“Et nulle autre me faict plus proprement homme que cette cy:” Michel de Montaigne's embodied masculinity

Writing in a period of considerable anxiety about gender roles, Montaigne (1533–92) developed a series of reflections on gender and masculinity in which he destabilized the gender and sexual hierarchies of early-modern France. First, drawing on an increasingly global archive of information about non-European societies, he argued that culture plays a major role in shaping the lives and experiences of women. Secondly, his understanding of nature enabled him to foster a notion of the equality of the sexes, even as he recognized that nature creates certain differences between men and women. Finally, on these foundations, Montaigne constructed a vision of masculinity that stresses it as an ethical value, one that he opposes above all to cruelty. Montaigne's sexual politics were, I suggest, at least in part a response to the Wars of Religion that had led to an excess of barbarity in early-modern France.     

政治阴谋的牺牲品——再论圣殿骑士团覆灭的原因

在中世纪基督教世界一度兴旺的圣殿骑士团,最终的命运相当悲惨。它的衰亡同十字军东征的失败有直接关系,但真正的原因是王权对教权的挑战和进攻。本文将分析法国国王腓力四世颠覆圣殿骑士团的真实动机,力图展现近代欧洲集权国家兴起的过程即是政治与教会的冲突过程,借以说明政教之间的复杂关系。     

William Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781) and the study of religion in Enlightenment England

This study argues that the English-born, Edinburgh-educated and Bath-based physician William Falconer (1744–1824) authored the only stadial history published during the British Enlightenment that analysed the influence of socio-economic context upon religious belief. A survey of the conjectural histories of religion written by the leading literati demonstrates that discussion of religion by the Scottish literati was undertaken separate from the “Scottish narrative” of stadial economic and political progress. We have to turn to Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781) to see a four-stage history of religion that related belief and practice to wider social and economic developments. While heavily derivative of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois (1748), Falconer’s Remarks has some claim to theoretical innovation and used his conjectural history to tell a story of English (not British) religious exceptionalism. Moreover, the work was received as a serious contribution to the late Enlightenment’s science of human nature and society.     

The public relevance of the church and Catholicism in Italy

Abstract

This article highlights the particular situation of the Catholic religion in Italy which distinguishes itself for its systematic organization, active association-forming and cultural vitality, unrivalled in any other European country either Protestant or Catholic. On the one hand the church in Italy still disposes of such a wealth of clergy and religious figures, dioceses and parishes, educational and social institutions, ecclesiastical groups and associations, and so on, that it can maintain a diffuse presence scattered over the national territory; it deploys numerous forces and resources which form an integral part of normal social relationships that animate civil society. On the other hand, the church and Italian Catholicism today are particularly active at a cultural level, with their contribution of ideas and experience on vital questions arising in social coexistence (ranging from the family to bioethics, from religious freedom to the secular State, from national identity to the multiethnic presence, and so on).     

A Manchu itinerary

Abstract

Eighty‐nine business letters from European map sellers to the London firm of Thomas Jefferys and William Faden are preserved in the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan. Dating from the decade 1773–1783, the letters reveal through the invoices, accounts payable, bills of lading, and orders many detailed aspects of the map trade in the eighteenth century at the time of the War of American Independence. Special attention is drawn to the exchange of maps between England and France during this period of war.     

Doctoral Theses in Progress

Abstract

Jean Bonfa's 1696 map offered the most accurate portrait in its day of the Comtat Venaissin. Commissioned when France threatened the region economically and politically, the map's topographical detail and allegorical themes exhibit a political geography favouring papal interests. Yet the map's coordinates for Avignon reflect neither Bonfa's skill as a positional astronomer nor his collaboration with the Paris Observatory. Finally, because local authorities controlled the distribution of Bonfa's map, it was not available to other cartographers.     

Financial crises and the balance of power in international finance, 1890–2010

Has the centre of gravity of international finance irreversibly started to shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific since the financial debacle of 2007-2008? This article discusses this highly topical question in a historical perspective, by considering previous changes in the balance of power in international finance and the role played by global financial in these changes. Particular attention is paid to the Baring Crisis of 1890, the American Panic of 1907, the financial crisis of July -August 1914, the banking crises of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the financial instability of the early 1970s and the ensuing banking failures, the International Debt Crisis of 1982, and the Japanese Banking Crisis of 1997-8. The article concludes that financial crisis, perhaps surprisingly, did not lead to clear changes in the balance of power in international finance; and that the financial debacle of 2007-8 is unlikely, in the medium-term, to fundamentally alter the current order.     

Historiographical Foundations of Modern International Thought: Histories of the European States-System from Florence to Göttingen

Summary

The foundations of modern international thought were constructed out of diverse idioms and disciplines. In his impressive book, Foundations of Modern International Thought, David Armitage focuses on the normative idioms of natural law and political philosophy from the Anglophone world, from Hobbes and Locke to Burke and Bentham. I focus on parallel developments in the empirically-oriented disciplines of history and historiography to trace the emergence of histories of the states-system in the Italian- and German-speaking worlds, from Bruni and Sarpi to Pufendorf and Heeren. Taking seriously Armitage's remark that ‘the pivotal moments in the formation of modern international thought were often points of retrospective reconstruction’, I argue that the historical disciplines supplied another significant intellectual context in which the modern world could be imagined as ‘a world of states’.     

究竟应当以怎样的历史观指导我们的研究——兼与蒋大椿教授讨论

以真理性的历史观念指导我们的研究,是一个极其重要的问题;而且,由于长期以来教条主义统治了我们的历史研究,因此,一个真实而且正确的历史观乃是非常必要的.本文认为:马克思主义的历史观即"唯物史观",不仅可以质疑而且可以批评.但是,这种质疑和批评必须是建立在理解乃至超越的基础之上的,否则,所有相关的讨论也就可能只是在前马克思的水平之下进行的.     

“Refusing to be a victim,refusing to be an enemy”. Form-of-life as resistance in the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism

This paper focuses on practices of non-violent resistance as they are played out in the ongoing Palestinian struggle against the Israeli settler colonialism in the occupied West Bank. By looking at the resistance of expanding settlements, demolition and land confiscation orders, and livelihood destruction in two Palestinian sites, the paper shows how Israeli settler colonial apparatuses, and the variety of techniques and practices of erasure they mobilize, can be fruitfully studied through site-specific ways of Palestinian resistance. In order to do so, the paper turns to discuss a peculiar form of non-violent resistance grounded in what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘destituent power’. It shows how the acts of destituent resistance in the two sites under study function by playing with the apparatuses of control in creative but non-violent ways; namely, by using the potentialities of that form-of-life that the settler colonial apparatuses try to cancel, overrule, control, weaken, criminalize, and erase. The idea of ‘destituent play’ is hence elaborated, and special attention paid to its ability to slow down and hamper the repressive functions of the settler colonial apparatuses through the creative use of the potentialities of Palestinian everyday life.