Family and influence to the south of Normandy in the eleventh century: the lordship of Bellême

The Bellême family were among the most important of the new families to emerge in the unsettled conditions of northern France in the tenth century. They illustrate well the manner in which those families extended their influence at the expense of declining central authorities. The nature of their relations with their overlords, the counts of Maine and the dukes of Normandy, is examined and a new chronology proposed for the complex divisions of estates among the family. It is suggested that family quarrels of the 1040s and 1050s seriously weakened their position and that the lordship was easily dominated by Geoffrey Martel, count of Anjou, the most powerful figure in mid-eleventh century northern France. A reversal is traced in the pro-Angevin sympathies of Bishop No of Sées, the last surviving male member of the family, after the failure of the coalition of Angevins and Capetians against the duke of Normandy in 1054. However, it was not until the estates of the family were eventually reunited in 1071 on the succession of Ivo's niece, Mabel, and her Norman husband, that the lordship came completely under the influence of the ascendant Normandy.     

How the News was brought from Byzantium to Angoulême; or,The Pursuit of a Hare in an Ox Cart

Abstract

Adémar of Chabannes (988-1034) of noble family, a-monk in the monastery of St. Cybard (Eparchus) at Angoulême, compiled a Chronicon in three books. The first begins with the origins of the Franks and ends with the death of Pepin the Short in 768; the second deals with the reign of Charlemagne; the third covers the years 814 to 1030. The first two books and the first fifteen chapters of the third (down to the year 877) are wholly derivative from identifiable sources. But from chapter sixteen onward the third book provides valuable information chiefly on the period 877-1030 in Aquitaine, presumably drawn from local written sources and from the memories of Adémar's associates. These included notably his two uncles, who were attached to the monastery of St. Martial at Limoges, as was Adémar himself in his youth. It was at St. Martial that on a stormy night in 1010 Adémar had a vision in the heavens of a fiery Cross with Christ upon it weeping a great river of tears: an experience that rendered him so thunderstruck (attonitus) that he kept it secret in his heart until many years later when he was nearing the end of his Chronicon. Then he wrote it down. From St. Martial he returned at the age of twenty-two to St. Cybard, took orders, and spent his life in writing. The‘original’chapters of his Chronicon only occasionally evince any interest in or knowledge of events in France north of Loire.     

Matéo Maximoff's La Septième fille: A Roma Testimony of Internment and Assimilation

Set in the internment camp at Lannemezan where the author and his family spent two years, Matéo Maximoff's La Septième fille gives a voice to a minority group that has suffered from negative stereotypes since its arrival in France in the Middle Ages. In that work, Maximoff, the first authentic Roma novelist, blends folklore and oral tradition with historical fact, chronicling the conditions in the camp at Lannemezan even as he spins a supernatural tale worthy of the most gifted of conteurs. Informed by historical sources and ethnographic studies, this article suggests that La Septième fille may be read as a metaphor for the internment of the Roma by the Vichy regime and the policies aimed at ‘socialising’ and forcing them to become sedentary, policies that began during the Third Republic and that continued well into the twentieth century. La Septième fille is one of the rare literary works (along with Didier Daeninckx's La Route du Rom, 2003) to treat the little-known Vichy initiative of interning Roma—the majority of whom were French citizens—in 31 camps around France.     

Migration and the built environment: a spatial analysis of resettlement in Çeşme,Turkey

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the retreat of the Ottoman Empire caused a massive scale migration in the Aegean regions. This process was furthered by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) between the Turkish Republic and Greece. Gradually, more than one million people were formally exchanged under the control of the respective national authorities. This study shows that the predictions made by political authorities regarding the expected adaptation and homogenization based on religious affiliations failed to materialize; instead, the process of migration generated its own unique and autonomous processes derived primarily from cultural aspects and social origins. This research examines the materialization of the migrants’ adaptation practices and the spatial transformations in the built environment at both urban and domestic level, in order to indentify spatial and related social conflicts that arose as a result of socio-cultural mixing through a case study of the Çe?me Peninsula, Turkey. The study concludes that the relationship between social space and the physical environment is intertwined, with spatial transformations based on residents’ home of origin, professions and economic prosperity positioned in a clearly defined hierarchy of meaning.     

Job training and unemployment: Is Southwestern jiving me again?

Harland Padfield and Roy Williams. Stay Where You Were: A Study of Unemployables in Industry. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1973. xviii + 282 pp. Figures, tables, and appendix. $7.50 (cloth), $3.25 (paper).     

Aspects of the History of the Nerves: Bell’s Theory,the Bell-Magendie Law and Controversy,and Two Forgotten Works by P.W. Lund and D.F. Eschricht

The French physiologist François Magendie showed, in 1822, that the anterior roots of the spinal nerves are motor and the posterior sensory. The English anatomist Charles Bell claimed the discovery, but his claim was based on republications of papers in which the wording had been altered to be consistent with Magendie’s findings. Bell also appropriated Herbert Mayo’s discoveries of the functions of the fifth and seventh cranial nerves. Bell repeated his claims in a number of influential publications, supported by his brothers-in-law John and Alexander Shaw. And for a century and a half, Bell figured as the discoverer in most references to the subject. During this period, several reviewers did go back to Bell’s original papers, disclosing Bell’s falsifications in the republished texts. But Magendie was not definitely acknowledged as the discoverer of the function of the spinal nerve roots until Cranefield’s (1974) treatise. Cranefield, as did all other reviewers, overlooked accounts from 1825 by P.W. Lund and F.D. Eschricht. They critically reviewed Bell’s early publications and reached conclusions similar to those of Cranefield concerning the roles of Bell and Magendie in the discovery of the function of the spinal nerve roots.     

Claiming Commerce,Quality and Credit: Raisons d’être of the Antwerp and Brussels tapissierspanden (Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries)

Literature on the Antwerp and Brussels tapissierspanden tends to give a one-dimensional account of the institutions as very similar commercial enterprises that were embraced wholeheartedly by everyone involved in the Antwerp and Brussels tapestry worlds since they all shared the same concerns and a single goal — namely, to develop and secure a central meeting point and marketplace. This essay, however, adopts a different vantage point. It discusses the tapissierspanden from the viewpoint of the conflicting business conduct and strategies developed by Antwerp city council and tapestry entrepreneurs on the one hand, and Brussels tapestry entrepreneurs on the other. This essay argues that those who founded the institutions in Antwerp and Brussels established and used them to further completely different objectives — and that their strategies, which both manifested themselves and crystallised in the panden, present tapestry scholarship with a fundamental methodological problem, the magnitude of which has yet to be appreciated.     

‘It shocks me,the place of women’: intersectionality and mining companies’ retrogradation of indigenous women in New Caledonia

Indigenous women’s social positionings are complex and dynamic, informed by culture and post-colonial politics; gender and ethnicity intersect with age, socio-economic status, and social hierarchies. This article uses an ethnographic study of Kanak women’s engagements with mining in New Caledonia, to examine three questions. First, how do indigenous women’s dynamic social positionings shape their possibilities for negotiation with and resistance to industry? Secondly, how do women’s possibilities for engagement in turn shape the wider community’s possibilities for negotiation with or resistance to industry? Finally, what is the companies’ role in shaping women’s possibilities for such engagement? I draw on the critical feminist concept of intersectionality, bringing this into conversation with concepts of symbolic and cultural violence and hegemony. Over time, women began to actively negotiate with and resist industrial projects, in line with growing gender equity in New Caledonia, but the mining companies referenced – and thus reinforced – women’s dominated social position as an excuse to sideline their concerns, a type of cultural violence I term ‘retrogradation.’ Thus, this article recognizes indigenous women’s increasing agency in engaging with external actors, such as industrial projects, yet also shows how outsiders can commit retrogradation to further marginalize young, rural, poor community women. I discuss how such marginalization limits options for the larger group. Finally, I point to a way out of oppression, through transformation of hegemonic ideologies.     

‘Lend me your ears’: social policy and the hearing body

Recent developments in music regulation policy in some European countries show a recognition of changes in the built environment, contemporary demographics and the sonic profile of popular music. These initiatives have not been echoed in Australian music policy, where the primary focus is on the cultural and economic conditions of production and consumption, with little interest in the mechanics and biology of sound production and circulation, and their social welfare implications. Within the general category of noise pollution, it appears that the proliferation of low-frequency noise (LFN) is the fastest growing problem, in which contemporary popular music is increasingly implicated. This paper explores why LFN should suddenly become so pervasive that it has begun to attract specific social policy and legislative measures, its own scientific journals, and attempts to establish standards of its measurement specific to a profile that evades traditional sound pollution analysis.     

“Remember me”: Hamlet,memory and Bloom’s poiesis

Although memory is not explicitly named in “Hades”, it nonetheless features centrally. Intertextuality is an example of memory, and in “Hades” Shakespeare’s Hamlet is remembered – specifically the Ghost’s relation to Hamlet, whom he bids to “Remember” and “revenge”. Derrida calls this relation “hauntological”: it is characterised by an uncertain gaze, the father telling his son what to do, and the son mourning for his father. In Bloom’s mourning for his father, Virag, hauntology might be expected. However, it is Bloom’s late son, Rudy, who hauntologises Bloom, thereby revitalising the latter; this adjusts Shakespeare’s original hauntology. While considering repeatable ways of maintaining this hauntology, Bloom jocularly reverts to new technology: the phonograph and photograph. His plan reveals his relish for liminality and poiesis: being and non-being at the same time. Bloom is thus remembered into the future, all the while Ulysses is haunted by Hamlet.     

‘God was with me everywhere’: women’s embodied practices and everyday experiences of sacred space in Czechia

In this paper, we approach religion and spirituality through the analytic lens of the everyday and examine how ordinary women make sacred space through their embodied, emotional, and spatially varying practices. Our research is grounded in Czechia where about 80% of inhabitants do not declare any religious affiliation and ‘new’ religions are on the rise. We deploy auto-photography as a method that invites participants’ own visual representations and interpretative narrations of their quotidian experiences. Thirty-eight Christian, Buddhist, and non-religious women participated in this study in 2016. Our analysis of photographs and interviews shows that our participants turn places that are not primarily associated with religion or spirituality (such as a kitchen sink or a bus stop) into sacred or spiritual places while at the same time integrate officially sacred spaces (such as churches and meditation centers) into their daily lives through social activities. Thus, we argue that a mutually transformative process is taking place in contemporary Czechia. In this process, religiously affiliated and non-affiliated women alike transform everyday spaces into sacred sites through their embodied and emotional practices that seek calmness, peace, and transcendence. At the same time, women who participate in organized religions remake the sacrality of officially sacred sites through their emphasis on social connections and feelings of communal belonging and shared identity. Our findings underscore that sacred space is not fixed in any one location and its production involves the continual emotional and material investment by ordinary women.     

Synônê: re-considering a problematic term of middle Byzantine fiscal administration

Abstract

The history of Byzantine fiscal administration, as is well-known, is still an area in which many problems remain to be resolved. In 1880 the Russian Byzantinist V. G. Vassilievsky, one of the first historians to address them seriously, described Byzantine fiscal structures as labyrinthine; other scholars have not disagreed. But as a result of the work of successive generations, we are in a much better position today to understand the fundamental lines of development of late Roman and Byzantine fiscal arrangements, and in particular to follow the evolution of middle and later Byzantine fiscal administrative structures out of the situation that prevailed in the later Roman period, especially from the fifth and sixth centuries. Many problems remain, of course, and in the present contribution I would like to re-examine the term synônê, which has a technical significance in late Roman and Byzantine texts. The exact meaning of the word remains disputed and this has led to conflicting opinions among those who have attempted to interpret its application in the sources. The resolution of some of these questions has important consequences for our understanding of how the state's fiscal structures operated over the period in question.     

‘They never pass me the ball’: exposing ableism through the leisure experiences of disabled children,young people and their families

In this paper, we explore the participation of disabled children, young people and their families in leisure activities. Drawing on the accounts of disabled children, young people, and their parents and careers, we reflect on the leisure spaces that they access and record some of their experiences within them. Using the concept of ‘ableism’ [Campbell, F. K. 2009. Contours of Ableism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan] we interrogate the data gathered as part of a two-year project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council Does Every Child Matter, post-Blair? The interconnections of disabled childhoods' (RES-062-23-1138). By doing so we identify some of the inherent and embedded discriminations in favour of those children and young people who are perceived to be ‘able’ that simultaneously work to exclude the young ‘kinds of people’ [Hacking, I. 2007. “Kinds of People: Moving Targets.” Proceedings of the British Academy 151: 285–318] categorised as ‘disabled’ and their families from leisure facilities and opportunities. We suggest that currently, disabled families and children occupy a mix of ‘mainstream’, ‘segregated’ and ‘separate’ leisure spaces. We discuss the impact of occupying these spaces and ask what the experiences of accessing leisure by disabled children, young people and their families reveal about the processes and practices of ableism.     

Killing the ' Fantôme Canaque ': Evoking and Invoking the Possibility of Revolt in New Caledonia (1853-1915)

Evocations and invocations of the possibility of revolt or violence on the part of Kanak were an ever present feature of European settler discourse in 19th and early 20th century New Caledonia. Within this discourse, there was a constant tension between the possibility of (or potential for) violence invoked by settlers, and the attempts of colonial administrators to deny this possibility. For the local administration, denial of the possibility of a mass Kanak revolt was part of an attempt to move towards a more indirect form of control over the dangerous individual. Settler evocations or invocations of the possibility of revolt can be seen, depending on the context, as direct threats to Kanak, as appeals for administrative intervention (repression) or as rhetorical attacks on the local administration.