From the British Museum to the Great Blasket: Robin Flower and the Western Island

This lecture examines Robin Flower’s engagement with the Irish language, with Irish literature, and especially with the oral traditions of the Great Blasket Island, Co. Kerry, Ireland, commencing in 1910 and continuing for more than three decades. He was taught modern Irish by the Blasket Islander, Tomás Ó Criomhthain, and, during his several visits to the Great Blasket, he collected folklore from many of the Islanders, including the noted storyteller Peig Sayers.     

From the Angels of Mons to the Garden of Gethsemane: Some Theological Reflections on the Western Front

The Great War began with widespread public euphoria across the combatant nations, with community leaders, political, ecclesiastical and other, giving enthusiastic endorsement to the ‘war effort.’ In addition to simplistic and clichéd proclamations that ‘God is on our side,’ early in the war stories of spiritual phenomena, such as the so-called ‘Angels of Mons’ and the ‘White Comrade’, captured the public imagination. As the war progressed, however, and particularly in the wake of the Battle of the Somme from 1 July 1916, there is a noticeable shift in the spiritual and theological language of the battlefront (if not the home front) — away from angelic visitations bringing divinely ordained victory, and towards the ‘suffering God’ of No Man’s Land. The primary vehicle for this are the war poets, and the dominant symbolic language that of the Passion of Christ, who prays with great anguish in the garden of Gethsemane on the night of his arrest and betrayal that the cup of suffering might pass from him. As that cup will nor pass from Christ, neither would it pass those who endured the trenches of the Western Front. By the end of the war, the transcendent God had become an imminent deity, and the place of visitation was not the heavenly places, but the mud and blood of No Man’s Land.     

从赈务到洋务:江南绅商在洋务企业中的崛起

本文围绕着对洋务企业中一个活跃群体即江南绅商崛起过程的细致分析,对学界此前观察中国近代绅商阶层的起源和中国近代工业化兴起进程的视角和进行历史定位的方式进行了反思.本文的研究表明,这两个历史事件决非是仅仅构成宏大叙事的重大事件,而是都包含着由冲击与回应、传统与近代、内因与外因、整体性与地方性等一系列二元关系发生复杂的交织和互动而形成的实践逻辑,也只有综合运用宏观与微观、自上而下与自下而上的视角,才能准确理解和把握这样的实践逻辑.     

The Wreck of the Warship Northumberland on the Goodwin Sands,England, 1703: an interim report

The Northumberland, a third‐rate man‐of‐war was lost with all hands during the Great Storm of 26–27 November 1703 on the Goodwin Sands—famously known as ‘the ship swallower’. It was rediscovered in 1980 by local divers following the location of a sister ship, the Stirling Castle. Since, the primary concern has been to record exposed structural remains, ordnance and artefacts, and interpret the wreck formation of the site. This paper describes the results of this work, and discusses in particular the size of the keel, the use of chocks, and standardization of ordnance in the Restoration Navy through reference to comparable ship‐finds and historical records.     

From Domus to Polis: Hybrid Identities in Southey’s Letters from England (1807) and Blanco White’s Letters from Spain (1822)

ABSTRACT

Robert Southey’s fictive travelogue, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), inspired several imitators, most importantly José María Blanco White with his Letters from Spain (1822). These works rejuvenate a fictional device popularised by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters—the “familiar stranger”—at a crucial juncture when British involvement in the affairs of Europe provoked a reassessment of pre-Revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The stranger as home-interpreter calls attention to an emerging emphasis in European Romantic thought on the contingency of freedom with hybrid, mobile identities, prefiguring the psycho-social-historical terrain in which Jean-François Lyotard and Dean MacCannell link modernity with travel and tourism. This essay argues that the Romantic figure of the foreign traveller expresses a condition of travel, reflecting Lyotard’s critique of human contingency in his essay “Domus and the Megalopolis.” Southey’s sympathetic stranger modulates a conversation with Wordsworth about the nature of modern subjectivity, historically contingent yet paradoxically liberated from historical particulars. Blanco White’s Letters from Spain demonstrates how displacement, emigration, and expatriation become refigured as conditions of the modern psyche, especially visible in moments of political crisis, when the cosmopolitan polis is immobilised by the myth of the domus.     

Before and after the Grenville Act: The House of Commons and the Morpeth Elections of 1768 and 1774

The Grenville Act of 1770 was designed to prevent justice being ‘sacrificed to numbers’ when election petitions came before the Commons. The fate of the petition following the Morpeth election of 1768 illustrates how ministerial and other powerful influences, as well as prejudice, could determine the result, the votes of freemen who had gained their rights by peremptory writs of mandamus from the court of king's bench being declared invalid because they had not been admitted to their freedom in the customary manner. At the 1774 election, the partisan returning officers rejected many votes, but a riot forced them to return the candidates having a majority with these votes. When petitions complaining of a forced return and counter petitions alleging bribery and corruption came to the Commons, a party succeeded in postponing to a distant date a hearing on the merits of the election, and in restricting the remit to the committee chosen under the Grenville Act. One of the sitting members was unseated but allowed to petition on the merits, but parliament was prorogued before his petition was heard. On renewing it in the next session, he made substantial alterations which were challenged and a committee was appointed to investigate. All who came to the committee were to have voices, and, realising that his cause was thereby rendered hopeless, the petitioner withdrew his petition. Thus a party in the House was still able to exert influence and, on this occasion, to bypass the Grenville Act, which, however, in other cases evidently proved satisfactory.     

从《晋辟雍碑》看晋武帝立嗣

晋武帝立嗣是事关西晋政权存亡的重大问题。而《晋辟雍碑》为探究该问题提供了新材料。将碑文与史籍相互比证,可知皇太子司马衷莅临辟雍观礼虽不合古制,但此举却是晋武帝提升太子在士林声誉的重要措施。陪同太子辟雍观礼的贾充、司马攸、杨珧分别代表着功臣、宗室、外戚三派政治力量,是成宁二年后晋武帝对西晋政局改组后的集体亮相。晋武帝这一系列举措都是为确保太子司马衷顺利继位而展开的。     

Multilateral Development Finance in Non‐Western Thought: From Before Bretton Woods to Beyond

Recent initiatives of China and other emerging powers to create new multilateral development lending institutions (MDLIs) are often portrayed as efforts to build upon and/or reform an idea pioneered by Western officials during the Bretton Woods negotiations. However, recent literature has shown that support for MDLIs also had deeper non‐Western roots in the pre‐Bretton Woods era. What led thinkers outside the West to propose MDLIs in that earlier period? How might their ideas be relevant to current non‐Western initiatives to create new MDLIs? This article addresses these questions with a special focus on the ideas of China's Sun Yat‐sen (1866–1925) and Peru's Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (1895–1979). Although their intellectual journeys were quite distinct and their specific proposals differed, these two thinkers advocated the creation of MDLIs for similar reasons that stemmed from their anti‐imperialist sentiments. Their ideas find some echoes in current non‐Western initiatives.