Witchcraft in the Early Modern Isle of Man

ABSTRACT

This article examines evidence relating to witchcraft beliefs and official attitudes to witchcraft in the Isle of Man during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is based mainly on court records, and above all those of the Manx ecclesiastical courts. It demonstrates that there was a rich popular culture relating to witchcraft on the island, with a number of individualistic features. It places Manx witchcraft beliefs in relation to two other phenomena that were central to the island's popular culture: fairy beliefs and the belief in the efficacy of the curse. It also demonstrates that the island's authorities maintained a relatively low-keyed approach to witchcraft (only two people are known to have been executed as witches in the island), treating it as a sign of popular ignorance and a regrettable source of neighbourly disputes rather than as a satanic heresy.     

The Singing Postman: The Mobility of Traditional Culture in Nineteenth-Century France

Nineteenth-century French traditional culture was not immobile. Nor was it a conservative impediment to ‘modernization’. Focusing on the ethnographic work of two folklorists – Félix Arnaudin (1844-1921) in the Landes, and Victor Smith (1826-1882) – this article explores the ways that traditional culture circulated, and the people that carried it. Far from sedentary ‘peasants’, many of the singers and storytellers the folklorists collected from were actively involved in modern transport networks and worked in new occupations. These hybrid networks suggest a picture of nineteenth-century culture ‘from below’ that flows along informal, regional conduits, both within and beyond the borders of France.     

The Languages of Peace During the French Religious Wars

ABSTRACT

The desirability of peace was a common topos in sixteenth-century political rhetoric, and the duty of the king to uphold the peace for the benefit of his subjects was also a long-established tradition. However, the peculiar circumstances of the French religious wars, and the preferred royal policy of pacification, galvanized impassioned debate among both those who supported and those who opposed confessional coexistence. This article looks at the diverse ways in which peace was viewed during the religious wars through an exploration of language and context. It draws not only on the pronouncements of the crown and its officials, and of poets and jurists, but also on those of local communities and confessional groups. Opinion was not just divided along religious lines; political imperatives, philosophical positions and local conditions all came into play in the arguments deployed. The variegated languages of peace provide a social and cultural dimension for the contested nature of sixteenth-century French politics. However, they could not restore harmony to a war-torn and divided kingdom.     

Comfort,Class and Climate Change: The Rise of Glass in Late Medieval and Early Modern Domestic Architecture

ABSTRACT

In the modern world, glass windows are considered an indispensable element of the built environment. Throughout premodern times, however, glass was not universally used in European architecture. This article argues that the rise of glass in Western architecture was neither an inevitable nor a linear process, but rather a response to certain social, cultural and environmental factors that gained increasing relevance from the late medieval period onwards. In other words, glass windows are a cultural convention, reflecting some of the wide-ranging and transformative challenges that Europeans faced in the late medieval and early modern period.     

The Leary Larrikin

ABSTRACT

This article explores the sartorial style of participants in a street-based youth subculture that thrived in late nineteenth-century Australian cities. Known as ‘larrikins', the lower working-class youth so described had a distinctive style of dress including heeled boots and bell-bottomed trousers. Here we examine the material processes through which this larrikin look was produced, locating it in distinctive urban settings and placing it against a backdrop of nascent mass consumption. While also considering the cultural sources of inspiration for larrikin style, our key aim is to demonstrate the richness of an analysis attuned to materiality, preferring this to the semiotic approaches that dominate the relevant literature.     

Celebrate Nation,Commemorate History,Embody the Estado Novo: The Exhibition of the Portuguese World (1940)

ABSTRACT

In 1940, the Portuguese regime, named Estado Novo, hosted its biggest national exhibition: the Exhibition of the Portuguese World (EPW).

The event aimed both to commemorate Portuguese history and to justify the teleological nature of the dictatorship. This article discusses the national identity narrative conveyed by the allegorical pavilions conceived for the historical section of the EPW. In examining the ephemeral architecture and the debate which arose among intellectuals at the event, this article explores the process of narration and reinterpretation surrounding the display and elucidates the complex process of reception by the citizenry.     

Increase in the preference for civic over ethnic nationalism among Poles: The impact of representations of a multiethnic past on the perceived inclusiveness of the nation

While the importance of a nation’s history for its current national issues is well established, whether and how that history may be leveraged to promote inclusive and amicable intergroup relationships is less clear. We offer answers to these questions by showing that the referencing of a multiethnic past of a nation is a form of indirect intergroup contact that increases the perceived inclusiveness of the current nation. Firstly, in a nationally representative sample of Poles, we demonstrate that after referring to Poland’s multiethnic history before and during World War II, respondents expressed a greater preference for civic rather than ethnic nationalism. In other words, they expressed more inclusive understanding of their national identity. Secondly, in the follow-up experiment, we further explore this effect by replicating it in one of the targeted samples. Overall, our findings demonstrate how nations may benefit from utilising some parts of their history to promote inclusiveness.     

Acculturation Preferences,Ethnic and Religious Identification and the Socio-Economic Adaptation of Russian-Speaking Immigrants in Belgium

This study tests a model of the socio-economic adaptation (SEA) of Russian-speaking immigrants in Belgium. It examines the roles of language skills and length of stay in Belgium, and of ethnic and religious identification in their acculturation preferences in their adaptation. The study showed that language skills were positively related to preferences for integration and assimilation, while length of stay was negatively related to separation. In turn, integration and assimilation predicted higher SEA, and separation predicted lower adaptation. Ethnic and religious identification also played a role. In sum, more orientation toward the host society (integration and assimilation) promoted better adaptation.     

The Island of Aegina: An Example of Modus Vivendi in the Medieval Mediterranean

The medieval Mediterranean has predominantly been considered to be a place of continuous conflict in matters of political and territorial ambitions, and, of course, religious dominance. The constant incursions on the islands of the Mediterranean have been considered by historians, legitimately in many instances, to be destructive of local communities, and to have caused turbulence in the economy, society, and culture. However, there is documentation which proves that such invasions were frequently followed by improvement in administration, and subsequently by production of art and a new type of culture that was an amalgam of Western and Eastern elements.

This article aims to illustrate certain positive side effects of this interaction in the Mediterranean through a specific example: the medieval city of Aegina in the Aegean Sea. During its history, the island passed through the hands of the Franks, the Venetians, the Catalans, and eventually the Ottomans. The architectural forms and artistic patterns that will be discussed support the argument that the medieval Mediterranean became a place for the exchange of ideas, and a canvas for multicultural activities.     

Fear and Rumour in the People's Republic of China in the 1950s

ABSTRACT

The article explores the nature of popular fears during the early years of the People's Republic of China by examining two types of rumour: those of a ‘secular’ type that told of China's defeat in the Korean War, a third world war or an imminent nuclear attack; and those of a ‘supernatural’ type that told of demons out to snatch vital organs or the end of the world. These rumours testified both to the resilience of ancient cosmological beliefs and values and to their capacity to fuse with elements of ‘modern’ politics. The article asks what they tell us about the relationship of the party-state to the populace.     

Conceit and Capacities of the Vulgar Sort: The Social History of English as a Language of Politics

The growth of England from Norman-Angevin colony to imperial power began with the social development of a national community that conducted its arguments in English. In this sense vernacularization was the constituting process of English history. This article connects the history of language to constitutional history, and affirms recent calls for an approach that transcends conventional boundaries between late medieval and early modern periods, and between intellectual, cultural, social, demographic, economic, political and constitutional histories. Vernacularization is seen as a movement from below. It is linked in various ways to traditions and customs of resistance and rebellion that are seen as having shaped the history of England from the thirteenth century to 1649.     

Collaboration in,Collaboration Out: The Eighties in the Age of Digital Reproduction

In this article I bring together the practical, pedagogical and theoretical implications of a relatively small digitization project, ‘Observing the 80s’, in order to explore the ways in which ‘the digital’ might transform historical practice. Borrowing from Benjamin’s work on production and reproduction I argue that not only are historians currently using digital tools in interesting ways, we are also well equipped to understand what the implications of these tools are. By thinking about digitalization, we can draw together the processes of production, analysis and reception of our historical evidence. Digital technology may only have become the subject of historical research, funding and teaching relatively recently, but the frameworks of cultural and social history provide us with the skills to evaluate its potential meanings. Not least, Benjamin helps us to analyze and evaluate what it really means to be a historian researcher and teacher in a British University today. In so doing, Benjamin’s work can help us uncover and celebrate the unknown through a process of collaboration, juxtaposition and engagement despite the increasingly quantified and goals orientated context in which most academic historical work takes place.     

Under the gaze of the state: policing literature and the case of Taslima Nasrin

Abstract

This article situates Taslima Nasrin, the controversial writer from Bangladesh, in a particular political and religious moment in the history of Bangladesh, to analyse the difficult relationship the postcolonial state shares with a writer whose work deliberately unsettles the issues of minority and of women and/in religion. The complex mosaic of Nasrin’s work, comprising as varied genres as newspaper columns, poetry and popular novels, has engendered, in the last ten years, unprecedented responses both for and against her writing. This has brought the issue of literature and its uneasy negotiation with state politics to the forefront of national debate. Despised by Islamists and fundamentalists, equally loved and loathed by the reading public, considered with caution by secular intelligentsia and fellow feminists, and ultimately banned by the state, Nasrin is a unique case in point. Her work, written under the gaze of the state defying the fundamentalist fatwa demanding her death, hence invites discussions on state censorship invoked using religious sensibility as a marker of literary judgement and the associated perils of women writing on women in a postcolony like Bangladesh.     

Collages of Memory: Remembering the Second World War Differently as the Epistemology of Crafting Cultural Conflicts between Russia and Ukraine

This essay critically examines the current duality of Russian-Ukrainian intercultural relations and explores the subject of politics of active and selective memory as the claimed root of current controversies and military tensions. Through rhetorical analysis of historical and contemporary national narratives, it demonstrates how culturally defining experience of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War is remembered, rethought, and reused by respective parties to reinvent the Self and the Br/Other, as well as rethink ones positionality on the world arena.     

The Earthly Landscape of the Heavenly City: A New Framework for the Examination of the Urban Development of Frankish Jerusalem

This article introduces a new methodological framework for the examination of Frankish Jerusalem's urban development, based on a database encompassing documents relating to Jerusalem from the first half of the twelfth century. The deconstruction of documents according to their primary elements provides a new framework for their use in the study of the socio-economic mechanisms that propelled the transformation of Jerusalem's cityscape, hitherto commonly perceived as restricted to monumental construction. This supplements the panoramic view of the city, obtained from contemporary narrative sources and archaeological evidence, with an analytical depiction of the evolving urban environment. Such an analytical approach unveils previously undetected facets of Jerusalem's urban development, such as the early emergence and spatial distribution of residential areas, crystallisation of notions of property ownership and shifting patterns of economic conduct. It sheds new light on the periodisation and scope of urban change in Jerusalem and its correlation to wider socio-economic processes.     

The English Translation of Arabic Puns in the Holy Quran

The pun is a tricky use of a word or phrase which has very different meanings that are closely interrelated, or of words with the same sound but different meanings. The Pun is a term with a dual meaning: “close” using obvious reference, and “far” using obscure reference. The hidden is usually meant. The close meaning is the sooner that comes to the listener’s mind. However, the speaker targets at the far one yet use the close to hide it. Translating the Quran text always raises several serious challenges in translation; these challenges are due to the different translations of puns and the misinterpretations between the intended meanings of a pun with their basic concepts, which could result in a certain amount of ambiguity. The study examines the Quranic corpus and its three versions of English translations. The study utilizes the typology of Delabastita?s for horizontal puns, Nida’s techniques of dynamic and formal equivalent and Newmark’s translation methods. This research attempts to investigate the semantic meaning of puns in the Quran translation and to define the translation techniques applied in translating the Quranic puns from Arabic into English.     

The Almohads and the Qur’ān of Uthm ān: The Legacy of the Umayyads of Cordoba in the Twelfth Century Maghrib

The sixth/twelfth century geographer, al-Idrīsī, alludes to the presence of the so-called Qur’ān of Uthmān in the great Mosque of Cordoba and a ceremony in which it was brought out and paraded daily after the Umayyads proclaimed themselves caliphs in 317/929-30. Around 552/1157, the same Qur’ān appeared in the processions of the Almohads, a Ma?mūda Berber dynasty from the High Atlas mountains, who also claimed to be caliphs. Ibn ?ā?ib al-?alāt, al-Marrākushī and the unknown author of the ?ulal al-mawshiyya, who describe the Almohad parades, all mention the Qur’ān's Uthmānic antecedents and possession by the Umayyads. Using this as a starting point, this paper will explore the image the Umayyads projected in the Maghrib, and the later significance of Cordoban Umayyad prototypes to the ruling Mu’minid dynasty of the Almohads. This contributes to a larger discussion of the evolution of a paradigm of imperial power in the Islamic west and its manipulation to legitimise a succession of dynasties whose actual origins, ambitions and praxis diverged widely.     

St Francis of Assisi and Islam: A Theological Perspective on a Christian-Muslim Encounter

In 1219 an encounter took place between a Christian from Italy, Francis of Assisi, and the Muslim Sultan of Egypt, al-Malik al-Kāmil. This meeting took place at Damietta in northern Egypt during the progress of the Fifth Crusade. Over a period of perhaps three weeks, religious dialogue took place between Francis and al-Kāmil, after which time the Sultan had Francis escorted safely back to the Christian camp. It is possible to discern from the writings of Francis after his return from Egypt that the meeting had had a deep religious impact upon him, realised in the latter years of his life. It can be said that both Francis and al-Kāmil experienced through their encounter what the Christian theologian Bernard Lonergan has spoken of as a conversion into a new horizon. The historical encounter between Francis and the Sultan witnesses to the fact that through religious conversion, it is possible for members of different religious faiths to arrive at a common vision of universal peace and reconciliation.