Nostalgia or das Heimweh: Homesickness and the Press-ganged Soldier in Sylvia’s Lovers (1863)

This article argues that Elizabeth Gaskell’s historical novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) uses nostalgia as a literary aesthetic and historical context to articulate a narrative of disorientating epochal change. Gaskell’s novel draws on nostalgia’s roots as a psychosomatic disease afflicting soldiers displaced by international conflicts to reassert the traumatic roots of a familiar feeling often understood as superficial and insignificant. Nostalgia began as a disease brought on by migration and only later came to be thought of as a type of sentimental memory; first home was far away and then it was long ago. Gaskell’s novel incorporates both, mingling longing for a place with longing for a past. This double distancing articulates an experience of transition within her historical novel. She draws on an eighteenth-century trope used by figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth, repurposed for the demands of prose fiction. The homesick soldier who was the first sufferer with pathological nostalgia is cast as the central protagonist of historical transformation and an emblem of uneasy transitions. Sylvia’s Lovers has received scant critical notice to date and, perhaps for this reason, its explicit allusions to nostalgia, and the role they play in Gaskell’s historical imagination, have been left entirely unremarked.     

The story of Comanche: horsepower,heroism and the conquest of the American West

Marked by the Census Bureau’s closure of the frontier; the symbolic end of American Indian resistance at Wounded Knee and powerful articulations on the ‘winning of the West’ from Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill Cody, the early 1890s was a critical moment in the history of the American West. It also saw the death of one of the region’s most famous cavalry horses, Comanche, who succumbed to colic in 1891 aged twenty-nine. Famously billed as ‘the only living thing to survive the Battle of the Little Bighorn’, this article uses Comanche as a locus around which to examine the history of warhorses in the military culture of the American West, and, more broadly, to point towards a growing scholarship on war and the environment that emphasises the usefulness of such themes as spatiality and inter-species exchange in embellishing our understanding of the experience, impact and cultural memory of war. Not only does Comanche’s lifespan (c.1862–1891) usefully coincide with the federal government’s final conquest of the West but his equine biography serves as valuable testament to the use of horses in the US military as both practical and symbolic agents of American expansionism.     

Were the Wars of Religion about Religion?

Abstract

William Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence raises important questions about the role of religion in society. It challenges all-too-common misunderstandings about the relationship between religion and politics and, most valuably, warns against any assumption that religion is peculiarly prone to violence. This essay nevertheless takes issue with his attempt to disprove what he calls “the myth of religious violence” with evidence from the Wars of Religion in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe and his claim that “the story of these wars serves as a kind of creation myth for the modern state” (10). The essay emphasizes the importance of understanding the religious dimensions of early modern Europe's wars but also of recognizing that, in both historical and contemporary situations, religious motivations are best understood not as independent variables but rather as catalysts that could exacerbate-or relieve-tensions rooted in other sorts of divisions or quarrels.     

Richard,duke of York,and the crisis of Henry VI's household in 1450–1: some further evidence

The political crisis in England in 1450 and the deteriorating relationship between King Henry VI and Richard, duke of York, in the summer of that year are examined in the light of two new documents. These provide direct evidence of the reaction of the royal household, if not the king himself, and his advisers to the duke of York's return from Ireland, firstly from the Midlands in the summer of 1450, and secondly, from North Wales around April 1451. Both items were sent to Lord St Amand. The first, from the duke of Buckingham, notes the arrival of a notable force in Warwickshire and a stand-off between the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield and the men of Stafford and its region. The second, from a royal servant, Thomas Broun, is a memorandum of advice for St Amand, who was shortly to become chamberlain in North Wales. It focuses on the excesses of Sir Thomas Stanley, one of a small group of royal household officials holding office in this area, and the threat they posed to the king's regime and its financial stability.     

The Balkan Wars and the rise of the reactionary modernist utopia in young Turk thought and the journal Türk Yurdu [Turkish Homeland]

The article examines the rise of the ‘reactionary modernist’ project that developed after the devastating defeat of the Balkan Wars and which was promoted by the Young Turks by means of articles published in Turkish Homeland, the intellectual platform of the Young Turks. The article argues that the outlines of this project to a large extent shaped the contours of Turkish nationalism then, and that they have hence been constitutive of Turkish nationalism ever since.     

Dental status of Napoleon's Great Army's (1812) mass burial of soldiers in Vilnius: childhood peculiarities and adult dietary habits

A mass grave of the soldiers of Napoleon's Great Army, containing no less than 3269 individuals who died during the retreat from Russia in December 1812, was uncovered during an archaeological rescue excavation in 2002 in Vilnius, Lithuania. General dental analysis, including that of dental wear, tooth loss, caries, calculus, and periodontal diseases and abscesses, was used to evaluate the oral health status and possible dietary patterns of individuals who represented recruits from almost all of Western and Central Europe. Growth conditions in childhood were studied by scoring of linear enamel hypoplasia. In all, 293 individuals (6528 teeth) were selected for the analysis; 20–30 year old males made up the majority of the sample. Their general dental status is characteristic of young individuals: low dental attrition and antemortem tooth loss, as well as low prevalence of calculus and abscesses. The caries rate was average compared with late Medieval/early industrial populations and typical for individuals with diverse diets. However, a considerable amount of pulp caries and a high number of carious teeth in some individuals indicate consumption of cariogenic products (e.g. sugar, sweet drinks) and poor oral hygiene. The frequency and severity of hypoplasia was lower compared with other populations of that time, suggesting the selection of the fittest individuals for military service; this correlates with the historically known selection criteria of that period. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“Religious Violence as Modern Myth”

Abstract

In this essay the author summarizes the argument of his book entitled The Myth of Religious Violence, whose main contention is that there is no reason to suppose that people are more likely to kill for a god than for a whole other host of “secular” ideologies and practices that behave in the way that “religions” do. The author then goes on to respond to various critiques that have been made of the book since its appearance in 2009.     

“奉辞伐罪”:伊利里亚战争与罗马东扩

从公元前3世纪晚期至前2世纪中期,地处亚得里亚海东岸的伊利里亚人与罗马多次交战。缕析波利比乌斯等古典史家的记述,交战历程依次为:伊利里亚人劫掠和扩张、罗马商人和伊萨向元老院控诉和求援、罗马遣使交涉、伊利里亚人蛮横回应、罗马出兵讨伐。着眼于史实层面,罗马遣使交涉,基本是其对外扩张中先礼后兵的惯常策略,也是其强化宣战理由的重要环节。而就历史叙事而论,波氏的伊利里亚战争文本,一方面将罗马对伊利里亚的征服呈现为奉辞伐罪、解救他邦的功业;另一方面是论证罗马优良政体及其在罗马统一地中海世界中所发挥的有力作用,在此叙事逻辑指引下,伊利里亚成为罗马需要匡谬正俗的对象。     

‘Barbarity more suited to Savages’: British soldiers’ views of Spanish and Portuguese violence during the Peninsular War, 1808–1814

This article explores British soldiers’ reactions to the violence that Iberian soldiers, guerrillas and civilians perpetrated against wounded French soldiers and prisoners of war during the Peninsular War. Whilst they saw this violence as retaliatory, and sympathized with the suffering of the occupied, British soldiers were shocked, disturbed and outraged, often leading them to self-identify with their very enemy — the French. On one level, this violence was seen as a fundamental violation of customary rules of war. Yet further, in British minds it revealed a deeper Iberian culture of violence and way of war, which set the Iberian peoples apart from ‘civilized’ nations.