‘’Tis Not in the Power of Words to Tell What My Heart Feels in Favour of You’; or,What the Ossulston Diary Does Not Reveal

Charles Bennet, 2nd Baron Ossulston is largely known through his diary of his daily social encounters, which was first analysed for its political import by Clyve Jones. A further set of documents in the Bennet family papers deepens our understanding of Ossulston's life and his social milieu among the aristocracy under Queen Anne. The love letters sent to him from a Mrs Sarah Sidney throughout 1710 reveal much about life in the aristocratic hothouse of St James's Square. They also show how the ‘ministerial revolution’ of that year was seen by two politically conversant figures at the margins of the royal court. This relationship was long-lasting and has been a hitherto unknown aspect of Ossulston's life, which may help explain some of his attitudes.     

The Culture of Fasting in Early Stuart Parliaments*

The fasts, proposed and observed by parliament in the first half of the 17th century, have always been defined as opportunities for propaganda. This article focuses, instead, on their cultural and religious meanings: why MPs believed that the act of fasting itself was important and what they hoped it would achieve. It argues that fasts were proposed for two reasons: to forge unity between parliament and the king at a time of growing division, with the aim of making parliamentary sessions more productive and successful, and to provide more direct resolution to the nation's problems by invoking divine intervention. Fast motions commanded widespread support across parliament because they were rooted in the dominant theory of causation – divine providence – and reflected the gradual conventionalisation of fasting in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. However, this consensus seemed to wane in the early 1640s as divisions between Charles I and some of his most vocal MPs widened, while the fast day observed on 17 November 1640 was used by some MPs to express their opposition to Charles's religious policy, especially regarding the siting of the communion table/altar and the position from where the service was to be read. The article concludes by reflecting on how a study of parliamentary fasting can contribute to wider debates on commensality and abstinence.     

Treason,sodomy, and the fate of Adenolfo IV,count of Acerra

The article recounts the charges brought against Adenolfo IV, count of Acerra, a magnate of the Regno in the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, and his execution for sodomy in 1293. This is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, known cases of the death penalty being exacted for sodomy in Europe. Behind it lies a trial in which Adenolfo was convicted of treason but received a royal pardon five years later. The story casts light on relations between the rulers of the Regno and their overlords the popes, on the judicial methods employed in the Regno, and on the government of Charles II.     

Wissenschaftliche Photographie als visuelle Kultur. Die Erforschung und Dokumentation von Spektren

This paper discusses facets of 19th‐century scientific photography as a visual culture. The example of spectral research and documentation is particularly well suited, because prismatically diffracted light from the sun or from luminous gases was one of the most frequently examined phenomena of that century. The results were significant not only for physics but also for analytical chemistry and astrophysics. The spectrum also served as an ideal test object for checking the effectiveness of a wide array of photochemically sensitizable surfaces to the various color regions. Scientific photography became the most important experimental technique in the infrared and ultraviolet. H. A. Rowland's spectrum charts are discussed as an example of the transition from comprehensiveness in documentation to fetishism. The discussion of the Lippmann process, one of the first methods of color photography, addresses the associated training of the eye. Issues of authenticity and the much averred ?mechanical objectivity”? are raised with regard to retouching. The overriding theme of visual science cultures leads furthermore to unanticipated interdependencies with other scientific fields, such as geography, and draws the importance of practitioners into the foreground.     

Christian Marriage,Money Scams,and Melanesian Social Imaginaries

In this paper, we draw on fieldwork with middle‐class investors in ‘fast money schemes’ (Ponzi scams) to consider how Neo‐Pentecostal Christianity may be mediating social and economic change in Papua New Guinea, particularly in relation to gender equality. Ideas of companionate marriage and the cultivation of an affective self imply masculinities that are more sensitive and less domineering. As these images of fulfilled modernity flow out from Pentecostal churches into broader Papua New Guinean society, they corroborate Taylor's theory of how change occurs within the modern social imaginary.     

Convergence in Cold War Physics: Coinventing the Maser in the Postwar Soviet Union

At the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s, the process of parallel invention of masers and lasers took place on the opposing sides of the Iron Curtain. While the American part of the story has been investigated by historians in much penetrating detail, comparable Soviet developments were described more superficially. This study aims at, to some extent, repairing this discrepancy by analyzing the Soviet path towards the maser from a comparative angle. It identifies, on the one hand, significant differences between the two projects regarding their heuristics, the relationship between theory and experiment, grounding in different academic cultures, and the resulting conceptualization of the maser principle. At the same time, the case also illustrates more fundamental transformations in the practices of postwar research that can be characterized as a convergence between the Soviet and the American science of the period.     

The Unquiet Frontier

Abstract

There are many different diagnoses of what constitutes the “post-secular.” My own view is that it constitutes the unprecedented and paradoxical coexistence of two supposedly contradictory social, religious, and cultural trends: on the one hand, the persistence of secular objections to public religion and on the other, the novel re-emergence of religious actors in the global body politic. John Caputo’s much quoted aphorism — that God is dead, but so also is the death of God — captures this agonistic model of the post-secular, in which what we are looking at is not the revival of religion, or the reversion of secular modernity into a re-enchanted body politic, but something more unprecedented and complex. Yet it also means there is little in the way of agreed discourse about the nature of the public square and the legitimacy of religious reasoning within it. This article considers one possible model, that of “post-secular rapprochement,” as one way of envisaging how newly-emergent forms of religious activism and discourse might be mediated back into a pluralist public domain.     

The British Archaeological Association and the Genesis of J. C. Bruce’s The Roman Wall

On 31 July 1849, John Collingwood Bruce gave a lecture on Hadrian’s Wall at the British Archaeological Association’s annual Congress in Chester. This was his first lecture outside his native North-East on the subject on which he was soon to become the leading authority. Two primary accounts of the occasion survive, but are contradictory in several details. These contradictions are explored, the accuracy of the account in the JBAA upheld and the importance of the occasion emphasised.     

Habermas and Taylor on Religious Reasoning in a Liberal Democracy

Abstract

This article compares Habermas’s and Taylor’s approach to the role of religious language in a liberal democracy. It shows that the difference in their approach is not simply in their theories of religious language. The contrast lies deeper, in their incompatible moral theories: Habermas’s universal discourse ethics vs Taylor’s communitarian substantive ethics. I also explore William Rehg’s defence of discourse ethics by conceding that it is based on a metavalue of rational consensus. However, I argue that Habermas’s and Rehg’s discourse ethics and translation proviso are untenable. While Taylor rightly argues that there is no reason to exclude religious reason from the formal political sphere, his proposed fusion of horizons to generate a new hybrid framework is also problematic. I suggest that Taylor’s historical hermeneutics should be extended to include the narrative approach to ethical deliberation as conducive to mutual experiential understanding, and hence to achieving a fusion of horizons of the diverse worlds of citizens in a liberal democracy.     

Science and secularization

ABSTRACT

According to a long-standing narrative of Western modernity science is one of the main drivers of secularization. Science is said to have generated challenges to core religious beliefs and to have provided an alternative, rational way of looking at the world. This narrative typically relies on progressive and teleological understandings of history, and commitment to some version of an ongoing struggle between science and religion. By way of contrast, recent theories of secularization, such as that of Charles Taylor, have suggested that the role of science in secularization has been greatly exaggerated. This article also offers a critique of the standard “science causes secularization” story. But in contrast to other critiques of this kind, it suggests that science nonetheless has a significant role in secularization – one that can be maintained without a commitment to a crude progressivist history or a narrative of science-religion conflict.