Rebuilding the Middle Ages after the Second World War: the cultural politics of reconstruction in Rothenburg ob der Tauber,Germany

Rothenburg ob der Tauber is one of Germany's most popular tourist destinations attracting over two and a half million visitors annually. Yet, many visitors do not realize that nearly half of Rothenburg's medieval architectural heritage was destroyed in 1945. Its reconstruction was characterized by complex negotiations and compromises as Rothenburgers attempted to balance contemporary preservation philosophies with the town's image as a national symbol and economic interests in a revived tourist trade. These diverse factors were generally complementary and resulted in a remarkably consistent and consensual effort, but the project was not without controversies and contradictions. This article examines the cultural politics of reconstruction in Rothenburg as an attempt to preserve and rebuild the town's image as well as its actual physical structures. Although both the reconstruction of Rothenburg's built environment and its symbolic meaning buttressed the town's status as a national cultural icon, divergent strategies for each project have diminished awareness of the reconstruction period and opportunities for critically engaging this past.     

Archaeological investigations in Bergen 1980–1986: Some new aspects on the development of the town

The last six years' emergency excavations in Bergen, by pure chance covering the major part of the medieval town, have provided new information on several issues concerning the town's earliest development and structure, enabling us to sketch a development of the two somewhat different from previous suggestions. The original shoreline appears to have left rather less building land than expected, and the evidence for originally two separate centres is strong. A particularly rapid growth in the south suggests this as the major harbour in the town's earliest phase. The settlement expansion in the twelfth century resulted in the gradual merging of the two centres into one town, completed with the rebuilding after the 1248 fire providing an apparently continuous waterfront along the eastern shore of Vågen.     

Le groupe cathédral dans le paysage urbain en Italie (XIII–XVe siècles)

Reflecting on the alleged differences between the medieval town, based on its cathedral church, and the Renaissance town, supposedly grouped round its prince's palace, the author embarked on an examination of the role of the duomo and its precinct in the Italian town of the later middle ages. Apart from its central importance in religious functions, especially preaching and processions, and the conscious effort to ensure that the town's greatness was matched by the splendour of its cathedral, the author shows that the duomo served as the venue for recieving distinguished visitors, for public declarations, for miracle plays, for funerals, and even for some purely secular activities. The role of the duomo was thus at once religious and social and political.     

‘Questo cor che tuo si rese’: the private and the public in Italian women's love letters in the long nineteenth century

Love letters are attracting increasing scholarly attention, especially from historians of scribal culture and historians of emotions. This article brings these two strands together to explore the unpublished love letters of four Italian women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their letters, spanning a period from the 1840s up to the First World War, provide insights into the genre, and into women's lives and emotions in this period. Three of them were from the bourgeoisie or piccola borghesia and one, in slightly contrasting mode, was a peasant. Women of the middle class lived a secluded life, and writing was essential to express themselves, to construct an identity and to become visible. Their love letters were anything but private: they were continually supervised and scrutinised by their families, so that their letters inevitably had a public quality and were sometimes multi-authored. Single young women needed to subvert social rules in order to establish their independence and claim private space for their love correspondence.     

Rescuing the Future: César Vallejo and Postcolonial Thought

This article explores some of the ways in which the Heptaméron's thirteenth nouvelle plays upon epistolary expectations established by medieval letter-writing traditions, and it suggests how sixteenth-century epistolary exchange had shifted from its medieval antecedents, particularly in regard to the materiality of letters. It also considers the implications of Marguerite's epistolary play for the letter-writing landscape and for the subject at the very heart of the Heptaméron: love, and the fictions we necessarily engage in writing about it.     

Learning from popular culture: Interpretation,visitors and critique

Abstract

The publication of Frank McCourt's autobiographical novel, Angela's Ashes in 1996 has sharply focused attention upon a sense of place and heritage identity of the Irish town of Limerick. It has both bolstered a local civic self‐conscious identity and spawned ‘McCourt tourism’. On the other hand it has provoked local controversy by revealing the existence of a number of hitherto largely concealed heritage dissonances.

The historical vision of the interwar period that it vividly portrays is a working‐class experience of poverty, poor housing, and absence of facilities compounded by an indifference of the local contemporary political and clerical establishment. There is a geography of McCourt's Limerick, much of which is still extant, composed of row housing, docks, gas works, public houses, Victorian churches and the like that is a different Limerick to the medieval conserved monuments of English Town or the stately residences of the Georgian Newtown (as portrayed in the earlier novels of Kate O'Brien). Such an image contrasts not only with the tourism image projected externally but more significantly with much of the received interpretation of the post‐independence Irish State that was until recently an almost unchallenged dominant ideology.

The catalytic impact of a single novel upon a town's self‐identity raises more general issues about the role of the novel in the shaping, revision and essential instability of heritage messages through time, as well as the management of disagreeable or contradictory elements in a local past through a polysemic and essentially multilayered heritage.     

Howden Church

Shrewsbury's late sixteenth-century Old Market Hall—recently restored and returned to public use—is among the most prominent buildings in the town centre and, or so it would seem, a reminder of the town's pre-eminence as a marketing centre in the central Marches in the early modern period. Combining documentary evidence, archaeology, and the evidence of the building itself, this inter-disciplinary study sets out to examine the real reasons for the Hall's construction, how it was built, and the way in which it functioned. The paper also looks backwards to the growth of marketing in this part of Shrewsbury in the thirteenth century, and its promotion by considerable civic investment in the 1260s when a new market square was created from what was previously a wet wasteland. Looking forward, it tells the story of the Hall's use in the post- medieval period, and of past attempts to deal with inherent structural defects in the original design.     

A Nabataean and Roman shrine with civic and military gods at Humayma,Jordan

The lifecycle of a Nabataean and Roman community shrine at Humayma, Jordan reflects the evolving values of the town's inhabitants from the first to the third century CE. This paper reviews the evidence for the shrine's appearance and significance over this period, as well as the nature of the cult practised there. Beginning its existence as a Nabataean shrine, whose design incorporated the rising sun and the town's primary peak, the building was damaged when the Romans converted Nabataea into Provincia Arabia. The Roman garrison initially dismantled the shrine to build their fort, but a few decades later the shrine was restored with a centrally placed Nabataean betyl and legionary altar symbolising harmony between the garrison and the town. The garrison's god, Jupiter‐Ammon‐Serapis, and possibly Isis, were now worshipped alongside the town's Nabataean deity. This shrine stressing military‐civilian harmony was later deliberately damaged, most likely during Zenobia's revolt.     

THE STREETS AS A MEETING PLACE FOR DIFFERENT ACTORS AND AGENDAS: BUILDING AND USE OF OPEN SPACE IN 16TH‐CENTURY NYA LÖDÖSE,SWEDEN

The town of Nya Lödöse, close to present‐day Gothenburg, Sweden, existed from in 1473‐1624. The material from the extensive archaeological excavations 2013–2017 presents the opportunity to study construction, use, and change of the streets. There seems to have been a clear hierarchy of streets, ranging from main streets to local streets and private alleys. This variety of streets covered different needs in the town's infrastructure. They were also the meeting point for different public and private actors with shifting objectives. Over time the authorities gained increased control over the streets, apparent in the material from the 1580s and onwards. This can be seen as a part of a Scandinavian trend linked to the emergence of the early modern state.     

Free and Happy Bonds: Loving v. Virginia's Nineteenth-Century Precedent on Marriage and the Pursuit of Happiness

Loving v. Virginia declares that marriage contributes to the pursuit of happiness. It supports this claim by citing 19^th century precedent, precedent which itself drew upon a longstanding view of marriage and happiness's pursuit. This article examines that view in state and federal opinions from the decades surrounding 14^th Amendment ratification. The courts saw marriage as fulfilling the human need for community, thereby aiding in the private happiness of those marrying and the public happiness of the political society. Marriage supported private happiness by forming a bond that provided for physical, material, and emotional needs. Courts sought to aid these goals while also protecting spouses' rights. Marriage supported public happiness through creating and educating future citizens as well as cultivating virtuous habits among those married—goals which the courts also sought to protect. The article concludes by discussing the continuity and discontinuity between these 19^th century cases, Loving, and Obergefell.     

Forum Ware

THREE BURGAGE PLOTS within a deserted area of the medieval new town of Newport were excavated. Buildings were established on the burgage plots following the town's foundation in the late 12th century, but these were short-lived and the plots were soon given over to agriculture. Evidence for buildings was slight. It is argued that the excavated dwellings were earth-built and thatched and possibly conformed to a standard plan. Boundaries between individual burgage plots and between blocks of plots were investigated, thus examining the means by which the town was laid out.     

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.     

MODERNITY: A PROBLEMATIC CATEGORY IN THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS

Emotions in History: Lost and Found by Ute Frevert is a lively introduction to some of the issues that historians must address when writing about emotions. Emotions in History notes some of the uses emotions have had in both public and private life, and it charts the changing fate of several emotions—particularly acedia, honor, and compassion—that have been either “lost” or “found” over time. Nevertheless, it suffers from a notion of modernity that obscures rather than clarifies. Making “modernity” the cause of changes in emotional ideas, comportment, and feeling, it cuts today's society off from its earlier roots and fails to see the continuities not only in emotions themselves but also in the mechanisms by which emotions have changed over time. Frevert's assumption that only the modern world has been interested in emotions is belied by eloquent learned writings on the topic in the medieval period (though not using the term “emotions”). Further, modernity is not alone in having effective mechanisms by which ideal standards of emotions and their expression are transmitted to a larger public.     

Best Practice in Australia's Foreign Policy: 'Konfrontasi' (1963-66)

Australia's handling of Indonesia's confrontation of Malaysia ('Konfrontasi') constitutes a case-study of best practice in crisis management. A strong minister of External Affairs, working closely with an effective department, persuaded Cabinet to set policy guidelines which would serve Australia's long-term regional interests. Bureaucratic skill and diplomatic flair helped to ensure the success-and so the continuance-of the policy, despite private and public criticism. An independent foreign policy, such as had also served Australia well in the late 1940s in facilitating the decolonisation of Indonesia, not only assisted Britain to decolonise successfully in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, but had lasting results in establishing Australia as a credible regional player and in defining the enduring importance of good working relations with its neighbour, Indonesia.     

Staging the Interior: The Public and Private Intimacies of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle's Domestic Lives

‘Home’ is one of the most evocative and comforting words in the English language. It produces, at least in its idealized form, notions of safety, comfort, privacy, individuality and communion with family and friends. The supposed autonomy or permanence of home, however, is undermined frequently throughout one's life course revealing instead spaces of interactionism, public disturbance, discomfort, conflict, labour, stress and even violence. Reading Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle's voluminous letters one reads the emotional and psychological importance of ‘home’ and the vital necessity of the ideal world apart. The middle-class home was meant to stage a domesticated and comfortable private haven, withdrawn from public view and distant from the imperatives of the economy and politics, however, the house was also the physical representation, the outward ‘sign’, of the Carlyles' public identity. How the House looked and functioned – externally and internally – represented the Carlyles to the outside world. Home was, as Walter Benjamin alluded, like a sheltered theater box from which the occupants looked at the stage of the outside world and also the stage upon which the outside world cast its own critical eye on the action within. The necessities of life and the public fascination with the interior signify that private and public are largely mutable concepts. Any clear distinction between inside and outside, private and public are complicated as we look at the intimacies of the Carlyles' lives.     

Europe and the American mind∗†

Wells's The New Machiavelli (1911) offers an excellent case study of the use of anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism as both a philosophical and a rhetorical strategy. In Remington, Wells creates a protagonist who follows Machiavellian rules of behaviour and denounces those who do likewise. The novel is structured to show Remington's progress from an idealist refutation of Machiavellism, through a recognition of its necessity, to the formulation of a private and political method for the necessary pursuit of Machiavellian principles under the disguise of anti-Machiavellism, including trenchant criticisms of Fabians as anti-Machiavellian Machiavellians. These stages, culminating in complete personal and public failure, are reflected in Remington's party allegiances, and broadened by Wells into an account of British party ideologies around the turn of the twentieth century. Wells's rhetorical design for mapping and assessing anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism is paralleled by an exploration of that technique in himself, attested by the predominance of autobiographical elements in The New Machiavelli, and by similarities between Remington's and Wells's own deception of others and themselves. Far from incidental, anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism is the motif that unites the shifting party allegiances, political conceits and moral hypocrisies, and private and public failures of Wells, Remington, and of the period of British politics that they intend to encapsulate.     

Public reason and private passion

Distinctions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ dimensions of human life have traditionally been associated with philosophical distinctions between Reason and other, supposedly lesser, mental traits, such as passions and desires. This paper examines the ways in which these associations have affected character ideals associated with citizenship and our understanding of sexual difference. It discusses, in particular, Hegel's idea, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, that female consciousness is constituted through the exclusion of women from the public domain, and relates it to earlier interconnections between the male‐female and public‐private distinctions in Rousseau, Hume and Kant.     

Women and the Nationalisation of Literature: Text and Image as Parallel Narratives with Multiplied Meaning in a Hindi Periodical (1927–1941)

The early twentieth century is a period in colonial Indian history marked, among other things, by nationalist explorations of what was commonly described as the upper middle‐class, Hindu high caste ‘woman's question’. In the process, gender roles and responsibilities in public and private spheres were being contemplated and negotiated in oral and written forms. This essay explores the text‐image combinations and relationships in a mainstream Hindi literary periodical published in North India in the 1930s. It focuses specifically on the gendered visual narrative that emerged from this periodical's engagement with the role of women in the Hindi public and private spheres. It argues that through the combination of text and image, the reader of the Hindi periodical Sudha was presented with verbal and visual messages that were deeply embedded in debates on literary and cultural nationalism.     

Rape on the Railway: Women,Safety, and Moral Panic in Victorian Newspapers

In the Victorian press, the railway carriage was painted as a site of particular danger for women travelling alone. As a hybrid public and private space, the carriage placed strangers together in an intimate, quasi-domestic setting for which there were few established norms of behaviour. When male and female solo travellers found themselves confined together, it set the scene both for sexual assault and for false charges of assault, which the newspapers played upon; solo female travellers were depicted as either potential victims or potential Potiphar's wives. These representations were prominent in two moral panics that attempted to regulate women's movement. In this article, I examine accounts of sexual assault from the Lancet, The Times, the English Leader, and the People's Advocate from the 1860s and 1870s and consider newspaper reports as a source of erotic stimulation in a late-century pornographic novel, Raped on the Railway. I argue that the newspapers' fascination with sexual violence on trains, while connected to the weakened division between public and private spaces and an association of railway engines with virility, was primarily a response to fears about women's increasing freedom.