Public rites and public wrongs: ritual aspects of diplomas in tenth‐ and eleventh‐century England

This paper investigates the symbolic nature of tenth‐ and eleventh‐century Anglo‐Saxon diplomas, arguing that they are important witnesses to public rituals of conveyance. Against this background we can more fully appreciate the significance of Æthelred II's diplomas of the 990s restoring lands to religious houses which had suffered at his hands. It is argued that these documents are witnesses to an important ‘penitential programme’ involving multiple public admissions of wrongdoing.     

Ethnic minorities and the eugenic promise: the Transylvanian Saxon experiment with national renewal in inter-war Romania

The history of inter-war European eugenic movements overwhelmingly focuses on projects proposed by nation-states, and in doing so frequently overlooks the possibility of ethnic minorities pursuing independent, or even competing, nation (re-)building agendas. This article explores how the German Transylvanian Saxon minority perceived, appropriated, and ultimately pursued the eugenic promise of a healthier, purer, nation in inter-war Romania. It explores the life and work of two of the discourse's leading figures, namely Heinrich Siegmund and Alfred Csallner, before turning to eugenic policy of awarding substantial ‘honorary gifts’ for supposedly eugenically valuable children pursued by Fritz Fabritius' Fascist Self-Help movement after 1933.

The analysis of Saxon eugenics offered here wants to be understood as both a case study and a stepping stone, an opportunity to compare and contrast it with those potentially advanced by other ethnic minorities, and to thereby rethink the relationship between eugenics and ethnic minorities more widely. Therefore, to augment historiography's perception of eugenics as a state-wielded tool of victimisation and assimilation with another perspective, namely that of how and why a biological understanding of identity was ideally suited to an ethnic minority striving towards empowerment and re-homogenisation – towards a ‘eugenic fortress’.     

Josephus' description of the Essenes illustrated by the Dead Sea Scrolls

The essay analyses the notion of ‘purity’ in the early writings of Walter Benjamin, focusing more specifically on three essays written around the crucial year 1921: ‘Critique of Violence’, ‘The Task of the Translator’, and ‘Goethe's Elective Affinities’. In these essays, ‘purity’ appears in the notions of ‘pure means’, ‘pure violence’, ‘pure language’, and, indirectly, the ‘expressionless’. The essay argues, on the one hand, that the ‘purity’ of these concepts is one and the same notion, and, on the other, that it is strongly indebted to, if not a by-product of, Kant's theorisation of the moral act. In order to make this claim, the essay analyses Benjamin's intense engagement with Kant's writings in the 1910s and early 1920s: ‘purity’ is a category strongly connoted within the philosophical tradition in which the young Benjamin moved his first steps, namely Kantian transcendental criticism. The essay argues that the notion of ‘purity’ in Benjamin, though deployed outside and often against Kant's theorisation and that of his followers, and moreover influenced by different and diverse philosophical suggestions, retains a strong Kantian tone, especially in reference to its moral and ethical aspects. Whereas Benjamin rejects Kant's model of cognition based on the ‘purity’ of the universal laws of reason, and thus also Kant's theorisation of purity as simply non empirical and a priori, he models nonetheless his politics and aesthetics around suggestions that arise directly from Kant's theorisation of the moral act and of the sublime, and uses a very Kantian vocabulary of negative determinations construed with the privatives-los and -frei (motiv-frei, zweck-los, gewalt-los, ausdrucks-los, intention-frei, etc). The essay explores thus the connections that link ‘pure means’, ‘pure language’ and ‘pure violence’ to one another and to the Kantian tradition.     

The apostle of internationalism: Stephen Duggan and the geopolitics of international education

Stephen Duggan, the educator and director of the Institute of International Education (IIE) between 1919 and 1946, has been described as an ‘apostle of internationalism’. Duggan's work as the director of a new international agency in the co-ordination of educational exchange sought to position the United States of America as the centre of international education. Duggan's writings during this period reflect the articulation of a geographical vocabulary which positioned the United States as a steward of an ‘international’ space of education despite Duggan's continual disparagement of cultural imperialism. This paper explores the geographies of Duggan's discursive rendering of American responsibilities for the security of ‘the international’, the potential for America to act as a beacon of educational exchanges, and as the ‘rational’ space to counteract threats to an imagined American educational hegemony. This outline was shot through with the anxiety of alternative internationalisms and the possibility for education to be used in opposition to the ‘virtuous’ international education proposed by Duggan and his contemporaries. An exploration of Duggan's writing provides a backdrop to the development of international educational agencies in the interwar period as critical technologies of an American geopolitical power.     

Advances and impasses in Fred Halliday's international historical sociology: a critical appraisal

How did Fred Halliday recast International Relations (IR) theory as international historical sociology? This article explores Halliday's intellectual trajectory across this terrain and suggests that the notion of ‘capitalist modernity’, derived from an amalgamation of neo‐Marxian and neo‐Weberian historical sociology, functioned as the strategic master‐category, which anchored his thought on International Relations throughout his work. This category was successively reconceived and complemented to generate four, partly contradictory, analytical frameworks at a lower level of abstraction: ‘global conjunctural analysis’; a neo‐Weberian ‘sociology of the inter‐state system’; ‘international society as homogeneity’ and ‘uneven and combined development’. The article identifies the advances and impasses in each intellectual move and exemplifies the limits of Halliday's approach in relation to his analysis of revolutions. It suggests that while Halliday was instrumental in reconnecting IR with historical sociology, providing crucial openings and correctives to mainstream IR theory, his theoretical emphases remained ultimately too syncretistic and additive to shift the debate on firmer ground. While this can be read as a failure, there is also evidence to understand this anti‐formalism as a deliberate intellectual choice. The article concludes by suggesting that the very term international historical sociology, predicated on a distinct modernist vocabulary, may itself preclude a full historicization of categories of analysis, restricting its use as a general framework for capturing the historicity and sociality of geopolitical practices across time and space.     

A Women's Health Issue?: Framing Post-Abortion Syndrome in the 1980s

In the 1980s, a subset of anti-abortion activists in the US claimed the existence of ‘post-abortion syndrome’ (PAS), a mental illness resulting from the trauma of abortion. Appropriating vocabulary from 1970s feminist health activism, these anti-abortion activists argued against the main goal of that movement, reproductive justice. Instead, conservative and essentialist PAS activists argued ‘aborted women’ needed to take control of their health by telling their stories of victimisation. Using interviews, congressional hearings and contemporary texts, this article uses PAS to discuss tensions over women's mental health amid the 1980s' backlash.     

Using an awakening narrative to leave behind a former national‐identity: an investigation of the conversion of national‐identity in Taiwan

National‐identity has become a civil religion and a major source of how people define themselves. Changing one's nationality thus is a salient event/social process in today's society; therefore, people's nationality conversion deserves more academic attention. Treating the convert as a social type and regarding people's self‐reports (or converts' accounts) as topics for analysis, this article examines the Taiwan case to illuminate how people tell their stories of converting nationality. ‘Converts’ usually employed an awakening narrative to leave their former national‐identity behind: For example, the ‘awakening’ plot is readily apparent, a huge contrast between a previous ‘wrong’ self and a current ‘correct’ self is mentioned, and the ‘awakening’ is delineated as an achievement. The symbolic awakening is harnessed as a strategic tool to create discontinuity autobiographically, to justify one's major change, to ensure that one's cognitive security remains intact, and to call for more awakenings. This article further notes that, since narrative itself is a practice, people always have ‘a self in the making’ which determines (and is determined by) how people (re)tell their life stories. Moreover, in Taiwan's case, we see that ‘awakeners’ usually admired early awakeners but blamed late awakeners (which constitutes an interesting triadic group relationship); people may also describe their experience of having multiple awakenings before the ‘grand’ awakening (‘Awakening’). © The author(s) 2015. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2015     

An Essay on the Context and Formation of Wilhelm von Humboldt's Linguistic Thought

SUMMARY

This essay combines the study of Humboldt's sources with a critique of the treatment of this subject in most studies of Humboldt and his linguistic thought. One crucial issue is the date of his early ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’, which is our first evidence of his mature thinking about language. This text is conventionally dated 1795, thus ruling out that Humboldt might be indebted to the anthropo-linguistic philosophy that he explored in Paris a few years later. But a host of facts make the date untenable and the debt unquestionable, including incontrovertible evidence that ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’ relies on Condillac's argument for the anti-idealist principle that the distinction between subject and object is the absolute precondition for self-awareness and reflection, and thus, by the same token, for the concept of Weltansicht. ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’ also shows that Humboldt was inspired to choose Condillac's and Destutt de Tracy's argument over that of Fichte for what Berkeley disapprovingly called ‘outness’. This analysis exemplifies the critique that is advanced in this essay.     

Saxon military revolution, 912–973?: myth and reality

For more than a generation Karl Leyser's influential thesis, which credited Henry I with undertaking a military revolution which made possible the Saxon dynasty's rule of Francia orientalis, has dominated the scholarly literature. According to Leyser, Henry radically reformed the Saxon military by building a large force of heavily armed mounted fighting men. These men provided the means necessary to assure Saxon domination. It is argued here, by contrast, that this Saxon military revolution is a myth and that the continental Saxons, as contrasted to those in England, saw the gradual development of a heavily armed mounted fighting force following their conquest by Charlemagne in 805. The real Saxon military revolution was Henry's creation of the agrarii milites and the building of frontier fortifications.     

ASSIMILATION THROUGH DOMESTIC TRANSFORMATION: SASKATCHEWAN'S MASONIC SCHOLARSHIP PROJECT, 1922–23*

The Masonic Scholarship Project reflected a growing post-World War I commitment to the assimilation of Canada's central and eastern European immigrants. By placing ‘Anglo-Saxon’ teachers in non-English schools, the project sought to extend Canadian influences into Saskatchewan's isolated immigrant blocs. The project's designers had a profound understanding of the way in which social order is embedded in the domestic environment and focused much of their attention on ensuring that the domestic realm was conducive to change. This paper examines the efforts made to transform the woman's role in the home and in the community. These efforts centred on providing the immigrants with an example of ‘suitable’ behaviour and values. The teachers were encouraged to visit all of the homes in their districts, and to use the school for community-focused events such as picnics, sewing circles, and literary societies. The transformation of the domestic realm was viewed as a critical step in immigrant assimilation. Le Projet Bousier Maconnique exprimait un engagement croissant après la Première Guerre Mondiale pour assimiler les immigrants canadiens de L'Europe centrale et de l'est. En mettant les professeurs ‘Anglo-Saxon’ dans des écoles á population non-anglo-saxonne le projet tendait á augmenter l'influence canadienne dans les quartiers isolés de la Saskatchewan. Les animateurs du projet avaient une vaste compréhension de la facon dont l'ordre social était intégré dans la cellule familiale et ils ont concentré leurs efforts afin de s'assurer qu'il conduisait au changement. Ce document s'intéresse aux efforts faits pour transformer le rôle de la femme au foyer et dans la communauté. Ces efforts étaient dirigés afin de donner aux immigrants un exemple ‘convenable’ de conduite et de valeurs. Les professeurs étaient invités á visiter tous les foyers de leur district et á se servir des écoles pour les évènements communautaires tels que les pique-niques, les ateliers de couture et les centres littéraires. La transformation de la cellule familiale était percue comme une étape cruciale á l'assimilation des immigrants.     

Hornell,Hasslöf and Boatbuilding Sequences

Hornell's publications on ‘native watercraft’ form a unique ‘library’ dealing with boatbuilding and boat use. His quest for the origins of water transport, on the other hand, was unsuccessful. In a clarification of the issues involved, Hasslöf criticized Hornell's use of the term ‘carvel’ and proposed ‘shell‐first’ and ‘skeleton‐first’ as best able to characterize boatbuilding traditions. Those terms subsequently gave way to ‘plank‐first’ and ‘frame‐first’. Certain north‐west European vessels, each built in both those sequences, were identified by Hasslöf as a link between ‘plank‐first’ and ‘frame‐first’. Such a transition would have been facilitated by the use of ‘framing‐first’, a building sequence used in north‐west Europe and in the eastern Mediterranean from the early 1st millennia AD.     

‘Fare di ogni famiglia italiana un fortilizio’: The League of Nations' economic sanctions and everyday life in Venice 1

Abstract

The imposition of punitive sanctions against Italy by the League of Nations in November 1935 in response to the invasion of Ethiopia, a fellow league member, provided the fascist regime with an opportunity to mobilize the civilian population into ‘resistance’ against the ‘economic siege’ and to promote its ideals of nationalism, imperialist expansion and autarchy. This article examines the way in which the fascist authorities in Venice, aided by a supportive local press, sought to use the sanctions and ‘sanctions resistance’ to engage Venetians – especially women – in the fascist project and explores the effect of the anti-sanctions resistance measures on Venetians' daily lives. Placing importance both upon the regime's intentions as well as Venetians' reception of the anti-sanctions rhetoric, and drawing upon Michel de Certeau's observations on The Practice of Everyday Life, the article argues that Venetians' reception of such propaganda was characterized above all by confusion and by a multiplicity of personal choices and reactions, spanning a range of possible responses from unequivocal support through passive acceptance or indifference to outright rejection or subversion of the sanctions resistance measures that sought to elicit consent for the fascist project.     

Archaeology,common rights and the origins of Anglo‐Saxon identity

It is generally accepted that rights over land, especially rights of pasture, played a formative role in establishing the identity of early Anglo‐Saxon ‘folk groups’, the predecessors of the middle Anglo‐Saxon kingdoms. This speculative paper sets early medieval and medieval common rights in the context of the archaeological longue durée of the period before 400 ad . It argues that ancient traditions of common governance, integral to Anglo‐Saxon identity, might have offered an attractive legitimacy to middle Anglo‐Saxon kingdom‐builders. While not seeking to establish any answers, the paper hopes to contribute to a wider research agenda.     

‘Barons’ Wars,under Other Names’: Feudalism,Royalism and the American Founding

SUMMARY

The Machiavellian Moment was largely responsible for establishing what remains the dominant understanding of American Revolutionary ideology. Patriots, on this account, were radical whigs; their great preoccupation was a terror of crown power and executive corruption. This essay proposes to test the whig reading of patriot political thought in a manner suggested by Professor Pocock's pioneering first book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. The whig tradition, as he taught us, located in the remote Saxon past an ‘ancient constitution’ of liberty, in which elected monarchs merely executed laws approved by their free subjects in a primeval parliament. This republican idyll, whigs believed, was then tragically interrupted by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which introduced feudal tenures and monarchical tyranny. Did patriot theorists accept this narrative? The answer, I shall argue, is strikingly mixed. By the early 1770s, appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’ had become less common in patriot writing. And by the end of the 1770s, many patriots had absorbed a completely different understanding of the feudal past—one pioneered by Royalist historians of the seventeenth century and then adapted by Scottish historians of the eighteenth. This shift reflects a broader transformation in patriot political and constitutional theory.     

Bede, Æthelberht,and the ‘examples of the Romans’ in early medieval England

In Book II, Chapter 5 of the Historia ecclesiastica, Bede writes that the Kentish king Æthelberht had, ‘with the advice of his counsellors, established legal enactments according to the examples of the Romans.’ This article argues that Bede’s formulation serves as a means of characterizing the increasingly interventionist role played by early Kentish kings in making the laws issued in their names.     

Day centres for homeless people: spaces of care or fear?

It is now widely argued that the contemporary city is becoming an increasingly hostile environment for homeless people. As basic street survival strategies are criminalized and public space ‘purified’ of those whose ‘spoiled’ identities threaten to ‘taint’ fellow members of the public, city authorities seem to have turned from a position of ‘malign neglect’ to more obviously punitive measures designed to contain and control homeless people. Less widely acknowledged but equally prevalent, however, is a parallel rise in the ‘urge to care’; evident in the growing number of night shelters, hostels and day centres emerging in recent years to provide shelter and sustenance to homeless people. This paper contributes to a small but growing body of work examining the development of the ‘spaces of care’ springing up in the interstices of a ‘revanchist’ city, by examining the development and internal dynamics of day centres for homeless people in the UK. Drawing upon a national survey of service providers, and a series of interviews and participant observations with day centre staff and users, the paper argues that day centres act as important sources of material resource and refuge for a highly stigmatized group. However, it warns against the romantic tendencies implicit in the notion of ‘spaces of care’, emphasizing that what for one person may operate as a ‘space of care’ might, for another, be experienced as a space of fear. The paper concludes by noting the ambiguity and fragility of such spaces within the wider ‘revanchist’ city.

Les centres d'hébergement temporaire pour itinérants: espaces de soins ou de peur?

On affirme couramment que la ville contemporaine est en train de devenir un milieu de plus en plus hostile pour les itinérants. Pendant que les stratégies ordinaires de survie dans la rue sont érigées en crime et l'espace public est «purifié» de ceux dont les identités «souillées» risquent d' «entacher» les autres membres du public, les autorités de la ville sont moins disposées à appuyer une position de «négligence pernicieuse» que des mesures nettement plus punitives conçues pour contenir et contrôler les itinérants. Ce qui est moins reconnu mais aussi courant est la progression simultanée du «désir de donner des soins» que permet de témoigner la croissance depuis quelques années de foyers d'hébergement, de gîtes, et de centre d'hébergement temporaire qui offre un toit et des moyens de subsistance aux itinérants. Cet article contribue à enrichir le corpus d'une ampleur limitée mais grandissante sur l'émergence d' «espaces de soins» dans les interstices de la ville «revancharde» par l'examen du développement et les dynamiques internes de centres d'hébergement temporaire pour itinérants au Royaume-Uni. Cet article a recours à un sondage national sur les fournisseurs de services et à un éventail d'entrevues et d'observations participatives auprès d'employés et d'usagers des centres d'hébergement temporaire. Il y est proposé que ces centres servent de lieu de distribution de ressources matérielles et de refuge pour un ensemble de personnes très défavorisées. L'article prend toutefois ses distances par rapport au penchant romantique implicite dans l'idée d' «espaces de soins», et souligne que les processus à l'?uvre peuvent être le reflet d'un «espace de soins» pour une personne ou celui d'une expérience d'un «espace de peur» pour une autre. Cet article termine par le constat qu'à l'échelle de la grande ville «revancharde», ces espaces demeurent ambigus et fragiles.

Centros diurnos para la gente sin techo: ¿lugares de asistencia o de miedo?

Hoy en día se reconoce que la ciudad contemporánea representa un lugar cada vez más hostil para la gente sin techo. A la vez que se criminalizan las estrategias básicas de sobrevivencia en la calle y se ‘purifican’ los espacios públicos, sacando a personas cuyas identidades ‘arruinadas’ amenazan con ‘contaminar’ a otros miembros del público, las autoridades cívicas parecen haber dejado su postura de ‘negligencia maligna’ a favor de medidas más punitivas, concebidas para contener y controlar a la gente sin techo. Menos reconocido, pero no menos corriente, es el aumento paralelo del ‘impulso a asistir’, evidente en el número cada vez mayor de refugios nocturnos, hogares y centros diurnos que han surgido en recientes años donde les dan alojamiento y alimento a los sin techo. Este papel contribuye a un conjunto de trabajo que examina el desarrollo de ‘espacios de asistencia’ que surgen en los intersticios de una ciudad ‘revanchista’, por medio de un estudio del desarrollo y la dinámica interna de los centros diurnos para los sin techo en el Reino Unido. Haciendo uso de un estudio nacional de las organizaciones que proporcionan servicios para los sin techo, y de una serie de entrevistas con funcionarios y usuarios de los centros diurnos, el papel sugiere que los centros diurnos sirven como fuentes importantes de recursos materiales y de refugio para un grupo muy estigmatizado. Sin embargo, argumenta en contra de las tendencias románticas que son implícitas en la noción de ‘espacios de asistencia’ y enfatiza que lo que puede servir como un ‘espacio de asistencia’ para una persona puede ser experimentado como una espacio de miedo por otra persona. El papel concluye por notar la naturaleza ambigua y frágil de estos espacios dentro de la ciudad ‘revanchista’ más amplia.