Researching the Medieval Past between Catalonia and Romania. Josep Puig i Cadafalch,Nicolae Iorga,and the Transnational Writing of National History (1921‐1935)

This paper analyses knowledge transfers between Catalonia and Romania in the interwar period, in order to cast new light on the nature of national history writing in early‐twentieth‐century Europe. To do so, it discusses the historiographical works of the Catalans Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1867–1956) and, to a lesser extent, Antoni Rubió i Lluch (1856–1937) and of the Romanians Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940) and Constantin Marinescu (1891–1970). It pays particular attention to Iorga's and Marinescu's contributions on the history of medieval Catalonia in the Eastern Mediterranean and to Puig's studies on Moldavian painted churches. In doing so, the paper challenges the view that the historiography of foreign scholars regarding one's own national history was often disregarded as incompetent. At the same time, the paper also responds to the debate on the creation and validation of cultural knowledge across borderlands, outside of cultural cores. It builds on recent work on the creativity of cultural peripheries and argues that, while France continued to operate as a reference in the exchanges between Catalans and Romanians, their historiographical exchanges responded to local research and political agendas.     

Disentangling the politics of breastfeeding

Infant feeding has become a target of policy at international, national and local levels. In the UK, although breastfeeding has been recognised as having a major role to play in public health, less than 1% of babies are exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life. In this article, I highlight the need to better understand this gap between policy and practice. I describe how Actor-Network Theory and the debates around vibrant materialities can bring fresh insights into the complex entanglements around breastfeeding, and its particular forms of politics, and consider how infant feeding might challenge and enrich these approaches.