Monastic literate practices in eleventh- and twelfth-century northern France

This article aims to apply the concept of literate practices to the production of written artefacts in northern France during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. It is argued that the increasing impact of the written word in society was not a straightforward process but one that suffered setbacks and whose nature depended on how it was applied at a micro-level. Using the vantage point of the archives of a number of Benedictine monasteries in the valley of the Scarpe, a small river currently situated near the current Franco-Belgian border, it is shown how the monks responded to the uncertainties of their age by exploring the advantages of producing and receiving large numbers of documents, all of which were created, used and stored in functional and specific, but changing, contexts.     

‘The revolt of the medievalists’. Directions in recent research on the twelfth-century renaissance

This historiographical article contains two basic parts. First, it discusses recent approaches to the twelfth-century renaissance in the last two decades by focusing on some selected themes. These themes basically derive from Charles Homer Haskins' notion of the renaissance and include individualism, rationality, secularisation, and the question of the emergence of a ‘critical mentality.’ From this point of departure, the article addresses the question of thematic innovation with regard to the twelfth-century renaissance. The second part of the article discusses the effect of the so-called linguistic turn on renaissance studies in general and on the twelfth-century renaissance in particular. In conclusion, some suggestions for further research are singled out.     

Confessional disputes in the republic of letters: Susan Du Verger and Margaret Cavendish

The starting point of this article is an understudied piece of critical exegesis from 1657 titled Humble Reflections Upon Some Passages of the Right Honorable the Lady Marchionesse of Newcastles Olio. An obscure Englishwoman named Susan Du Verger composed this 164-page tract to refute a three-page essay on “A Monastical life” by the prolific poet, playwright, and philosopher, Margaret Cavendish. While there is now a substantial body of work on nuns and convents, this research largely overlooks how early modern women engaged with these topics in a scholarly manner. Along with elucidating the gamut of relevant patristic and ecclesiastical histories that were available in the English and French vernaculars, Humble Reflections provides a prompt for investigating Cavendish’s ideas on ecclesiastical order, ceremonies, and toleration. I propose that Cavendish refused to grace Du Verger with a direct response because her polemic disregarded the unofficial codes of conduct — friendship, transnational community, and inter-confessional co-existence — that were supposed to maintain peace within the Republic of Letters. In conclusion, this essay displays that Cavendish was actually a great admirer of monasticism, though not so much for its role in the spread of Christianity as for its place in the development of natural philosophy.     

Hosting the king: hospitality and the royal iter in tenth-century England

Traditional studies of royal itinerancy have depended on locating the king’s progress through his kingdom(s) as precisely as possible and it should therefore not surprise that the iter regis in pre-conquest England has received relatively little attention, since Anglo-Saxon diplomas only rarely record their date and place of issue, making the establishment of the royal itinerary all but impossible. However, more recent studies, particularly by German scholars, have moved away from the earlier attention to the concrete details of the royal iter and focus more on the effects of itinerancy as a method of rulership, viewing itinerancy as a central part of royal ritual. This study argues that if we investigate itinerancy in tenth-century England from this standpoint, we can throw new light onto the subject. Contemporary sources reveal that in England as in France and Germany the iter regis was of great importance, with symbolic acts of feasting and gift-giving accompanying royal visits. The attention given to these ritualised acts in contemporary sources suggests, moreover, that Anglo-Saxon kingship possessed an important ‘charismatic’ quality, which deserves further investigation.     

‘Taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’: towards an historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery

By examining the case of James MacQueen (1778–1870), this paper initiates a research agenda that contributes to what David N. Livingstone has argued remains the most pressing task for historians of geography: to write ‘the historical geography of geography’. Born in Scotland in 1778, MacQueen was one of the many ‘arm-chair’ geographers whose efforts at synthesising contemporary and historical sources were a significant feature of the encounter between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, although he never visited Africa, his speculations about the course and termination of the River Niger turned out to be broadly correct. What makes MacQueen a particularly significant figure was the original source of his theory: enslaved Africans in a Caribbean plantation-colony. In this light, a remark that MacQueen's imagination was ‘taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’ carries a dark double-meaning, because ‘captive’ knowledge was the very source of MacQueen's interest in African geography. Beginning with MacQueen's time in Grenada, the paper explores a series of personal relations, textual traces and West African ethno-histories to reveal how his geographical knowledge and expertise were bound up with Atlantic slavery. This shows not only how the colonial economy, centred on the Caribbean, underwrote the production of geographical knowledge about Africa, but also how British geographical discourse and practice might be probed for traces of Atlantic slavery and enslaved African lives. More generally, the case of James MacQueen illuminates a broader field of relationships between Atlantic slavery, West African exploration, and the development of modern British geography in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Examining these relationships is key to writing a ‘historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery’ and contributes to postcolonial histories of the discipline by revealing the tangled relationships that bound geography and slavery, knowledge and subjugation, that which ‘captivates’ and those held ‘captive’.     

The development of the longbow in late medieval England and ‘technological determinism’

Traditional understandings of the development of the medieval English longbow and its role in the fourteenth-century ‘infantry revolution’ have recently been challenged by historians. This article responds to the revisionists, arguing based on archaeological, iconographic and textual evidence that the proper longbow was a weapon of extraordinary power, and was qualitatively different from – and more effective than – the shorter self-bows that were the norm in England (and western Europe generally) before the fourteenth century. It is further argued that acknowledging the importance of the weapon as a necessary element of any credible explanation of English military successes in the era of the Hundred Years War does not constitute ‘technological determinism’.     

Continuity,chance, and change: The character of the industrial revolution in England

This article examines the life and works of Robert Blakey, author of the first English-language history of political thought. Studies of Blakey have typically concentrated on one aspect of his life, whether as an authority on field sports or as an historian of philosophy. However, some of Blakey’s lesser-known ventures, particularly his early Radical politics, his hagiographies, and his attempts to write a biography of Charlemagne, heavily influenced his more famous works. Similarly, Blakey’s upbringing in a Calvinist tradition, rooted in the Scottish School of Common Sense philosophy helps makes sense of his philosophical and theological commitments, yet has been largely ignored. This article provides a sketch of Blakey’s life, tying these disparate strands together, and explaining their influence upon, and relevance to, the first history of political philosophy.     

An angel’s power in a bishop’s body: the making of the cult of Aubert of Avranches at Mont-Saint-Michel

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Benedictine monks of Mont-Saint Michel promoted the cult of Aubert of Avranches, the abbey’s legendary co-founder, and used his newly rediscovered relics as a means of accessing the patronage and power of the elusive, incorporeal archangel Michael, the community’s other founder. Texts, images, the strategic placement of Aubert’s relics throughout the abbey church reinforced the association between these two saints, rendering Aubert more powerful and Michael more accessible. This local study of the interaction between these two cults at the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel suggests that medieval monastic uses of relics were more creative and varied than is generally recognized and that relationships between saints within a single cultic environment could be extremely complex and unstable.     

Migrants,inequalities and social research in the 1920s: The story of Two Portuguese Communities in New England

In this article, I analyse the production and reception of a 1923 social monograph on migrant communities in New England and in doing so: (1) outline an archaeology of the social sciences in the U.S., by analysing aspects of their development, dynamics, institutional politics and research agendas; (2) discuss the tensions between social, racial and cultural interpretations of inequalities in the political economy of the 1920s; (3) analyse the pervasiveness of racialist thinking in science, society and politics, its impact in the hierarchization of groups for purposes of border control, and how the targeted groups responded to it.     

巴克尔及其《英国文明史》在中国的传播和影响

英国史家巴克尔及其《英国文明史》在中国的传播和影响,与中国近现代史学的科学化追求有相当关系。是书以探求历史如何成为一门科学为主旨,在20世纪初年曾出现了四种中文译本,对当时新史学思潮产生了直接或间接的影响。五四以后,巴克尔史学在更大范围内得到了介绍和探讨,而且《英国文明史》又被重新译刊,说明它对中国史学科学化具有一定的借鉴价值。     

Performing Hospitality in Moldova: Ambiguous,Alternative, and Undeveloped Models of National Identity

This paper examines performances of hospitality in everyday life to explore the lived experience of “being Moldovan”. National identity in Moldova can only be understood by reference to the peculiarities of history—to the presence of a neighbouring kin-state (Romania), a multiethnic population, Soviet ideology, and successive efforts at nation-building. The instabilities, contradictions, and ambiguities of national identity are also experienced and interpreted, as they are regularly performed in informal and formal settings. The “hospitality” of Moldovans—performed daily through linguistic code-switching, in practices of buying and selling, in life-cycle celebrations such as weddings, and in the official greeting and welcoming of dignitaries and visiting delegations by folk-costumed performers—is, paradoxically, an important site of this experience of ambiguity. The same set of practices both renders its performers “masters of their own houses”, while at the same time revealing the limits of the metaphor.     

Emblems and enigmas: Revisiting the ‘sword’ belt of Fernando de la Cerda

The belt of Fernando de la Cerda is on permanent display in the Museo de Telas Ricas, Burgos. Presently, scholars believe the belt dates from 1252–75, is of Hispano-Islamic work and was worn as a baldric. This article suggests that the belt is English, that it was commissioned by King Henry III and was worn around the waist. Henry gave the belt to the count of Champagne, Thibault II, during his first diplomatic visit to France. In turn, Thibault probably gave the belt to Fernando de la Cerda, the infante of Castile, in 1269, at Fernando’s wedding. The belt’s burial with the Castilian infante provides important evidence of the close familial and political relationships that linked the ruling dynasties of north-west Europe during the thirteenth century. Commissioned as a gift and richly decorated, the belt should be seen as an example of the aesthetic accomplishment of Henry III, his use of propaganda and political aspirations.     

Adgar's Gracial and Christian images of Jews in twelfth-century vernacular literature

This article concerns the adaptation and translation into the Anglo-Norman vernacular of an existing tradition of Latin miracles of the Virgin by the twelfth-century poet William Adgar. Adgar included many older ideas about Jews in his version of the stories, but also borrowed themes and language from contemporary courtly romance literature in order to suit his intended audience of lay nobles. In doing so, he portrayed Christian characters as the embodiment of loyalty and other courtly values. At the same time, he began to portray Jews according to courtly types of treachery. New implications emerged in his work about the general moral character of Jews, in contrast to previous works that commented mainly upon the nature of Jewish belief. Recent scholarship on Christian-Jewish relations in the twelfth century has begun to pay increasing attention to the movement of new Christian ideas about Jews outside of scholarly and ecclesiastical circles. The study of vernacular literature has an important place in this scholarly debate, since the move to the vernacular broadened the audience among which the new ideas about Jews could be spread.     

The History of Political Thought as secular genealogy: the case of liberty in early modern England

ABSTRACT

The History of Political Thought originated in, and partially remains an adjunct to the academic study of politics. As such it is not a mere subject matter or authentic tradition of speculation, but a secularising genealogy in some tension with an impulse to rigorous historicity. It provides an under-acknowledged context for the thinkers and concepts placed within it. The difficulties and consequent distortions are illustrated with reference to seventeenth-century discussions of liberty. It is argued that notions of negative liberty and Republican liberty as an ideological alternative are secularising genealogical projections that distort the character of seventeenth-century debate; but that republican liberty can be reformulated in more historically plausible terms as a special case of one of the entailments of contentious office-holding in and beyond a secularised conception of the political. Thomas Hobbes's conceptions of liberty provide a concluding illustration.     

Monks and lay communities in late antique Gaul: the evidence of the Eusebius Gallicanus sermons

The Eusebius Gallicanus sermons reveal the congruity in late antique Gaul between the models of pastoral care for monks and lay Christians. For these Gallic clergy, there was little antagonism between monastery and world. Preachers to both audiences share a common central concern with the defence of community and in this respect they differ from some of their contemporaries. The sermon collection demonstrates that the ascetic world in Gaul was far from monolithic and that pastoral care could be highly individualised and responsive to the demands of local communities.     

Gender in Polar Air: Roald Amundsen and his Aeronautics

Abstract

The aim of this article is to discuss the polar aeronautics of the 1920s as men, that is: to take seriously the obvious – but so far more or less ignored fact – that polar history is a gendered history: a man's history. It is time to ask what kind of men the polar aviators were: that is the purpose of scrutinizing polar history as a part of the history of masculinity. A more general purpose of gender studies is to study the variety of masculinity as an illustration of the historicity of human behaviour. The conclusion of the article is that the polar aviators were representatives of an archaic kind of masculinity that deviated from the hegemonic engineer-hailing masculinity of the 1920s. They were escapists, of course. They loved flying, of course – and certainly they worshipped technology. At the same time, however, they acted extremely emotionally and even irrationally towards themselves. They were dictated by their strong feelings in a degree that collided with both common sense and the ideals of correct manliness. Thus, the article is intended to be a contribution not only to the study of masculinity, but even to the discussion in social research on the meaning of emotions in human interrelationships.     

Aratea: a review of the literature concerning MS. Vossianus lat. q. 79 in Leiden University Library

The beautiful, well-known, but highly problematical, illuminated Carolingian MS. of the classical astronomical work called the Aratea or the Syntagma Arateorum, once owned by Isaac Vossius, has long been a prized possession of Leiden's University Library. Aratos of Soli, the Greek poet (about 315-270/23;9 B.C), was the author of the earliest version of this work, which he called the Phaenomena; Germanicus Caesar, Cicero and Festus Rufus Avienus produced Latin translations of it. Over the years an extensive literature has developed concerning the many problems raised by this MS. This literature is reviewed in detail in what follows and an attempt made, as it were, to clear the air ready for the further research which is shown to be necessary.