Curious Paradoxes: James Anthony Froude's View of the Bible

James Anthony Froude disapproved of the apologetic methods used by English Protestants in defending Christianity because he felt they did not answer the real questions. Nevertheless, he was disquieted by the rise of religious infidelity during the nineteenth century. Froude believed that heterodox clergymen deserved a hearing, but he also believed they had to be answered. He feared that simply using legal means to silence the doubters would strengthen infidel opinion, and drive young inquirers toward Rome or atheism. At a minimum, Froude himself wanted to believe the gospel history. While he could not believe much that was said in its defence, he was unhappy with much that was said against it. Froude suggested that the synoptic gospels might have been based on an early, authentic biography of Christ. He preferred this solution to assuming that the early church had been motivated by “passion or fraud or cowardice” in creating a fiction.     

A biography of James Ramsay Hunt (1874-1937)

James Ramsay Hunt (1874-1937) was a pre-eminent twentieth-century American neurologist. The name of Ramsay Hunt is known today because several neurological disorders bear his name, including the herpetic geniculate ganglion syndrome and a form of ataxia and myoclonus. Despite his importance in the field of neurology, few biographical details have been recorded about Hunt's life. One of the authors of this report recently located Hunt's daughter. This biographical sketch was based on interviews conducted with her and review of documents in her possession, including letters written by Hunt. Details are depicted about Hunt's family background and childhood, medical education and early professional development, courtship and marriage, wartime experiences, family and social life, daily routine and professional development, as well as illness and death.     

James Fitzjames Stephen,John Stuart Mill,and the Victorian Theory of Toleration

Due to his famous conflict with John Stuart Mill, James Fitzjames Stephen is often assumed to have been an opponent of toleration and intellectual freedom and a defender of authoritarian or reactionary principles. These assumptions are misleading. Stephen was, and was known in his time to have been, a champion of toleration. This essay provides a comprehensive overview of his writing on these themes, drawing from a wider array of texts than is usually considered in the study of the Stephen-Mill controversy. Contrary to popular belief, Stephen had a deep and multi-faceted argument in favor of toleration. As a critic of contending theories of toleration and freedom of discussion (especially Mill’s), Stephen was concerned to defeat what he saw as the resurgence of a priori principles in Victorian political philosophy and to combat the expansion of a proper notion of toleration to include a cluster of beliefs and attitudes of which he disapproved. In his approach to these issues Stephen was, arguably, as representative of Victorian thinking as the author of On Liberty.     

Gorgobad: reflections on a German-Australian family biography

This article continues the focus on German-Australian militarised modernities through the Second World War to the present day. It draws on the author’s own family history, beginning with the memories evoked by her grandparents’ house in northern Sydney, built between 1950 and 1953. Named ‘Gorgobad’, Persian for ‘place of the wolves’, it resonates with a family history that involves German colonial investments in post-First World War Iran, the global geopolitical upheavals of the Second World War, which drew her family into separate histories of refuge, British imprisonment and deportation and, finally, building a new home in Australia. The essay asks pertinent questions about the entanglement of hegemonic racialised orders in Europe with the very racialised orders of the grounds on which Gorgobad was built.     

Visual and aural intellectual histories: an introduction

ABSTRACT

If the subject matter of intellectual history is the study of past thoughts, the intellectual history of the visual arts and music may be characterised as the study of past thoughts as they were expressed visually and aurally. Yet this is not always how an intellectual history of art and music has been practiced. More attention is often paid to verbal texts about art or music, rather than to the visual or the aural per se. If we accept that ideas can have visual and aural, as much as verbal form, then the histories of art and music are significant repositories of thoughts of individuals and networks of individuals (creative artists, patrons, institutions) within a given culture and period. But the ways in which those thoughts are articulated as aural or visual “texts”, and the ways in which they can be accessed by those who seek to understand them, will be specific to each art form, and represent a distinctive kind of intellectual activity in each field.     

The biography of Ignatios the Deacon: a reassessment of the evidence

Abstract

The recently published critical editions of three of Ignatios the Deacon's works, his correspondence and two of his hagiographical texts, may have enhanced our familiarity with an important scholarly figure, but have apparently not established a consensus as regards his educational curriculum and ecclesiastical career. This is not surprising in view of the lack of explicit information on crucial periods of his life and the wide diversity of the literature associated with his name. However, the discussion has become all the more confused as some of Ign.'s autobiographical references have been called into question (to my mind, not reasonably) or not taken into account in their entirety. Setting aside the divergences between the biography sketched by Cyril Mango and that by myself, which mainly concern the tentative period of Ign.'s episcopate and the period he became skevophylax, a very different interpretation of Ign.'s biographical data has been offered by Georgios Makris, the editor of the Life of St. Gregory the Decapolite. And a more recent reconsideration of his biography, presented in the Berliner Prosopographie der mittelalterlichen Zeit and published in full length by Thomas Pratsch in this journal, without radically disputing the basic chronological framework of Ign.'s lifetime as proposed by Mango, has tried to rearrange the scattered pieces of his puzzling career. Several hypotheses regarding Ign.'s ecclesiastical career were also put forward by Michel Kaplan in his inquiry into Ign.'s letters dateable to his period as metropolitan of Nicaea. Finally, in his posthumously published History of Byzantine Literature, Alexander Kazhdan, demonstrating excessive skepticism, distinguished the author of the anonymously preserved correspondence from Ignatios the Deacon, as well as denied him the composition of other works that have been assigned to him. The purpose of the present note is to re-assess the biographical evidence provided in Ign.'s own work.