Socio-semiotics and the symbiosis of humans,horses, and objects in later Iron Age Britain

Using an approach derived from material culture studies and semiotics, this speculative paper addresses possible relationships between humans and horses in the British Iron Age. Through a study of dominance of horse imagery found on Iron Age British coinage, specifically the Western coins traditionally attributed to the ‘Dobunni’, the author explores what these coins may be able to inform us regarding the possible relationships between humans and horses and their personhood therein. Drawing on wider evidence including faunal remains and other horse-related metalwork, it is argued that these coins could be interpreted as a manifestation of the complex perspectives surrounding a symbiotic relationship between humans and horses.     

Two roads to Belgrade: the United States,Great Britain,and the first nonaligned conference

In 1961, at the height of the Berlin crisis, the United States and Great Britain simultaneously struggled to adopt effective policies toward the first meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade. While the John F. Kennedy administration initially adopted a policy of standoffishness toward the conference, the government of Harold Macmillan engaged in a campaign of quietly encouraging moderate attendance. Moderate British expectations led to sound policy, whereas the Kennedy administration's inability to develop a coherent outlook and response cost it a priceless opportunity to understand the emerging phenomenon of nonalignment.     

Probability and certainty in seventeenth-century england. a study of the relationships between natural science,religion, history. law,and literature

Enlightenment optimism over mankind's progress was often voiced in terms of botanical growth by key figures such as John Millar; the mind's cultivation marked the beginning of this process. For agriculturists such as Arthur Young cultivation meant an advancement towards virtue and civilization; the cultivation of the mind can similarly be seen as an enlightenment concept which extols the human potential for improvable reason. In the course of this essay I aim to explore the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘cultivation’ through botanical metaphor. By using the recurring motif of the mind's cultivation as a site from which to explore enlightenment views on female understanding, I investigate how far concerns with human progress extended to the female mind.

I examine the language of botany and cultivation in texts by authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia Barbauld alongside that of Rousseau and Millar. Wollstonecraft's appropriation and subsequent inversion of the conventional cultivation metaphor, for example, demonstrates her desire to draw attention to society's neglect of women's educational potential by substituting images of enlightened growth with those of luxuriant decay. By pushing this analogy further she indicates how society has cultivated women rearing them like exotic flowering plants or ‘luxuriants’ where ‘strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty’. I discuss the antipastoral rationalism which enables her to unmask the false sentiment behind this traditional metaphoric association between women and flowers arguing that such familiar tropes are the language of male desire and are indicative of women's problematic relationship to culture.     

Confrontation and conciliation: the sami,the crown and the court in seventeenth-century swedish lapland1

This article aims to discover in what kind of legal cases conflicts may be traced between the Sami and representatives of the Crown, and in which situations conciliation is apparent; and it also answers the questions of how and why this happened. It is evident, from the court rolls from the court district of Jukkasjärvi (one of the two northernmost lappmarker in Sweden at this time), that the Crown prosecuted the Sami for sexual offences and crimes against religion. This was due to the prevailing ideology of the seventeenth century, in which Lutheran Christianity prevailed, and because the court was the arena for a power discourse: there was a “right” way to live and behave. This came into conflict with Sami tradition. The Sami themselves pursued a desire and need for conciliation, which becomes apparent in cases of crimes such as murder, manslaughter and grand theft, but also in civil cases, e.g. inheritance. This was due to the fact that the population was quite small, bound together in different relations, and because large-scale conflicts were not beneficial to Sami communities. Even though the Crown Court was an arena of power, it was also used by the Sami for their own ends, and thus we can see an interactive Sami society, independent of the prevailing political Lutheran Christian ideology and its discourse.     

Post-Enlightenment sources of political authority: Biblical atheism, political theology and the Schmitt-Strauss exchange

This essay reevaluates the Weimar writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, specifically, their intellectual efforts to replace the political authority of Kantian liberalism with, respectively, a ‘political theology’ and ‘Biblical atheism’ derived from the thought of early-modern state theorists like Hobbes and Spinoza. Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that post-Kantian Enlightenment rationality was unraveling into a way of thinking that violently rejected ‘form’ of any kind, fixated myopically on material things and lacked any conception of the external constraints that invariably condition the possibilities of philosophy, morality and politics. They considered Kantian reason and liberal politics to pose serious threats to ‘genuine’ expressions of rationality and as dangerous obfuscations of the necessity of political order—of the brute fact that human beings stand in need of ‘being ruled,’ as such.     

Through the eyes of rural notaries: business, community and confessional divisions in seventeenth-century poitou

Historians have often reflected upon the relations between Catholicsand Protestants in the small towns of seventeenth-century France.Using the recorded information on the lives and business dealingsof notaries, this article looks at how they integrated intoand dealt with both confessional groups in the small Poitoutown of Chef-Boutonne. Of the twenty-one men who listed themselvesas notaries in the parish registers, seven left records of theacts they drew up. Using their papers as well as parish registersthe article follows up on these men, their religious affiliation,families, marriages, training as notaries, business dealingsand their selection as godparents for town children. It thenreflects back upon the role of these men and their respectiveconfessional groups in the crucial years between the end ofthe Wars of Religion and the lead-up to the revocation of theEdict of Nantes.     

Poor relief, taxes and the first Universal Pension Reform: the origin of the Swedish welfare state reconsidered

In the year 1900, Sweden probably had the oldest population in the contemporary world. It was also the first nation to implement a universal pension system in 1913. The universal character in early social legislation has certainly been decisive for the development of the Swedish welfare state. This alternative has not been self-evident. Why did the reforms turn universal, when the continental model, the Bismarck social security system, was exclusively directed at industrial workers? Research has concentrated on demographic factors and growing demands for social security, or on the fact that Sweden was still a predominantly rural society with about 2,400 local authorities. This article examines the development of social legislation in the light of local government expenditures and incomes, and suggests an overlooked possibility: the formulation of the first universal national social security reform was a redistributional response to uneven distribution of incomes and general expenditures among the rural districts in Sweden.     

Cultural contacts and ethnic origins in Viking Age Wales and northern Britain: the case of Albanus,Britain's first inhabitant and Scottish ancestor

Albanus, an eponymous ancestor for the kingdom of Alba, provides an example of the extent to which the creation of an ethnic identity was accompanied by new ideas about origins, which replaced previous accounts. Through an analysis of the Historia Brittonum’s textual tradition and Welsh knowledge of early Roman history and medieval ethnic groups, this article establishes that Albanus was added to the Historia Brittonum in the late ninth or early tenth century as an ancestral figure for the new kingdom of Alba in northern Britain. This was potentially a result of shared political situations in Gwynedd, Alba (formerly Pictland) and Strathclyde in relation to Scandinavian power at this time, which encouraged contacts and the spread of Alba-based ideology to Gwynedd. The later development of this idea and its significance in Alba itself, Geoffrey of Monmouth's account and English claims to supremacy over Scotland are also traced.     

Jesuit thalassology reconsidered: the Mediterranean and the geopolitics of Jesuit missionary aims in seventeenth-century Ethiopia

During the second half of the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus relied heavily on Portuguese trade routes in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in order to reach Ethiopia. However, geopolitical shifts, particularly the rise of Ottoman sea power in the Indian Ocean and the Spanish conquest of Portugal in 1580, ended this route’s viability for the Jesuits. In order to sustain Jesuit connections with Ethiopia, Father General Mutio Vitelleschi decided in 1627 to abandon the Portuguese and send four Jesuits with French passports through Ottoman territory and up the Nile, whence they would travel overland into Ethiopia. After arriving in Egypt, however, the Jesuits were arrested, interrogated and expelled by the Ottoman governor, who suspected that they were Habsburg spies. The course of this failed Jesuit effort to reach Ethiopia has three important implications for our understanding of the Mediterranean and its relationship with other sea spaces in terms of early modern empire building and Catholic evangelization. First, the decision to abandon the Portuguese in favour of the French illuminates how the Mediterranean remained at the fore of the Society of Jesus’s missionary efforts. Second, French willingness to protect the Jesuits demonstrates that Louis XIII of France saw the Mediterranean as an important theatre for achieving his political, religious and economic goals. Third, the Ottoman decision to arrest and expel the Jesuits due to fears that they were in Egypt to assist in a Coptic rebellion and concomitant Hapsburg invasion demonstrates both Ottoman anxiety concerning the rise of European religio-imperial ambitions and the Ottomans’ ability to control foreigners travelling through their lands. In sum, these developments illuminate a larger thalassological picture of the Mediterranean, which, like other sea spaces, obtained as an important contact zone where early modern powers competed to build empires and save souls.     

Diana,Dido, and The Fair Maid of Dunsmore: classical precursors,common tunes,and the question of consent in seventeenth-century balladry

The tragedy of Isabel of Dunsmore—an English shepherd’s daughter who commits suicide after being impregnated by a social superior—is recounted in two similar, yet lyrically distinct seventeenth-century ballads: “The Lamentable Song of the Lord Wigmoore Gouernor of Warwicke Castle and the Fayre Maid of Dunsmoore” and “The Fair Maid of Dunsmore’s Lamentation Occasioned by Lord Wigmore Once Governour of Warwick-Castle.” What is remarkable about these two ballads is that, despite commonalities in plot and even pacing, they offer divergent interpretations of a shared series of narrative events. What is more, both ballads do so by suggestively juxtaposing Isabel’s story both textually and musically with varying mythological precursors: Lucrece, Diana, Callisto, and Dido. This essay seeks to untangle how these classically inspired intertexts serve to characterise Isabel and Wigmore’s relationship in each ballad, particularly when it comes to the fraught issue of female sexual consent.     

A queen without a sceptre: public opinion and the political-constitutional debate in Italy in the first fifty years of national unification

Italy's intellectual debate over the concept of ‘public opinion’ in the first fifty years after unification can be better understood if one starts from an analysis of the constitutional framework. The definition of the rights and duties of rulers and ruled was the most pressing concern for the liberal ruling class. It should be noted that a strong paternalistic element was always present in the Italian intellectual debate. This paternalistic approach emerges clearly in the official Catholic culture. The main difference between Catholic intellectuals and liberals was over the ‘public sphere’. Liberalism mistrusted the masses because they were prone to insubordination and easily manipulated by demagogy, but it also believed the masses could elevate themselves. The ruling class's culture was essentially a synthesis between ‘moderatismo’ and that section of Catholicism that was less closed to modernity. Public opinion was considered by many as ‘queen of the world’, but according to the Albertine constitutional statute, the king was more politically influent.     

The creative evolution of scientific paradigms: Vernon Lee and the debate over the hereditary transmission of acquired characters

By the end of the nineteenth century, evolution through natural selection had been widely accepted, but the means by which innate or acquired characteristics were transmitted from parent to offspring remained hotly contested. As the literary career of Vernon Lee makes evident, discussion of the validity of newly espoused theories was not limited to science. This essay explores Lee's lifelong engagement with emerging and often unproven ideas in heredity and evolutionary science by arguing, first, that rather than a unidirectional flow of ideas from experimental science to literature and the social sciences, there was instead a productive and creative trafficking between these fields; and, second, that despite Lee's early rejection of Lamarckism, she continued to utilize superseded paradigms to inform her writing in a number of fields outside evolutionary biology.