The Shifting Ideological Currents of the Transatlantic Puritan Community in the Early Seventeenth Century

This article explores the ideological transfigurations which appeared when English Puritans relocated to New England. It does so by examining particular communications which took place between the Puritans of the “Great Migration” of the 1630s and their erstwhile associates in “Old” England. Though both sets of Puritans had seemingly much in common when they were ideological allies back in Old England, not least being an antipathy towards the Laudian ecclesiastical establishment of the late 1620s and 1630s, the movement to the colonial periphery of New England exposed previously unnoticed, or, at least, overlooked, ideological divisions. This article explicates one significant ideological issue upon which these Old and New England Puritans were divided: that of the appropriate relationship between the civil and ecclesiastical spheres of the polity.     

Politics and Eschatology: Reassessing the Appeal of the “Jewish Indian” Theory in England and New England in the 1650s

This article examines the “Jewish Indian” theory — which claimed that American Indians were the ten lost tribes of Israel — in 1650s England and New England. The theory found support in England while failing in New England. This difference in reception can be explained by considering its ecclesiological, political, and eschatological implications. Biblical commentators in both England and New England held to a form of “Judeo‐Centric” eschatology, which looked for a sudden, miraculous conversion of the Jews and their eventual superiority to Gentile believers. Such beliefs undermined crucial elements of New England ecclesiology when applied to Native Americans. Conversely, the New England Company used the theory in its publications as a fund‐raising tool in England. These publications impacted upon debates on Jewish readmission to England in the mid‐1650s, with New England missionary models suggested as a way of evangelising Jews. This article therefore argues for the importance of understanding eschatological beliefs in local contexts, while demonstrating the way in which such beliefs can be maintained and reoriented in the face of apparent disconfirmation.     

The Common Good,Pluralism and the Small Church

Abstract

This paper discusses the understanding of “Common Good” that has been used by the Church of England, especially over the last five years. It suggests that its implicit universalism and identification of Christian morality with the ethical norms for the nation is premised on an understanding of the role of the Church which is no longer realistic. After a brief discussion of the latest statistics for church attendance and a comparison with other national churches in Northern Europe, I suggest that the Church of England is a “small church” and even that Christians constitute a religious minority. This means that the pursuit of the “Common Good” as defined by the church may simply be a piece of nostalgic longing for the time of the “big church.” The recent exclusions for the churches on same-sex marriage legislation indicate that the gap between most of the churches and the wider society. Rather than defining the common good, I suggest that in a pluralist society the churches which recognize their limited role will need to build alliances and common causes with other groups, both religious and secular.     

« Techno-Esthétique » de L’Économie Smithienne Valeur et Fonctionnalité des Objets dans L’Angleterre des Lumières

From The Theory of Moral Sentiments to his essay on The Nature of that Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts, Adam Smith offered a vision of aesthetics combining beauty and utility. An echo of exchange value as the “ability to buy other goods” — the “power” to organize and achieve one’s goals — his definition of beauty was premised on the “aptness” of things, that is, the fact that they were also useful. Sustained by the commodification of products, a kind of “techno-aesthetics” thus emerged in England in the 18^th century, one that implied designing, adapting, reducing and showcasing the means of production.     

Performing curiosity: re-viewing women’s domestic embroidery in seventeenth-century England

For many in seventeenth-century England, curiosity became an intellectual and physical means of exploring natural and artificial wonders and categorising tangible and intangible things. For well-off Englishwomen, “curious work” had a more specific meaning. It described a specific type of pictorial, decorative embroidery, usually learnt in school and practised in the home, possessing moral agency and functioning as an indicator of status and wealth. Although recognised for their exuberant use of extravagant materials, these embroideries have proved challenging to appreciate and understand. This paper re-situates these “curious works”, placing them within the changing concept and practice of curiosity in early modern England by using an object-based evidence approach combined with an historical archaeology methodology. Viewing these artefacts through the “lens of curiosity” provides a new perspective on these embroideries as the outcome of the performance of the feminine curiosity and thus the equivalent to the masculine project of curiosity.     

Rules for Cultural Radicals

Abstract: This article explores the various forms of “social skill”, what we call “rules for cultural radicals”, that the Amber Film and Photography Collective (and primarily its founder and leading visionary, Murray Martin) used to create and sustain an egalitarian arts organization and oppositional cultural movement in the Northeast of England. The collective represented a radical challenge to the world of British filmmaking, featuring innovative practices of cultural work, non‐commodified forms of cultural economy and a commitment to a democratic culture. These “rules” constituted innovative forms of strategic action—visionary leadership, improvisation, risk taking, brokerage—that helped create a durable collective identity and networks of solidarity. We explore the extent to which Amber's “rules” are prefigurative of contemporary forms of cultural activism and radical artistic practice.     

Shelley’s Jingling Food for Oblivion: Hybridizing High and Low Styles and Forms

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that there was a sense in which Shelley actively approved of “jingling verse.” His poetic energy was sustained by a substratum of popular and tuneful versifying, such as impromptus, bouts-rimés, anagrams, enigmas, ballads, Mother Goose rhymes, proverbs, hymns, and drinking songs. He hybridizes the registers and meters of these humble forms with elevated, sublime, and erudite ones. This hybridization is, arguably, connected to the characteristic coexistence of the direct and clear with the knotty and puzzling in his poetry. After a brief account of Shelley’s submerged youthful reading, noting in passing that Shelley’s lyrics proved amenable during the early twentieth century to recycling as Shelleyesque jingles, the essay illustrates its thesis from unfamiliar fragments in Shelley’s notebooks, such as the late lyric fragment “Time is flying,” and from more familiar matter such as “Dirge for the Year,” “Mont Blanc,” “The Cloud,” “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci,” “The Sensitive Plant,” “Song: to the Men of England,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and Peter Bell the Third.     

Recognizing and Moving on from a Failed Paradigm: The Case of Agricultural Landscapes in Anglo-Saxon England c. AD 400–800

A central preoccupation for archaeologists is how and why material culture changes. One of the most intractable examples of this problem can be found between AD 400 and 800 in the enigmatic transformation of sub-Roman into Anglo-Saxon England. That example lies at the heart of this review, explored through the case of the agricultural economy. Although the ideas critically examined below relate specifically to early medieval England, they represent themes of universal interest: the role of migration in the transformation of material culture, politics, and economy in a post-imperial world, the significance of “core” and “periphery” in evolving polities, ethnogenesis as a strategy in kingdom building, property rights as a lens for investigating cultural change, and the relationship between hierarchical political structures and collective forms of governance. The first part of my argument proposes a structured response to paradigmatic stalemate by identifying and testing each underlying assumption, premise, and interpretative framework. The recognition of any fallacies, false premises, and flawed arguments might assist with an overall evaluation of the continuing utility of a discourse—whether it has life in it yet, or should be set aside. In either case, the recognition of its structure should enable arguments to be developed that do not lead into a disciplinary cul-de-sac, prevented by the orthodoxy from exploring new avenues for research. In the second part of the review, I deliberately adopt a starting point outside the limits of the current discourse. Freed from the confines of the conventional consensus, I experiment with an alternative “bottom-up” approach to change in early medieval England that contrasts with conventional “top-down” arguments. I focus in particular on how rights over agricultural property—especially collective rights—and the forms of governance implied by them may assist in illuminating the roles of tradition and transformation in effecting cultural change.     

5. WHAT DO MEDIEVAL BUILDINGS MEAN?

The aim of this article is to review and reconsider what scholars, including historians, archaeologists, and those in other disciplines, are trying to get at when they attempt a “social interpretation” of English late medieval domestic buildings. I focus on the definition and interpretation of “meaning,” and I examine critically a series of concepts routinely deployed in social interpretations in the past, including my own work, such as type, zeitgeist, and intention. I argue that some of these concepts and interpretive moves are problematic and rather than aiding in our understanding, raise further questions in their turn about how buildings were lived in and understood by their medieval inhabitants. I argue for a shift in language and jargon away from “planning” and “meaning” to that of “lived experience”. I explore such a possible shift with reference to different understandings of and debates over the late medieval castle of Bodiam in southeastern England. Such a shift from meaning to lived experience raises fresh challenges for the development and empirical evaluation of interdisciplinary research on medieval buildings, but it also raises fresh possibilities and insights.     

Jefferson's Legacy to the Supreme Court: Freedom of Religion

Except for Rhode Island, each of the thirteen American colonies created some form of established religion. The English venturists who undertook settlements in New England and Virginia simply assumed that religion would be inextricably tied to their colonial enterprises. ¹ The 1606 charter creating the Virginia colony required that all ministers preach Christianity that followed the “doctrine, rights, and religion now professed and established within the realme of England”—in other words, the Church of England. ² To bolster the struggling Jamestown settlement, in 1610–11, Sir Thomas Dale promulgated “Articles, Lawes, and Orders, Divine, Politic, and Martiall for the Colony in Virginia.” Clergymen were to read “Dale's Laws,” as they were labeled, to assemblies every Sabbath. The thirty‐seven rules included eight that specifically referred to God and prohibited impiety, blasphemy, sacrilege, and irreverence toward preachers or ministers. The sixth law was particularly notable for its strict religious requirements and harsh penalties for violations: “Every man and woman duly twice a day … shall … repair unto the Church to divine service upon pain of losing his or her days allowance for the first omission, for the second to be whipped, and for the third to be condemned to the Gallies for six months. Likewise no man or woman shall dare to violate or break the Sabbath by any gaming … but duly sanctify and observe the same, both himself and his family, by preparing themselves at home with private prayer, that they may be better fitted for the public according to the commandments of God and the orders of our Church. …” ³ Colonists faced the death penalty after the third offense of missing morning and afternoon Sunday devotional services.     

Assemblages of State Power: Topological Shifts in the Organization of Government and Politics

Abstract: Multi‐scalar or multi‐site power relations offer two contrasting ways of understanding the shifting geography of state power. In this paper, we argue for a different starting point, one that favours a topological understanding of state spatiality over more conventional topographical accounts. In contrast to a vertical or horizontal imagery of the geography of state power, what states possess, we suggest, is reach, not height. In doing so, we draw from Sassen (2006 , Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton University Press) a vocabulary capable of portraying the renegotiation of powers that has taken place between central government in the UK and one of its key city regions, the South East of England; one that highlights an assemblage of political actors, some public, some private, where negotiations take place between elements of central and local actors “lodged” within the region, not acting “above”, “below” or “alongside” it. The articulation of political demands in such a context has less to do with “jumping scale” or formalizing extensive network connections and more to do with the ability to reach directly into a “centralized” politics where proximity and reach play across one another in particular ways.     

Housing Regeneration and the Private Finance Initiative in England: Unstitching the Neoliberal Urban Straitjacket

Abstract: This paper responds to recent debates in human geography about ideal‐type versus contingent neoliberalism, or what Gibson‐Graham conceptualises as “strong” vs “weak” theory, by offering some reflections from an in‐depth study of the private finance initiative (PFI) in England. It first introduces the history and purpose of the PFI as the Labour government's flagship public–private partnership (PPP) approach to public infrastructure modernisation. It then critically analyses its use in inner‐city regeneration through a case study of a PFI housing scheme in the northern English city of Leeds. The paper argues that, when seen through the lens of “strong theory”, a PFI appears to be a consciously designed “neoliberal straitjacket” intended to lock‐in gentrification‐based regeneration at the neighbourhood level, guarantee long‐term profits to (finance) capital, and create powerful privatising and marketising pressures across the local public sphere. However, it is equally possible to construct a preliminary “weak theory” of the PFI that unhides its inherent contradictions and shows how everyday activism by local community actors can successfully influence and contest how neoliberalism is rolled out on the ground.     

‘A sense of where you belong in the world’: national belonging,ontological security and the status of the ethnic majority in England

ABSTRACT. The significance of national forms of imagination and organisation has been increasingly questioned in an era of rapid globalisation. While theoretically stimulating, those who stress the importance of global mobility and sociability sometimes overlook what well‐established, “thick” attachments to the nation offer to disparate individuals, notably in terms of anchoring subjectivity. This first part of this paper explores how debates around belonging in England continue to define certain “ethnic” groups as more or less national, because they embody certain traits, practices or norms. It is then suggested that those who claim, and are treated as if, they belong “without question” may be offered a key sense of material and ontological security that is underpinned through routine practices, symbolic forms and institutional arrangements. The second section looks to evidence this argument by exploring how challenges to this ontological order, which focus on the agency of “perceived” others in relation to everyday spaces, practices and material objects, are debated and resisted.     

福蒂斯丘与英法封建君主制比较

福蒂斯丘爵士是15世纪英国的法学家和政治理论家,他最早研究了中世纪末英国的君主制类型及其与其他君主制的区别。他的特殊经历使其首次提出英国实行的是"政治且王室的统治",以区别于法国的"王室的统治"。上述两种类型的封建君主制在形成过程和统治方式上大相径庭,统治结果也截然分明,两者的优劣判若两途。福蒂斯丘有关"政治且王室的统治"的理论不仅揭示了中世纪末英国封建君主制的类型,对宪政理论的发展也具有奠基意义。     

SOME HISTORICAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE “DOWN EAST” ROUTE

For over three centuries, explorers and privateers, fishermen and planters, job seekers and tourists have plied the “Down East” route–bearing witness to the close connection between New England and Atlantic Canada. Today the traditional “good neighborliness” is threatened by a series of complex issues: American ownership of recreational land, environmental problems and jurisdictional disputes. This article seeks to place these present controversies in perspective by a historical overview of some key factors which have contributed to the interdependence of the two regions.     

福蒂斯丘与英法封建君主制比较

福蒂斯丘爵士是15世纪英国的法学家和政治理论家,他最早研究了中世纪末英国的君主制类型及其与其他君主制的区别。他的特殊经历使其首次提出英国实行的是"政治且王室的统治",以区别于法国的"王室的统治"。上述两种类型的封建君主制在形成过程和统治方式上大相径庭,统治结果也截然分明,两者的优劣判若两途。福蒂斯丘有关"政治且王室的统治"的理论不仅揭示了中世纪末英国封建君主制的类型,对宪政理论的发展也具有奠基意义。     

The journey as a transcultural experience for international students

An international two-year Erasmus Mundus MA, Transcultural European Outdoor Studies (TEOS), uses the journey as a central metaphorical concept, the “peregrinatio academica”, and experiential pedagogy. Students study human nature interactions through the lens of outdoor education and recreation while travelling for a semester at a time in three European countries: England, Norway and Germany. We argue that the transcultural concept is facilitated by the diverse nationalities of the student cohort and the concept and experience of the journey. Empirical evidence from student feedback, course discussions, and staff reflections is used to explore the ways in which the programme elucidates ideas of expert and Eurocentric knowledge of landscape and learning by valuing individual knowledge constructions and new research. Simultaneously, we argue that the typical European “gaze” on the “other” somehow is reversed as “others” gaze at European cultures, and, to some degree, contribute to destabilizing culturally taken-for-granted knowledge. This offers new opportunities for a more nuanced transcultural exploration of human nature interactions in diverse landscapes and cultures. We conclude that the knowledge and skills developed by this programme supports the development of “transculturalized” students with the enhanced capacity to shift between and discuss diverse positions and ways of viewing and knowing.     

Aristotelian Ethics and Luke 15:11–32 in Early Modern England

The discourse surrounding Luke 15:11–32 — commonly titled “the parable of the prodigal son” — in early modern England is a major site of convergence for Aristotelian and Christian ethics. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the perceived role of “prodigality” (in the sense of excessive expenditure) in the parable of the prodigal son became deeply bound up with Aristotelian ethics; the parable's evolving title and its increasingly prominent role in casus summarii both contributed to and were affected by these changes. Despite the importance of both Aristotelian ethics and the parable of the prodigal son to early modern culture, scant research exists on the vital intersection between the two. By tracing the evolution of biblical paratexts, this article explicates how the parable gained its title. It then explores how the shared use of ?σωτ?α (prodigality) in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Luke 15:13 affected the interpretation of Luke 15:11–32 in early modern England, and the repercussions this had for early modern philosophy and theology. It concludes that Aristotelian ethics were hugely influential in both the early modern interpretation of Luke 15:11–32 and the concept of “prodigality” that the parable was so often used to explore.     

SCHOLARSHIP AND PERIODIZATION

Davis argues that the familiar periodization dividing European history into medieval and modern phases disguises a claim to power as a historical fact. It justifies slavery and subjugation by projecting them onto the “feudal” Middle Ages and non‐European present, while hiding forms of slavery and subjugation practiced by “secular” modernity. Periodization thus furnishes one of the most durable conceptual foundations for the usurpation of liberty and the abuse of power. In part I, devoted to “feudalism,” Davis traces the legal, political, and colonial struggles behind the development of the concept of “feudal law” in early modern France and England and unravels just how that concept hides colonial oppression while justifying European sovereignty. In part II, devoted to “secularization,” she demonstrates the failure of twentieth‐century critics of “secularization” like Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg, and Reinhart Koselleck to break out of the limits imposed by the medieval/modern periodization. Part II concludes with a look at conceptual alternatives in the writings of Amitav Ghosh and the Venerable Bede. Three limitations of this book are worth mentioning. It traces the political history hidden by the concept of “feudalism,” but does not trace the political history hidden by the concept of “religion.” It offers no answer to the question of how to break the link between scholarship and politics without ending up in a logical impasse or reinforcing the link. It does not address the possibility that answering this question may require breaking with the terms of professional historical inquiry. Perhaps the question could be answered in terms like those that led Wittgenstein to characterize his Philosophical Investigations as remarks on the natural history of human beings.     

Imaginary Success?—The Contentious Ascendance of Creativity

This paper posits that a set of “creative industries” centred around cultural practice have played a key role within a dominant “economic imaginary” in recent years. The success and stability of this role is considered, and a coherent position regarding the nature of creativity is outlined. Examination of the “evidence” gathering projects used to bulwark this position, however, reveals how the data which emerge from such projects may no longer appropriately serve to support the position the creative industries have come to occupy within the dominant imaginary. It is argued that this imaginary persists in providing a coherent framework for understanding and for action, however, regardless of the contradictions it contains. A tangible example of this “imaginary success” is briefly considered within the UK context, via an examination of developments around the staging of the European Capital of Culture programme in Liverpool, England in 2008. In this case, it is also argued that apparent contradictions are successfully concealed by dominant positions regarding culture and creativity. In conclusion, some explanations for this state of affairs are considered, and it is argued that the increased attention being paid to cultural creativity may render the continued concealment of these contradictions untenable.