Dependency,Shame and Belonging: Badging the Deserving Poor,c.1550–1750

The badging of the poor under the terms of the statute of 1697 has long been regarded as the most visible expression of the repressive and discriminatory nature of the welfare regime established by the Elizabethan poor laws. In a historiographical tradition stretching back to the Webbs, pauper badges have been regarded as weapons of deterrence in the campaign against a nascent ‘culture of dependency’ among the able-bodied poor who had come to believe that they were entitled to parish pensions. Even the Webbs, however, remained unconvinced that the 1697 statute was effectively enforced, and more recent revisionism in the historiography of welfare has not only welcomed but amplified their scepticism in its attempt to rehabilitate the old poor law as benevolent and sympathetic in operation. There has, however, been little attempt to measure the enforcement of the policy in the archives of county and parish governance, and even less to reconstruct the negotiations that took place over the wearing or removing of these symbols, which at the same time implied both belonging to, and yet paradoxically also exclusion from, the local community. This paper rehearses the discourses which gave rise to the badging of the poor in the years before and after the 1697 statute, and analyses the politics of identity among paupers, parish officers and magistrates as they actively debated if, when and by whom badges should be worn.     

Islam,Jews and Eastern Christianity in Late Medieval Pilgrims’ Guidebooks: Some Examples from the Franciscan Convent of Mount Sion

The Holy Land was described, not just in the accounts of the pilgrims who visited the most sacred land of Christianity, but also in several compilations and collections of texts conceived as guidebooks for clerics and pilgrims. From the fourteenth century onwards, many of these collections are clearly linked to the Franciscan Convent of Mount Sion. These assemblages often include texts on customs and religious beliefs of the peoples of the Near East and on the history of the Holy Land. One of the aims of the compilers seems to have been to prepare the reader to meet unorthodox practices and beliefs, emphasising the contrast between Latin Christianity and Eastern Christianity or Islam.     

Enchanted Modernity,Anglicanism and the Occult in Early Twentieth-Century Oxford: Annie Moberly,Eleanor Jourdain and their ‘Adventure’

In August 1901, two respectable, unmarried Edwardian ladies travelled backwards in time. On a sightseeing trip to the Court of Versailles, Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain were transported back to 1792 where they encountered the soon-to-be-executed Queen Marie Antoinette. In 1911 they recounted their experiences in An Adventure, a book that was widely reviewed and ran to many editions. Throughout these episodes and their telling Moberly and Jourdain held the positions of Principal and Vice Principal of St Hugh’s Hall, one of Oxford’s newly established colleges for women. Later historians and members of St Hugh’s tended to dismiss them as ‘potty’ or attempted to protect their reputations as pioneers of women’s education from (what was subsequently perceived to be) the embarrassment of An Adventure. This article revisits Moberly and Jourdain’s “Adventure”, historicising rather than pathologising or seeking to explain it away. Alongside the sceptical responses, there were many who believed Moberly and Jourdain, and the two women did not lose social or professional standing as a result of telling their story. In trying to understand why this should have been the case, the article draws upon two bodies of recent scholarship. Firstly, it examines An Adventure in light of work that has rejected older formulations of modernity as necessarily ‘disenchanted’, and instead argues for the blurring of boundaries between occult and scientific discourses. In many ways, the case of An Adventure exemplifies and furthers this thesis, showing how it was possible for two educated, professional, “modern” women to believe they had entered into “an act of memory” by Marie Antoinette that transported them backwards in time. Yet, while most scholarship interested in the relationship between modernity and enchantment focuses on the relationship between science and heterodox/occult religions, An Adventure brings another element to the discussion: orthodox Christianity, and the Anglican Church in particular. Moberly and Jourdain came from clerical families and were devout adherents of the Church of England. Their “Adventure” also, therefore, speaks to recent histories of Christianity in modern Britain, which have argued against an overly polarised and oppositional understanding of the relationship between Christianity and the occult, or Christianity and secular science, pointing to the churches’ capacity for adaptation and incorporation. The article traces the reception of An Adventure as a way to explore further the basis upon which such claims could be both made and judged as credible in a rapidly modernising early twentieth-century Oxford. While highlighting the interconnections between the occult, Anglicanism and secular/scientific scholarship, the article argues that people at the time nevertheless carefully policed the boundaries of “legitimate” and “illegitimate” belief systems, a process informed by both gender and class.     

Christianity and Humanitarianism in the Doukhobor Campaign, 1895–1902

This article examines the campaign undertaken by British Quakers in the 1890s to defend the Doukhobor sect of Russian Christians. The notion of humanitarian sympathy is too often applied as if it were a constant. Quakers are seen by many as exemplars of humanitarian action. By contrast this article argues that the concern that led to defend the Doukhobors came from very specific images of Christian suffering, and that the campaign to defend the sect was shaped by religious, not humanitarian, aims and methods and the particular history and repertoire of Quaker campaigning. It contributes to the history of humanitarianism by showing how humanitarian campaigning derives from the social and cultural history of various actors, and how humanitarian activity is coloured, at all levels, by its social and ideological positioning.