Charles the bold and the crusade: politics and propaganda

The pressures on Charles the Bold (duke of Burgundy from 1467 to his death in 1477) to lead, or lend his support to, a crusade were many. His Italian allies and the papacy all pleaded for his help and participation; and these appeals were augmented by the exhortation contained in much of the literature popular at the Burgundian court and by the presence there of refugees from the East.Charles's response was mixed. Political and moral pressures made it impossible for him to ignore the question of the crusade, but, even if his attitude should be characterized as cautious rather than as indifferent, he never did go on crusade. Equally, however, he repeatedly justified his comparative inaction and, at the same time, made propaganda against his enemies by suggesting that their hostility alone prevented him from embarking on an expedition to drive back the infidel.This response, since it was not untypical of the princes of his generation, helps explain the West's failure to unite against the Turks. From the point of view of Burgundian history, Charles's cautious attitude towards the crusade tends to support the revisionists who argue that he was far less ‘rash’ than the traditional historical view allows.     

The politics of intimacy: Nazi and Hutu propaganda as case studies

This study examines the particular (but not exclusive) relationship between violent intimacy and Nazi and Hutu genocidal propaganda in relation to national desires. It focuses on the fears of the ‘double’ (the close stranger) as projected in language in order to point to the ‘anxiety of intimacy’ as a dangerous social space that under specific historical and political conditions can turn into genocide. As paradoxical as it may seem, intimacy is not only a concept of love but also a concept of hate and violence. This article aims to show how genocidal language can simultaneously reflect the desire of the other and its disavowal in violent language. Nazi and Hutu propaganda are analysed as case studies using psychoanalytic interpretations and social criticism theory to discuss how violent intimacy works in language and how mimetic desire of the other (of its freedom, power, intellect, pleasures, etc.), constitutes negative identification and a fear of the ‘double other’, giving rise to a ‘rapture of death’. Violent intimacy is not the only explanation of genocide, but it is a hidden force that should not be overlooked.     

The underclass in the first crusade:: a historiographical trend

This study explores a recent trend in the historiography of the First Crusade, specifically the behaviour of the Jewish and Christian ‘underclass’. This term is used to refer to women in the Jewish society of Latin Europe and to the ‘common folk’ in the neighbouring Christian society; both of these groups did not traditionally dictate social and political norms in their respective milieus. The argument is that historians traditionally accorded both sectors a leadership role in the Rhineland pogroms, based on medieval sources, but that they have recently revised the record and claimed that events were actually driven by the traditional (adult male) leadership, i.e. rabbis and nobles. The article studies the sources that served as the bases for the traditional and revisionist perspectives and traces the chain of historiographical development through the views of prominent historians. It also suggests contemporary issues that appear to underpin the revisions.     

John Murray: 'a bold and skilful engineer'

Abstract

Between 1832 and 1859 the essential structure of the harbour at Sunderland was completed. A divisive debate over the siting of a dock led to the establishment only of the small and irrelevant Wearmouth Dock in preference to a series of very imaginative schemes. The two piers were further improved and extended and this involved the remarkable feat of the movement of the North Pier lighthouse. The period culminated with the conception and construction of the great South Dock. The dominant figure throughout these events was the resident engineer John Murray.     

The roles of women in the crusade movement: a survey

This article gives a survey of the roles women played within the medieval crusade movement. Apart from considering the evidence for women joining crusade expeditions as pilgrims, fighters or camp followers, attention is given to the vast area of women’s contributions away from the battlefields and the impact women had on the propaganda, recruitment, financing and organising of crusades and their roles in looking after families and properties as well as providing liturgical support at home for crusaders on campaign. The aim is to map out the gender boundaries, their genesis and development, which defined women’s roles both within crusade armies and in the wider crusade movement in the 12th and 13th centuries and beyond. The article surveys available studies and also introduces, as particularly illustrative examples, the experiences of two prominent female exponents, Margaret of Beverley, who went on crusade in the 1180s, and Catherine of Siena, an ardent and outspoken promoter of the crusade in the 1370s.     

Gathering and using information at the fifteenth-century Church councils: the example of crusade

ABSTRACT

The discussion of crusade at the councils of Constance (1414–18) and Basel (1431–49) is used to test the hypothesis that in the fifteenth century increasing importance was attached to the gathering of information. At Constance the chief crusading topic was the past and future of the Baltic crusade; at Basel attention was given to the negotiation of peace with the Hussites and union with the Orthodox Greeks. The paper considers the origin and character of the information that reached the councils; how it was used in the discourse at Constance and Basel; and it then assesses the effect of information on collective decision-making at the councils. While it is only possible to see information exerting an impact in the case of peace with the Hussites, the overall value placed on it by the conciliar delegates was high, corroborating recent arguments that the fifteenth century was an ‘information age’.     

崔立秋:骑行川藏线，荡涤尘心的豪迈之旅

<正>大约一亿年前,在印度板块与欧亚板块惊天动地的相撞中,喜马拉雅山神话般地从古特提斯海缓缓升起,巍然矗立在8000米的高度。川藏路,就是人类刻在这片高原上的诗行。关于西藏的雄美,有数不清的话题;关于西藏的路险,有道不完的故事;关于西藏的魅力,只有亲历才能领略。川藏线沿途,色彩单纯到了圣洁,气韵委婉到崇高。在这条路上,美景与泥沙走石相伴,冰川与河流共舞。或一山有四季,或千里皆碧空。湖光山色风情万种,草原牧场天地相连。川藏路翻越了12座海拔在4000米以上的高山,跨过了14条波涛汹涌的大河,蜿蜒曲折,蛇形千里。     

Governmentality and comic propaganda: Mighty Man,the black superhero of apartheid

Recent years have seen growing academic interest in the proliferation of a distinct genre of African superheroes. There is, however, a much longer – and at times, problematic – history of superheroes in and from Africa, a history often heavily infused with colonial and imperial ideology. Using the 1970s South African Mighty Man comic book series, this article highlights how popular culture and media can be used as covert and mundane tool of governmentality. Mighty Man can be understood as a technique of power deployed in service of the apartheid regime's philosophy of separate development, illustrating the use of popular culture as a technology of (colonial) governmentality. The landscapes, narratives and additional content of Mighty Man were used in efforts to instil and frame a conduct of conduct amongst Black subjects – both in accepting separate development and the apartheid government, and in framing the everyday practices and dispositions that would allow for governing at a distance by the white minority regime. Mighty Man provides a powerful example of state-commissioned, covert comic propaganda which was indelibly framed by government policy and an ambition to create and impose a set of values and ideals around the dispositions, behaviour and actions of Black subjects. Ultimately, Mighty Man embodied a segregationist fantasy in which the absence of non-Black characters both denied the possibility of inter-racial contact and normalised social and spatial segregation – as well as class-based aspirations – while simultaneously promoting the conduct of conduct amongst subjects that would maintain these divisions. Through the construction of moral township landscapes, the Mighty Man series not only sought to regulate the conduct of the colonised subject through the condemning of ‘immoral’ behaviours but also attempted to offer illusory hopes of aspiration and freedom.     

Federalism: Money and politics

J. S. H. Hunter, Revenue Sharing in the Federal Republic of Germany, Centre for Research on Federal Financial Relations, Research Monograph No. 2, ANU, 1973, pp. 116 + xi, $3.00.     

Crusading and crusade memory in Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum

This article is a preliminary investigation into the way the Cistercians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries conceptualised and contextualised the history of the crusading movement, with a specific focus on the way in which they integrated their involvement in crusading into the Order's sense of institutional memory and corporate identity. The article presents a study of Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum, a collection of exempla that was composed for the edification of Cistercian novices in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Although the text is well known to medievalists (and particularly to scholars of medieval Cisterciana), it has yet to be subjected to a close reading by historians of the crusades. By examining the way in which Caesarius used and described the crusades in the Dialogus, the article demonstrates the potential of using non-narrative texts to explore medieval understandings of the crusading past and, more generally, illustrates further the importance of warfare in the shaping of medieval monastic culture.     

NATO: the practice and politics of transformation

The Iraq crisis caused a deep rift in US–European relations and within Europe. NATO seemed sure at least to be damaged, if not fatally undermined. But to the dismay of those who have been waiting for many years for NATO finally to unravel, the Atlantic alliance spent 2003 proudly showing off its transformation project, and looking forward to its next enlargement in 2004. Yet these necessary improvements to NATO's political and military structures, and to its deployable capability, cannot alone secure the alliance's future. This article argues that what is needed, as ever, is a shared determination among governments that NATO can continue to serve their needs. There has been no better opportunity since the end of the Cold War to place the US-European security relationship on a firm footing through NATO. There has also been no moment when the penalties of failure have been higher. If NATO's transformation agenda, together with the NATO–EU 'Berlin Plus' arrangement, are not exploited to the full, then US-European security relations are unlikely to recover from Iraq.     

Sputniks,explorers and propaganda: The discovery of the earth's radiation belts 1

Abstract

The most important scientific discovery of the early space era ‐ the 1958 discovery of the radiation belts of the Earth ‐ was made in the context of Cold War rivalry between the USSR and the USA. The paper uses previously unavailable archival records to reconstruct the relative contributions of American and Soviet researchers and their interations during the process of discovery. The former discovered what is now known as the inner radiation belt, while the latter observed the outer radiation belt and gradually came to realize the existence of two distinctively different zones of radiation. The uses of science for the purposes of Cold War political propaganda affected the behavior of scientists and led to the misrepresentation of the events in mass media.     

Smells like politics: planning and the inconvenient politics of intensive peri‐urban agriculture

Intensive farming is an increasing part of Australian agriculture, including in the multi‐functional landscapes at the edges of Australian cities. The example of intensive “broiler” poultry production reveals the tensions that arise when sites of hyper‐productivity conflict with social change in rural areas. Planning processes for intensive farming in the Australian state of Victoria are predicated on stability and consensus: on assumed static and uncontroversial ideas of agriculture, its place, and the primacy of agricultural productivity. Yet concerns about the industrialisation of agriculture are live political issues at the local level, especially in dynamic peri‐urban locations. This paper explores the emergence of a politics of place outside the bounds of planning consensus through an analysis of planning appeals and associated media relating to planning permits for intensive poultry developments in Victoria over 2011–2016. We highlight tensions that exist in relation to technical planning assessments and categorisations used to assert farming as the orthodox use of rural land, especially when new forms of farming look and feel demonstrably different. Using Mouffe's problematising of the negation of antagonism and Rancière's notion of the risks of a false consensus democracy, we argue that planning processes for intensive farming illustrate critical issues in participatory planning. While ostensibly post‐political decision‐making narrows the politics of place and food systems to decisions about policing the boundaries and buffer distances placed around intensive poultry developments, alternative representations of rural life persist. The certainty offered by code‐based planning does not negate the ongoing (if inconvenient) politics of intensive peri‐urban agriculture.     

Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and Italian propaganda abroad

After the outbreak of war, public and private institutions in Italy embarked on various propaganda projects without coordination. It was not until Vittorio Emanuele Orlando became prime minister (from 30 October 1917 to 23 June 1919) that the first serious efforts were made to organize propaganda abroad. G. A. Borgese, a contributor to the Corriere della Sera, took an active role in the defense of Italian intervention in the war and was assigned various missions abroad, commissioned by the editor of the newspaper and, after this first experience, by the army and naval authorities, and by Orlando himself. His unpublished report Dello spirito pubblico in Francia, written at the end of his mission to Paris in March and April 1917, describes Italian propaganda efforts in France and French public opinion on Italy and the Italians, making it an important text that reveals both the problematic relations between Italy and France and the mistakes and shortcomings of Italian propaganda.     

Urban politics: Theory and practice

Blair Badcock, Unfairly Structured Cities, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1984, pp. 395, $17.95 (paper).

John Halligan and Chris Paris (eds), Australian Urban Politics: critical perspectives, Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1984, pp. 247, $12.95 (paper).