An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Greenbank,Darlington

NORTH of the R. Tees pagan Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are only conspicuous by their virtual absence; and, from the ten undoubted examples known,¹ both the quality and quantity of the objects recovered do little to illuminate the Anglo-Saxon element in the culture of Bernicia—a kingdom which probably owed much of its numerical strength to native British survival.² In view of the scant evidence available, it is surprising that the finds from Darlington, the richest cemetery N. of the Tees, have never been fully published before.³ This paper seeks to make good this omission.     

The empire unpossess'd: An essay on Gibbon's decline and fall

In an essay on Nietzsche's view of morality written in 1891, Eduard von Hartmann suggested that Nietzsche's most important contribution to philosophy was in the sphere of ethics; at the same time, he drew attention to the affinity between Nietzsche's ideas and the philosophy of Max Stirner. Hartmann's remarks open up Nietzsche's philosophy to examination in terms of a radically materialist framework. Nietzsche sees the ethics of asceticism, and hence Christianity, as a consequence of metaphysical dualism (which his materialist monism rejects), a stance which enables him to advance a positive, because physiologically based, sexual ethics. His philosophy proposes a profound and instrinsic relationship between the sexual and the aesthetic. This article shows how an appreciation of the radical materialism advanced by Nietzsche serves as evidence of the relevance of his philosophy to contemporary concerns and debates in ethics, and explores Nietzsche's ethical programme to develop ‘a more Goethean attitude toward sensuality’.     

Assessing stories before sites: identifying the tangible from the intangible

Despite a growing recognition that intangible heritage forms an important part of the significance of heritage sites, and that intangible values are intertwined with material resources and spaces, many procedures for the identification and management of heritage sites remain unchanged and fail to integrate these two sets of values. The conservation of heritage sites continues to be dominated by a process that first identifies a material site and then identifies the associated values that comprise its significance. This paper suggests that rather than identifying the physical expression of heritage as the initial point of heritage assessment, the stories (or intangible values) of a region or national history can form the primary mechanism for identifying physical heritage sites. Using the example of Australian government policies of Aboriginal segregation and assimilation, we suggest how national stories – or intangible values – might be used to identify representative sites.     

A method,a model and Machiavelli: history colloquium at Princeton, 19 November 1968

John Pocock gave “A method, a model and Machiavelli” as a talk at Princeton University in 1968. What happened to the text afterwards is uncertain, but it remained in the papers of Professor Donald Weinstein until his death in 2015, when it was identified by his widow Beverly Parker as being of importance. The text is especially revealing about Pocock’s attitudes to the history of ideas/intellectual history in the late 1960s and more especially the state of the grand project that became The Machiavellian Moment some years later.