Preaching laughter in the thirteenth century: the exempla of Arnold of Liège (d. c.1308) and his Dominican milieu

Historians of medieval laughter have, over the past few decades, imagined the thirteenth century as a period of Christian rapprochement with laughter and humour. Whereas in the twelfth century and before, laughter was largely associated – in art, exegesis, narrative and in preaching – with diabolism and damnation, the consensus is that in the 1200s and beyond Christian culture began deploying and preaching laughter as a positive spiritual expression and strategy. Above all, scholars have identified this shift with the thought and practice of the Dominican Order. This paper enriches this narrative by analysing the neglected exempla collection of the Dominican preacher Arnold of Liège (d. c.1308). Reading Arnold's collection – which harshly forbids laughter – in relief to a number of similar compilations made by Dominicans in the same period, offers an image of how the significance of laughter had become pluralised in mendicant theology by 1300, and of how old ideas of a radically negative laughter persisted in haunting the pulpits and street corners of the thirteenth century.     

The Safavid-Qizilbash Ecumene and the Formation of the Qizilbash-Alevi Community in the Ottoman Empire,c. 1500–c. 1700

Alevis, the largest religious minority of Turkey, also living in Europe and the Balkans, are distinguished from both Sunnis and Shi?ites by their latitudinarian attitude toward Islamic Law. Conceptualizing this feature as “heterodoxy,” earlier Turkish scholarship sought the roots of Alevi religiosity in Turkish traditions which traced back to Central Asia, on the one hand, and in medieval Anatolian Sufi orders such as the Yasawi, Bektashi, Qalandari, and Wafa?i, on the other. A new line of scholarship has critiqued the earlier conceptualization of Alevis as “heterodox” as well as the assumption of Central Asian connections. In the meantime, the new scholarship too has focused on medieval Anatolian Sufi orders, especially the Bektashi and Wafa?i, as the fountainhead of Alevi tradition. Critically engaging with both scholarships, this paper argues that it was the Safavid-Qizilbash movement in Anatolia, Azerbaijan, and Iran rather than medieval Sufi orders, that gave birth to Alevi religiosity.     

中世纪西欧三个等级的观念初探

在中世纪西欧,关于三个等级的观念是逐渐地形成的。开始时,出现了教会人士高于俗人的观念;以后,随着社会对战争,尤其是对异教的战争的需要的增加,武人的地位在俗人中突出起来,于是又出现了武人高于其他俗人的观念。这样,就最终形成了整个社会从高到低,依次由教会人士、武人和其他俗人这样三个等级构成的社会等级观念和社会分工观念。     

卢以纬《语助》“俗语”考论

本文分为上下两篇：上篇对《语助》中所用的“俗语”资料进行逐条考证,下篇则从汉语史和汉语言学史的角度对《语助》使用“俗语”的情况进行分析评论。     

Craven and the Elizabethan Settlement: Diverging Confessional Identities, 1580–1603*

During the second half of Elizabeth's reign the imposition of the Settlement and its compliance within the Craven region of the West Riding of Yorkshire gave rise to increasingly divergent religious identities. Initially, recusant numbers increased despite the introduction of more draconian measures to combat Catholicism after 1580. Catholicism became clandestine. Craven's location next to conservative Lancashire facilitated the movement of itinerant priests to serve the separate Catholic community of interrelated lower gentry and their households. Concurrently evangelical clerics, planted to encourage the acceptance of the Settlement, opposed the hierarchical Elizabethan Church, objecting to its retention of clerical dress and sacramental rituals. This Puritan dissent gave rise to nonconformity and a more radical interpretation of the Reformed Church of England. However, by 1603 the majority in Craven had conformed to the Settlement, but continuing Protestant dissent would culminate in sectarianism in the next century.     

Conjuring Boundaries: Inferring Past Identities from Religious Artifacts

A detailed examination of commonalities between folk religion beliefs and practices of African American and European American ethnic groups raises intriguing issues. Interpretations concerning the ethnic group association of conjuration artifacts uncovered at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sites in the mid-Atlantic region must be based on a clearer articulation of the interplay of three issues: the general dynamics of ethnic group boundedness; how material culture communicates such ethnic identities; and how conjuration practices support or subvert ethnic group boundaries. A variety of protective and malevolent conjuration practices likely functioned in different ways in intergroup and intragroup settings.     

稻熟·鱼肥·美酒飘香——奇妙的水族端节

水族端节习俗中,农耕稻作文化的特征,节日的时间、庆典活动内容等,都反映水族同胞丰富多彩的民族文化。     

Master Wiger of Utrecht's Liber exemplorum sub titulis redactorum

This article introduces the Liber exemplorum sub titulis redactorum of Master Wiger, provost of St Peter's Collegiate Church, Utrecht (afterwards, a convert to the Franciscan Order, fl. 1209–38). Wiger's collection, which was compiled at some point between c.1205 and 1228, is one of the earliest surviving representations of the genre of ‘example book’. It stands in a far more direct literary relationship with the encyclopaedic compendia produced after c.1250 than with the works of Wiger's contemporaries – authors such as James of Vitry, Caesarius of Heisterbach, Odo of Cheriton and the compiler of the anonymous Cistercian collection recently edited under the title Collectaneum exemplorum et visionum Clarevallense. This is established by an examination of the principles of structure and design in Master Wiger's text, and a comparison of his approach to the emerging problem of textual ‘searchability’ with systems employed by contemporary authors.     

The contested interpretation of heritage landscapes in northern Ireland

Abstract

Because the nature of society is both negotiated and contested, cultural artefacts, including heritage landscapes, will be invested with differing and conflicting meanings by various social groups. This is but one aspect of what might be termed the dissonance of heritage. The present discussion is framed within the context of the argument that relics of the past are a resource to be selectively exploited in accordance with contemporary political and cultural demands. The paper uses the example of Ulster's Folk and Transport Museum to examine these issues. It concludes that while consumers do appreciate the cultural complexity of the Museum's role as one medium of communication of identity in a contested society, the institution's effectiveness in this regard is undermined by the middle‐class bias of those consumers.     

Struggles for the Folk. Politics of Culture in Czechoslovak Ethnography, 1940s–1950s

Focusing on politics of culture in early socialist era, this article explores struggles for imposing particular visions of “folk” during the revolutionary zeal characterizing the post-1948 period's development in the discipline of Czechoslovak ethnography. It examines the self-proclaimed turn from previous ethnographic traditions, accused of bourgeois nationalism, to socialist orientation towards studying “true folk”. By tracing struggles around the re-conceptualization of constitutive criteria and boundaries defining the essential object of ethnographic inquiry, the socialist ethnographers readjusted to the changes by focusing on more “progressive” traditions and shifted towards the “working-class” seen as possessing revolutionary spirit and the true authentic essence of the nation. The article argues that the new ethnographic wave ultimately re-inscribed the essentialist categories they virtually combatted by embedding them within the same structural framework rooted in the national order of things.     

Between Leibniz and Kant: The Political Thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt

Abstract

In his early text, The Limits of State Action, Wilhelm von Humboldt raises the Kantian question of the permissibility and legitimate extent of political and juridical coercion, as his contribution to a debate amongst Kantians launched by the publication in 1785 of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In arguing for a minimal state, concerned exclusively with internal and external security of its members but not at all with their felicity, Humboldt inflects Kantian political thought in the direction of a liberal laissez-faire state, in marked contrast to the strong interventionism that his fellow-Kantian Fichte derived from similar Kantian grounds. The article argues that the underlying conception of the individual retained by Humboldt has markedly Leibnizian traits, namely the notion of freedom as the spontaneous unfolding of a highly personal, monadic developmental trajectory toward perfection, which ought not to be impeded or homogenized by unnecessary state intervention. Humboldt thus represents not only a ‘rightist’ libertarian reading of Kant, but a particular appropriation of significant Leibnizian themes. His combination of these sources is compared with that of other contemporary theorists like Hufeland and Fichte.     

丁景唐与民歌社

丁英与民歌社,关系到20世纪40年代沪上一段重要的民间文学学术史。刘锡诚真正关注到了丁景唐作为民间文艺学家的成就,但他关于丁景唐与民歌社的有关论述尚存在一定的问题,有待澄清。通过全面的资料爬梳,考察民歌社的名称、成立、组创者、启事、地位,即可在一定程度上还原"丁英与民歌社"这段学术史。     

关于元杂剧《灰阑记》的来源问题

《灰阑记》引起了世界的关注,国内有学论及了它的来源和世界性影响问题,这有意义。但学关于《灰阑记》题材来源的说法是不正确的。《灰阑记》虽在内容上与佛教、基督教、伊斯兰教所记的故事有相似之处,但李行道却不是从这三个宗教故事中取材。一,三个宗教虽在唐代以前就传入中国,但其时除了佛教有关故事已翻译过来以外,其他两个同类故事是不是已经翻译过来,难以确定;二．李行道是中国的隐士,不是宗教信徒,他受中国传统化的影响,《风俗通义》是宋元习见之书,他见到的可能性更大;三,元杂剧创作中普遍存在着吸取历史故事、小说等材料进行创作的倾向．李行道所在的平阳是当时杂剧创作的中心之一,他当然会受到这个倾向的影响。因此,我们认为,他是从中国本土的故事受到启发,创作了《灰阑记》。中国本土故事就是见载于《风俗通义》中的黄霸断两妇人争子的故事。《灰阑记》的故事情节、宗旨．与之极为一致。世界几种化中都存在着《灰阑记》式的故事,这一情形值得深入研究。用比较的方法研究中外化及学的相互影响及异同,是有意义的,但应注重事实,不应轻言袭用而贬低一个民族创造化的努力和对世界化的贡献。     

论民间俗曲对元曲艺术的渗透与影响

通过疏理讶鼓、叫声、耍曲、鼓板、唱赚、诸宫调等民间艺术的流变,着重探讨民间俗曲对元曲艺术的渗透与影响,分析元曲与民间俗曲传统艺术形式的密切关系,考证元曲曲调及曲体多方面的源头谱系。认为元曲同时受到大小传统文化的影响,是文人词曲与各种流行俗乐相互碰撞,相互渗透,相互交融的产物。     

Pioneer Living 1963 Style: Imaginations of Heritage in a Post‐war Canadian Suburb

This article connects the origins of a Canadian living history museum to the cultural and social developments of 1960s suburban Canada. Although there exists a strong literature on heritage and commemoration in Canada (and around the world), few scholars have looked explicitly at museums in that country. The literature on history museums elsewhere in the world is stronger. However, despite the strengths of this international literature, its focus has been on the use of museums in the present. An important aspect of the use of heritage, the historical contexts in which past museum visitors interpreted museum themes and displays, has not received much attention. This article argues that museum patrons of the 1960s, the decade in which many living history museums were founded, saw pioneer villages in the context of their own modernising lifestyles. However much Black Creek Pioneer Village might reflect anxiety about the direction of modernity, it also framed the past in ways that legitimated modern, suburban living.     

The Professors' Africa: Economists, the Elections of 1907, and the Legitimation of German Imperialism

German economists led by Gustav Schmoller created the KolonialpolitischesAktionskomité (colonial-political action committee) duringthe so-called ‘colonial crisis’ of 1906–1907to promote the German colonial empire at a time when it wassuffering much scandal and criticism. Widely esteemed and enjoyingthe appearance of non-partisanship, they worked closely withthe government of Bernhard von Bülow during the electionsof 1907, arguing that colonial empire was economically and politicallyindispensable and that its financial burdens were bearable.Straddling a position between the economic imperialism of manyGerman liberals and the settler colonialism prevalent in conservativeand radical nationalist circles, they helped secure a middleground that enabled the Bülow bloc and developed many ideasfor colonial reform that came into currency during the Dernburgera (1906–1910). Through lecturing, the mass disseminationof relatively high-quality literature, and the demarcation ofthe new academic sub-discipline known as Kolonialwissenschaft(colonial science), a potent complex of liberal-nationalistambitions was fused with a new ‘scientific’ colonialismthat helped redefine and legitimate a German civilizing missionin Africa and forge an imperialist ideology that gained a nationalaudience.