Colonowhen, Colonowho, Colonowhere, Colonowhy: Exploring the Meaning behind the Use of Colonoware Ceramics in Nineteenth-Century Manassas, Virginia

This paper explores the meaning and use of colonoware ceramics recovered from six archaeological sites dating from the nineteenth-century at Manassas, Virginia. Americans, both free and enslaved, occupied this landscape. Archaeological investigations have recovered colonoware at some nineteenth-century domestic sites but not others. The occurrence of colonoware at these sites is patterned: colonoware in nineteenth-century Manassas was not an “ethnic” marker denoting peoples of African descent, but rather a social marker that distinguished enslaved people from free. People of free and enslaved status attributed negative connotations to colonoware. Enslaved servants employed colonoware out of economic necessity, not as a way to express ethnicity.     

Historical Notices of ISLIP,Oxfordshire1

Reginald Taylor and Lord Fletcher Essay Prize Winner

One of the most architecturally stimulating features of the Old Town Bridge Tower in Prague is the net vault over the ground level, designed by Peter Parler. Often assumed to have been built after the net vault of Prague Cathedral’s choir, this article looks more closely at the masonry, the heraldry and the sculptures of the Tower to suggest that the Bridge Tower vault predates the choir vault. After setting this vault as the first net vault in Bohemia, the article examines how this particular formt fits within the evolution of Parlerian vault designs in Prague. In addition, the article explores the larger implications of a design process where smaller spaces are used to experiment and develop new designs before utilising those designs on a larger scale.     

James Wray’s Carpentry Yard: archaeology of an early Williamsburg industrial craft site

Abstract

The archaeological work at the Wray Carpentry Yard in Williamsburg, Virginia offers a unique venue for the contextualization of 18th-century trades and tradesmen in the British colonies. James Wray’s craftsmen, both enslaved and free, included carpenters, joiners, glaziers and cabinet-makers working in a growing urban centre, providing services to a town that was quite literally under construction. The story these workers tell through the archaeology of their buildings and possessions is distinct in the archaeology of 18th-century Britain and its colonies, as no comparably intensive contextual examination of an urban artisan complex has been undertaken.     

The Baptist Chapel burial ground,Littlemore, Oxford

Abstract

Excavation of the cemetery associated with Littlemore Baptist Chapel, Oxford, revealed a total of 31 graves and coffins dating to the second half of the 19th century. The remains of 30 individuals survived. Coffin fittings were not plain as expected, but rather followed the Anglican tradition of the time. The skeletal evidence indicated a population where some suffered nutritional deficiencies in childhood, while others experienced longevity in adulthood, with the majority of pathological conditions being linked to old age. Evidence of trauma and degenerative change linked to manual labour were largely absent. Two examples of neoplastic disease were identified and these are discussed in detail.     

A Fifteenth-Century Painted Sermon at the Door of the Cathedral of Bressanone

Abstract

This article argues that a portion of the fifteenth-century frescos at the entrance door from the cloister to the cathedral of Bressanone can be seen as a painted sermon. The analysis draws on the frescos of two vaults and the interaction between words and images. In the first vault, just above the entrance of the church, the frescos present not only the contents of a sermon, but also its structure, namely an episode from the Gospel, a catechetical pattern, the quotation of auctoritates and a social goal to be achieved. The frescos of the second vault represent the contrast between virtues and vices using the pairs presented in Matthew 24. 40–41. This text was read by the medieval exegetical tradition as a scheme for the different status of Christian life, thus this vault could be seen as an elaborate catechetical pattern with a large system of biblical quotations. Moreover, the structure of the frescos of the second vault can be read as a sermo modernus based on the divisio of Matthew 24. 40–41. Finally, the comparison with a portion of a sermon by Bernardino da Siena on the theme of avarice confirms that the elements represented in Bressanone were really used both by preachers and painters.

In this way, the images of the cloister are a sermon, which continually preaches to anyone entering or leaving the church, thus organizing the public space as a 'theatre of memory' and offering a message readable at different levels.     

The Shwe-hmu,or Burmese Tax-Gatherer.

This article started life as an address to The Folklore Society at a conference on “The Sea in Legend and Tradition,” held in Great Yarmouth in September 2009. My invitation to speak there arose from my co-authorship of The Lore of Scotland (Random House, 2009) with the late Jennifer Westwood. One story I had researched was a nineteenth-century Mull legend, “MacLean of Duart and the Spanish Princess,” a tale with a more complex history than could be covered within the format of the book. What follows is a synthesis of material from various sources, drawing together the legendary and historical elements of the saga.     

The meaning of El Roi and the mythological dimension in Genesis 16

Abstract

This article discusses the literary debt of the story of Hagar in Genesis 16 to the Ugaritic text KTU 1.23, suggesting that behind the present tale lie ancient royal ideological motifs. These have a bearing on the present form of the story, ans suggest a message of hope to an exilic readership. The divine epithet Roi is explained as “seen”, expressing Hagar's surprise at surviving a vision of God.     

Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity

ABSTRACT

Across a broad range of late nineteenth-century French medical texts that described the newly denoted sexual pathologies of frigidity, inversion, fetishism, nymphomania, sadism and masochism, one finds a term being used for which no current equivalent exists. This term is l’amour morbide – morbid love. Its use was initially as common in respectable medical texts as it later became in erotic fictional writings. In some cases, it appeared to refer to a particular sexual pathology, albeit one which troubled the very notion of perversion as aberrant or abnormal. This article considers the role that l’amour morbide played in the sorting of medical terminology for describing sexual perversions in late nineteenth-century France, and examines what its relationship was to degenerationist thought. Engaging with Ian Hacking’s notion of “transient mental illnesses” produced by unique cultural ecologies, it is proposed that morbid love occupied the space between decadent culture of fin-de-siècle France on the one hand, and on the other hand degenerationist frames adopted by French doctors in the context of international medical and psychiatric conversations.     

Cartographical collections in America

ABSTRACT

The importance of maps in the construction of national territories has already received much attention from scholars; however, the discussion has mostly centred around the creation of political boundaries in emerging regions or states. Ethnic cartography, on the other hand, remains little studied, despite the fact that it also produced powerful symbolic meanings, advanced science and became a tool for various political ideologies. This article introduces the role that the mapping of ethnic territories played in political discourse in nineteenth-century Russia.     

The Clubmen of the West Riding of Yorkshire During the First Civil War: “Bradford Club-Law”

Abstract

The Luddite machine-breaking outbreaks in 1812 were not solely an urban or industrial phenomenon. Using a case study of the Horbury district in the West Riding, this article shows that Luddism, and especially popular fear of Luddism, was heightened by ancillary activities, both criminal and customary, occurring on the semi-rural peripheries of urban-industrial areas. Incendiarism was a common feature of social conflict in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. This article also demonstrates how the environment and landscape of the industrialising Pennines shaped the disturbances of 1812. Luddites were defending their customary 'task-scapes' that were increasingly being enclosed by aggrandising landlords and manufacturers. Luddism can only be understood within a longer and more holistic context of regional social tensions and customary practices of resistance.     

Reflections on the History and Historians of the black woman’s role in the community of slaves: enslaved women and intimate partner sexual violence

Taking as points of inspiration Peter Parish’s 1989 book, Slavery: History and Historians, and Angela Davis’s seminal 1971 article, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” this probes both historiographically and methodologically some of the challenges faced by historians writing about the lives of enslaved women through a case study of intimate partner violence among enslaved people in the antebellum South. Because rape and sexual assault have been defined in the past as non-consensual sexual acts supported by surviving legal evidence (generally testimony from court trials), it is hard for historians to research rape and sexual violence under slavery (especially marital rape) as there was no legal standing for the rape of enslaved women or the rape of any woman within marriage. This article suggests enslaved women recognized that black men could both be perpetrators of sexual violence and simultaneously be victims of the system of slavery. It also argues women stoically tolerated being forced into intimate relationships, sometimes even staying with “husbands” imposed upon them after emancipation.     

‘The innate yearnings of our souls’: Subjectivity,Religiosity and Outward Testimony in Mary Howitt's Autobiography (1889)

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in women's involvement in nineteenth-century religious cultures. However, the overwhelming focus remains firmly on the role of religion in providing motivation, sustenance and justification for women's involvement in feminism and other public campaigns. Questions of faith and devotion, spirituality and Christian selfhood, and the relationship of spiritual freedom to other liberations – religious issues that are at the heart of many women's life histories – remain largely unaddressed. This article focuses on the life of Mary Howitt, the popular nineteenth-century English poet, journalist and campaigner for women's rights, whose Autobiography (1889) describes an extraordinary religious journey. Raised in a strict Quaker household, Howitt resigned from the Society of Friends in the midst of a Unitarian interlude in the 1840s, became deeply involved with Spiritualism in the 1850s and 1860s, and finally moved to Rome, both physically and spiritually, at the end of her life. The article explores Howitt's representation of the Quaker piety of her youth as stifling and oppressive in its concern with outward forms of religious observance, particularly an emphasis on a traditional style of dress and on resisting ‘worldly’ activities, including poetry and art. A reading of the autobiography alongside her earlier writing reveals how themes become ‘composed’ into a coherent, stable life story, one shaped by later nineteenth-century public discourses that allowed for a greater religious fluidity and a new reflection on childhood experiences.     

The Woollen Industry of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) 1450–1550: Problems of a Balkan Textile Centre

Abstract

This article examines British responses to changes in Japanese dress during the Victorian period. The disapproval of the Japanese adoption of European clothing is shown to be linked to British anxieties regarding their political relationship and cultural engagement with Japan. The ways in which the kimono served as a touchstone for the British understanding of the country, representing an unchanging and romanticised view of the cultural identity of its Japanese wearer, is also explored. However, the kimono did not only signal ‘Japaneseness’, but was assimilated in British fashion as well. This article further explores how the kimono was related to issues of late nineteenth-century dress reform in Britain as well as to British unease about the cultural changes that they themselves had experienced in the wake of industrialisation.     

Apprentices,Goldsmiths, and the North in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

The story of King Edgar being rowed on the River Dee at Chester in 973 by eight subordinate kings was once well known. This article examines how it was used in popular history writing from the eighteenth century onwards, with greatest development in the mid nineteenth century, and subsequent decline into its present obscurity. It served English political and cultural ends, being used to demonstrate the natural superiority of that race over the others in the Union, particularly the Scots. Decline of imperial sentiment and ignorance of pre-Conquest history have relegated it to incidental mention in county histories.     

Scholars at War: Australasian social scientists, 1939–1945

ABSTRACT

In 1858, a scandal rocked Sydney – the captain and the owner of the Sydney-based barque Sutton were accused of kidnapping 65 Pacific Islanders to sell to sugar planters on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion. While Dorothy Shineberg highlighted this incident in a 1984 publication, she based her story on official documents located in the French and British archives and, understandably, largely portrayed it as a diplomatic dispute between the colonial powers. This paper revisits this notorious yet little known episode, taking into account the press coverage the affair received in Australia as well as the archival correspondence. It repositions the narrative in the complex colonial space of Sydney, where culpability was very much tied to local politics, class and notions of nationality. Set against the backdrop of the British anti-slavery laws, it considers the implications of this affair on future recruiting ventures in the region, including the introduction of indentured labour to Australia in 1863.     

Proto-Israelite Mythopoeics. A Perspective from Neuroscience on the Book of Joshua

This article contends that the Deuteronomic‐1 legend of the book of Joshua was formed into its mythical cyclical form through a process of oral transmission. As the oral stories told about an original source event were transformed into a community story it began to take on a liturgical form. This article explains the neuropsychological aspects of this natural process and also highlights how the cultural shift in the 12th century B.C.E. preserved the form of the Deuteronomic‐1 legend.     

Industrializing Crusoe: Adventure,Modernity and Anglo-American Expansionism

This essay focuses on two updated, Americanized versions of the Robinson Crusoe story published in the final quarter of the nineteenth-century: Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island and Douglas Frazar's Perseverance Island: or the Nineteenth-Century Robinson Crusoe. The first half of the essay considers how these Robinsonades reworked Defoe's novel as a fantasy of applied technology in an industrialized agrarian context. The second half of the essay engages with recent historical work on nineteenth-century British expansion in order to consider how Verne's and Frazar's adventures might be understood in relation to the flow of migrants and money from Britain to America around the period the novels were written. As a result, the essay proposes The Mysterious Island and Perseverance Island as literary vehicles that inspired visions of agro-industrialization at a time when Victorian subjects were increasingly drawn to the American West as a site in which to sink their labour and finance. Thus linking the circulation of the adventure form with overseas capitalist enterprise, the essay concludes by reflecting upon how such expansionism might be understood with regard to the discriminatory processes of primitive accumulation and uneven development that have characterized the growth of the modern capitalist world system.     

"More than seven sons": Ruth as example of the good son

The Book of Ruth is a beautiful story about faithfulness, love, and the blessing of Yahweh, but it also consists of hints and clues that might seem unmotivated or loose. The name of the book, the connection to the days when the judges ruled, the storytellers discreet commentaries through the story, are some examples of such hints and clues. They give the text an atmosphere that disturbs the idyllic, naïve impression usually associated with Ruth . If we focus on the expression "more then seven sons" at the end of the story, and understand Ruth in the role as Naomi's son, many of these hints and clues fall into place. This article goes through the Book of Ruth focusing on this interpretation. With Ruth as the example of the good son, other sons, within or surrounding Ruth , fall short.     

Towards a new philosophy of history. European Vichianism and Neapolitan Hegelianism (1804–48)

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Hegel’s reception among nineteenth-century Neapolitan authors went hand-in-hand with a renewed interest in Giambattista Vico’s philosophy of history. It considers the mechanisms of circulation and reception that shaped responses to Hegelianism within the broader context of European debates on La Scienza Nuova. These developments largely directed Neapolitans’ understanding of Hegel’s ideas and encouraged the merging of local thought with wider European currents. Neapolitan Hegelians engaged very extensively with the works of French and northern Italian authors, such as Jules Michelet and Carlo Cattaneo, who had understood Vico as a proponent of an absolute concept of historical time that neatly dovetailed with the philosophical preoccupations common among German idealists. The article makes a case for a transnational understanding of Neapolitan Hegelianism, arguing that this current of thought did not merely stem from the passive absorption of Hegel’s ideas, but emerged as the synthesis of a local and a European dimension of philosophy.