THE PUZZLE OF THE BANQUET HALL OF THE DUKES: THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF SWEDISH HISTORICAL RESEARCH STUDIED THROUGH LUDWIK FLECK'S “THOUGHT COLLECTIVE” AND “THOUGHT STYLE”

In 1312, the Swedish dukes Erik and Valdemar Magnusson married the Norwegian princesses Ingeborg Haakonsdaughter and Ingeborg Eriksdaughter at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway. In 1313, the two couples were reunited at a purpose-built banquet hall, believed to have been located in the medieval Swedish town of Lödöse. The main source of information concerning these events is the Swedish medieval rhyme chronicle The Chronicle of Duke Erik. However, a closer reading of the chronicle reveals that Lödöse is never mentioned in relation to the banquet hall. The article discusses the passing down of knowledge through generations of the same professional collective, in this case the professional collective of Swedish historians during the twentieth century, and demonstrates how the validity of once-established prescientific knowledge persists. To achieve its goal, the article applies Ludwik Fleck's terms “thought collective,” “thought style,” and “tenacity in science,” as well as Thomas Kuhn's concept of the “paradigm,” to a historiographical case study of how the proto-idea of the banquet hall being located at Lödöse has survived to become an established scientific fact. The location of the banquet hall concerns but a minor detail in the turbulent political situation of the Swedish kingdom during the first decades of the fourteenth century. However, the continuing reiteration of this minor detail is evidence of a larger phenomenon, namely how contemporary historical research is influenced by scholars in the prescientific past.     

Consociationalism and the politics of the census in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland

Population censuses have symbolic and instrumental importance for ethnic, national, linguistic or religious groups and their political representatives. This is particularly apparent in deeply divided societies, where political institutions are designed to accommodate groups through forms of power sharing. Existing literature posits that consociational power-sharing institutions, which are commonly employed to manage inter-group conflict, are likely to incentivise contestation and mobilisation in relation to the census, but this claim has not been tested empirically. Employing the case studies of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland, this article tests a proposition about the relationship between consociationalism and the politics of the census: that it is corporate consociational designs that are likely to result in contestation of the census and mobilisation of groups during enumeration, whereas liberal consociational designs will not. The analysis offers support for this proposition, but also suggests that other features of power-sharing settlements, such as the federal nature of the Bosnian state and the majoritarian provision for a ‘border poll’ in the Northern Irish settlement, also play an important role in shaping census politics. These insights contribute to political geographic debates about the census by highlighting the influence of institutional design on struggles over how and where populations get counted, which are applicable beyond the immediate context of deeply divided societies.     

Playing with Fire: The 4th Duke of Hamilton's Jacobite Politics and the Union

James Hamilton, duke of Hamilton and the Scots jacobites are generally linked in analyses of the final years of the Scots polity. Indeed, Hamilton is often presented as the leader of the jacobite party in the Scottish parliament. Yet both contemporaries and historians have been unsure what to make of his on-again, off-again, conduct with respect to the exiled Stuarts and France. This has fuelled an ongoing debate about Hamilton's erratic and highly enigmatic behaviour during the winter of 1706–7, when the Union was passing the Scottish parliament. Was he genuinely opposing the Union? Was he duped by the court? Or was he, ‘bought and sold for English gold ’? This essay takes a fresh look at the duke and his part in the Union crisis in the light of new and previously underused jacobite sources with a view to better understanding Hamilton's aims, objectives, and influence with this crucial group. Only the jacobites and the Cameronians were potentially willing to take their opposition to the Union to God's Acre. But neither party immediately flew to arms in response to passage of a union they both believed was a betrayal of everything they held dear, and Hamilton was a major factor in their failure to do so. This essay thus takes a close look at the duke's part in preventing a major national uprising against the Union in the winter of 1706–7 and advances a new interpretation of his conduct and significance throughout the Union crisis.     

Island Biocultural Assemblages — The Case of Kinmen Island

ABSTRACT A growing mass of research contributes to our understanding of how biological and cultural diversity are related in complex and important ways. This paper presents an assembling process of biodiversity and cultural diversity on an island, Kin‐men (Quemoy), based on 1600 years of its environmental history. The study shows that the island's biocultural assemblages are a result both of external relations with the island's surrounding environment and internal relations within the island's changing human ecology. Distant political powers and economic forces are the two major external influences that have affected the flow of natural and cultural elements to and from the island, while ‘screening effects’ and ‘isolation effects’ are two factors that explain internal interactions. The island's biocultural assembling processes reveal that the openness of the island facilitates increase in the diversity of biocultural elements, while its less disturbed isolated condition fosters natural succession and co‐evolution. The study suggests that biocultural assemblages and the associated processes of co‐evolution and nature–society interactions are accomplished through the intermittent opportunities purposively provided by or inadvertently found in the openings and closures of boundaries, setting the scene for both boundary crossings and bounded shelter, by intent or chance.     

“Die wissenschaftliche Ausbildung des Arztes ist eine Culturfrage …”. Über das Verhältnis von Wissenschaftsanspruch,Bildungsprogramm und Praxis der Medizin

The article shows that the elite, nationalistic and imperial mentality of German medicine in the second half of the nineteenth century was closely connected to its aim to be understodd as a natural science. With this in view leading representatives of German medicine propagated a scientific approach to man and nature instead of the traditional values of humanistic education (“Bildung”). One of the most important consequences of the new scientific ideal in medicine — integration in governmental planning, the change in professionel status of doctors, the increasing tendeny to recognize biologistic ideologies — was the loss of the medical ideal of the ars medica, a subject which has not received sufficient thematic attention. This theme is explored in the third part of the article.     

Zoologische Gärten in Stadtkultur und Wissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert

The foundation and administration of European Zoological gardens in the 19^th century is analized. It is significant of such new institutions, that they are founded in the large cities, and that most of the founders looked at the great models in Paris and London, which are described first. Further it is shown that the change from princely menageries to public Zoological Gardens is caused both by common interests in people's education and pleasure and by scientific aims which leaded to choose the name Zoological “garden” in analogy to botanical gardens. It seems to be characteristic of such public institutions created by citizens in the 19^th century that they are mostly supported by commercial or scientific local societies. This is exemplified by describing the administration of the Zoological gardens of Berlin (1841), Frankfurt (1856) and Hamburg (1863), which initiated also research for acclimatization of wild animals.     

青海古代文化遗址时空分布特征

本文对青海古代各历史时期的文化遗址及文物进行了分析与探讨,提出了青海古代文化遗址有着分布的集中性、石器时代的完整性以及多元结构的民族文化特点;论证了以上特点是由地理环境及历史的各民族文化活动所致。     

Britische Politiker als Liebhaber der Wissenschaft (ca. 1850–1914) — Zur Ideologie des Amateurismus

The various scholarly and scientific endeavours — comprising both arts and sciences —, which British statesmen persued in their leisure time, transcend the mere biographical aspect. In the light of the slow, yet steady professionalisation of educational and political institutions, many of them modernised or newly created in order to achieve what came to be called “National Efficiency”, the literary and scientific pastimes of men, like Gladstone, Morley, Salisbury, Balfour or Haldane, seemed soon to become somewhat obsolete. Yet, it is argued, that the often professedly amateurish activities did not merely display the traditional hobby attitude to the sciences, so characteristic of the wealthy aristocrat, but in some cases revealed a good understanding of the scientific and educational needs of society, leading up to their active advancement. The British amateurs, it would seem, were pleading for providing a balanced higher education and training, rather than going for the technical excellence of the political rival Imperial Germany, which dazzled and, at the same time, intimidated some of them.