A psycho-historical source: the Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent

Medievalists turn to Guibert of Nogent's Memoirs (1116) for the account of the Laon uprising they contain. And yet this account is poor history. It is didactic and self-righteous in tone; one senses that the writer consistently sacrificed historical truth to the moral point he was trying to make. Scratch this twelfth- century ‘historian’ and you will find underneath a guilt-ridden cleric, haunted by vivid sexual reminiscences of his mother and by the terrible chastening reality of the Virgin Mary. A sensitive reading of the confessional sections of the Memoirs may yield up crucial unconscious impulses in a medieval man's psyche: his ‘masculine’ ambitions for glory, his need to prove his manhood, and yet also his ‘feminine’ desire for selfless submission to God, and his need to achieve a kind of passive holiness and innocence. These opposing impulses may account for the ‘demon’ that tortured Guibert of Nogent.After isolating certain psychological themes in the Memoirs it is possible to relate these themes to various nuances in the psychological ‘milieu’ of twelfth-century France. It is also possible to relate some of these themes to a ‘milieu’ not altogether different from that of twelfth-century France — twentieth-century southern Italy. For in southern Italy, we find that the psychological relationship between masculinity and femininity and (perhaps as a result of this relationship) the prominence of the Virgin Mary in the lives of the people corresponds closely to the situation in twelfth- century France. But this cross-cultural analysis is meant only to illuminate some of the possibilities of psychohistory. At the very least, a psychohistorical consideration of a text such as Guibert of Nogent's Memoirs should reveal some useful correlations between the single psychological current and the larger tides of cultural history.     

The Metamorphosis of Woman: Transmission of Knowledge and the Problems of Gender

This study investigates the perceived inequality of male and female education, focusing geographically on the lands of Loire and Rhine and distinguishing between: (a) the way knowledge was acquired; (b) the media in which it was set down; (c) the content of the knowledge; and (d) the way it was transmitted to others. Starting with Guibert of Nogent's characterisation of both his (lay) mother's and his (lay) uncle's religious formation as well as his own training as a cleric and an abbot (c. 1125), developments in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are inventoried and the findings are tested on an example from the late middle ages, Christine de Pizan.     

Getting the punchline: deciphering anti-Jewish humour in Anglo-Norman England

The idea that laughter was impossible for medieval monks has been largely overturned in recent decades, but the paucity of sources and the cultural specificity of humour still makes understanding their sense of humour difficult. William of Malmesbury, a twelfth-century English Benedictine, nevertheless provides a rare glimpse of what made monks laugh in his collection of Marian miracles, the Miracula sanctae Mariae. Introducing one of his miracle stories as ‘a great joke that will have readers laughing out loud’, William gives us invaluable information about the way humour could infiltrate the most unlikely of genres, in this case one generally thought to be devotional and edificatory in nature. The story is also virulently anti-Jewish. By placing the joke in its historical context, exploring the themes of corruption, political weakness and interaction between Jews and Christians in twelfth-century England, we can understand what this joke meant and what it can in turn reveal about the world that produced it.     

A colpi di cuore. Storie del sessantotto

This article attempts to tackle the problem of how a colonial culture that was elaborated through the written word may have impacted on an Italian society that was significantly more ‘backward’ than its western European counterparts. The Prima Guerra d'Africa (1885-96) has often been seen as a military campaign desired exclusively by an isolated Italian government in a society that was incapable of using the occasion to develop cultural themes that impacted on the desires and aspirations of the ‘real’ Italy. This supposed societal dysfunction meant that Italy failed to create a ‘culture of imperialism’ in the years of the Scramble for Africa in a way that has now come to be considered of such central importance for the histories of France, Britain or even Germany.

Through an analysis of the role played by primary schools in Italian culture in these years, this article attempts to reverse this view, arguing that even taking into consideration Italy's ‘backwardness’ there was not only a great awareness of what Italy was supposedly doing in Africa but also a serious attempt to load the events that occured there with a meaning that had a much more intimate relationship with Italy's population. Although defeat in Africa meant a major setback in this process, imperialism as a cultural phenomenon continued to be of fundamental importance to the progress of nation building and the development of nationalism in Italy and, Finaldi argues, it should therefore be assigned a place in Italian culture that is much more on a par to that which culture and imperialism are deemed to have held for other European nation-states.     

A bigger Settecento Italiano: wider vistas and open terrain

This paper introduces the six essays from the UCLA-Clark Library Conference on ‘The Culture of Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Italy’ (23?–?24 January 2004). Franco Venturi's persona, productivity, method, and themes are reviewed to help explain his influence on Italian Enlightenment Studies, while at the same time showing how recent research has developed in a number of directions?–?following up on his insights, exploring new topics, or leaving large questions yet unexamined.     

‘In gente Britanniarum,sicut quaedam nostratum testatur historia …’: national identity and perceptions of the past in John of Salisbury's Policraticus

This article examines the construction of national identity in John of Salisbury's Policraticus (c.1159). This well-known treatise has not been included in recent discussions of identities in medieval Britain. The focal point of the analysis is the author's contradictory representations of Britones. John of Salisbury emphasised the distinction and hostility between the Britons/Welsh and the English; at the same time, he claimed that the ancient Britons (Brennius and his companions-in-arms from Geoffrey of Monmouth's De gestis Britonum) were ‘compatriots’ and ‘ancestors’ of the ‘contemporary’ inhabitants of the English kingdom. Comparison with other twelfth-century texts reveals specific features of the model of national identity traced in the Policraticus: the appropriation not only of the British past, but also of the British name and identity, and the imagining of a unified people of Britain. This culminated in the invention of the unique term gens Britanniarum, which nevertheless did not exclude the ‘English’ as an alternative or even interchangeable name. The article discusses political agendas behind John of Salisbury's use of the language of ‘Britishness’, most importantly, support for the pan-British ambitions of the archbishops of Canterbury. The example of the Policraticus, with its combination of both conventional and original elements, nuances our understanding of how and for what ideological purposes national identity might have been constructed in twelfth-century England.     

Hair in the Disraeli Papers: A Victorian Harvest

The Hughenden Collection of Disraeli Papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford comprises over 50,000 items relating to the life and work of Benjamin Disraeli and his family. This article tracks hair through the Hughenden Collection in order to explore the collecting habits of Mary Anne Disraeli. It argues that reading Mary Anne Disraeli's story through hair – both hair as object, held in an archive and hair as represented in archival text – reveals aspects of that story occluded by reading only those archival texts with self-evident documentary value. It thus makes the case for a holistic reading of the Disraeli archive, and Victorian collections of personal papers more generally, by taking Mary Anne Disraeli as its central case study. In so doing it also illuminates her story, and points to the necessity of reading the stories of forgotten women through archival silences and absences. Section I reviews recent scholarship on hair in nineteenth-century Britain in order to contextualize Mary Anne Disraeli's case. Section II anatomizes the Hughenden hair collection in order to illuminate Mary Anne's history, her impulses as a collector, and the extent to which her activities complicate scholarly narratives about the sentimental commodification of Victorian hair. Section III gestures towards recent work on the archive and material culture to tease out the consequences of her example for our reading of the archive and our understanding of the texture of Victorian ‘thing culture’ more generally.     

Books received

This article examines the remarkable ‘changes and transpositions’ of form found in Jordan Fantosme's Chronicle, an important Anglo-Norman estoire recounting the rebellion against Henry II in 1173–74. By reading these literary changes as accommodations of circumstances and persons, they can be used to locate the Chronicle in very specific historical and social contexts. Jordan, clerk of the bishop of Winchester and master of the city's grammar schools, places himself, both socially and discursively, within a community of administrative barons, who are very carefully remembered in the Chronicle as a coherent social affinity, or foedus amicitiae, both alienated from and seeking solidarity with the king. These conditions explain the Chronicle's central rhetorical impulses: to chastise the king, sometimes bitterly, and to persuade him to ‘love, cherish … and reward’ these specific barons. To achieve these rhetorical desires, Jordan draws upon the resources of contemporary literary education to imagine and perform persuasion. The Chronicle is thus a powerful illustration of John Baldwin's account of the ‘interpenetration’ of studium et regnum, institutional learning and political administration, in twelfth-century England. Because the Chronicle has in the past been understood as a panegyric, or even propaganda, for a royalist cause, this baronial reading represents a major re-assessment of its sociabilities and purposes.     

The virgin of the Macana: Emblem of a Franciscan predicament in new Spain

The importance of the Virgin Mary in Mexico's religious pantheon is well documented. Of the great variety of devotions imported to New Spain from Europe, Mary became a favored one; she was invoked by all sectors of society at different historical junctures, and was often promoted by specific religious orders or social groups. A number of these cults became inextricably linked with a sense of community autonomy and evolved into emblems of local pride, of which the Virgin of Guadalupe is the best-known example. To strengthen their local and creole character, a significant number of these devotions grant an essential place to the Amerindian in their apparition stories. This is the case with the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Virgin of Remedios, and the Virgin of Ocotla´n to cite a few examples. Several works of art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent these devotions by showing the Virgin Mary and the American Indian together.     

Adgar's Gracial and Christian images of Jews in twelfth-century vernacular literature

This article concerns the adaptation and translation into the Anglo-Norman vernacular of an existing tradition of Latin miracles of the Virgin by the twelfth-century poet William Adgar. Adgar included many older ideas about Jews in his version of the stories, but also borrowed themes and language from contemporary courtly romance literature in order to suit his intended audience of lay nobles. In doing so, he portrayed Christian characters as the embodiment of loyalty and other courtly values. At the same time, he began to portray Jews according to courtly types of treachery. New implications emerged in his work about the general moral character of Jews, in contrast to previous works that commented mainly upon the nature of Jewish belief. Recent scholarship on Christian-Jewish relations in the twelfth century has begun to pay increasing attention to the movement of new Christian ideas about Jews outside of scholarly and ecclesiastical circles. The study of vernacular literature has an important place in this scholarly debate, since the move to the vernacular broadened the audience among which the new ideas about Jews could be spread.     

Adgar's Gracial and Christian images of Jews in twelfth-century vernacular literature

This article concerns the adaptation and translation into the Anglo-Norman vernacular of an existing tradition of Latin miracles of the Virgin by the twelfth-century poet William Adgar. Adgar included many older ideas about Jews in his version of the stories, but also borrowed themes and language from contemporary courtly romance literature in order to suit his intended audience of lay nobles. In doing so, he portrayed Christian characters as the embodiment of loyalty and other courtly values. At the same time, he began to portray Jews according to courtly types of treachery. New implications emerged in his work about the general moral character of Jews, in contrast to previous works that commented mainly upon the nature of Jewish belief. Recent scholarship on Christian-Jewish relations in the twelfth century has begun to pay increasing attention to the movement of new Christian ideas about Jews outside of scholarly and ecclesiastical circles. The study of vernacular literature has an important place in this scholarly debate, since the move to the vernacular broadened the audience among which the new ideas about Jews could be spread.     

ABDULLAH BIN ABDUL KADIR MUNSYI: A MAN OF BANANAS AND THORNS

Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munsyi is best known for his memoirs, labelled by some his autobiography, the Hikayat Abdullah. The missionary, Alfred North, encouraged him to write his life story, a first in Malay, and it has been assumed that Abdullah, working in a new genre, was relatively faithful to the conventions of the genre; that at the very least, he was attempting to produce a tolerably straightforward account of his life and times. Both his admirers and detractors, though seemingly at odds, saw Abdullah's work as a mouthpiece for British values. It did not occur to scholars that Abdullah might possess his own agenda, and that his working in a foreign genre did not necessarily produce what those scholars assumed it did. This has produced a blinkered understanding of what Abdullah was about. His supreme aim was to enhance his own image and stature. Production of ‘historical’ facts was sometimes a secondary concern. ‘Fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’ were not yet established conventions in his literary milieu. He worked under major constraints, for his livelihood depended on not alienating patrons and future patrons, yet he devised ways to air views critical of the powerful. Here he was much more concerned with Islamic issues than ethnic ones.     

The Story of Jimmy: the Practice of History on North Pentecost,Vanuatu1

The Story of Jimmy is a frequently told oral‐historical account of ‘first contact’ from North Pentecost, Vanuatu. It describes the adventures of a group of ni‐Vanuatu plantation labourers who escape from Fiji by hijacking a ship and navigate a return to their home islands in Vanuatu. Central to the story is a young white man, known simply as Jimmy. Unwittingly forced to make the journey with them, and before they are all finally shipwrecked on the east coast of North Pentecost, Jimmy witnesses the murder and cannibalisation of his father by the starving hijackers. Yet upon departing for home some four years later he bestows a new name upon the Island: Uretabe, the ‘world of love/gifts’. This story, with its dual‐inverted narrative of abduction, transformation, escape and return, presents a remarkable account at a unique moment of historical rupture and cross‐cultural exchange. In doing so it also expresses idiomatic themes of mobility, place and identity as they relate to the politics of both the colonial past and postcolonial present in North Pentecost. This paper explores those themes and narratives while considering their relevance to my own experiences as a researcher in the area.     

Pius XII: Romanita,prophesy and charisma

The modern popular cult of the Pope, which originated with the ‘disinherited’ papacy of Pius IX, reached its acme with Pius XII. Phases of intensification of this cult, which was linked to other ‘devotions’, those of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and of the Virgin Mary, served to mobilize the Catholic masses at critical junctures for the Catholic Church and in the face of what were perceived as political threats. Pius XII had to animate ‘movement’ in an age proclaimed to be one of a unique crisis of civilization. The projection of him as a charismatic figure was linked to that of Rome as a sacred centre and as the very fulcrum of world history. The Catholic activist ethos of ‘movement’ and also the presentation of the interchange between Pius XII and the Crowd had features in common with Fascist rhetorics, but ultimately the cult of the ‘victim‐Pope’ represented an inversion of the crasser forms of power‐imagery.     

The dynastic triangle in international relations: Modena,England, and France, 1678–85

This article is a case study of how dynastic marriages in the early-modern period were wont to disappoint the participants. In this era, ruling dynasties frequently sought to marry suitable members of their family networks to well-placed clients in other states. These marriages were frequently intended to cement friendship or bind political wounds caused by previous conflicts. In 1673, the marriage between James Stuart, Duke of York, and Maria Beatrice d’Este, sister to the Duke of Modena, was sponsored by Louis XIV, King of France, thus giving rise to what one might term a ‘dynastic triangle’. This article, written from the Este perspective, demonstrates how the Duke of York and the King of France each subsequently failed, on two occasions, to support Francesco II d’Este's geopolitical objectives in northern Italy. For York, and his brother King Charles II, the failure to assist the Duke of Modena was as a result of their political inability to do so. On the other hand, Louis XIV's refusal to help Modena was because of conflicting French objectives in Italy. The negative Este reaction was both an indication of the Italian states’ fear and distrust of France, and a reminder that small states had ambitions and goals which were difficult to attain when not sponsored by a larger power. But these goals were often pursued when such sponsorship appeared likely, and were often unrealistic. The strains in dynastic relationships usually resulted from realisation that certain goals were irreconcilable.     

The Mystery of St Cuthbert’s Ducks: An Adventure in Hagiography

‘St Cuthbert’s duck’ is a folk name for the common eider (Somateria mollissima). The saint’s affinity for the black-and-white ducks has been accepted uncritically for centuries. For such a well-documented saint, however, his ducks are strangely absent from early records. His near-contemporary hagiographers, including the Venerable Bede, make no mention of waterfowl. The enduring association begins almost five centuries after his death in a piece of twelfth-century folklorismus.     

The apparitions of the Virgin Mary of Medjugorje: the convergence of Croatian nationalism and her apparitions

Abstract. This article concerns the alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary in one of the most popular, ‘active’ apparitional sites in the world: Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The connection between nationalist discourse and apparitions has often been observed and noted in the literature on nationalism; however, the examples of this connection are scattered in the literature and the question why the apparitional phenomenon so easily lends itself to co‐option into nationalist discourse has never been addressed. This article explores this question by showing that what binds the two phenomena together is the idea of ‘chosenness’ and ‘specialness’, which in turn can be theoretically linked to discussions about national election in the literature on nationalism. This article illustrates the convergence of nationalist and apparitional discourses by drawing on a selected number of examples of how the apparitions in Medjugorje have been appropriated by Croatian nationalist discourse.     

Enlightenment and reform: an overview of culture and politics in Enlightenment Italy

This essay analyses the influence of the work of Franco Venturi on Italian studies of the eighteenth century over the last fifty years. Venturi's ‘model’ has certainly been of fundamental importance in stimulating new research on the connections between Enlightenment and reform in the eighteenth-century Italian states and is still an essential point of reference for all research in the field. But the direction of eighteenth-century studies in Italy has been shaped also by the contributions of many other scholars. Starting in the 1970s Italian historians became increasingly interested in new questions that were being posed by historians in France and Britain, which contributed to a more general shift away from the biographical focus on individuals characteristic of much of Venturi's work in favour of more collective topics, new types of sources and new ways of interpreting them. This article describes the different themes around which relations between culture and politics in eighteenth-century Italy have been studied, from civil, military and ecclesiastical institutions to the administrative and reform elites, the world of salons and sociability, publishing, religious beliefs, gender differences and science.     

‘…but not gagged’: Responding to Covid-19 and its control measures in France,Italy and the USA

The beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic was far from the ‘great equalizer’ sometimes described by the media. This article shares themes emerging from research conducted in 2020 in France, Italy and the USA concerning responses to the pandemic and its social effects. The authors analyze how the pandemic elicited varied reactions within the three countries where they conducted anthropological fieldwork. They propose that narratives of the Covid-19 response can shed light on how individuals navigate social and political relationships in each context.