The making of a minor saint in Drogo of Saint‐Winnoc's Historia translationis s. Lewinnae

In 1058, the Flemish abbey of Saint‐Winnoc stole St Lewinna's relics from a minster in southern England. The community worked to establish her cult in Flanders. Although scholars have focused on the material gain Saint‐Winnoc probably hoped the cult would bring, this article argues that the development of the abbey's communal identity figured more prominently in its motives. The community saw Lewinna primarily as a means to help bolster its bid for independence from its mother house.     

The impossible object: Relics,property, and the secular in post‐Soviet Russia (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The article analyzes a recent court case concerning the relics of two 14th‐century Russian Orthodox saints, during which the Russian state ruled to confiscate the relics from the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church. I examine the church's attempts to fight back, paying particular attention to how the conflicting parties have differently framed the disputed objects' materiality. In doing so, I link the ongoing debates over whether dead bodies can be considered property and who owns the bodies of saints, to the current battles in Russia over the boundaries between the sacred and the secular. The relics affair, I suggest, ultimately points to the issue of how politics itself is constituted through the battles to define these boundaries, who claims the power to draw these lines, and why issues dealing with dead bodies possess a certain affective charge that causes political action. I argue that the case of the Suzdal relics makes visible certain aporias in both secular law and religious discourse, which ultimately make this case impossible for the state to resolve in its favour through conventional judicial means without overruling the law. In this process, the object of dispute itself disappears from the discursive space, becoming buried in a sort of ‘black box’, the interior contents of which are ultimately unnameable and uncategorizable.     

Within sacred boundaries: the limitations of saintly justice in the province of Narbonne around the year 1000

ABSTRACT

Around the year 1000, judges from the ecclesiastical province of Narbonne (southern France and Catalonia) crafted judicial strategies that reinforced the region's Visigothic Code with the power of saints – conceived as gatekeepers to God's heavenly courtroom – to validate the oaths of witnesses. This practice merged liturgically grounded ideas about supernatural forces and space with a law code that prioritised secular authority. To forestall opposition to rulings, officials sometimes held proceedings in churches. This paper examines two unusual cases illustrating the challenges such strategies faced, given the perception that saints were not omnipresent. These disputes raise questions about the nature of saints, the degree of agency humans attributed to them and the utility of sacred spaces for legal ritual. In the province, saints were powerful, but constrained by their inability to act beyond the walls of consecrated sanctuaries housing their relics. This relegated saints to supplementary roles in law.     

‘Almost Every Miracle is Open to Carping’: Doubts,Relics, Reliquaries and Images of Saints in the Long 12th Century

Many of the great surviving monuments from the middle ages, the cathedrals, churches and objects made for them or for private devotion, testify to the importance of Christian faith in medieval culture. Devotion to the saints was a facet of that belief, vividly recorded in the surviving relics, reliquaries and images of saints as well as in hagiographic literature. Yet medieval sources also contain references to doubts about the nature and power of saints and their relics. The overcoming of doubt or incredulity was a widely used trope in hagiography. However, if we take medieval doubts seriously, they should prompt us to consider whether the images and objects created to celebrate particular saints might sometimes have been designed to bolster dubious claims or help to authenticate disputed material within a rich discourse about both individual saints and relics and about the nature of holy bodies more generally.     

‘Facing the future’: tourism and identity-building in post-socialist Romania

Tourism is an important component of the process of identity-building, representing one way in which a country can seek to project a particular self-image to the wider international community. As such, tourism has considerable ideological significance for the formerly socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe that are seeking to project and affirm distinctly post-socialist identities as part of the process of re-integration into the political and economic structures of Western Europe. This paper focuses on tourism and identity-building in post-socialist Romania. In particular, it focuses on one building — the so-called ‘House of the People’ — which is intimately linked with Romania’s totalitarian past and which is fast becoming Bucharest’s biggest tourist sight. The presentation of the building to tourists seeks to ‘reconfigure’ its past so that it accords better with Romania’s post-socialist identity, and particularly its aspirations to (re)establish itself as a country of ‘mainstream’ Europe.     

‘Fighting from the fields’: developing the British ‘National Farm’ in the Second World War

The Second World War had a profound impact on British Agriculture, with state intervention at an unprecedented level cementing the idea of a ‘National Farm’ in both the popular and the governmental psyche. Critical attention has recently begun to refocus on this period, adding to the somewhat celebratory meta-narratives written in the official histories. Drawing from the practice of micro-historical research and recent work in geography that seeks to understand the production of the landscape ‘from within’, this paper explores how ‘small stories’ can afford an appreciation of the ‘complications of everyday existence’ and bring greater depth, nuance and understanding to these ‘larger’ historical events and their influence on the British countryside. Utilising oral histories from farms in Devon (UK), the paper explores the micro-geographies which shaped as well as destabilised the national farm message as it was translated into the local context.     

Politics, diplomacy and the cult of relics in Venice and the northern Adriatic in the first half of the ninth century

In early medieval Europe the cult of the saints emerged as a prominent focus for the construction of political identity. Corporeal relics became objects of importance, conferring status on their possessor; and, like other precious commodities, they frequently served as prestigious diplomatic gifts, useful for the fostering of political affiliations between donor and recipient. This strategic use of saints' cults is here examined with special regard to the region of the northern Adriatic. In the first decade of the ninth century, Byzantine attempts to maintain the allegiance of Venice and urban centres along the Dalmatian coast may have prompted the translations to the region of the relics of saints such as Anastasia, Tryphon and Theodore, all of whom became important civic patrons. Later in the century, the Byzantine mission to Moravia was focused on the relics of St Clement, while archaeological and other evidence suggests that Frankish missions into the Balkans may have stressed the cult of St Martin, a native of Pannonia. Ultimately, Venetian independence from both powers was made possible by their adoption of a new patron saint, Mark, whose cult arrived from Alexandria unencumbered by implicit political debts.     

Roman soil and Roman sound in Irish hagiography

ABSTRACT

Irish hagiography displays considerable interest in communication between Ireland and Rome, particularly as this featured saints, popes and relics. While people and objects travel between the two places, there is also concern to circumvent the distance involved. This article discusses an episode of miraculous communication in the Irish Life of St Colmán Élo. Here messages and messengers travel from Rome, but time and space are also telescoped through aural and material means: the sound of the bell marking the death of Pope Gregory the Great and a gift from him of Roman soil to be spread on Colmán Élo’s cemetery. The article considers how the two elements function within their hagiographical context to connect Rome and Ireland, and how these places shaped the account. The roles of bell and soil both draw on their associations in Ireland and relate to papal communication as this was experienced and imagined more widely.     

Hope’s Work

This article, given as the Antipode RGS‐IBG Lecture on 28 August 2019, argues that hope can be found through training an attentiveness to the social world in troubled times. Hope then is an empirical question and a matter of documenting hopeful possibilities that often otherwise remain unremarked upon. In this sense “worldly hope” draws possibilities that are manifested in the social world and stands in contrast to cruel forms of optimism or an unrealistic faith in future progress. An argument for such an approach to hope and trouble is developed through two examples drawn from contemporary London life, namely, the silent walks at Grenfell Tower in West London and a community arts project in Bellingham, South East London.     

‘Kingdom Come’: Representing Mormonism through a geopolitical frame

This paper extends the reach of ‘popular geopolitics’ by exploring the geopolitical frame that American popular/news magazines use to portray a major religion in the United States: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the most prominent body known as Mormonism). It asserts that magazines often represent this type of Mormonism as a geopolitical entity, and sometimes even as a geopolitical threat. Prior to the early twentieth century, these portrayals were hegemonic, given the national government's distrust of Mormonism. But echoes of an earlier and more virulent geopolitical discourse have persisted, long after the federal government made its peace with Mormonism. This paper defines and analyzes twentieth-century magazines' geopolitical discourse on Mormonism, particularly in relation to Mormon spatiality. In doing so, it puts forward concepts of geopolitical optic and logic in order to more effectively distinguish between variations in geopolitical language.     

Causality,Chaos Theory,and the End of the Weimar Republic: A Commentary On Henry Turner’s Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power

This article seeks to integrate the roles of structure and human agency in a theory of historical causation, using the fall of the Weimar Republic and in particular Henry Turner's book Hitler's Thirty Days to Power as a case study. Drawing on analogies from chaos theory, it argues that crisis situations in history exhibit sensitive dependence on local conditions, which are always changing. This undermines the distinction between causes and conditions (including counterfactual conditions). It urges instead a distinction between empowering and constraining causes of specific human actions as a more fruitful model. The paper also discusses more briefly two other analogies to chaos theory: 1) similarity across differences in scale as applicable to different levels of individual (psychological) and collective events, which are seen as homologous; 2) a model of branching as applicable to the totality of causes of a given event.     

‘Las Vegas is not where we are’: Queer readings of the Civil Partnership Act

This article interrogates the United Kingdom's new Civil Partnership Act, which is intended to create a new legal status of ‘civil partner’. The Act confers benefits and imposes legal responsibilities on those same-sex couples who register their relationships. Analysing the Governmental material produced in support of the legislation, as well as Parliamentary debates, the article provides a critical analysis of the ideological underpinnings of civil partnership. A series of dichotomies—marriage/not marriage; sex/no sex; status/contract; conjugality/care; love/money; responsibilities/rights—informs the Government's construction of the category of ‘same-sex partner’. Those dichotomies lend themselves to a deconstructive analysis, applying the insights of queer theory. The result is a skepticism regarding the Act's replication of a marriage model for same-sex couples. Instead, the article concludes by advocating the search for more pluralistic and flexible legal models that better represent the diversity of relationship forms found today.     

After the ‘king of beasts’: Samuel Baker and the embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon

This paper draws on and develops a range of concepts and methodologies from ‘more-than-human’ and animal geographies to map some embodied historical geographies of elephant hunting in mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon. It focuses in particular on the exploits of Samuel Baker and some of his contemporaries. The paper attends to the attachments, crossings and ethics that passed between hunted and hunting bodies to flesh out the colonial visions of these ‘seeing men’ of empire. It critically engages with existing work on hunting and colonial natural history by examining interwoven human and nonhuman experiences, exploring elephant hunting as a collection of embodied and co-evolutionary processes with complex material histories. Drawing out the importance of embodiment, affect and intercorporeal exchange the paper then reflects on the performance, epistemology and ethics of hunting practice and traces the role played by a code of sportsmanship in orientating and legitimating the ethical sensibility of hunting. In conclusion the paper details what is gained from this style of embodied historical analysis which unsettles any simple spatio-temporal territorialisation of (post-) colonial historical geographies.     

‘Elementary aesthetics’, hedonist ethics: The philosophical foundations of Feuerbach's late works

In contrast to the conventional view of Ludwig Feuerbach as a left-wing Young Hegelian, this article argues that his primary contribution to philosophy is to be found in his later ethics, the basis of which may be discerned in his earlier writings. Over and above recent work on Feuerbach's aesthetics, his relation to Herder, and the relationship between aesthetics and ‘theological politics’ in his thought, Feuerbach's philosophy can re-evaluated, in relation to Epicurus and the French libertin tradition, as articulating an ethics of hedonism. In The Essence of Christianity (1841), the Nachlass fragment ‘Elementary Aesthetics’ (1843), and his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843) Feuerbach moves towards the vitalist materialist position that culminates in his (proto-Nietzschean) insight in ‘Against the Dualism of Body and Soul, Flesh and Spirit’ (1846) into the world as an ‘aesthetic phenomenon’, thus laying the foundations for his recognition of the centrality of sensuous pleasure to the ethical life.     

Unpicking Sri Lankan ‘island-ness’ in Romesh Gunesekera's Reef

Through a close reading of the Anglo–Sri Lankan author Romesh Gunesekera's 1994 novel Reef, this paper interrogates the misplaced concrete-ness regarding Sri Lanka's status as archetypal ‘island-state’. I show how Reef maps an imaginative geography which both naturalizes and problematizes Sri Lankan ‘island-ness’. Through the memory of the novel's main protagonist the author's exploration of modernity fixes geographical knowledge of Sri Lanka. ‘Island-ness’ emerges as a rationalization of modernity, one with its roots in Sri Lanka's colonial experience which the author then unpicks as he proceeds to explore the limits of modernity. I suggest that Reef demonstrates how island-ness is an inescapable yet problematic dimension of contemporary Sri Lankan geography. This is an ambivalent contradiction that fuels a civil war in Sri Lanka which relentlessly and sanguinely contests the integrity of Sri Lankan island-ness. The paper emphasizes how Romesh Gunesekera's hybrid position, as an author born in Sri Lanka and now writing from England, constitutes a post-colonial intervention which allows us to ask new questions about Sri Lanka's ‘natural’ insularity. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.     

Blaming the Medici: Footnotes, falsification, and the fate of the ‘English Model’ in eighteenth-century Italy

Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the ‘English Model’ for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the ‘English Model’ beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesi's 1757–1758 translation of John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England. The ‘English Model’ was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the model's meaning, rejecting the need for protectionism and instead embracing a providential faith in laissez-faire. This tradition began with an important, but falsified footnote in Carlo Denina's 1769–1770 Rivoluzioni d’Italia. In this note and the tradition that adopted it, Lorenzo de’ Medici's imagined English wool factories became the locus of this inversion, and, through a reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, blaming the Medici as agents of Italy's aberrant historical development became an alternative to blaming English economic imperialism in late eighteenth-century Italy. The narrative of Medici involvement in the decline of Italy was finally realigned with Genovesi's original intention under the auspice of Pope Pius VI in 1794.     

Male Saints and Devotional Masculinity in Late Medieval England

This article considers the ways in which the lives of male monastic saints circulating in late medieval England (and the cults of male saints more widely) were underpinned by certain ideas and ideals of masculinity and the functions which these performed. It argues for the significance of male saints serving as devotional models for the lay audience of these texts (both men and women). The two main sources are William Caxton's Golden Legend (published in 1483) and his Vitas Patrum (published after his death by Wynkyn de Worde in 1495). It therefore seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of the ways in which piety was used to assess masculinity, but also the extent to which piety as a social identity (both public and private in nature) was informed by notions of manliness.     

Le prieuré de Saint-Zacharie en i403 d'après le Livre de raison de son prieur

Saint-Zacharie is a small township northeast of Marseille, some kilometers from the main Aix-en-Provence-Nice road. In the middle ages it possessed a priory of Benedictine nuns of St Zacharias which was a dependency of the abbey of St Victor at Marseille. This abbey appointed a monk with the title of prior to administer the nunnery at Saint-Zacharie, while the nuns themselves elected a prioress. The Livre de raison drawn up by Jean de Assana, prior in 1402, allows us to establish the convent's budget. It reveals the efforts undertaken to restore a situation which had been severely shaken by the troubles of the fourteenth century, and in particular to develop the domain, which furnished the greater part of the convent's revenues from the production of corn and wine. Only corn provided a cash surplus. The economy of the priory was thus fragile because insufficiently diversified. The house faced other problems too. The development of its spiritual life was no longer a prime aim: the abbey of St Victor on several occasions arbitrarily limited the number of its nuns. There were ninety-eight of them in 1322; twenty-four in 1402; five in 1461. What is more, they were reduced to an income which provided only a bare living so that the convent's possessions appeared to be being exploited mainly as a source of profit for the prior and for the financial benefit of the mother house of St Victor, the archbishop of Aix, and the papal court.     

Testing the ‘Laacher See hypothesis’: tephra as dental abrasive

In a series of recent studies, changes in material culture and settlement pattern in the Late Glacial of Northern Europe have been linked to the eruption of the Laacher See volcano. This eruption occurred c. 13,000 years ago towards the end of the Allerød chronozone. It is argued that the tephra fall-out from this eruption set in motion significant demographic fluctuations along the northern periphery of Late Glacial human settlement and that these led to a number of material culture transformations. In particular, the emergence of the regionally distinct techno-complexes with large tanged points – the Bromme culture in southern Scandinavia and the Perstunian culture in northeastern Europe – and the temporary abandonment of central European regions are thought to relate to this eruption. While numerous archaeological datasets are in accord with this ‘Laacher See hypothesis’, the forcing mechanism or mechanisms that brought about these archaeologically visible changes have remained largely unexplored. A particular challenge is to explain how some of the culture-historical effects of the Laacher See eruption seem to change or become more pronounced with distance from the eruptive centre. We here investigate one potential middle-range link between the Laacher See eruption and Late Glacial fauna and foragers: tephra as dental abrasive. We use instrumented nanoindentation to quantitatively investigate tephra from a number of sites covering the medial and distal fall-out zones as well as the dental enamel of Homo sapiens and key prey species of Late Glacial foragers. Our results show that the Laacher See tephra contained particles roughly twice as hard as even the hardest portions of any of the teeth investigated. We also suggest that fluoride-induced weakening of dental enamel may have further aggravated tooth wear. These mechanisms may have acted in concert to produce elevated levels of, in particular, animal mortality, which in turn may have led to an abandonment of the affected landscapes.