The Correspondence of Asturian Emigrants at the Turn of the Century: The Case of José Moldes (c. 1860–1921)

The private letter, one of the most representative expressions of mass literacy, was the product of improved postal services and epistolary manuals. In the nineteenth century, which also witnessed the new phenomenon of mass emigration, letter writing became one of the most common practices. This article discusses the correspondence of José Moldes, an Asturian who left Spain for Puerto Rico at the age of fourteen and settled shortly afterwards in Chile. He died in his native Asturias at the age of sixty-one. Throughout these fifty or so years, José wrote letters to keep in contact with members of his family, to control them when he became head of the household or to manage his businesses and investments. About 120 of his letters survived in the Moldes-Barreras family archive, through which we can reconstruct his experiences. The essential characteristics of this epistolary corpus emerge from an analysis of its material and graphic aspects, suggesting the profound influence of immigration on personal writing.     

Reaping the rewards: the potential of well designed methodology,a comment on Vardi et al. (Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 1716–1724) and Goodale et al. (Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 1192–1201)

The recent articles by Vardi et al., “Tracing sickle blade levels of wear and discard patterns: a new sickle gloss quantification method” (Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 1716–1724), and Goodale et al., “Sickle blade life-history and the transition to agriculture: an early Neolithic case study from Southwest Asia” (Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 1192–1201), are two papers that seek to address interesting archaeological questions through the development of new approaches to measuring the duration of stone tool use. Here comment is made on the fashion in which research design and analytic procedures contribute to limit the capabilities of each of the techniques presented. Whilst the authors support the investigation of novel techniques, in order for the results of any use-wear analysis to be accepted as reliable the methods employed must be demonstrably sound.     

Preaching laughter in the thirteenth century: the exempla of Arnold of Liège (d. c.1308) and his Dominican milieu

Historians of medieval laughter have, over the past few decades, imagined the thirteenth century as a period of Christian rapprochement with laughter and humour. Whereas in the twelfth century and before, laughter was largely associated – in art, exegesis, narrative and in preaching – with diabolism and damnation, the consensus is that in the 1200s and beyond Christian culture began deploying and preaching laughter as a positive spiritual expression and strategy. Above all, scholars have identified this shift with the thought and practice of the Dominican Order. This paper enriches this narrative by analysing the neglected exempla collection of the Dominican preacher Arnold of Liège (d. c.1308). Reading Arnold's collection – which harshly forbids laughter – in relief to a number of similar compilations made by Dominicans in the same period, offers an image of how the significance of laughter had become pluralised in mendicant theology by 1300, and of how old ideas of a radically negative laughter persisted in haunting the pulpits and street corners of the thirteenth century.     

‘Western Perversions’ at the Threshold of Felicity: The European Prostitutes of Galata‐Pera (1870–1915)

Istanbul in the late nineteenth century grew to be a hub of the so‐called “white slave trade”, the trafficking of women predominantly from the Eastern Habsburg provinces to brothels from South America to East Asia. As a strong movement to suppress this trafficking grew in Europe, the Habsburg authorities’ incapability to suppress the trade endangered Austria‐Hungary’s standing in the Eastern Question, that is, its attempt to play a significant role in the Ottoman territories. The article investigates how contemporary discourses on gender, imperialism and nationalism combined to turn the issue of Austrian prostitutes in Istanbul into an issue that was strongly contested especially between the Ottoman authorities and the Habsburg diplomats at the beginning of the twentieth century.     

The importance of national parks to nation‐building: Support for the National Parks Act (2000) in the Scottish Parliament

In 2000 Scotland finally introduced legislation to enable the establishment of its first national parks, 50 years after England and Wales. This paper considers interpretations of this event and reflects on the importance of national parks to nation‐building. Grounded within a framework which holds landscape to be an important signifier of national identity, these issues are explored through a case study of the Cairngorms National Park. This study found that it was the ‘nation‐building’ agenda which was a key factor in securing the unanimous support of the Scottish Parliament for the National Parks Act (2000) but that this agenda hid competing definitions of what shape Scotland's landscapes should be. This suggests that the National Parks Act appealed as a form of institutional, as opposed to cultural, nation‐building.