The Unimaginable

Arthur Danto advocates the thesis that we cannot imagine the art or artwork of the future. This thesis is motivated primarily by his Hegelian conception of history and secondarily by his holistic conception of art, which is informed by Wittgenstein. At first glance the thesis seems to conflict with Danto's second thesis that anything (any object) can be a work of art. Danto's solution to this problem is not very convincing. A more promising approach can be found in Kant's aesthetics and especially in his concept of genius.     

Bishops and Professionalization in Sweden,c. 1780–1880

This article investigates the concept of professionalization in terms of the bishops' role in the 19th-century Church of Sweden. Previous research has generally claimed that from the late 18th century until the mid-19th century, before the abolition of the Diet of Estates, the Swedish bishops amounted to secularized, conservative state officials who lacked the ability to effect religious reform. In this article, however, it will be argued that in the early 19th century, several decades earlier than previously assumed, the Swedish episcopate had begun to undergo a slow transformation that is best described as professionalization. It is posited that the bishops, inspired by Evangelical revival and Romanticism, became increasingly specialized in religion and theology in their education, thinking and practice. The episcopal profile also changed as the middle classes gained more influence from the early 19th century onwards, and this, in turn, prompted a higher standard of role performance.     

The Volatility of Sex: Intersexuality,Gender and Clinical Practice in the 1950s

The term ‘gender role’ was coined at Johns Hopkins's paediatric endocrinology clinic in the 1950s, where Dr Lawson Wilkins and psychologist John Money diagnosed, treated and evaluated intersexual children, most of them suffering from a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). Going beyond existing discourses on the medicalisation of intersexuality, I reframe the emergence of gender as an element in the development of a specific medical treatment for an endocrinological condition and excavate the complex and contingent historical factors that led to the formulation of gender role in the Hopkins context. Using previously unavailable patient records from the clinic, this article follows the patients through their medical encounters and describes the process of normalisation around the diagnosis, treatment and management of CAH. By paying specific attention to the practices at the clinic, I show that diagnosing a child's sex often depended on the physicians’ skill, experience and techniques. Correct gender role was folded into the management of CAH as one aspect of successful treatment. Normalisation was a process, in which treating somatic effects and assuring psychological healthiness were deeply enmeshed in the conviction that a normal life would only be possible as a clearly gendered and sexed person.     

THE MEDIEVAL CHURCHYARD AS AN URBAN EMPTY SPACE: TRACING ACTORS AROUND THE CHURCHYARDS OF ST. ALBAN AND ST. CANUTE,ODENSE

The study applies the concept of ‘urban empty space’ as defined by Monica Smith to the adjacent churchyards of St. Alban and St. Canute, the latter being both a cathedral and a shrine for the royal saint, Canute the Holy. The aim is to demonstrate that the churchyard of St. Canute incorporated other temporary functions for the urban society, which subdivided the space into more labile areas or demarcations of use. The demarcations might, according to the concept, become contested areas between various users; thus, the article seeks to identify possible contestants through examining the built environment as well as the artefacts – in the present case, though, limited to the pottery. The article shows that the studied objects can shed new light on the urban empty space of the medieval churchyard. It is also a reminder that urban churchyards are not completely isolated loci of sanctity for the dead but are very much a part of urban life.