The death of the right‐to‐die campaigners (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The ‘right‐to‐die’ or assisted suicide debate in the UK has recently been dominated by high‐profile litigation which has brought to public attention stories of individual suffering. The most recent case is that of Tony Nicklinson who, as a result of his permanent and total paralysis which he said made his life ‘intolerable’, wanted the courts to allow a doctor to end his life. Only six days after a Judicial Review refused his request, Tony died of ‘natural’ causes. This article compares the presentation by the media of Tony's requested death with his actual death and discusses what this reveals more generally about the way in which the right‐to‐die debate is presented to the public. It argues that in a politicised debate in which the personal stories of the disabled‐dying are given airtime because of their didactic or symbolic potential, actual death becomes less important than the rights‐rhetoric surrounding death.     

The cult of Saint Denis and Capetian kingship

Throughout its history, the monastery of Saint-Denis sought to establish a tie with the ruling house, to make the abbey indispensable to the crown as the chief and privileged guardian of the royal presence. Beyond that, as the home of the principal Apostle of Gaul and the first bishop of Paris, it had a symbolic importance for the whole of France, independent of the monarchy itself.The representation of Saint Denis as a national saint, guiding, protecting, and promoting the well-being of the monarchy, was a monastic theme from the ninth century forward. The cult assumed its chief importance, however, in relation to the Capetians when, it is argued, it performed a critical function in the definition of French national identity under the aegis of the monarchy. In its importance for both France and the monarchy, the cult of Saint Denis helped make possible the fusion of two streams of national consciousness that might otherwise have remained distinct. Further, Capetian kings, by identifying themselves with the cult of Saint Denis, were able to tap a significant element of national devotion which contributed to the creation of a royal personality of national scope in France.     

THE FINAL PHASE?

This essay reviews the recent book by Carolyn Dean that seeks to elucidate the ways in which complaints about a “surfeit of memory” and the privileging of Jewish victimization during the Holocaust as unique and as the emblem of radical evil in our times has shaped discussions of victims in general, creating an environment in which groups vie for victim status as a means of validating their grievances and making claims for justice. The hostility to such claims has, Dean argues, created antivictim discourses that end up generating aversion toward victims, primarily by denying the validity of their claims to suffering and, in the case of Jews, projecting them as “perpetrators” in their neglect of the suffering of others. At the same time, Dean argues, the demand that victims narrate their suffering in the aesthetically constrained style of “minimalism” equally undermines the legitimacy of victims' memories by demanding that they be presented in an already mastered form, thereby erasing the very trauma that, in principle, such narratives seek to represent. At stake in the debates concerning Holocaust memorial consciousness and its proper modes of representation, this article suggests, are larger historiographical and ethical issues about how to integrate the horrors of the past and the traumatic experience of terror into the normal protocols of historical writing, which rely on distance, objectivity, and interpretive critique as governing procedures. To incorporate terror into historical representation will mean acknowledging and accepting as historiographically legitimate the differing status of analytically recuperated “facts” and victim testimony and finding a way to theorize the reality of “voices” from the past without assuming the necessary “truth” of what they convey.     

The use of OSL dating in unstructured sands: the archaeology and chronology of the Hutton Sands at Canteen Kopje (Northern Cape Province, South Africa)

Archaeological research at the site of Canteen Kopje, Northern Cape Province, South Africa, has focused on the rich Earlier Stone Age assemblages recovered from the Younger Vaal Gravels. This paper presents the results of excavation and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of the overlying Hutton Sands. We discuss the evidence for colonial period interaction between diamond miners and indigenous groups at the site, as well as the presence of an earlier phase of terminal Middle Stone Age/early Later Stone Age occupation. The OSL analyses demonstrate the potential distortion of OSL ages due to substantial bioturbation and its effect on the dating of archaeological sites situated in unconsolidated sands.     

Fallow deer (Dama dama dama) management in Roman South-East Britain

This paper presents new carbon, nitrogen and sulphur isotope data for European fallow deer (Dama dama dama) in Roman Britain and discusses results in light of evidence from classical texts, landscape archaeology, zooarchaeology and the limited available samples of metric data. The new isotope data presented here are from Fishbourne Roman Palace (Sussex), two sites on the Isle of Thanet (Kent) and a further two sites in London. In spite of small sample sizes the data make an important contribution to the very limited corpus of scientific research on the species and provide new resolution to the nature of fallow deer movement and management in Roman Britain.     

Getting inside our informants' heads

William H. Geoghegan. Natural Information Processing Rules: Formal Theory and Applications to Ethnography. Monograph of the Language‐Behavior Research Laboratory, Number 3. Berkeley: University of California Language Research Laboratory, 1973. viii + 448 pp. Figures, tables, appendixes, and bibliography. $6.50 (paper).     

‘Defense of the realm’: evolution of a Capetian propaganda slogan

Historians have long recognized the importance of the Roman-canonical maxim ‘defense of the realm’ to the propaganda politics practised by later Capetian kings, most notably in the climactic struggle between Philip the Fair and Boniface VIII. Although rightly conceding to Roman law the major impulse to its formulation, they have been less sensitive to the way in which the doctrine fits into historical images of Capetian kingship. The theory of the king as defender of the realm was critical in the early as well as late middle ages. In tracing the evolution of this slogan through the chronicle tradition of Saint-Denis, the most extensive and consistently royalist historical corpus in Capetian France, one sees the emergence of concepts congruent with those developed in legal and canonical texts, but which reveal little or no influence from these more learned sources.This article argues that the chroniclers' persistent focus on the image of the king as royal defender facilitated the interior evolution of the meaning of ‘defense of the realm’ from that of feudal tuitio to the public concept of Roman jurisprudence. The chroniclers of Saint-Denis thus testify to the way in which older theories of monarchy were being subtly transformed by the changing nature of kingship itself. But at the same time they lend an air of coherency and familiarity to one of the most disruptive periods of Capetian history and sustain a sense of the evolution of the French monarchy within the context of fundamental notions governing medieval kingship.