Overlooked Husbands: The Paradox of Unfree Marriage in the Carolingian World

Unfree people in the Roman world could not legally marry, while they could in the Middle Ages. This paper explores the marriage of the unfree in the Carolingian empire (750–900 CE), a society with an intense moral concern about marriage. Carolingian churchmen wrote extensively about marriage, using a strongly gendered discourse focusing on how men should approach marriage and behave as husbands. However, these moral and legal texts rarely discussed unfree marriage, even though the practice was common. It is argued that this silence reflects the persistence of late antique class-based gender models, in which masculinity was reserved for married property holders. Although legal prohibitions on unfree marriages had ended, Carolingian moralists continued to be influenced by patristic assumptions that these were not valid relationships. These assumptions, combined with Frankish social practices that largely excluded unfree men from other key male roles, such as arms-bearing, meant that unfree husbands were not conceptualised as sufficiently ‘manly’ to have their marriages discussed. It is only from the tenth century onwards, when images of masculinity began to fragment more along lines of social status, that authors began explicitly to state that the Christian ideas of marriage applied to all, free and unfree.     

(Re)Inhabiting awareness: geography and mindfulness

This paper opens up a dialogue between mindfulness and the discipline of geography. As a meditative practice that cultivates ‘present-centred non-judgmental awareness’, we claim that the practices and insights of mindfulness have important implications for various forms of geographical enquiry. This paper argues that mindfulness can inform geographical practices in relation to epistemology and methodology, and contribute towards geographically informed critical psychological theory and action. More specifically, we claim that mindfulness could offer a practice-based context to support the study of affects, extend the application of psychoanalytical geographical methods beyond the therapeutic, and contribute to emerging geographical studies of behavioural power and empowerment. This analysis explores these sites of interaction through a series of reflections on the Mindfulness, Behaviour Change and Engagement in Public Policy programme that was developed and delivered by the authors. This more-than-therapeutic mindfulness programme has been delivered to approximately 47 civil servants working in the UK Government.     

Time,temporality, and woman–child relations

This is the second in a series of Viewpoints about a symposium on the intersections and antagonisms between various forms of feminism and the politics of childhood. This article traces the various ways in which time and temporality were mobilised in symposium papers and discussions and considers the implications for efforts to conceptualise woman–child relations. In conclusion, the potentials and risks of focusing on temporality when theorising relations between those positioned as women and those positioned as children are considered.     

Mississippian monumentality in the Yazoo Basin: recent investigations at the Carson site (22CO505), northwestern Mississippi

Investigations at the Carson site (22CO505), located in Coahoma County, Mississippi, have uncovered data on the development of a large Mississippian mound center dating to the period from A.D. 1200 through European contact. Recent sediment coring, excavation, artifact analyses, and radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating shed light on earthworks and household structures at Carson, and on Mississippian culture in the Yazoo Basin more generally. Sediment coring demonstrates a laterally transgressing Mississippi River system deposited coarse sandy ridges and clay-filled swales underneath a surface horizon comprised of variously coarse to medium-fine sediment originating from generalized overbank flooding. In some instances, flood-borne sediments were found on mound flanks, indicating that at times river-based flooding may have interrupted mound construction. Sediment coring and trench excavation also demonstrate that Carson’s Mound D was built in four stages, with Stages II and III comprising the major stages of earth moving. Excavations on the mound summit reveal evidence of several superimposed structures that were burned in place and likely used for the production of stone, shell, and wooden craft items, perhaps related to Mississippi Ideational Interaction Sphere (MIIS) paraphernalia. Here we describe recent investigations at Carson and present preliminary findings; forthcoming publications will emphasize strategies of power, monumentality, craft production, and Mississippian exchange systems.     

Introduction: recent approaches to pottery and society in the Southeast

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the themes of this special edition of Southeastern Archaeology on modern pottery studies and summarizes the articles included in this edition. Southeastern archaeologists increasingly are applying new theoretical constructs and techniques to ceramic studies. These new techniques, in conjunction with traditional typological analysis, allow archaeologists to approach the study of past peoples from a broader perspective.     

Study and School in the Lives of Children in Migrant Families: A View from Rural Jiangxi,China

Millions of children in China have been ‘left behind’ in the countryside while their parents work in distant places to support the social reproduction of their families. This article examines the role of study and schooling in this process. The analysis shows that family strategies to pursue socio‐economic mobility are intricately connected to state frameworks for providing support, and schools are central to this. This is because both family and state interests in the attributes and prospects of the next generation converge in schools. At the same time, on a day‐to‐day basis, the labour of children in schools and the labour of parents in the cities are intertwined. Specifically, by communicating with each other about study, and by focusing on the child's educational future as the key purpose of their daily work, both children and parents carry out their obligations towards each other, while finding ways to cope with the emotional difficulties that protracted physical separation entails.     

Gothic memory and forgetfulness in Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love and ‘The Demon Lover’

Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love (1954) and ‘The Demon Lover’ (1945) share an uncustomary usage of Gothic conventions: the Anglo-Irish writer invests the Gothic genre with new meaning for the war-torn Irish and the post-World Wars generation by skewing Gothic conventions, reflecting a new Gothic for a new age – one that has seen the effects of two catastrophic wars and not only dead soldiers, but dead-in-life survivors. In A World of Love, Bowen uses not a ghost that haunts the attic, but a nearly forgotten dead World War I soldier; not a male power of place and a fleeing female, but a female power of place and a displaced male; and not a lonely, menacing castle, but a dilapidated farm. In both the novel and the short story, the dead-in-life survivors must remember in order to successfully exorcise the war and the dead soldiers of war, thereby revitalizing themselves. Those who cannot remember are doomed to the past. This article examines the twist on the Gothic novel and its statement about the possibly disastrous effects of forgetting and of remembering incorrectly – anxieties shared by other twentieth-century Irish writers in terms of their eroding cultural identity and past.