佚诗佚联新考

金圣叹生前著述甚富,然由于是被清廷杀头者,并遭妻子流边、家产籍没的严惩,故直接反映其思想感情和生平交游的诗文作品存世极少.此文新辑得其佚诗12首、佚联等3则,为金圣叹的文学创作和生平史实的研究提供了一批新资料.     

“In Front of the World”: Translating Beatriz Nascimento

This collection translates some of the work of the influential Black Brazilian thinker and activist Beatriz Nascimento (1942–1995) for the first time into English, in collaboration with her only daughter, Bethânia Gomes. Historian, poet, theorist and organiser, Beatriz Nascimento was a key figure in Brazil’s Black Movement until her untimely death in 1995. She dangerously wrote at the height of Brazil’s Military Dictatorship (1964–1985), and theorised extensively on the Black condition in Brazil; the unique experience of Black women; and quilombos—Brazilian maroon societies that she imagined as spaces of both historical and contemporary fugitivity. Following Alex Ratts, this introduction outlines her contribution to radical geography, in particular Black geographies, territoriality and embodiment. It also positions Nascimento within the trans‐Atlantic Black radical tradition. We present two of Nascimento’s essays in translation here. The first, “The Concept of Quilombo and Black Cultural Resistance”, introduces a crucial strand of her scholarly work, on the history and socio‐political significance of quilombos (maroon communities). The second, “For a (New) Existential and Physical Territory”, shows Nascimento in a different mood: philosophical, reflective and iconoclastic. In addition, two of her poems—“Dream” and “Sun and Blue”—are also translated here for the first time.     

John Breuilly: ‘Eric Hobsbawm: nationalism and revolution’

This article considers how Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) connected the concepts of revolution and nationalism, analysing this in relation to his biography, his politics and his work as a professional historian. It traces major changes in Hobsbawm's understanding of revolution and nationalism as he, the political world and the ways of writing history all changed over the course of his long life.