Why praise Jews: satire and history in the middle ages

Modern readers, including highly sophisticated, professional historians, have not always understood that medieval praise of jews, in its rare occurrences, never signifies categorical approval of Israelites. Instead, such praise functions as a condemnation, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, of Christians whose behavior is not even equal to that of the lowest members of society. The elaborate story told by Richard of Devizes about the murder, towards the end of the twelfth century, of a young Christian by a Jew at Winchester provides a clear illustration of the problem.     

In praise of folly: international administration and the corruption of humanity

Advocates of international administration tend to embrace conduct and utterance that proposes to vindicate fundamental human rights and freedoms by suspending an important part of its content: the principle that human beings should not be subject to coercion except where they have given their consent. This article begins by arguing that the character of this dilemma is obscured by a vocabulary of technique that divests the category 'international administration' of its normative coherence. In fact, international administration discloses two distinct modes of association—contract and trust—which presuppose different values, different obligations, and different expectations. The article proceeds in arguing that a trust instituted among equals is susceptible to objection in so far as trustee and beneficiary are necessarily joined in a coercive relationship that rules out the possibility of consent. The article concludes by arguing that recent attempts at reconciling this sort of relation with the demands of human rights entails a kind of corruption that is intelligible in making ordinary language correspond with the ideal, so that what was once described as the denial of human dignity—subjection to alien rule—is now described as the promotion and protection of fundamental human rights.     

The intimate dance of diplomacy: in praise of practice

Those who study international relations pay little attention to those who practise them. But the terms of scholarly explanation—the great abstractions of state, interest, power and so on—are always embodied in human representatives, and their interactions mediated through human relationships. The daily experience, lived and felt, of diplomats thus offers a valuable perspective on how international relations work. Two recent studies by Iver Neumann capture this world through an anthropology of the diplomatic tribe. They illuminate the highly distinctive conventions, rituals and symbols of this world, showing how diplomats are recruited and socialized, where and how they perform their roles and how they communicate —and how these practices evolve in the face of social and technological change. Diplomats emerge as indispensable specialists in creating, asserting and agreeing meaning, and diplomatic conduct as a critical variable in explaining international outcomes. Taking the perspective of practice seriously can build a better political science of international relations, balancing first‐person understanding with third‐person explanation, impersonal forces with human stories, and contextual facts with their rhetorical construction. It can also help bridge the gap between theory and practice. This points to an exciting agenda for future research.     

A Door of Hope Re‐opened: The Fifth Monarchy,King Charles and King Jesus

A Door of Hope was the manifesto of the Fifth Monarchists’ desperate uprising in London in January 1661, a few months after the Restoration of Charles II. While the rising itself is well known, its manifesto has never been examined in detail. Probably based on a sermon to Venner's congregation, it displays a defiant conviction that the Restoration could be understood as part of God's providential plan, the next step towards the imminent kingdom of Christ on earth. But it also reaches out to a much wider constituency, all the supporters of the “Good Old Cause,” offering a programme that might appeal to many radicals. And the author draws on secular, republican discourse to buttress his apocalyptic claims, revealing close links between even the most extreme Fifth Monarchists and wider currents of interregnum radicalism.     

King Edgar,Wales and Chester: The Welsh Dimension in the Ceremony of 973

Abstract

This article addresses two related aspects of King Edgar's visit to Chester — why he went there and how he got there. Interpretations of its purpose have generally been based upon English sources and have paid less attention to Welsh evidence: this article attempts an alternative perspective. The first of the two aspects is a stage in the development of the ‘Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’ expressed in the coronation at Bath and a tenth-century durbar at Chester when the might of the King of all England was pronounced to the outside world. The second, which was linked to that and specifically directed at the North-West, was a determined attempt to define and strengthen the north-western frontier of the extended kingdom and tighten Edgar's grip upon the northern Welsh princes whose constant infighting presented an opportunity for Norse and/or Irish incursions. His actions became an economic as well as a military necessity, to maintain the English grasp on North Wales and to protect the important trading links between Chester and Ireland.     

太平天国幼天王、干王等未刊供词中的新史料及辨证

台北故宫博物院文献部藏有幼天王、干王、洪仁政、黄文英等人供词、自述共 2 8件 ,内多未刊发的重要史料 ,涉及天国晚期政治、军事、人事、生活等方面。如南京失陷后 ,幼天王、干王等南下欲投奔侍王李世贤、康王汪海洋 ,而李、汪对“迎驾”“护驾”并不积极。这些新史料对于研究太平天国历史 ,特别是天国晚期历史 ,有重要的价值。     

Processing together,celebrating apart: shared processions in the Latin East

ABSTRACT

Twelfth-century narrative accounts in Armenian, Syriac and Latin recount a number of processions in Syria and Palestine in which both Eastern Christians and Latins participated. Processions were one of the many ways by which the Franks expressed their political dominance over the urban (and likely also the rural) landscape, but it was also a way that all Christian communities used to express and even construct relationships among themselves. Scholars often assume that the procession performs (in a Durkheimian sense) the work of creating or displaying unity. Yet the scattered sources of the twelfth-century Frankish Levant suggest that this is only one of the functions an inter-confessional procession can play. As common were processions that delimited, separated and hierarchised communities.