René of Anjou,King of Sicily,and the order of the Croissant

Founded in 1448 by René, Duke of Anjou and titular King of Sicily, the Order of the Croissant represents one of many secular orders of chivalry established by late medieval rulers. An examination of the Order's statutes and membership indicates that the Croissant was more than a colourful convocation of knights. As René's personal creation, the Croissant served as a political instrument not only for controlling his vassals, but also for advancing his territorial claims.     

The writings of Ademar of Chabannes,the Peace of 994, and the ‘Terrors of the Year 1000’

The belief that apocalyptic expectations existed at the turn of the first millennium is no longer widely held, even though some recent scholars have suggested they did. This paper seeks to confirm the notion that, at least in the monastic milieu, belief that the Last Judgement was imminent did exist in the decades around the year 1000. To support this argument, this paper will examine the writings of the monk, Ademar of Chabannes. In his work of history and the sermons he wrote near the end of his life, Ademar reveals his own eschatological mentality. His history, it will be argued, contains numerous accounts of prodigies and signs that indicated Ademar and his contemporaries thought that they were living in the Last Days. Ademar's apocalypticism is revealed even more fully in his sermons, which were organised along the lines of salvation history. His account in the sermons of the Peace of God council of 994, which also appears in the history, clearly demonstrates his eschatological sensibility. His record of this council, written over 30 years after the event, it will be argued, is apocalyptic in both form and content. The structure of his account is arranged in the tradition of apocalyptic literature, and the events he records are described in language drawn from the Revelation of John and the book of Isaiah. Ademar also drew on the idea of the refreshment of the saints found in the writings of Jerome and of Bede in his explanation of the events of 994. Ademar's writings, therefore, reveal the existence of apocalyptic expectations at the turn of the first millennium.     

Enemies of liberty? Nationalism,immigration, and the framing of terrorism in the agenda of the Front National

This paper systematises the framing of the terrorism issue in the programmatic agenda of the Front national (FN) by focusing on nationalism. We argue that the FN's position on terrorism constitutes part of its strategy to justify its anti‐immigrant agenda by offering ideological rather than biological rationalisations for national belonging. To test our argument empirically, we operationalise four categories of nationalism, including ethno‐racial, cultural, political‐civic, and economic, and code official FN materials published in reaction to seven terrorist attacks on French soil during the period 1986–2015. We find that whilst older documents draw on all four categories, Marine Le Pen documents draw almost exclusively on the cultural and political‐civic categories, confirming our argument. Building on the “normalisation” or “de‐demonisation” approach, our nationalism framework presents a distinct theoretical advantage by allowing us to conceptualise the shift in the party's programmatic agenda.     

Lincoln,Race, and the Spirit of ’76

Abstract

This essay examines how Lincoln dealt with race, slavery, and emancipation in antebellum America. It argues that despite a few controversial statements and policies regarding black Americans, Lincoln sought to preserve the American union and its system of self-government by reclaiming the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Unlike U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who exploited white bigotry in his promotion of local “popular sovereignty” as a solution to the slavery controversy, Lincoln highlighted the natural rights of blacks as a way to prevent the spread of slavery and thereby save what he would later call “the last best hope of earth.”     

Geometry,Construction and Structural Analysis of the Crossed-Arch Vault of the Chapel of Villaviciosa,in the Mosque of Córdoba

The vault of Villaviciosa is one of the oldest existing examples of a true ribbed vault, and is the first of the crossed-arch type. Although its perfection suggests earlier trials, none has been found so far. It predates the oldest Romanesque ribbed vaults by more than a century. Notwithstanding its importance, no construction and structural study has ever been done; neither has an accurate survey been published. The purpose of this article is to fill this gap in the history of vault construction. A detailed survey has been made, providing the first accurate drawings of the vault. A close inspection of the extrados, completed with a visual inspection of interior damages, has allowed ascertaining the main construction features. With the geometry and the material data a structural analysis has been carried out. This analysis explains the fundamental structural behavior of the vault and throws new light into some historical issues; for example, it leads to discarding the widespread belief that the ribs are decorative: they are supporting the weight of the vault.     

‘In the very eye of the storm’: India,the UN,and the Lebanon crisis of 1958

This paper effectively provides the view from New Delhi of the crisis in Lebanon in 1958, UN intervention in the conflict, and subsequent peacekeeping in the region. The account uses archival material from the National Archives of India, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, the UNARMS, the National Archives, UK, and published primary material. Most significantly, the paper revisits the memoirs of Ambassador Rajeshwar Dayal (the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative) who was seconded from the Indian Foreign Service for the special purpose of UN arbitration in the Lebanon Crisis. Dayal played a pivotal role in defining India’s position in the crisis, and through Indian contributions to mediation and peacekeeping, in the UN. Furthermore, given India’s relationships with many other non-aligned nations in the region, the paper takes a broader view of the narratives surrounding the crisis and eventual US intervention and victory from mainly Indian sources, thus contributing to the study of the short-lived crisis.     

Insurgency,heritage and the working class: the case of the Theatre of Union Nº6 of the Coal Miners of Lota,Chile

This paper examines the construction and preservation history of the Theatre of Union Nº6 of the Coal Miners in Lota, Chile, a city whose identity has been redefined due to changes in the capitalist economy, becoming known as an ‘ex-coal mining community’. Drawing on insurgent planning theory and through a political, economic and social analysis of the history of this national monument, the paper explores how grassroots heritage movements, grounded on their historical memory of social struggle, question authorised voices in the field, influencing the production and definition of their urban heritage. The strategies used by these groups are discussed in the context of the emergence of social movements at the beginning of the twentieth century, the influence of the Modern Movement in Chile as a symbol of social justice, and the communities’ current preservation efforts. Through interviews, participant observations, archival research and analysis of the physical built environment, I argue that moving across ‘invited’ and ‘invented’ spaces of participation, Lotinos are capable of disrupting hegemonic conceptions of heritage, using it for their own social, cultural and economic purposes and creating opportunities for a more inclusive and democratic cultural process.     

Meridionalismo,the crisis of liberalism,and the advent of Marxism in post‐risorgimento Naples

For an ideology described by Marx himself as one that was suitable only for advanced societies, backward Naples ironically served as the point of entry for Marxism in Italy. As theorists and activists, the great Neapolitan Marxists—Antonio Labriola, Carlo Cafiero, Arturo Labriola, and Amadeo Bordiga—completely dominated the initial stages of the movement. For an understanding of the severe socio‐economic conditions that did much to make Naples the incubator of radicalism in post‐Risorgimento Italy, the literature of the meridionalisti (southern reformers) remains indispensable. Under attack on both sides of the Atlantic by a new generation of historians who admirably seek to produce a nuanced history of the South by rising above the stereotypes associated with a one‐dimensional image of the “Southern Problem,” the meridionalisti require supplementing today as historians. Nevertheless, the reaction against them has been too extreme. They remain invaluable eye‐witnesses to the conditions and events that formed the historical context of Marxism's momentous appearance in Italy.     

Louis XVI,the Court of the Tuileries,and the Corps Diplomatique 1789–91

The French Revolution sought to erect an edifice which would bridge the chasm between ancien regime realpolitik and a more idealistic vision of international relations based on natural law. The deputies of the Constituent Assembly, despite their noble intentions, failed to do so. They ended up hurtling into an all-too-familiar vortex, where appeals to natural law hid naked military aggression and strategic egocentrism. Whether this outcome was inevitable or contingent on circumstances continues to pose a dilemma for historical writing on the early Revolution. This article explores the question from the unmined perspective of the foreign Ambassadors resident in Paris during the French Revolution. It uses their unpublished despatches and French police reports to shed new light on the French Revolution's alienation from the international relations system of the ancien regime.     

Bakhtin,Boredom, and the ‘Democratization of Skepticism’

This article examines recent scholarly work on boredom by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of modernity, irony, and mass skepticism. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin noted that, beginning in the 1840s, Western societies had been gripped by an “epidemic of boredom.” He was referring to a peculiarly modern form of mass boredom, associated with the “atrophy of experience” in a mechanized and urbanized social life—a boredom Elizabeth S. Goodstein has characterized as the “democratization of skepticism.” Although Bakhtin says little about “boredom” directly, he probes the sociocultural conditions that give rise to it. Bakhtin, for example, celebrates the liberatory and egalitarian promise of modern vernacular speech, which displays a healthy suspicion of “monotonic” qualities of elite genres, and which springs not from the pulpit or the palace, but from the street, the marketplace and the public square. Bakhtin is concerned about the nihilistic implications of this disenchantment of the world and the threats it poses—indifference, reification and alienation—to the “participative” mode of social life he favours.     

Ecocriticism,Joyce, and the politics of trees in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses

This article explores the ecological and ideological context of a passage in which two nationalists lament Ireland's treeless state. Although Joyce satirises these professed tree-lovers and the cause of reforestation, the passage alludes to a lively, serious topic in fin de siècle discourse. While Catholic nationalists blamed the loss of the island's once-vast, oak-dominated forests on British colonialism, a history elided by unionists, they shared a belief in the economic benefits of reforestation. Like Joyce, both sides knew little of Ireland's post-Ice Age natural history and did not appreciate the cultural importance of forest ecosystems to ancient Celtic peoples. Today, the Republic's profit-based plantations of conifers enact the materialist ideology of c.1904 reforestation advocates while overlooking the environmental and cultural benefits of restoring the biodiversity of native deciduous forests.     

Tibetan livelihoods and the ‘Great Development of the West’:Modernization,pastoral resources,and the ‘urban future’ of the grasslands

1.Introduction Rural livelihoods in Tibet2 have,during the last fifteen years,undergone fast and profound processes of economic transformation and state-led modernization,both in the TAR and the Eastern parts of the Tibetan plateau.Local life styles have changed at a pace rarely seen in an area where people subsisted,until the late 1990s,almost entirely on nomadic mobile livestock production.New local socio-economic structures with peculiar characteristics have emerged.They include the decline of traditional livestock-based (mobile) pastoralism;the emergence of a ‘post-pastoral’ economy based on the extraction of medicinal fungi for Chinese and international markets;and the emergence,often from below,of new arrangements governing rangeland access and usage.     

Mirrors of Modernity: Time–Space,the Subaltern,and the Decolonial

This essay is cast as something of a personal narrative. It recounts how I have arrived at inklings and intimations of space and time, particularly pervasive procedures of the spatialization of time and the temporalization of space, in tandem with understandings of disciplines and subjects of modernity. The account begins with my pre-apprentice days in Delhi, moves onto my apprenticeship at Cambridge, covers my journeyman sojourns in Mexico, and extends unto my artisanal concerns in the present. At stake especially are encounters and entanglements with time and space as folded within the creases of subaltern studies and de-colonial understandings (yet also postcolonial perspectives and historical anthropology). On the one hand, I explore how these shifting orientations have drawn upon hegemonic representations as well as non-certified imaginations of time and space, to now press familiar associations and now unravel unusual enunciations of these concepts and processes. On the other hand, I track the active construal, the exact production, of space and time within the epistemic practice of these critical perspectives. At stake throughout are wider issues of meaning and power, alterity and authority, difference and disciplines.     

Theocracy,Eschatology, and the Ephemeral Church: Graham Ward and the “Crisis of Democracy”

This article offers a critical assessment of Graham Ward’s political theology and critique of modern democracy. Ward argues that modern democracy expresses a nihilistic metaphysics and lacks an adequate account of the embodiment of sovereignty within the social, with the result that it tacitly harbors totalitarianism. As an alternative, Ward advances a theocratic model of the social, with the aim of providing an account of the social embodiment of sovereignty lacking in democracy. The article argues that Ward is ultimately unsuccessful in this attempt. His eschatological focus separates the church from the world, undermining his account of the embodiment of sovereignty and reinforcing the very emptiness at the heart of the social his theology is intended to counter.     

In the name of God: translation and transformation of Chinese culture,foreign religion,and the reproduction of “Tianzhu” and “Shangdi”

Translation between one language and culture into another assumes that a fundamental set of commonalities exist between the two cultural and linguistic contexts. In the case of the Christian Bible, Chinese translations not only involved translating words into Chinese, but also adapting and transforming an exotic Western religion for local sensibilities in such a way that Christianity might be recognized as a legitimate system of thought within a Chinese cultural milieu. Focusing on the perspective of different Chinese translations of the name of the Christian God, this article examines the history of the debate regarding the issue of translation, and the approaches adopted by the Catholic and Protestant faiths. It examines the reclamation and evolution of traditional Chinese vocabulary into new terminology through the application of Western religious concepts, and the ways in which indigenous Chinese society accepted these concepts, with an eye towards examining the course of historical progress through the history of social adoption of these ideas.     

Restoration Leeds and the Aldermen of the Corporation, 1661–1700

Abstract

In the 1945 General Election, the Conservative Party under the leadership of Winston Churchill was defeated in a largely unexpected Labour landslide. The former Prime Minister's son, Randolph Churchill, MP for Preston since 1940, also lost his seat, but by a swing much lower than the national average. This was hardly due to his performance as a constituency MP. He was largely absent on military service. His ability to antagonise his own constituency workers was no help to his cause. He did have the advantage of name recognition and a heroic war record, but these were hardly decisive factors. It is argued here that his comparatively strong electoral performance was due to his adoption of the cause of social reform combined with his ability to campaign in a flamboyant manner that appealed to electors, which suggests that a very different result might have been possible if his approach had been taken up nationally by the Conservative Party.     

War memorials and the commemoration of the Israeli war of independence, 1948–1956

Gershon Greenberg, The Holy Land in American Religious Thought, 1620–1948: The Symbiosis of American Religious Approaches to Scripture's Sacred Territory, Lanham, Maryland, University Press of America, 1994.

Steven Beller, Herzl, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991, 161 pp.

Theodor Herzl: Briefe und Tagebucher, Briefe 1895–1898, Vol. 4, 1990, and Briefe 1898–1900, Vol. 5, 1991, Barbara Schäfer et al, eds., Frankfurt/M., Propyläen Verlag.

Jacques Kornberg, Theodar Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993, 272 pp., $24.95.

Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, £29.95.

Laura Zittrain-Eisenberg, My Enemy's Enemy: Lebanon in the Early Zionist Imagination, 1900–1948, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1994, 211 pp., $29.95.

Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al‐Hajj Amin al‐Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement, New York, Columbia University Press (Revised Edition), 1991.

Hava Eshkoli (Wagman), Silence: Mapai and the Holocaust — 1939–1942, Jerusalem, Yad Izhak Ben‐Zvi, 1994.

Yechiam Weitz, Aware but Helpless: Mapai and the Hobcaust — 1943–1945, Jerusalem, Yad Izhak Ben‐Zvi, 1994.

Jehuda Reinharz, Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993. xii, 498 pp., bibliography, index, illustrations, £32.50.

Dov Gavish, Land and Map: The Survey of Palestine, 1920–1948 (Hebrew), Jerusalem, Yad Izhak Ben‐Zvi, 1991, 297 pp.

David H. Shpiro, From Philanthropy to Activism: The Political Transformation of American Zionism in the Holocaust Years 1933–1945, New York, Pergamon Press, 1994, xxxvi + 208 pp.

Asher Susser, On Both Banks of the Jordan: A Political Biography of Wasfi al‐Tall, Frank Cass, London, 1994.

Samuel Heilman, Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra‐Orthodox Jewry. New York, Schocken Books, 1992, xxxi, 394 pp., $27.50.

Yosef Gorny, The State of Israel in Jewish Public Thought: The Quest for Collective Identity, New York, New York University Press, 1994, xii+279 pp.