MEDIEVALISMS AND MEDIEVAL TIMES: CONFRONTING CHRONOPOLITICS WITH MEDIEVAL TEXTURES OF TIME

This review essay examines Nadia R. Altschul's discussion of medievalism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South America in Politics of Temporalization: Medievalism and Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century South America. She explores a chronopolitics whereby the notion that late medieval Iberia lagged developmentally behind the rest of Europe sustained the claim that parts of South America were still medieval, even while capitalist modernity was established elsewhere. Her exploration of the instrumentalization of this trope for neocolonial and neoliberal purposes provokes my own exploration here of medieval ideas about time. Medieval people actually had very sophisticated ideas about time, and this complexity troubles the idea of a simplistic and dully repetitive medieval temporality on which the linear hierarchies of time analyzed and critiqued by Altschul rely. More than this, though, I suggest that medieval ideas of time provide us with alternative chronotopes in the sense of thinking through the relationships between time and space in very different ways; in turn, this might permit a different kind of chronopolitics. First, I explore the ways in which medieval people experienced and articulated multiple interwoven layers of time, de-essentializing hierarchies of temporalities and puncturing the illusion that certain spaces should be associated with certain times. Second, I look at the ways in which time was not straightforwardly conceived of as linear in the Middle Ages and consider the ways in which this troubles ideas of periodization; a short discussion of nostalgia in different periods sustains this point. Third, I explore the ways in which ideas about time could be contested in the Middle Ages, challenging the idea that chronopolitics need just be a study of hegemonic attitudes.     

Spreading fear,communicating trust: writing letters and telegrams during the Panic of 1873

Abstract

This article analyses how journalists and businessmen used and perceived the Atlantic cable following the failure of New York banking house Jay Cooke & Co. in September 1873, an event which sparked stock markets panics in Vienna and Berlin. It is argued that while bankers successfully used telegraphic cables to communicate intelligence such as price information, letters proved superior as a medium for establishing personal trust, as the case of New York banker George Opdyke shows. Journalists, too, were critical of the telegraph’s performance, blaming the paucity of information available on the technology’s supposedly inherent deficiencies. This criticism, it is argued, was ultimately based on the ‘imagined reception’ of cables by their senders, as well as on the persistence of earlier imagined uses of telegraphy. These, I argue, continued to inform contemporary expectations of telegraphy’s performance.     

Being Mesolithic in Life and Death

Fifty years ago, approaches to Mesolithic identity were limited to ideas of ‘Man the Hunter’ and ‘Woman the Gatherer’, while evidence of non-normative practice was ascribed to ‘shamans’ and to ‘ritual’, and that was that. As post-processual critiques have touched Mesolithic studies, however, this has changed. In the first decade of the 21st century a strong body of work on Mesolithic identity in life, as well as death, has enabled us to think beyond modern Western categories to interpret identity in the Mesolithic. These studies have addressed the nature of personhood and relational identities, the body, and the relationship between human and other-than-human persons. Our paper reviews these changing approaches, offering a series of case studies from a range of different sites that illustrate how identity is formed and transformed through engagements with landscapes, materials, and both living and dead persons. These are then developed to advocate an assemblage approach to identity in the Mesolithic.     

Soldiers under the Skin: Diversity of Race,Ethnicity, and Class in the Illinois National Guard, 1870–1916

A close examination of the Illinois National Guard (ING) between 1870 and 1916 demonstrates that contrary to the commonplace assumption of a homogeneous, white, middle class, native‐born membership, the ING had a very heterogeneous membership, drawing in rural and urban men, and men from an array of ethnicities, races and economic circumstances. Information on 2245 members drawn from enlistment data and the federal census, combined with evidence drawn from a wide variety of textual sources firmly establishes that this organization attracted men from a broad range of backgrounds. The ING stands out against other male‐only organizations of its time as an organization whose membership was consistently drawn from a broad cross‐section of the American population. The Illinois National Guard of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offered an organization that could unite many American men across cultural and social boundaries at a time when there was much to divide them.     

The drivers to Erasmus work placement mobility for UK students

This paper examines the drivers to UK student work placement mobility through the Erasmus programme (European Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students). This research was stimulated by the overrepresentation of UK students in the Erasmus work placement programme since its introduction in 2007. Using a multi-methods approach, based on student interviews and report analysis, five main drivers to Erasmus work placement mobility are revealed: employability, the economic downturn and subsequent failure to secure a placement in the UK, language, finance and personal factors. This paper discusses these five factors to reveal the complex and interlinked influences that encourage UK students to undertake an Erasmus work placement. Overall, employability is identified as the main driver to the mobility of Erasmus work placement students. It is argued that the neoliberal agenda in UK higher education, to streamline away from education for the public good, towards education for employability purposes, is a key factor in explaining the popularity of Erasmus work placements in the UK. Importantly, this paper argues that the drivers to work placement mobility are different to the motivations to study abroad. It is, therefore, essential that they are dealt with separately in order to explore the differences and similarities between sub-types of student mobility.     

A Grocer's Tale: Gender,Family and Class in Early Nineteenth‐Century Manchester

This article examines the diary of George Heywood, a journeyman grocer turned small shopkeeper, who moved to Manchester from Huddersfield in 1809. Heywood's modest lifetime ambitions were to own a grocery shop and find a companionable wife. As a lower‐middle‐class man of humble means and limited ambitions, Heywood does not fit the heroic mould of those working‐class diarists and autobiographers of the nineteenth century that have more readily captured historians’ attention. Yet it is precisely this ‘ordinariness’ that makes Heywood's journal important. His smaller‐than‐life adventures are the very stuff of lower‐middle‐class life, and reveal something of a petit‐bourgeois world from which historians and social commentators have traditionally shied away. His diary allows us to glimpse one form of masculine identity that both fits with and complicates our notions of ‘bourgeois’ masculinity in this period.