Preaching and History: The Audience of Ranulf Higden’s Ars componendi sermones and Polychronicon

In his Ars praedicandi sermones, in traditional yet rich metaphoric language, Ranulf Higden compares Christ to a fountain, a shepherd, a rock, a lily, a rose, a violet, an elephant, a unicorn, and a youthful bridegroom wooing his beloved spouse. Ranulf encourages preachers to use such metaphors while using them himself, rendering his text a performed example of what he encourages. This text is clearly linked to two others: Ranulf’s Latin universal history, the Polychronicon, and John Trevisa’s English translation of it. In the Polychronicon, Ranulf relates the life of Christ, utilizing some of his own rhetorical suggestions from his preaching manual. He also depicts a cross-section of good and bad preachers, including Gregory, Wulfstan, Eustas, St Edmund, and one William Long-Beard and his kinsman, who exemplify (in different ways) the wisdom conveyed in Ranulf’s instruction in the Ars praedicandi. This essay suggests that the literary relationship between the preaching manual and the Polychronicon supplies additional support for the idea that the audience of the latter was not noblemen exclusively, but also clergymen who preached and had responsibility for the care of souls (cura animae).     

The gross domestic person? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

On the cusp of what is widely perceived to be seismic economic change, Fioramonti's analysis of the history and power of the GDP is a provocation to anthropologists to unpack its underlying assumptions about the human dimensions of economic life, and to imagine a different set of assumptions for the future. He depicts the presumed most basic unit for GDP analyses, the household, as a “cage”, where all the relevant economic processes go through monetization and formulaic relationships and aspirations. This paper examines the history of the “person” who is necessarily in a “household”: from the household being tax unit, to a domestic unit, to its currently expanding position as a node for the temporary meeting of varied trajectories of life and flows of varied kinds of value. The paper concludes with the challenge to create new metrics as being a challenge to comparison and analytical acuity, drawing on the anthropological archive.     

The signory and its supporters: the Este of Ferrara

The signory of the Este, like that of other contemporary signori, was officially inaugurated with a public election. The ‘people’ (popolo) of Ferrara thereby instated an hereditary ruler who had absolute powers over the city. This election, together with the fact that there were no successful rebellions against the Este, has led some historians to argue that these signori achieved an implicit understanding with the ‘people’ of Ferrara.The evidence of contemporary chronicles, though often ambigous, does not support this view. Likewise, the legislation of the first Este signore demonstrates a desire to suppress the ‘people’ rather than to co-operate with them. The group whose support was essential to the Este was the nobility; chronicle and archival evidence indicates that the Este considered this group to be the very basis of their signory. The interests of the nobility, as well as the need to maintain good relations with Venice, made far more impact on Estense policy than did the wishes of the ‘people’.     

The potential of hyperspectral and multi-spectral imagery to enhance archaeological cropmark detection: a comparative study

Aerial photography has made the single most important contribution to our improved appreciation of the density, diversity and distribution of archaeological sites in Britain since World War Two. This is particularly the case for areas of intensive lowland agriculture where ploughed-out sites are known mainly from marks in the crops growing above them. However, reconnaissance for such cropmarks is not equally effective throughout the lowlands, because of the particular conditions of drier weather, well-drained soils and arable agriculture required before they become visible, and is highly unpredictable.     

The Jim Crow Craze in London's Press and Streets, 1836–39

This article examines clothing in public lunatic asylums in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. It considers the intentions of the authorities but also explores patient experience and agency, which have been notoriously difficult to access. Publicly funded (pauper) patients had to give up their own clothes and wear the asylum's standard apparel. Asylum authorities did not envision this as a uniform, either honorific or punitive, and claimed that imposed dress was intended to improve patients' behaviour and assist recovery. There was growing awareness that variety in dress could be beneficial and there were calls for some pauper patients to be allowed to wear their own clothes, but this was ultimately impractical within the economy of mass provision in the public asylum. Although clothing might have offered comfort to the impoverished, some patients were angered and humiliated by its imposition. Ill-fitting items and rough fabrics could be a daily, bodily, reminder to the wearers of the shame of their status as insane paupers. It did, however, offer some room for self-fashioning. Patients were able to make small but, in the circumstances, telling adjustments to the way they wore their clothes and their hair. If it was considered safe, they were allowed some minor possessions. Certain of these items, like spectacles and false teeth, were vital to basic agency and independence. Others, such as jewellery – and especially wedding rings – could help maintain a vital link with relationships in the outside world.     

‘The Colonial Children Cry’: Jo the Crossing-Sweep Goes to the Colonies

In this article I explore the affective power of Charles Dickens's character Jo, the crossing-sweep from his novel Bleak House, and his broader cultural significance. Contemporary audiences were deeply moved by Jo's tragic death, sparking a vast popular, and especially visual, culture around the homeless white child. Yet, by establishing an affective and moral opposition between white waif and black ‘heathen’, in a relationship Dickens termed ‘telescopic philanthropy’, audiences were directed to care about the white poor with the inference that black people were not a proper object of compassion. Jo's touching story circulated widely across the colonies of Australia and New Zealand, and was put to work in transmitting inherited British values and making sense of local political and social circumstances. By the late nineteenth century the emotional regime symbolized by Jo the crossing-sweep effectively consolidated racial exclusions.